[Coco] CoCo3 and OS-9

[Andrew]

All,

With all this talk about the OS-9 and such, I thought I would ask, 
partially for my benefit as well as for others who may not have given it 
as much thought as myself - how do you set up a real (and/or emulated) 
CoCo with OS-9?

I would be interested in both setting it up with floppy drives (and RAM 
disk?) and/or hard drives. Do you need a floppy drive to use a hard 
drive? What do you need to use a hard drive (I know at one time there 
were MFM and SCSI adaptors for the CoCo, presumably you could use one of 
those if you can find one - or, use one of the IDE adaptors from Cloud-9?).

Recently there was discussion on booting OS-9 from the hard drive - I 
didn't follow it too closely, but it seems that this is a difficult 
thing to set up (?)

What about a real-time clock - is this a needed thing, or a luxury? I 
suppose it depends on what is planned to be done with the system. How 
about extra memory? We know 512K is a comfortable "minimum" - but can it 
be done with only 128K (maybe with a hard drive or external RAM drive)? 
Or setup on a CoCo 2 system? Is it possible (today) to get larger 
expansion memory (like you could in the day up to 2 meg)? From where 
(Cloud-9?)...?

How about where you get the software? Can you still buy it and/or 
multi-vue and other packages? I was looking at the rtsi archive, and 
noticed some stuff there - can this be used to set up a system? What 
about the free (open source? freeware?) OS-9 reimplementation (can't 
remember the name)? Is there a freeware multi-vue? What about 
development tools, like BASIC-O9 (I think that is right)? What about 
applications and other useful tools?

In short - I would be interested in seeing a FAQ or something for 
someone relatively new to OS-9 on the Color Computer to allow them to 
set up an OS-9 system that ranges from a simple system (I have played 
with it briefly using a single floppy drive and RAM disk) to a 
multi-drive hard disk based system with all the bells and whistles. 
Also, info on doing something similar using emulators (which is the best 
emulator for this - do they all work to some degree, or is there one 
which is best?) would be useful for those without real hardware. Also, 
links to information (or the information itself)...

I think this would be a useful resource everyone interested in OS-9. I 
probably wouldn't be using it immediately, but I have always been 
interested in playing with it, and probably have more than enough info 
to get it all set up - but it feels like this information is really 
scattered for me (not that it is a problem) - I couldn't imagine what a 
complete newbie would feel like - probably overwhelmed...

Thank you all,

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona