[Coco] Booting Nitros9.

[Dave Philipsen]

I agree. The boot loader in the CoCo3FPGA is Brett Gordon’s design and I have also used it on my CoCoDEV system to boot NitrOS9 L2. The legacy method of booting OS9 (for the CoCo anyway) has been to break the operating system into two parts. One part is loaded with the boot loader (KrnP1) and the other is loaded with the boot file (KrnP2 and the rest of the modules). That method makes for a more complex system when all you really need to do is get the entire boot file (with both parts of the kernel) loaded into memory all at once and then just jump into the kernel. That’s basically what Brett’s boot loader does. The beauty of it is that the boot file contains the entire operating system and it can even be a fragmented file. Additionally, with some slight modification, I now have a boot loader for CoCo3FPGA that will let me boot either of two different boot files. That means I have one tried and true boot file that always works and never has to change. If I want to experiment with changes I can create a new, secondary boot file that can be selected at boot time. If that boot fails because of some experiment gone wrong I just drop back to booting the primary boot file and I can boot and make changes to my secondary boot file until I get it right and it boots correctly. 

-Dave Philipsen

> On May 10, 2020, at 4:24 PM, Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> We have a bootrom for the Coco3FPGA. That code could probably easily modified for other formats.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Sun, May 10, 2020 8:58 am
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Booting Nitros9.
> 
>> On 5/9/20 8:38 PM, Doug Fraser wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>> 
>> I have a question.  Is it possible to flash a Nitros9 boot kernel to a bank on the CoCoSDC like the Burke n Burke did with the XT-rom?
>> 
> I  have another question.  has anyone ever tried running NitrOS9 from a
> ROM?  OS9 was definitely ROMable does the same apply to NitrOS9?
> 
> bill
> 
> 
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