The MOOH memory & SPI board

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tormod
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tormod »

I made some short, shaky videos:
  1. Power cycling and booting FUZIX with the kernel loader in a boot ROM on the board:
    http://toolshed.sourceforge.net/fuzix/f ... _1120k.mp4 (4MB)
  2. NitrOS-9 Level-2 booting (using DriveWire):
    http://toolshed.sourceforge.net/fuzix/n ... vewire.mp4 (865KB)
Last edited by tormod on Sat Apr 07, 2018 9:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
pser1
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by pser1 »

Hi Tormod,
great news!
thanks for showing us this project runs forward ...
cheers
pere
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tormod
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tormod »

To celebrate that XRoar (development branch, snapshots) now has preliminary MOOH support, here is the simplest way to try out NitrOS-9 Level 2 on an emulated Dragon 32:
  1. Download this NitrOS-9 disk image (for Becker port / DriveWire emulation) and insert in the first disk slot (0) in the DW4 DriveWire server (which must be set up for emulation):
    https://nitros9.sourceforge.io/NOS9_680 ... becker.dsk (644KB)
  2. Download (and unzip) the attached kernel_becker.bin (NitrOS-9 kernel file as a DECB binary) and put it in your XRoar folder.
  3. Start XRoar like this:

    Code: Select all

    xroar -default-machine dragon32 -cart mooh -cart-becker -run kernel_becker.bin
Attachments
kernel_becker.bin.zip
NitrOS-9 Level 2 kernel file for MOOH with Becker port
(3.92 KiB) Downloaded 365 times
pser1
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by pser1 »

Hi Tormod,
very good!
I have downloaded the .bin and used instead of the DOS dweeb.
Both ways work flawlessly
Thanks a lot to you and Ciaran for modifying XRoar to suport MOOH
cheers
pere
FreeMemory.jpg
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bluearcus
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by bluearcus »

Wow, and Xroar support too! Must try this.
sixxie
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by sixxie »

Pretty cool to see level 2 running on even an emulated Dragon!

(Even if I did have to fire up the Java monstrosity that is Drivewire 4)

Worth noting that all XRoar patches were from Tormod, my only involvement was to apply them ;)
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tormod
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tormod »

An update on the MOOH front. The hardware has been tested by me and a number of beta testers and seems to work fine, and I am getting ready to send out boards to the "general audience". The latest board revision, see photo below, has mounting holes so it fits in a Tandy FD-502 enclosure or any enclosure made for the CoCoSDC.
mooh-rev1.1.jpg
mooh-rev1.1.jpg (164.19 KiB) Viewed 10008 times
MOOH clone army ready for world domestication err.. domination!


On the software side there are also a lot of news lately:

* NitrOS-9 boot module for the SD card! This is a first step towards full support for the SD card in NitrOS-9. The NitrOS-9 kernel and bootfile are both loaded from the SD card so it boots superfast.

* FUZIX has gotten GPT (GUID Partition Table) support. Allows plenty of labeled(!) partitions on the SD card. FUZIX displays the partition labels on boot. No more dd'ing out to anonymous sector or partition numbers when preparing the SD card, instead they can be accessed through e.g. /dev/disk/by-part-label/FUZIX_kernel on Linux. I know you all have been waiting for GPT support on your Dragon!

Longer term ideas involve auto selection of root fs partition based on partition type, and support for this in NitrOS-9 as well. All making it easier to maintain a number of OSes and configurations on a single card.
fuzix-gpt-table.png
fuzix-gpt-table.png (7.12 KiB) Viewed 10008 times
FUZIX boot, root fs selection menu


* XRoar now emulates the SPI interface and SD card (on MOOH and Spinx-512). This will speed up further development of the NitrOS-9 and FUZIX ports as well as the SDBOOT boot loader. FUZIX can now be emulated without DriveWire, so booting and running much faster. And unlike when using DriveWire, the exact same code runs on XRoar, without having to build for "real" or "emulator".

* Finally, first support for the CoCoVGA video board (replacing/enhancing the 6847) is being added to NitrOS-9 (by Boisy Pitre and David Ladd), and looks like a good combination with the MOOH. See below photo from Ron Klein's CoCo2/CoCoVGA/MOOH setup. Especially support for the 64-column text mode would be very interesting.
MOOH+CoCoVGA.png
MOOH+CoCoVGA.png (482.33 KiB) Viewed 10008 times
Showing the lower-case capabilities of the CoCoVGA board.


Code:
- For XRoar, see Ciaran's dev-0.35 branch from http://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/
- The NitrOS-9 Level 2 port is still not in the official repo, but is baking at https://gitlab.com/tormod/level2mooh
- The SDBOOT boot loader (for ROM or disk/cassette/DWLOAD) is at https://gitlab.com/tormod/sdboot (mooh branch)
- For setting up GPT partitions, GPT fdisk seems the best option: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ That site also has lots of useful information about GPT.
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tormod
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tormod »

An SD card image prepared with FUZIX, as well as an SDBOOT boot ROM image can be found at http://toolshed.sourceforge.net/fuzix/ with instructions on how to run it in XRoar.

Update: I posted this a bit early, not all the needed bits are in XRoar git yet. The Linux binary at above URL will work.
Update2: XRoar git is complete now.

Update3:
An SD card image prepared with WIP NitrOS-9 for MOOH on XRoar: https://nitros9.sourceforge.io/mooh/
This still requires DW4 or another DriveWire server with Becker emulation support.
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tormod
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tormod »

Finally I have working SD card drivers for NitrOS-9! Thanks to good XRoar support and some long train rides... I actually reused the coco3fpga drivers by Gary Becker and Bill Pierce to a large degree.

A video of the MOOH booting NitrOS-9, using its boot ROM and SD card: http://toolshed.sourceforge.net/fuzix/n ... sdcard.mp4 (416KB).

Updated SD card image for NitrOS-9 at https://nitros9.sourceforge.io/mooh/
tjewell
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Re: The MOOH memory & SPI board

Post by tjewell »

Just a quick note to say that this works great! Thanks Tormod, it's a really great card. Now, I really must get back into Fuzix ...
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