Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!rh2y+ From: rh2y+@andrew.cmu.edu (Russell E. Hoffman, II) Newsgroups: comp.os.os9 Subject: Re: 6809?? Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 89 21:51:58 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 49 Well, I use the CoCo under OS9 when I'm at home. (I'm at college now, so I use my os9/68000 system.) The coco is not as slow as it may seem... I've benched the CoCo vs. some other IBM compatibles (Tandy 1000, IBM XT) in Basic09 and the CoCo blew them away. The reason the CoCo is slower than most OS9 systems is that the drivers are not all interrupt-driven. The keyboard driver, for example, constantly polls the keyboard, eating loads of CPU time. The disk controller driver (CCDisk) also does not allow much in the way of other process time allocation during reads and writes. Finally, the serial port driver (RS232 or PRINTER) is not interrupt driven as far as input from the external terminal is concerned, and, since the Coco has no "real" serial port, the 6809 must emulate one in hardware, eating even more cpu time if that port is used. Now comes the good news: most of these drivers, if not all, can be replaced with better ones. Xrs232 is an interrupt-driven replacement for RS232. It comes with the Xcom9 package (I think). ACIAPAK also is interrupt-driven, but it requires you to own a radio shack rs-232 cartridge and a multi-pak intrface. I have heard of a replacement for CCIO (the one that does the keyboard polling) which is interrupt-driven, but I don't recall the name of it or where to get it. The disk controller driver (CCDisk) can be replaced by several drivers. One is FHL's Sdisk. This driver allows for double-sided drives and uses the device parameters in the device descriptors rather than having them hard- coded into the driver (which is what CCDisk does....) There is also NDisk, which, as I recall, is either PD or it is in a magazine and you can type in the source and assemble it yourself.. Interrupt-driven disk drivers come with some of the replacement controllers (such as the Disto[?] No-Halt Controller). Now, you ask, where does one get this stuff? Frank Hogg Laboratories The Regency Tower, Suite 215 770 James Street Syracuse, NY 13203 D.P. Johnson 7655 S.W. Cedarcrest Street Portland, OR 97223 Also, check out Radio Shack and Rainbow Magazine. BTW, Frank Hogg sells a modules that enables you to run under Lv. I and have up to 85x24 text screen that draws the chars on the graphics screen. Its called HiRes, and comes with some other neet tools (char. set editor, rsdos <--> os9 conversion, many char sets.) on the O-Pak disk. Hope that helps.... Russell E. Hoffman, II. Carnegie Mellon University rh2y+@andrew.cmu.edu