archive.worldofdragon.org

Hello everyone!

A user from the spanish ZonaDePruebas forum sent me the book "Using Floppy Disks With The Dragon Microcomputer" scanned.

It is an interesting book as it was edited by Cumana/Premier and it has the complete list of commands and parameters of Delta DOS. I recognize that without a book like this, a Delta controller is completely useless (I borrowed one from a friend of mine and couldn't get it to even format a disk...).

So, I've made a nice OCR and reformatted it so close as the original as possible, and added hyperlinks from the index pages to the sections on the book.

Then, why v1? Because I don't have a quality scan of the cover of the book, and pages 48-49 were missing (pages 46-47 were repeated twice).

If I can get the two missing pages and the cover, I'll make the definitive version.

You'll find the OCR'ed pdf file attached and you can download the original file here.

Please take a look at it. Suggestions and corrections are welcome!

Thanks! This is really excellent stuff

Excellent! Thank You.

That's really cool.

It does show up that the ROM we have available can't be the only one though: typing those CONFIG commands out verbatim just gives PARAMETER ERROR.

robcfg wrote:I recognize that without a book like this, a Delta controller is completely useless (I borrowed one from a friend of mine and couldn't get it to even format a disk...)

Any chance you could do a ROM dump?

Yes, but as far as I remember it was the same as hosted on the archive.

I'll take a look at it or even ask again for it. The MK1 and case pictures in the Delta wiki page are precisely of that controller.

It could be an error on the original book, on my side, or just another version of the rom as you suggest. Or it could be that yours is the one with a different rom and not the other way round...

I'm glad you like my pdf version, because it's a lot of work, but it really is worth it. I'm eager to get the missing pages and the cover XD

If the dump is the same, fair enough - we're probably just missing something. Or it could be prodding some hardware and getting a result that I'm not emulating properly! I'll throw some debugging in, see if anything pops up.

Edit: Ok figured it - if you use 'L' and 'H' instead of the 'S' and 'D' in the manual it works (Low and High density, I guess). However, that just uncovers more things to debug. Woo.

Hey guys!

I found my dump of the Delta DOS cartridge, compared it with the one here on the archive, and they're identical.

So far what I'm seeing is that if you CONFIG A,40,18,1,3,H then INIT A, it sets double density ok, but then proceeds to do a write track as though it's single density. This would probably work except that the CRC is never initialised... All very odd.

I'll try to borrow the Delta cartridge again, but it will take some time...