RE: [MiNT] MiNT and MetaDOS

["Julian Reschke" <reschke@medicaldataservice.de>]

> From: owner-mint@fishpool.com [mailto:owner-mint@fishpool.com]On Behalf
> Of Martin-Éric Racine
> Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2000 11:04 AM
> To: MiNT List
> Subject: RE: [MiNT] MiNT and MetaDOS
>
>
> On 2000-5-2, Julian Reschke <reschke@medicaldataservice.de> wrote:
>
> > > Why not put everything inside the XFS itself?
> >
> > To allow you to use other people's BOS drivers?
>
> Pretty hard, since BOS driver documentation is not found.

You may like it or not, but there *are* alternative BOS drivers, and people
*do* use them.

> Besides, Atari themselves clearly stated that MetaDOS was
> obsoleted by the XDD/XFS interfaces.

I'm not sure who stated that, but it obviously does only apply to DOS
drivers. XFS still need a way to physically access the device, and a
well-defined OS layer is right thing to do. Do you want extfs to bypass the
hard disk driver? Go figure.

Besides that, the statement would have a lot more credibility if Atari
actually had released a CDROM XFS which does all what the already existing
MetaDOS was doing at that time.

> > > Does anything else besides SPIN! use BOS drivers, nowadays?
> >
> > For instance the MagiC XFS, and DOS drivers when you run on
> > plain TOS.
>
> a) Does Magic use MetaDOS to load itself???  Or what do you mean?

SPINMAGC.XFS uses BOS drivers.

> b) Which DOS drivers?

HSMAY*.DOS, ISO9660F.DOS, HS-ISO.DOS, SPIN.DOS.