How To

WARNING: At the present, OS/64 should NOT be considered stable.  Therefore, never use this on a system that contains valuable data.

You can run OS/64 two ways.  The first is without disk access.  To do this, simple download the latest iso file, and either burn it to a CD-ROM, or use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB stick.

Drive access requires a bit more setup.  OS/64 can read and write FAT32 formatted IDE drives (and should be able to for SATA drives in legacy mode), with the following notes:


  • The OS will only acknowledge the FIRST IDE drive, master, and first partition.  This partition must be formatted as FAT32.  FAT16 does not work at this time (but likely will in the future).
  • The OS currently can not format the drive for you yet.  Therefore you need to partition and format the drive yourself first.  Ive had success with Freedos.  Keep in mind that a partition must be a certain size before Freedos FDISK program will switch from FAT16 to FAT32.  I think I used a 100GB drive....quite roomy for a Commodore
  • The OS works fine with LBA28 and LBA48 modes.  Large FAT32 partitions should be fine
  • DO NOT USE A DRIVE WHICH CONTAINS ANY IMPORTANT DATA!!  This is still very early in the development and you should not take a chance on losing something valuable.
  • D64 images?  Not at the present, but in time.
  • The USB stick you booted with is not considered an IDE drive by the PCI bus.  Currently I do not have USB code in the OS, meaning that you can not read from the stick as a drive.  This is a natural expectation, so I do intend to solve for this later down the road.
You can confirm that the system is able to access the drive by hitting ESC on the Commodore screen which should take you to an 80 column command screen.  Pressing [P] and [Enter] will display the drive partition information.  [D] will attempt to read the directory.  




As of this writing, SAVE doesnt work yet.  BASIC's SAVE now works! You can also save via the 80 column screen (ESC).  Just type "W <FILENAME>" where Filename is an 8 character string with no spaces.  "W MYPROGRM" will save the contents of your BASIC program.  You can also save memory to disk by providing a starting address (in hex) and number of bytes.  ex:"W MYPROGRM C000 255".  All this will go away soon once the kernel routines have been patched, and this page will be updated appropriately.

Want to help out?  Im one guy and there's lots to do.  Use the contact me form at the bottom to let me know how you'd like to be involved.

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