[Coco] Rs232 Pack

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 17 December 2018 21:18:42 phil pt wrote:

> I do not think that is going to work. I think the Rs232 pack support
> will need to be added. The T2 Drivers is the software which use the
> Rs232 Pack to communicate.

/t2 s not the driver Phil, its the descriptor, and it has pointed at at 
least 2 different drivers over the history of os9/nitros9  On a coco2, I 
used aciapak.dr, which worked fine at 2400 baud but I have also used the 
sacia.dr, which also worked fine, but in the leadup to the full nitros9, 
apparently a very handy patch, I believe by Rick Adams who wrote RiBBS 
has been discarded from the nitros9 sources, perhaps whoever was 
reviewing and "optimizing the code" took it out because they wre never 
aware of it, and hardware flow control hasn't worked at my place since. 
It consisted of instructions to swap a couple pins on the 6551, and a 
patch to the driver, I forget which one now, which made 7 wire flow 
control work perfectly. If that patch could be located again, I might be 
co-erced into updating it so it works again. Somewhere in my travails 
with an original B&B XT-RTC, that patch got overwritten & lost forever 
to me.

If that patch could be dug out of someones archive and made available, it 
sure would be nice. If you look at the tech docs for the 6551, you will 
come to the conclusion its a broken chip as shipped, and this patch 
fixes it.

Its possible that the lack of this patch is what you are fighting with. I 
also no longer have a copy of RiBBS, due to the same problem I had from 
the gitgo with the original B&B XT-RTC controller, it had a nasty habit 
of handing os9 a sector of the allocation map that was 256 bytes of 
0x00's. The net result was that that page of the allocation map was then 
considered empty and allocateable for new file storage overwriting what 
was there. RiBBS was just one loss of many. That was on my original hard 
drive, a 30 meg RLL drive. I spent more time rebuilding the filesystem, 
learning everything there is to know about it, than in actually useing 
it. Almost gave up and went back to a TI-99/4A I still have but its  not 
been powered up in about 30 years now.

> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 11:49 AM Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> 
wrote:
> > On Monday 17 December 2018 07:52:27 phil pt wrote:
> > > The old Rs232 pack so that the old programs like Ribbs bbs may
> > > work and without re-writting several hundred lines of codes. 
> > > There is also old programs that support the Rs232 pack.
> >
> > Nitros9 supports it at any address you hack it to, just make it what
> > fits in your hardware by dmodeing the descriptor for /t2. Unless
> > RiBBS carries its own driver it shouldn't care.
> >
> > > On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 7:42 AM rietveld rietveld
> > > <rietveldh at hotmail.com>
> > >
> > > wrote:
> > > > What support were you hoping to add.   I know DW is now
> > > > supported by David Ladd
> > > >
> > > > Sent from my BlackBerry
> > > >   Original Message
> > > > From: phil pt
> > > > Sent: Monday, December 17, 2018 7:25 AM
> > > > To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> > > > Reply To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> > > > Subject: [Coco] Rs232 Pack
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Hello
> > > >
> > > > I know that I bought up this subject before but I think its very
> > > > important that adding support for the RS232 pack would offer two
> > > > things to the coco community.
> > > >
> > > > 1) Adding Rs232 pack using the same orginal address may allow
> > > > the old software like Ribbs to work without having to re-write
> > > > several hundred lines of code.
> > > >
> > > > 2) It may encourage more people to write applications for the
> > > > coco and make it easer.
> > > >
> > > > Sorry I do not beleive if we used a smaller computer system back
> > > > in the 60's to send a man to the mon and 6809 I think was used
> > > > on the earler space shuttles nothing is impossible.
> > > >
> > > > Phil Taylor
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Coco mailing list
> > > > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > > > https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Coco mailing list
> > > > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > > > https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> >
> > --
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
> > --
> > "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> >  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> > -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> > Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
> >
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco



-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>