[Coco] Disk sizes was make case sensitive?

Tormod Volden lists.tormod at gmail.com
Sun Jul 14 13:48:43 EDT 2013


On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 7:29 PM, Bill Pierce  wrote:
> By the way.... how many "new" users know what an "sdc" is? 0.  How many would download it to see what it is? 99%
> Why do you think people keep asking about how to do it?

At least the comment on the right hand side of the disk image listing
at http://www.nitros9.org/latest/ needs to be updated for these
images. It says "48 TPI, Double Density, Single Sided" for the SDC
image.

This is generated by 3rdparty/utils/aaw/mkdskindex which uses "os9 id"
to categorize the disk image. It has a quirk for DW disks, another
quirk for SDC images would be needed, I guess.

> It's tough for newcomers to OS9 when they can't even back a standard floppy boot to a standard floopy because there is no standard copy of the standard floppy.... Okie dokie artichokie? :-)
> Almost all of the NitrOS9 boot disks SHOULD have a 35trk SSDD version (multi disk to have all stuff available). (DW & Becker excluded though still would be useful)
>
> Let's say I just got a Coco 3 from ebay. I haven't used the Coco in 20 years and never used OS9 because of the complexity of the system. I decide to give this Nitros9 a go since everyone is talking about how "easy" it is to use. I download the standard disk image for nitros96809l2030209coco3.dsk
> I somehow made it through the obscure and mystical instructions to get HDBDOS running using a cassette cable... I even made a drivewire cable and can load the disk. But it won't boot. I need a dw bootdisk. back to download...
> I can boot the dw bootdisk in drivewire..... but have access to ONLY that disk. There's no HD drivers, only floppy drivers and something called "x0", "x1" "x2" & "x3".... I don't remember nothing like that and I can't get the disk to my 35trk floppy.

Again, I never used nitros9 and don't know it limitations, but: I
understand RAM is limited so the DW boot disk does not have FD drivers
by default. But isn't it possible to boot from DW, then load FD
drivers dynamically and use the floppy drives and DW at the same time?
In that case a disk image with FD drivers (mountable through DW) would
solve this. Or make a boot disk with both DW and FD support. If this
is technically possible it should be added to the disk image build.

Tormod



More information about the Coco mailing list