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 (164.19 KiB) Viewed 11193 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 (7.12 KiB) Viewed 11193 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 (482.33 KiB) Viewed 11193 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.