Dragon OS9 with drivewire support

[fridgemagnet]

Hi all,

Can someone point me in the direction of how to boot up Nirtos-OS9 on a Dragon 64 (real but emulator instructions would be useful as well) with Drivewire support. I've got working HDB-DOS images plus DWLOAD support in ROM so the hardware is in place. After searching through various posts on here, I think I can find bits on here but not the complete picture.

Rgs,

Jon

[pser1]

Hi Jon,

I don't know much about OS-9/NitrOS-9, but what I have done is:
In XRoar I have a bat file that loads a Dragon64 with HDB-DOS
Before starting it, I start DriveWire putting a special NitrOS-9 disk in slot 0
Then I start the bat file and get the normal Dragon prompt
Then I use:
DLOAD"DOS this is a special dweb that simply boots from disk0
And so you are in NitrOS-9 immediately, really very, very fast.

cheers
pere

Ps. I attach some disk images to be put at slot 0: 2 for Becker port (text and 51) and for Drivewire
Probably there are other ways to start it up, but so far I have not played with it more than a few minutes

[pser1]

Hi Jon,

I attach here the .bat file I use ... it's a bit special because I have all inside folders, but you will get the idea!

cheers
pere

screen.jpg (36.91 KiB) Viewed 4327 times

EDIT: All the tests I have made using any DOS different from HDB-DOS have failed (maybe I am doing something wrong, I don't know)
It seems to me that the only way is having the HDB-DOS installed, so I don't know how to do it in a real Dragon without going MAP1 and copying the Basic
that contains DWLOAD and the HDB-DOS too

[pser1]

Back again, Jon

I have started my Dragon (without drives) but connected to the PC via DriveWire.
With drivewire having in slot0 the NitrOS-9 disk for DW, I pressed Shift to avoid autorun...
Then DLOAD"DOS" has started NitrOS-9 without problems
So I think there is some sort of uncompatibility with XRoar that forces the use of HDB-DOS
You could use your Dragon with NitrOS-9 without floppies attached, great!

cheers
pere

[KenH]

Hi all,

Can someone point me in the direction of how to boot up Nirtos-OS9 on a Dragon 64 (real but emulator instructions would be useful as well) with Drivewire support. I've got working HDB-DOS images plus DWLOAD support in ROM so the hardware is in place. After searching through various posts on here, I think I can find bits on here but not the complete picture.

Rgs,

Jon

Download the DW dsk images from here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4952#p11974 (for XROAR use the becker variants)
Mount as dsk 0 on the DW server
If you're running HDBDOS, type "DOS"
Or, using the DWLOAD rom, type DLOAD"DOS"

also check out OS9 DeskMate - Tandy's GUI "office" suite for OS9
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4757

[pser1]

Hi Ken,

I have the file "nos9v303_d64COHR_becker.dsk" mounted as Disk0 in DriveWire
Then I start XRoar without DDOS or with DDOS11C
When I enter
DLOAD"DOS"
The screen shows the message "NITROS9 BOOT"
But nothing happens on the screen, it simply hangs the computer.
But ... if I do that with HDB-DOS installed in XRoar, it starts perfectly with both sentences:
DOS or
DLOAD"DOS"
So, what am I doing wrong?
I don't know why 'must' I have HDB-DOS installed to start NitrOS-9 ...

cheers
pere

[fridgemagnet]

It's been a *long* time since I delved into the inner workings of OS9 but in the original D64 incarnation, the DOS "BOOT" command would read in sectors 3-18 from the disk, then jump to the start of data block to begin execution. That initial bootstrap block (I believe) contained part of the kernel and the OS9 boot module. The boot module effectively comprised a self contained disk driver with enough logic to issue sector read calls to pull in the main Os9boot file. Interestingly though it didn't contain the logic to switch to map 1 so we were already in 64K mode at this point.

Now an alternative school of thought here is that if you can defer the switch to map 1 until the os9boot load process is complete, then you can significantly simplify what boot has to do because it can make use of the existing DOS ROM to perform the sector calls rather than having to re-implement that code itself. You also don't need different boot modules for the different startup permutations (floppy, DW, real HD etc.).

That's all just supposition but it would explain why you need HDB-DOS in order to boot the thing.

[pser1]

Hi, Jon
this could be a possibility, but then, why does a real Dragon 64 without any DOS start NitrOS-9 via Drivewire just with the command - DLOAD"DOS" - ?
In this case it cannot access any internal routine ... but it works well.

On the other hand, if I have the DOS and drives in my Dragon, it can easily start NitrOS-9 from disk with - BOOT - without need for drivewire, as we used to do in the 80's

So, No problem with a Dragon64 with or without drives (disk or DW4), but
I cannot start NitrOS-9 in XRoar if the Dragon hasn't the HDB-DOS installed, don't know why this happens.

cheers
pere

[fridgemagnet]

Yes, you're right there, now I've read back through the thread I see you got it working fine on the real kit. Maybe they've done something special for the Becker port which relies on HDB-DOS then?

I've now successfully booted up NitrosOS9 on my D64, with floppy drives attached using the images Ken pointed me at (thanks).

Next question then is can you access the Dragon's "real" floppy drives from that image? From what I can see, the D0, D1, D2 descriptors appear to be associated with rb1773 (CoCo controller maybe?) and not ddisk (well that's what the old OS9 driver for the WD2797 used to be called) and attempting to access them just yields an error 216, the drives don't even spin up.

[pser1]

I will give this a try along this afternoon.
But this should be no problem, then we could copy the whole disk to an VDK image and put it inthe Drivewire DISK folder, so it could be 'mounted' as a drive too
I think that I used my FLO2V dweeb to copy OS-9 disks into VDK. The problem, buy now, with DW4 is that it doesn't create files, so before making the copy, you need
to put a 'new file' there with the name you prefer and after that use:
DLOAD"FLO2V""DiskName" and it will be copied (180-360-720K disks only, not 1M2 nor 1M44)
I am attaching a 'new' VDK image (256 bytes to be DW$ compliant) to be copied as many times you need it!
You will find the dweeb "FLO2V", you should use the FLO2VC only if you have access to a DW4 server that has been modified in order to 'create' files

I will tell you the results of test tonight, I hope so

cheers
pere