Dragon OS-9 question

[lunecat]

Hi

I am using XROAR with floppy disk support and have booted the OS-9 system. Everything works well.

My question is how would I manage to import a text file from my PC (it is some floating point 6809 assembler that I downloaded from the RTSI OS-9 archive) so that I can get it onto a VDX virtual disk that I can use within the OS-9 environment?

[lunecat]

All sorted now!

Under OS-9 I attached a new virtual disk and formatted it, then copied a large enough text file from one of the OS-9 Assembler include definition files onto the new disk image and saved that.

Then using a windows hex dump/editor called XVI32 I opened the virtual disk image file (VDK) and located to the start of the text that I had copied onto it. Chopped out N bytes (where N is the size in bytes of the 6809 Assembler listing file that I downloaded from the RTSI OS-9 archive) With a second XVI32 I chopped out the full N bytes and pasted them back into the VDK image file and saved that.


Job done - now when I attached the Virtual disk under OS-9 and edit the file it contains the 6809 Assembler code ready to run it through the OS-9 ASM util.....


simples

[sixxie]

Haha, an excellent solution!

There may be an easier way though - I think there's a tool that comes with MESS called IMGTOOL that supports OS-9 disks (and probably RS-DOS format disks too). I've never used it, but it's worth checking out.

[prime]

The NitrOS9 toolshed suite can read and write files to OS9 and RSdos disks, it is command line driven but is pretty flexable.

Instructions to download and build are here : http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/n ... ing_Cygwin

Though I'm sure that there are windows binary releases available too, asuming that windows is your platform, though toolshed was originally written to be used
on macos/linux so should be buildable usable there too.

One thing to note is that it works with raw disk images so won't work with .vdk files, dunno if XRoar can handle them, however Mess can.

Cheers.

Phill.

[drag0n]

The easiest way to manipulate OS9 disks from a PC is using wimgtool (part of the extended MESS package).
Previous versions had an OS9 sub-directory bug, which prevented adding files in sub-directories but this has been fixed since version 0.140.
I've attached to this post the wimgtool windows executable which I compiled from version 0.143.