[Coco] Why there are no SS35 disks in nitrOS-9 distro ?

[Robert Gault]

Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't understand why there are no SS35 disks for NitrOS-9. Although I can
> make one in 5 minutes just changing the makefiles from a fresh mercurial
> checkout I still don't understand why they aren't there.
>
> Ok, level 2 I could agree but level 1 ? How many coco1/2 with double sided
> disks do you have out there ? And to get worse, those DS40 don't boot on
> MESS. So whoever is coming to coco scene just don't understand why he
> cannot use nitrOS-9 on MESS.
>
> I just made a SS35 for level 1 2.3.9 disk and all CMDS and SYS files fits
> into a single disk. I needed 2 more disks in order to have the DEFS and
> NITROS9 modules folder.
>
> Felipe
>

Taking your questions out of order....

The NitrOS-9 DS40 and 80 disks will indeed work perfectly with MESS if you 
change the names from .dsk to .os9.

There were many Coco users that bought third party disk drives rather than the 
original Tandy set. Essentially all third party drives had two heads and thus 
would work at a minimum as two single sided drives. Put another way, each side 
of a disk acted as a separate 35T disk and in some cases 40T.
While the Basic DOS required a modified ROM to efficiently use the back sides of 
the disks, modifying OS-9 two work with both sides of a disk was much easier and 
the method was published in most if not all of the Coco support magazines.

As for the NitrOS-9 repository, there is no need to include 35T single sided 
images. Anyone can take one of the current disks and with an emulator create a 
single sided 35T disk for use with very old hardware or with RGBDOS/HDBDOS hard 
drives. Just modify the existing scripts.

There is, however, one issue with the repository. There is no support for Level1 
v2.0.0. The NitrOS-9 version of Level1 does not work well or at all with some 
Coco games written for L1v2. Further, the repository does not include a boot_emu 
module for Level1 and the other boot modules need testing to prove they work if 
substituted for the OS-9 L1v2 boot module.