6 Jan
2023
6 Jan
'23
10:38 p.m.
At 2022-12-14T10:39:59-0500, Brad Spencer wrote:
"G. Branden Robinson"
<g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> writes:
The source to OS-9/6809 would have been released by Microware a long
time ago had it not been for a particular person in the user
community. Got mucked up. I fell out of following it after the BSD
Unixs became available.
They guy's name wasn't Mark Siegel, was it?
(Feel free to reply privately.)
Level II was nice. It was able to use bank switching
and would allow
a set of random 8k memory blocks out of the 128k or 512k present in
the CC3 system to be mapped into the 6809 64k address space. The
Color Computer didn't support memory protection, so no paging or any
real process protection, but this banking allowed for a lot of
possibilities. I know that there was other OS-9 systems around that
ran Level II but I don't really know how they managed memory. I would
suspect it to be simular to the CC3, but that is just a guess on my
part.
I ask because I asked around elsewhere, and this guy got very hostile
very fast, and touted the GIME chip as performing "address translation"
as if it were a Motorola 68451 or something. (I'm not sure even _that_
does address translation in the sense we think of it today, but in any
case it was a more powerful, more complex and therefore expensive part
than Tandy was ever going to replicate or put in their Color Computers.)
Regards,
Branden