[Coco] Another NitrOS-9 Newbie Question

[Bill Pierce]

Stephen, the problem is not usually with OS9/NitrOS9 as they are 100% compatible, but with proper setup. Almost all commercial OS9 products require a little more setup than just execing the program. Dynacalc for example... I bet if you read the manual, there is most likely a config file of sorts that needs to be set up somewhere... usually in "/dd/sys".
Another thing that kills most commercial (and PD) software from running on the modern systems is BAD PROGRAMMING. In the 80s, it was a common programming technique to hard code the drive name into the software... the C compiler has the "/D1" hard coded in a couple of places and has to be changed to "/dd" to be able to run the software from things like HDs and DW4 as well as from a single drive system with no "/d1". This was a problem even in the 80s as after OS9 L2 came out, the "/DD" (default drive) descriptor was introduced but people kept on insisting on using "/d0" & "/d1" in their software. "/dd" is basically your main drive, be it "/h0" or "/sd0", just renamed (internally and externally) to "/dd" to give all software a common drive. When proper drivers are installed, OS9 does not care what kind of drive you're using... it "Just Works"(TM)

The other thing (and usually the most frequent) is users.... People have a tendacy to like their "main" drive as "/h0", "/x0" or something odd... in OS9 L2 your default drive where your CMDS, SYS, DEFS  and LIB dirs reside on the ROOT directory, should ALWAYS be "/DD" regardless of the actual media. Breaking this rule alone can cause literally hundreds of programs not to run. Example... you stick a floppy in "/d0" of your DW4 system... type chd /d0, chx /d0/cmds... type "program" and it crashes with a Error #216 which "Program not found"... it was most likely looking for something on "/dd" which would most likely be your dw4 drive.
Most software needs to be copied to your "/dd".. all cmds in /dd/cmds... all sys in /dd/sys etc. Then if the software is written correctly, it will be able to find all it's files.
There is some software which has "/d0" and "/d1" hard coded and those would have to be altered with "ded" to point to "/dd", then verified so the CRC is correct.

One more thing.. when you extract raw files from "LHA", "AR", "PAK" or any other compression archiver, you must set the attributes of the executable files (attr file e pe). File attributes are not saved by archiving programs so this will always need to be done.
I am not referring to a zip in Windows containing a "dsk" file... but a compressed file in OS9 containing software modules.
 

Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Pereira <spereira1952 at comcast.net>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 23, 2015 6:42 pm
Subject: [Coco] Another NitrOS-9 Newbie Question


Hello all,

I have NitrOS-9 running on my physical CoCo 3 system.  I have been able to type 
in a couple of simple BASIC-09 programs and get them to go.

I looked around for some OS-9 applications, and I tried Dynacalc downloaded from 
the Color Computer Archive, but I could not get it to go.

Here’s my latest newbie question:  
If I have NitrOS-9 installed and running, should I be able to run applications 
that were originally designed to run on Tandy OS-9?

Some of the application .DSK files appear that they want to be the boot disk.  
Dynacalc seems to be one of these.  I am pretty certain that my setup, with 
HDB-DOS and Drivewire probably cannot support booting a disk with Tandy OS-9 on 
it, so how might I get the application to load and run?

As always, thanks very much for any advice you may have to offer.

smp
--
Stephen M. Pereira
Bedford, NH  03110
KB1SXE



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