[Coco] Dos ROMS.

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Robert Gault wrote:
> Phill Harvey-Smith wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to implement the same for the CoCo, and have a couple of 
>> questions.
>>
>> 1) I know there was a 1.0 version of RS-DOS, and that Mess uses RS-DOS 
>> 1.1, is the 1.0 rom available anywhere ?
> 
> It has been my understanding that MESS will use for the coco2 and up 
> emulation anything with the name disk11.rom. That is not pretty and it 
> means renaming files whenever you want to switch to a different version 
> of DOS, but it works.

Yeah that's how it's coded, you can load other dos roms as a cart, but 
then mess disables the dos hardware (I think), more seriously, it 
assumes that all carts auto start, which is not always what is 
needed...The AllDream assembler cart on the Dragon springs to mind.

> The 1.0 ROM is available (probably on the Coco3 site) and I can supply a 
> copy if needed.

Cheers, though as someone else pointed out disk10.rom is in with the 
cocoe bios set, so I now have a copy. I now have a copy of the CoCo 1/2 
driver that can use either the 1.0 or 1.1 disk rom, or none at all. Now 
that is working, adding others to the supported list would be easy enough.

>> 2) Where there other doses, available also that where compatible with 
>> the standard RS-DOS cart ?
> 
> Several were available usually as patches to DOS1.0 or 1.1. They worked 
> best when loaded over the Tandy DOS, copied to lower RAM, and then 
> burned to an EPROM.

Yeah, that makes sense, though to support them I would need images of 
the eprom...though the procedure above could of course be carried out in 
an emulator, saved to a cas or dsk file and extracted from there.

> ADOS and ADOS3 has been discussed here lately. 

Are these now freely available or are they still being sold ?

>						I use my own version of 
> RGBDOS (used with the Ken-Ton hard drive system) and Cloud-9 has their
> version called HDBDOS. There were others.

Ah, HDBDOS is definatly still being sold IIRC, so whilst I could add the 
needed code to support it, this would need the co-operation of the 
cloud9 folks.

The other problem with this, is once I have added support for things 
like this I tend to get pestered by people for all the roms it supports,
I would of course not hand out copies of a product still being sold, 
(actually at the mo since I don't own a copy of HDB, that would be 
impossible for me to do anyways :) ). I could of course flag the rom as 
optional, which I believe means that if it's there it can be used if it 
is not it can't :)

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.