OAS Software

OS9 is an operating system based around Unix specifically targetted for MC6809 based processors, hence it is written in assembler rather than C. Many of the Unix components are there including multi-tasking ability. It was developed during the late 70s/early 80s by Microware Corp who still develop it today, although now it is targetted for a range of processors including the 68xxx series. There are two OS9 variants for the 6809, Level 1 which is available for the Dragon supports up to 64K of RAM and Level 2 which is available on the CoCo 3 supports up to 16MB of RAM by using special paging hardware to switch in 64K blocks of memory at a time. OS9 Level 3 also exists but not for the 6809. There is still a fair deal of support around for OS9, particularly for Level 2 (from the Coco newsgroups eg. The BITNet CoCo newsgroup and several dedicated OS9 groups - comp.sys.os9. All the material here is for OS9 Level 1, and will probably run under Level 2 as well.

To run OS9 on a Dragon, you need a machine with 64K RAM ie. a D64 or an upgraded D32. You also need a disk system. OS9 puts the machine into 64K RAM mode, switching out the BASIC & DOS ROMS giving you a completely new operating environment. It is also a very flexible environment and very easy integrate new drivers and software to support any hardware add-ons you may have made (see the sections on PC-Share and adding a RAM Disk to your system.)

OS9 Level 1 - Year 2K

Up2Date Articles - Writing software for OS9 (incl. device drivers)

Dragon Disk Driver Assembler listing

Software Archive

Like the DragonDOS software archive most of the programs here are small utilities, filters or drivers for use with OS9 Level 1 and above. Source files are held as ASCII, whilst binary files are standard OS9 modules (more than 1 module may be held in a file, use utilities such as RIP to split them apart or load the file into memory then use the SAVE utility to save each module as a file). Any compressed files are held as archive (.ar) files - the decompressor is available amonst other places from the BITNet listserver - sending a mail with the words 'INDEX OS9' in the mail body to get a full list of the software available.

LF.BIN - Filter to remove line feeds from stdin. Uses 256 byte buffered blocks so should be substantially faster than other single character buffer filters.

ADDLF.BIN - Filter to add line feeds to stdin. Again, usses larger buffered blocks instead of the usual single character filters so is substantially faster.

SECTION.BIN - Filter to display a given section of a text file.

Usage: section start_line end_line < text_file
eg. 
section 200 400 <doc1.txt  - display lines 200 to 400 of doc1.txt

Diary Program - events reminder (for OS9 and MS-DOS!)

MS-DOS Disk Reader/Writer - read and write MS-DOS disks under OS9

ANAGRAM.BIN - anagram solver. Used in conjunction with a spell checker eg. SPELLDCM under Stylograph will provide words containing the supplied letters.

Example Usage:
spelldcm /h0/sty/dict ! anagram AYDUJDF > solutions

PIA21.A - sample SCF device driver for MC6821 PIA.

RDISK.A - sample RBF device driver (see Ram Disk Project)