[Coco] Looking for I/O specs for DECB,Nitros,.....

[Alan Jones]

Brett,
I am interested in your project. I asked for some help getting some 
FORTH software earlier on the list, but I got no response. If I can be 
of any help let me know. I am not an assembler programmer but I would be 
glad to test out your software when you get it working to your specs.

Alan

Brett K Heath wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Some of you may remember that I have on occasion made noises about
> "...working on a port of Laxen & Perry's f83 to the coco". Without going
> into gory details about why this project has been on hold (again) for the
> past several years (again) let me just say that a couple of weeks ago I
> managed to reassemble the components of my "development system"[1] and
> have started looking at it again.
>
> I still have to clean up and test a few things in the compiler source
> (mostly having to do with position independence), but the meta cross
> compiler, cross assembler and most of the 6809 kernel seem to be working.
>
> The looming obstacle is that, other than calls to the Basic rom's CIN and
> COUT routines, I have no information about the calling conventions imposed
> by any of the DOS's used on the coco. In and of itself this isn't
> particularly upsetting, but it does make it difficult to write the
> OS/Hardware specific code needed to make it useful on these systems;-)
>
> It gets worse, part of the design goal is it be able to deal directly with
> the disk hardware (making it possible to fix corrupted boot disks etc[2]).
> Again, lack of information about the calling conventions and functions
> provided by various disk subsystems makes writing drivers something of a
> challenge.
>
> So what I'm asking for is pointers to/copies of technical docs that
> contain this info for any OS, Disk controller, or whatever that is used
> with the coco. I understand that some of this may be proprietary info and
> am not asking anyone to violate confidentiality or copyright, but some
> information is considerably more useful than no information.
>
>
> For those of you unfamiliar with f83:
>
> F83 is an implementation of forth that (nominally) complied with the
> Forth-83 Standard. It was written by Henry Laxen and Michael Perry and
> released under very liberal terms (basically you had to give them credit
> for their code) as "No Visible Support Software" (I love that
> phrase) for CP/M 80, CP/M 68K, and MSDOS 1 (there may be others).
>
> As distributed it included complete source in a form that could be used
> by the system to recompile itself.
>
> Out of the box it included the following functionality, all available from
> the command line without leaving forth.
>
> Forth Interpreter/Compiler
> Assembler with control structures (If, Else, Begin, While, Until, Repeat)
> Cooperative multitasking (that worked on an 8080 running CP/M!)
> Screen Editor
> Forth debugger/single stepper, with breakpoints and stack display.
> Some handy utilities;
>   Hex dump (disk or mem)
>   Source code lookup ("view <command> will put you in the editor on the
>      screen where <command> is defined)
>   Forth decompiler ("see <command>" displays the current definition of
>      <command>)
>
> And it did all that (and more) with a footprint of around 16K on an 8080.
>
>
> This is getting long so I'll just repeat that any info I can get on OS or
> hardware interfaces (including char I/O) would be most helpful.
>
> TIA
>
> Brett K. Heath
>
>
> [1] My development system is basically f83 running under dosemu on a linux
> box, with Jeff Vavasours CoCo 2 Emulator running under dosemu as a test
> platform.
>
> [2] I have actually done this under CP/M, I had incorporated the bios from
> the disk controller board into my f83 (thanks to Morrow Designs for
> including source listing with their products) and managed to keep a flakey
> system going for an extra 6 months or so using forth as a repair tool,
> unfortunately I didn't manage to forth burned into eeprom before the
> system died completely.
>
>