[Coco] Building NitrOS-9 on Mac OS X

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 8:53 PM, nickma2 at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> 
> I definately found installing software to hard disk was easier on my
> old MS-DOS system than what I have found in OS-9 and I'm sure there
> are many who would agree with me on that.

Well, anything in the DOS days without an installer was just copying files over, the same as OS-9. The only OS-9 trick was the bootfile.

Tandy "solved" this with their config utility, which no one used. Microware later solved it with their OS-9 Configuration Wizard where you just clicked off what you wanted (COM ports, disk devices, etc.) and it wrote out a bootfile. That's what OS-9 needed, but once you learned the basics, it was just so much quicker to do:

ezgen -dm /d0/os9boot
l rbf
i /d1/drivers/scsi.dr
i /d1/drivers/h0.dd
q

Utilities like ezgen made it take a few seconds to add something to a bootfile -- no regenerating or remerging or anything.

Once I was in OS-9, I had hard drives, multi-tasking, multiple serial ports (my BBS ran in the background while I could still be programming), etc.

As a game programmer, we could have really used you with OS-9 -- I wish I had been around to help.

OH! By the way! I found an assembly source file. I believe I ported some RASCAN software to OS-9 for Frank Swygert! I think it was RASCAN -- not sure what else it could have been. I will have to take another look when I get back to that disk. I'd be curious if you recognize the original code -- might have been stuff you guys wrote?


> It doesn't really matter anyway. I don't use OS-9 for anything more
> than to boot a sluggish OS-9 game from disk.
> 
> (And Kyum-Gai for OS-9 was not really an OS-9 native program)


Nope -- RS-DOS converted to OS-9. You could load it, run it, play it, etc. and the system still operated. If you hit CLEAR to switch to another screen, the game would pause until you came back. It made use of OS-9 system calls so it could run from a hard drive, use whatever joystick you had (normal or via high-res interface), etc.

Thexder was also converted (though I recall reading it looked like it had originally been written for OS-9 anyway, then ported to the ROM Pak instead).

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