[Coco] Personal OS-9 on Atari emulators

[Joel Ewy]

Hey all,

Has anybody tried the disk images Bob Devries uploaded on any of the
Atari emulators?  I have done a little experimentation but haven't yet
gotten it to boot.  I've tried a recent aranym in fluxbuntu, and a
number of different emulators in Win2K.  The GEM/TOS bootloader runs and
asks for a boot disk, which I gather is the same disk that it's running
from (disk 1).  It goes something like this:

Insert your OS/9 BOOT diskette.
PRESS ANY KEY WHEN READY
[keypress...]

OS-9/68K System Bootstrap V2.1

After which the screen scrolls by with many repetitions of:
Exception Error, vector offset $00B8 addr $0000B6C0
Fatal System Error; rebooting system

Sometimes there is a string of bomb icons as well, and there are other
vector offset numbers and addresses.

The above is what I got with Steem Engine 2 in Win2K.  WinSTon crashes
after putting up the "Bootstrap" message and receiving a keystroke, and
SainT sometimes does as well.  The behavior varies slightly with
different Atari ROMs, but what I've used mostly is TOS 1.0, assuming
that to be the ROM most commonly in use at the time.

Bob Devries mentioned in an email on this list that Atari Personal OS-9
makes extensive use of the Atari's ROM routines.  Some of these Atari
emulators are reputed to be quite faithful implementation of the Atari
hardware (though it seems that most of them emulate the STE or STF, or
one of the other later machines, while the manual states that OS-9 is
for the 520ST or 1040ST -- I'd have to look up the differences between
those systems and the STE) since they are intended to run games and
demos, which pound pretty heavily on the hardware.

So I see several possibilities here:
1.  I'm making some dumb, really obvious mistake in my usage of the
emulators.
2.  There's some incompatibility between the disk image formats Bob used
and the formats expected by the ST emulators.
3.  None of the emulators emulate the hardware sufficiently well for
OS-9 to run.  (Doesn't seem likely on the face of it, especially if OS-9
makes use of the ROM to access the hardware.  Aranym can run Linux M68k,
and may even be being used to build packages for Debian.  But the aranym
package comes with a free TOS/GEM compatible system -- it would be worth
trying it out with original Atari ROMs)
4.  I haven't hit on the right combination of emulator and ROM. 

Anybody else have any thoughts or experiences to share along these
lines.  I'd love to be able to run OS-9/68K on my x86 laptop.

JCE