DragonMMC progres report.
Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2016 10:46 am
Hi all,
Just a little progress report for where I'm at with this project.
Hardware is pretty much stable now, I'll need to do another minor revision before going gold as it where but that's mainly to tidy things up so the final board doesn't have patch wires on it......
Software is now working fairly well, and can do the following :
On startup detects machine it's running on and uses the appropreate version of the firmware for that machine (Dragon or CoCo).
Has access to the FAT filesystem on the SD/MMC card through custom commands, can save & load directly to FAT.
Emulates tape loading to load / save .cas files from the SD/MMC, but obviously at much higher speed.
Can load cartridge images into the onboard RAM and optionally autostart them.
Has (optional**) emulation of Dragon DOS (1.3) and RSDOS, dependent on machine, and can have up to 4 disk images loaded at the same time.
** Dos emulation can be switched on and off with a configuration option, you simply set the option, and hard reboot the machine either by power cycling or setting $0071 to 0 and resetting.
This allows the loading of programs that will not work with dos enbabled.
The firmware is now completely field upgradeable, the onboard AVR microcontroller, can bootload it's own firmware and can also program the CPLD firmware when needed.
Since the Dragon / CoCo firmware is in an EEPROM this can also be updated via a program run from the SD/MMC card.
Comments ?
Anything people would like implemented?
Cheers.
Phill.
Just a little progress report for where I'm at with this project.
Hardware is pretty much stable now, I'll need to do another minor revision before going gold as it where but that's mainly to tidy things up so the final board doesn't have patch wires on it......
Software is now working fairly well, and can do the following :
On startup detects machine it's running on and uses the appropreate version of the firmware for that machine (Dragon or CoCo).
Has access to the FAT filesystem on the SD/MMC card through custom commands, can save & load directly to FAT.
Emulates tape loading to load / save .cas files from the SD/MMC, but obviously at much higher speed.
Can load cartridge images into the onboard RAM and optionally autostart them.
Has (optional**) emulation of Dragon DOS (1.3) and RSDOS, dependent on machine, and can have up to 4 disk images loaded at the same time.
** Dos emulation can be switched on and off with a configuration option, you simply set the option, and hard reboot the machine either by power cycling or setting $0071 to 0 and resetting.
This allows the loading of programs that will not work with dos enbabled.
The firmware is now completely field upgradeable, the onboard AVR microcontroller, can bootload it's own firmware and can also program the CPLD firmware when needed.
Since the Dragon / CoCo firmware is in an EEPROM this can also be updated via a program run from the SD/MMC card.
Comments ?
Anything people would like implemented?
Cheers.
Phill.