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Fuzix on the Dragon 64 with SAMx8
Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2025 4:52 pm
by sixxie
Youtube has decided this is a "short", presumably because of the stupid portrait mode.
https://youtube.com/shorts/WGGKEBfRt3I
Re: Fuzix on the Dragon 64 with SAMx8
Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2025 6:10 pm
by robcfg
Hehe, cool!
Re: Fuzix on the Dragon 64 with SAMx8
Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2025 3:44 pm
by tjewell
I really must check this forum more often, because that's soooo cool. And now also means there's an alternative to using Tormod's Mooh card (which is awesome ... but no longer available).
I'm probably late to the party as usual - tell more about the SAMx8 - does it replicate the GIME style memory mapping? (like the Mooh?). Or do I need a different Fuzix version? And - most importantly - will it work with any Dragon?
Also ... how's it working with the SDC? Do you have a hard disk image on there? The Mooh relied on a boot ROM and an SD card for its magic, yet I see none of this here.
This is rather exciting!
Re: Fuzix on the Dragon 64 with SAMx8
Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2025 4:24 pm
by sixxie
tjewell wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 3:44 pm
I really must check this forum more often, because that's soooo cool. And now also means there's an alternative to using Tormod's Mooh card (which is awesome ... but no longer available).
I'm probably late to the party as usual - tell more about the SAMx8 - does it replicate the GIME style memory mapping? (like the Mooh?). Or do I need a different Fuzix version? And - most importantly - will it work with any Dragon?
It's different - more limited in that it's 16K banking. Still two tasks though. But by adding flag registers, you can nominate 8K as COMMON space which works decently for Fuzix - no need to copy the common kernel area around for new processes. In dev that's turned into two 4K areas, as Fuzix only really needs 4K of common...
But the way it's designed it has one plus: video memory is moved to the board too. And you can set base address to anywhere in the 512K in multiples of 32 bytes, which is nice.
And sadly the answer to the last point is no - Dragon 64s only for this board layout; not even Tano I'm afraid. It plugs into the SAM socket
and one of the on-board latches (which you have to remove and put a socket in place of).
Also ... how's it working with the SDC? Do you have a hard disk image on there? The Mooh relied on a boot ROM and an SD card for its magic, yet I see none of this here.
Yes, you can use a special access mode of the CoCoSDC to read sectors from a mounted image in LBA mode. The CoCo 3 Fuzix port uses this, so I just borrowed that code. I did write a kernel loader though, as that hadn't been done for the Dragon off CoCoSDC.
This is rather exciting!
I'm enjoying playing with it. Having a bit of a weird issue at the moment with Fuzix keyboard scanning, but only in FAST mode (my PIAs are 'B's & the CPU's a 63C09, so shouldn't really be related to them... though I suppose one of the PIAs could be dodgy edit: probably not: swapping the PIAs doesn't change anything).
Re: Fuzix on the Dragon 64 with SAMx8
Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2025 5:13 pm
by sixxie
Ok I'm a little less worried about the Fuzix keyboard behaviour. Even on an actual D64 with no fancy stuff, if I do the keyboard scanning in the same way - extended write to B side followed immediately by extended read from A side, I get weird behaviour (see attached .dsk - BOOT and type - the keyboard scanning happens in fast mode).
I guess I'm either going to have to slightly reorder the Fuzix keyboard scan routine or make it force slow mode before it does it. But it does mean the SAMx8 is probably operating well enough
