[Coco] Re: speaking of HDB-DOS...

[Robert Gault]

x0remery at dsbmail.itg.ti.com wrote:
> Boisy (or Mark, but this is more of a software Q),
> I need a surefire way to detect if a CoCo3 is running HDB or RGB-DOS.
> Currently I'm just PEEKing at the "HARD DISK BASIC" banner in memory.
> Is this the same location/message for any version?
> Is this likely to change in the future?
> 
> I'm making a unified installation disk for Color FOG which will determine the
> correct
> version to install (HDB vs. RSDOS) but currently all I have to go by is Robert
> Gault's
> emulator version of RGBDOS. One of my goals with FOG is user-friendliness, which
> means asking the user as few questions as possible.
> 
> Thanks,
> Bob
> 

I don't remember seeing any answer to this question from Boisy or Mark. 
I certainly can't speak for them but the answer probably will be there 
is no foolproof method. The copyright message for the version of HDBDOS 
I have access to, 1.0, does not have the message fixed in memory with an 
ORG statement. That means any upgrades to the code could shift its location.

If you want to make your FOG code more complex and attempt a foolproof 
ID of HDBDOS as an alternative to RSDOS, you will need to search the ROM 
space for "HDB-DOS" (or maybe AES) rather than looking at a fixed 
location for a byte match up.