Multiple ROMs would be easy enough with a REX. Of course if the REX goes, you could be out of luck.
I have invested gated in a very small state of developing a smaller OS that would be in bits much, as I imagine, you are talking about. My professional work started on old NCR Tower system with quarter inch tape and Modus shared/networked hard drive systems. All of this running AT&T/NCR Unix System V R3.2. My personal computers at the time were a Color Computer 1 with 512k and 4 FDD running OS-9 Level 1 and my M100. OS-9 has a similar structure in that the kernel boots it all to a prompt and nearly all commands are called from disk. Something along these lines might be the way to go. I have been wondering if something could be written using Mike Stein's PCB with a 27C512. The System ROM space holding the kernel and the Option ROM space other commands including BASIC, TELCOM, TEXT, ADDRSS, and SCHEDL. This would leave room for commands plus TPDD and DVI support/bootstrap in the System ROM. The OS commands could be called on by the kernel when used at a prompt. For example: RAM> FILES 0:*.* Might CALL 63012 passing 0:*.* to the command of call another off set (63023) for a different command. It wouldn't be CP/M let alone Unix, but it could be useful. I suppose the same thing could be done with a REX so that someone could have other ROMware installed; e.g. Ultimate or Super ROM. Am I way off in my thinking? Maybe this is were the CP/M for M100 was going. God Bless, GregS <>< ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian White" <bw.al...@gmail.com> To: m...@bitchin100.com Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2018 4:59:47 AM Subject: Re: [M100] call for programs and games You know... thinking about that problem of needing a way to get a dos back if you wipe ram, why can't we have multiple roms? Would it be theoretically possible, assuming some new hardware, to break up the 32k rom address space into smaller seperate chunks, so instead of having to choose ts-dos rom as your only rom, or some other whole rom... what would it take to have a 1k or 5k chunk that is just teeny or ts-dos that stays there all the time like a normal rom, except it's only 1k, while the remainder can be some other rom of your choosing as long as it fits? For that matter, assuming the magic fictional hardware for the moment, why not assignable chucks through out the whole 32k? Basically so you could have whatever combination of apps you wanted. Like a bunch of virtual 2k chip sockets. Just in theory I mean. Of course I know no existing roms can operate this way simply because they weren't written to. Maybe what we *could* have, is a rom image builder, where you pick .co apps in a ui, and it spits out a rom image. I assume the apps would each need to be modified along the way by the image builder. It might have to supply a menu too. Kind of like rex & rexmgr, but working within a single rom, and not needing any special hardware to actually do the switching that rex does. no cpld. Just a thing that outputs a single rom image that only needs to be flashed to a plain old 32k rom. Like a build-your-own-UR2.
