[Coco] Another ROMable NitrOS9 question

[Bill Pierce]

Bill,
Running the C compiler in Level 1 with drivewire is tricky. Matter of fact, it was tricky in the 80s with vanilla OS-9 L1. It was easy to get your boot too large for the compiler to run.
You have to strip you boot down to as little as you can get by with. I had to play around with several boots before I could get to work on my 64k Coco 1 "F" board.
You have to use the 32 col screen as the "cohr" hi res driver (51 col) takes up too much memory, Use only the disk drivers & descriptors you can get by with, eliminate all the "/n", "/z" drivers and descriptors, and eliminate the pipes and printer drivers. I even take out the floppy drivers as I don't use them.
The problem is that the dw drivers and subs take up a lot of precious memory.
If you use level 2 to compile for level 1, remember to use the defs, headers and libraries from level 1 or you'll end up with level 2 system calls in a level 1 prorgam.

The source for the level 1 dw drivers needs to be checked as the level 2 drivers have the EKO turned off. I haven't run into theis problem but I've yet to check the latest level 1 & 2 builds on my Coco 1 & 2.

Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: billg999 <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu>
To: The COCO Mailing List <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, Jan 13, 2014 10:15 am
Subject: [Coco] Another ROMable NitrOS9 question




Since getting DriveWire working I have been having some fun with
NitrOS9 on a COCO2.  (Side Note:  Yes, it was eko=1 that caused
most of my troubles and adding xmode commands to fix it to the
startup file was an acceptable work around.  Still a problem with
the information that inetd puts out on startup keeping me from
running it in the background but one problem at a time!)  That is,
I was having fun until I discovered that there isn't enough memory
in a 64K COCO2 to actually do anything in NitrOS9.  Can't run the
C-Compiler, can't run Basic09.  So, I guess I will be going back to
using the COOC3 for any real development work I do.

But, this brought up another interesting idea in my head.  Has anyone
ever considered putting together a ROMed version of NitrOS9 to replace
the built in BASIC ROM in the COCO1 and COCO2?  I would think that an
equivalent to the NitrOS9 boot provided with DriveWire images could
easily be fit into the 16K ROM space leaving 48K for users to run programs.

Comments?

bill




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