[Coco] NitrOS9 on MESS?

[Roger Taylor]

At 01:30 AM 12/4/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>How about getting RGB-DOS working under MESS?  Can anyone tell me the ROM 
>differences between Jeff's emulator .rom and MESS' .rom?


That's easy.  The M.E.S.S. ROM format is just what you would expect... the 
byte-for-byte exact image of a ROM.
Jeff's format adds (I think) a 2-byte header at the top, and may even chop 
off trailing zeros at the end of the ROM?  Not sure.

Last year I successfully set up the M.E.S.S. CoCo 3 to boot using Robert 
Gault's DOS, I think RGB-DOS, and got it to recognize a virtual hard drive 
with 255 or 256 simulated floppies on it, plus maybe an OS-9 
partition.  It's been a while so my memory is foggy, but I remember it 
being very NICE since it booted automatically.

I think the idea is to fill that virtual hard drive 255 or so of your best 
CoCo floppy disks  ;) ;) ;) and if things are compatible per-software, then 
things should go well and you can just go into any drive and run programs 
to your heart's content.

Hyper-I/O was never that nice, requiring you to OPEN and CLOSE drives.  Yuk.


{Roger Taylor}