[Coco] OS9 Boot SDC

[L. Curtis Boyle]

Re: ACIA drivers history - 
The original Tandy one was ACIAPAK. There was a patch shortly afterwards on Compuserve, etc. forums that expanded it’s receive buffer so that it could keep up better with higher baudrates.
ACIADRV was a rewritten ACIAPAK with better code, more options, and larger buffers.
SACIA was the best (in my opinion) driver, with a ton of options, and you could assign (with XMODE) the # of 256 bytes that you wanted to assign for the receive buffer (up to 3.75K). Warning - this all came from your system memory map. It also supported a hardware hack (optionally) to swap DCD with something else so that you could received characters without carrier, which greatly helped. This was done by Bruce Isted, who also did the 6552 (dual port, 38.4Kbaud, no bugs like the 6551) driver at the same time, called DACIA. He also did the serial mouse drivers, so that you could use Microsoft mice (2 button) or Logitech mice (3 button) instead of the joystick ports. These were all interrupt driven, so they took NO cpu time unless you moved the mouse or clicked a button, so they were faster than even the 6 bit DAC joysticks.

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



> On Apr 23, 2020, at 5:01 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday 23 April 2020 18:36:26 L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> 
>> The one we used back in the day was SACIA (by Bruce Isted) and DACIA
>> (also by Bruce, but for the better/bug free 6522 chip instead the
>> 6551). Bruce had one master source file called XACIA that would
>> generate both. They had adjustable buffer sizes (up to 3.75K per
>> port), working software and hardware flow control, etc. Bill Nobel and
>> I have not gotten that far in the NitrOS9 boot modules yet in our Ease
>> of Use project (we have been cleaning up/optimizing some of the core
>> modules, and the graphics system), but after Beta 5 is out next week,
>> we are planning to start tackling some of modules that are further out
>> from the core (SDC, Drivewire, RS-232 etc.). But it will probably take
>> awhile for Bill and me to re-familiarize ourselves with this; we
>> haven’t looked at that code since around 2000/2001.
>> 
> All I can say is yippee! Please, when its ready, plz post the hg pull 
> links.
> 
>> L. Curtis Boyle
>> curtisboyle at sasktel.net
>> 
>>> On Apr 23, 2020, at 4:07 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Apr 23, 2020, at 4:45 PM, phil pt <ptaylor2446 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> It still works on the real coco. Can you please re-add it back to
>>>> NItroos9 please?
>>> 
>>> When I ran my BBSes, I used a third party serial driver that worked
>>> much better than the one that came with OS-9. The stock one couldn’t
>>> do high speed very well and the modified ones worked better and
>>> added better flow control.
>>> 
>>> I forget who wrote it, but it was a must have back then. I don’t
>>> know if that was merged into NitrOS-9 or not but you would still be
>>> able to get it and swap out the modules just like back then I would
>>> imagine.
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Coco mailing list
>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> -- 
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
> - Louis D. Brandeis
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>>
> 
> -- 
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com <mailto:Coco at maltedmedia.com>
> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco <https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco>