[Coco] OS-9 loading NEW WAY

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 21 April 2015 09:42:30 Boisy Pitre wrote:
> > On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:33 AM, Brett Gordon <beretta42 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > My more-or-less normal installation of Nitros9 works fine with my
> > partition tables. I just had to manually change my /dd descriptor to
> > match the partition table's offset.  Boisy's Superdriver layer
> > allows for a pre-filesystem offset.  It would be nice to modifiy
> > SuperDriver to automagically read the partition table, though.  
> > Another, "easy" way of allowing automatic Nitros9 configuration of
> > hd partitions would be to have the booter (i.e. CoCoBoot)... make or
> > mod the /dd and friends on-the-fly at boot (rather than loading them
> > from OS9Boot ).
>
> I would like to see a carefully designed plan for modifying LSN0 of an
> RBF device to handle partitions. In fact, I think it’s time for a
> newer RBF… XRBF… that would handle partitions natively and bring a
> number of other improvements (longer filenames possibly) to OS-9.

But, just for backwards compat with our existing disks, lets use the 
unused space IN LSN0.  Older systems then are free to ignore it and the 
conversion can take place without the loss of a single byte on an 
existing disk.

Jolly good idea Boisy and I am obviously for it, but that puppy is about 
4800 bytes now, so that would grow even more, and would need at least 
another page of sysram to maintain the tables.  We, or I at least am so 
strapped for sysram I havn't been able to format a floppy in ages 
without crashing.  This is on a machine with 2 megs of dram in it!

However, my experience playing around with dmem says that is yet lots of 
empty space in the first system block of 8k in a level 2 system.

First, we need an accurate memory usage map in that first 8k system block 
that I don't think we have unless enabling a symbol table printout while 
building something that uses ALL the defines might show us, +10000 
thanks if it sorts them in numerical order.

Then we need to define the new usages.  With the proper defines, we can 
code it without stepping on other toes.

> > Maybe the OP might have been refering to David Ladd's nitros9 ROM
> > booter?  It's another "floppy-less" way of booting Nitros9, and a
> > touch more traditional that my approach,   I think his work is
> > somewhere in the Nitros Repo….
>
> Errrr… David Ladd is a fine guy but the NitrOS-9 ROM Booter was my
> creation, not his.  I sold this through Cloud-9 for some years before
> giving it to the community in the form of open source (as I did with
> SuperDriver).
>
> Let’s be careful about wrongly assigning credit. I know it wasn’t
> intentional on your part, and I’m not trying to toot my horn, but I
> firmly believe that work must be properly credited.

+100

[...]

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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