[Coco] Another ROMable NitrOS9 question

[Tormod Volden]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 4:15 PM, billg999 wrote:
> 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.

This you can find in the level1/coco2/bootroms folder.

However, you won't gain memory space if you have 64K RAM. When you
start NitrOS-9 the ROM is disabled and the coco runs in all-RAM mode,
so you'll have 64K minus kernel and bootfile for your user programs in
either case.

The boot ROM can still have advantages such as faster boot, "embedded"
disk-less systems and so on.

Otherwise a boot ROM (replacing the BASIC ROM or sitting in a
cartridge/rompak) makes a lot of sense if you want to run NitrOS-9 on
a 32K RAM system...

Tormod