[Coco] Memory available in NitrOS-9 ?

[Stephen Pereira]

Hello again, all,

So, here I am wandering around in NitrOS-9 again...

My system is a 128K CoCo 3 with HDBDOS in an EPROM cartridge, using Drivewire 4.

I now know that NitrOS-9 cannot read any of my other .DSK images, so I cannot get any of my other files into NitrOS-9 easily.  Since I have not found the equivalent of the excellent FILE2DSK tool for OS-9 yet, this may become a challenge for me.

Next, I figured that I'd go to one of the CoCo software repositories and pick up something to play around with.  I selected Dynacalc from Tandy for OS-9.  I inserted the .DSK image into my Drivewire server and took a look at it.  It appeared that the disk is supposed to be in drive 0, because it has files like OS9boot and STARTUP.  also at the top level is a file called DYNACALC.TRM.  I took a look into the CMDS directory, and there is DYNACALC, along with only a few other commands.

Well, I am getting smart enough to understand that I probably cannot put this .DSK image into my Drivewire drive 0 and issue the DOS command, because the Tandy software probably has no knowledge of HDBDOS and probably won't boot.  But I did try to invoke the program by typing:  /X3/CMDS/DYNACALC.

What happened next?  I watched Drivewire start out on my drive 0 (as expected) then move onto drive 3 (as I had hoped) and then after a couple of seconds, I got an error #207 - that's memory full.

So, knowing that I am at least on the right track, I poked around a bit and found that the MFREE command tells me that I have 24K available, and the MMAP command shows me the same graphically.  So, in my 128K system, when I'm using NitrOS-9 I have only 24K memory left available for programs that I want to run.

NOW I know why many folks here on the list are so interested in obtaining more memory for their machines!

Thanks for listening.  I'll continue to putter around with this.

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