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| Parallax Forums > Public Forums > Propeller Chip > TriBladeProp PCB: Uses 3 Propeller ICs for a Single Board Computer (SBC) | Forum Quick Jump
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|  Dr_Acula Registered Member

       Date Joined Dec 2008 Total Posts : 606 | Posted 8/26/2009 5:51 AM (GMT -8) |   | | Can you just explain again, what is a packed hard drive? Ta. | | Back to Top | | |
  |  Dr_Acula Registered Member

       Date Joined Dec 2008 Total Posts : 606 | Posted 8/26/2009 2:56 PM (GMT -8) |   | Ah, that sounds interesting. Pure unaltered simh files. I like that. You describe how writes work. What about reads - do you read in 128 or 512 bytes when CP/M asks for 128 bytes? Just thinking of the probability that sectors are contiguous vs the overhead of reading in 4x the bytes vs the overhead of the start and stop routines on the sd card compared to the actual data reading. Also - dumb question but I can't work it out from the code - is the sd card working at 100khz or 400khz?
Have you got some code to post yet? | | Back to Top | | |
  |  Dr_Acula Registered Member

       Date Joined Dec 2008 Total Posts : 606 | Posted 8/26/2009 3:44 PM (GMT -8) |   | | Yes, that ought to deliver a speed improvement. I'm looking forward to the code! | | Back to Top | | |
       |  Dr_Acula Registered Member

       Date Joined Dec 2008 Total Posts : 606 | Posted 8/28/2009 5:25 AM (GMT -8) |   | | | |
    |  heater Registered Member

       Date Joined Feb 2008 Total Posts : 1832 | Posted 8/28/2009 6:09 PM (GMT -8) |   | Cluso:
I think the clean way to handle the boot code is your option 1)
a) Clear all the RAM to zero (up to FEFF anway). b) Read DSKBOOT.COM from an SD file and put it at FF00 c) Start the emulation. The Z80 then runs up RAM executing NOPs until it hits the boot code at FF00. From there, yes, it reads the boot tracks from the boot drive and off we go.
This saves having to prepare a 64K RAM image file and is better than 2) because it saves 256 bytes of HUB space.
Then we can add a user selectable boot floppy by prompting for a drive 0-7 and "poking" that into the right byte somewhere after FF00.
Then when we want to boot from hard disk we only need to load HDSKBOOT.COM from an SD file into RAM somewhere (I think it is 5C00) in addition to DSKBOOT.COM, The user can the select boot drives 0 to 11 (currently) which gets poked to the same place in the DSKBOOT area and off we go.
This is basically what SIMH does.
As for solving the different hardware implementation issues, I have a cunning and devious plan...
Given that:
1) We would like to be able to just drop in SIMH AltairZ0 disk images after minimal sector mashing (but, importantly, not necessarily boot from them) 2) We would like to accommodate Joda and the N8VEM/PropIO guys. After all we can help them and they can help us with BIOS hacking :) and cross-compatibility with many systems is always a good idea.
Then we all make a net gain by softening our stance on the "only use SIMH Altair BIOS".
Rather, we slowly start to diverge from that BIOS.
Let's face it, Altair floppy emulation is a disaster for us. Byte by byte I/O (no DMA) slows things horribly, having sector skew on the disk slows things horribly, the 137 byte sectors we already had to fix.
On top of that I already want to change the BIOS to get the AUTOEXEC function or run in 24K on the Demo Board. And we already need a small change to the CP/M 3 BIOS to get it to work on TriBlade.
The plan basically involves: 1) Changing the SIMH BIOS(s) to only support one Altair compatible floppy. So that we can drop in all those goodies that are available from SIMH (and out of respect for the Altair:)) 2) Changing the BIOS to support many disks via the hard disk driver (floppy or hard whatever size) giving us DMA and skew free speed. 3) Changing the BIOS to include AUTOEXEC. 4) Changing the BIOS to accomodate PropIO etc. (different port addresses etc) 5) Whatever else comes up.
Basically the changes are not huge. I believe any future SIMH Altair bug fixes/improvements could be easily back portable. Also as Yoda and Dr_A have said this new platform could end up being part of SIMH.
How cool is that ?
To that end I have already set up for myself a way of building ZiCog boot disks for DemoBoard, Triblade etc under SIMH on the PC.
OK this is getting long, more later. For me, the past is not over yet. | | Back to Top | | |
  |  Dr_Acula Registered Member

       Date Joined Dec 2008 Total Posts : 606 | Posted 8/28/2009 7:27 PM (GMT -8) |   | | Looking good. Now you can add files on bootup. I'm at work now and away from the triblade :( but I'll be following developments over the next 10 hours... | | Back to Top | | |
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