Attempting to get a DragonPlus board going ...

[sorchard]

Great to see you've got the Plus board working.

One thing that might be stopping Flex booting is the lack of D64 serial port, though my understanding is that stock Flex should work OK on an expanded machine. I've no idea what variations of Flex are kicking around at the moment. OS9 definitely hangs on boot because of the lack of serial port and needs a patch.

It might be worth comparing what you have with the standard upgrade method:
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... 4K_Upgrade

The article has a bunch of useful-looking routines that could be used for testing.

I did this upgrade to three of my machines bitd and didn't encounter any issues other than the serial port. I use one of them currently for 64K development. (I try not to use my D64 too much).

[sorchard]

Hi Tony,

Just in case it's of any use I've attached a map1 utility that copies rom to ram. You can then confirm ram is present at $c000 upwards with poke/peek.

run with CLOADM:EXEC

[tjewell]

Thanks Stew! Well, I can confirm I have 64K in this machine - but cheers for the pointers, hadn't clicked that an upgraded D32 isn't the same as D64. Is it possible to emulate a 64K D32 with Xroar? @sixxie will know!

Right, off to read Flex and OS/9 manuals, see what I can work out.

[robcfg]

I found this while looking at the link that Stew posted before.

It shows what to do to run OS9 on an upgraded Dragon 32.

[tjewell]

Ah, and another step forward. Flex runs under Xroar if I have the normal DragonDos cartridge ROM loaded, but doesn't if I have the super-dooper DosPlus ROM from @pser1 - so maybe that's what's happening? It's nothing to do with the DragonPlus, perhaps Flex simply doesn't work on machines with a CocoSDC? Okay, I'll dust off the D64 with the real floppies and make a Flex boot floppy.

@robcfg - ah, that looks good. I need to make some OS/9 boot floppies with DragonPlus drivers on, so I'll look at that too.

[tjewell]

IMG_20180226_130549-small.jpg (201.36 KiB) Viewed 5661 times

And we have OS/9 - okay, here's what I did, so I don't forget, and hopefully someone else finds it useful too.

I downloaded 'OS-9 Level 1 v1.2 (1983)(Dragon Data Ltd)[OS-9][!].zip' and 'DragonPlus OS9 Drivers (1985)(Compusense Ltd)[!][OS9].zip' from the OS/9 section of the archive.

I copied the unzipped OS/9 boot disk (OS9-SYSTEM.VDK) to OS9DPLUS.VDK, and loaded into Xroar as disk 1, set for 'write enable' and 'write back'
Loaded the Drivers disk as disk 2.

From inside OS/9 I did ...
COPY /D1/STARTUP /D0/STARTUP
COPY /D1/GO80 /DO/CMDS/GO80
(and so on for each file)

Then I quit Xroar, copied the VDK to my SDC and booted off OS9DPLUS.VDK - the machine now hangs, but that was expected - see this: http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... versus_OS9.

I actually skipped a step - I didn't do the poke, but went straight to EXEC9736 - it booted again, but this time all way to G080 and a working DragonPlus (I might need to do the poke next time if I want serial access maybe?)

[sorchard]

Is it possible to emulate a 64K D32 with Xroar?

You could put something like this in your xroar.conf:

Code: Select all

machine dragon32exp64
	machine-desc Dragon 32 (64K expanded)
	machine-arch dragon32
	ram 64

Then you will be able to select it from the machine menu, or specify on the command line with "xroar -default-machine dragon32exp64", or temporarily make it the default in xroar.conf with "default-machine dragon32exp64"

[bluearcus]

To get rid of the reset / poke shenanigans, someone needs to cobble together a 32(64) boot disk or hack the 6551 driver to behave nicely when it's not present.

Will have a look.

[tjewell]

Ah, @bluearcus, you're one step ahead of me! I just logged in to post asking why we needed to do the reset, what it actually did, and if we could get round it. Let me know what you discover!

@sorchard - perfect, thanks, I'll set that up.

[bluearcus]

Is it possible to emulate a 64K D32 with Xroar?

You could put something like this in your xroar.conf:

Code: Select all

machine dragon32exp64
	machine-desc Dragon 32 (64K expanded)
	machine-arch dragon32
	ram 64

Then you will be able to select it from the machine menu, or specify on the command line with "xroar -default-machine dragon32exp64", or temporarily make it the default in xroar.conf with "default-machine dragon32exp64"

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work... as Phil wrote on Farcebook...

what happens is OS-9 writes to the address where the serial port is normally on a 64, and because of the incomplete address decoding ends up writing to the PIA at $ff00, which is enabled $ff00-$ff1f

And any Dragon32(64) config in Xroar appears to trigger some incorrect logic which sets strict decoding of the FF00-FF07 address space based on memory size, not on whether the arch has an ACIA

So it's not possible to produce Tony's boot hang in current Xroar.

Update... patched and rebuilt from source. Yep. That fails.