Coco/Atari OS9 new hardware

[haywirepc]

Anyone that's seen Level II OS-9 on a Color Computer 3 (or the 68K version) would have to admit that its an unusually powerful OS (if somewhat intimidating since it can do some scary things via CLI).


I was a color computer guy before amiga... I had like 10 color computers over time. I still have 5 of them. os9 blew msdos so far out of the water, I used to dial a bbs, play a game while downloading files, render fractals, and play music files all at the same time, and that was in 1988. I had a pc too at that time (A 286 I think) but the coco was much more use, especially for fun stuff.

I switched to a friends pimped out amiga 1000 next. Being so used to multitasking, I couldn't stand a pc as my main computer...

I still use color computer 2's and 3's for hardware projects, because they are so easy to interface too. I have an alarm system built from a coco2, and a home automation controller built from a coco2. I have also built a bunch of robot projects using the coco2's or 3's because it draws less than 1amp.

Besides amiga, color computers were and still remain one of my favorite computers... I learned to program in basic on then, I learned to do hardware projects on them. Mostly, I learned how to push a computer to its limits and beyond on them.

I have seen this atari 6809 project and yes looks interesting. I am still on the coco mailing list... Which is quite active.

Steven

[haywirepc]

Porting nitros-9 to 8 bit atari hardware is not that exciting to me. I don't think the graphics and especially the sound are that much better than a coco3, especially an expanded one with an orchestra sound pack and speech synth card. A 512k coco 3 running nitros-9 with a 6309 upgraded processor is very interesting to see. When you see how well it performs and how smoothly it multitasks on such slow ancient hardware, its pretty amazing. Put against something like dos, desqview or win 3.1 with tons more processor speed and ram it is really quite amazing.

On nitros-9...
I'd rather see it ported to x86 or arm, but I suppose that will never happen.

[haywirepc]

Gary Becker's stuff?
Yeah, I've seen one. It works pretty good, although it needs another computer to store files and simulate a disk drive. According to Gary you should be able to set this up to start immediately as a Coco3 and load software from flash.

I'd buy one if it had the classic joystick ports, a built in floppy controller and simulated orchestra and sound speech card. Otherwise, may as well just use a pc set up nicely with any of the coco 3 emulators, or an actual coco3.

Steven