RACE Electronics Peripherals

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tjewell
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by tjewell »

Stew, well spotted! Fantastic, that works - I loaded it up with my small collection of games cartridges, and the pokes happily switched between them. So neat! Who needs a Tandy MPI eh?

So here's the 'Mega-Dragon', fully loaded with a Coco-SDC, the Speech&Sound cart, Tormod's new 512K expansion card and the classic Chess cartridge. What more can I want? Well, actually, I know - I have a real DOS cart too, but no floppy drive. I'll have to tweak Pere's DosPlus to support the Race, as his code works with an MPI, but that doesn't look tricky. Then I'll have one seriously blinged out Dragon!
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Pernod70
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by Pernod70 »

So did anyone here get the Sideways ROM cartridge? Looking at the wiki at http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... sROM02.JPG there's a ROM in there that I haven't seen dumped.
pser1
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by pser1 »

tjewell wrote: Fri Apr 08, 2016 3:34 pm I'll have to tweak Pere's DosPlus to support the Race, as his code works with an MPI, but that doesn't look tricky. Then I'll have one seriously blinged out Dragon!
Hello Tony,
talk to Philippe, I sent him my very last DP50E version that is compatible with the mega-mini-MPI by Ed Snider
This last version is ready to accept the RACE, but I need to know a way to assert that this module is plugged in
Do you know of any test that could be done to know if it is there?
chers!
pere
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robcfg
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by robcfg »

Pernod70 wrote: Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:05 pm So did anyone here get the Sideways ROM cartridge? Looking at the wiki at http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... sROM02.JPG there's a ROM in there that I haven't seen dumped.
I uploaded the pictures from an eBay auction, but sadly I don't have it. Otherwise it would have been dumped by now :mrgreen:

By the way, isn't "Sideways Rom" a very BBCish term?
Pernod70
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by Pernod70 »

robcfg wrote: Sat Jun 12, 2021 8:39 am I uploaded the pictures from an eBay auction, but sadly I don't have it. Otherwise it would have been dumped by now :mrgreen:

By the way, isn't "Sideways Rom" a very BBCish term?
That's unfortunate, was hoping it may have been found over the years since the pictures were uploaded.

Yeah, the term Sideways ROM is more commonly used with the BBC, and this seems to be based on the same principals with multiple ROMs installed that can be paged into the same ROM region from BASIC commands provided on the 2K ROM.

I could also use some technical info on the RACE Expansion System, as I'd be surprised if it doesn't respond to other addresses apart from $FEFF.
MaestroSoftware
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by MaestroSoftware »

Pernod70 wrote: Sat Jun 12, 2021 11:33 am I'd be surprised if it doesn't respond to other addresses apart from $FEFF.
I'm going to check on this asap. I found out that READING $feff switches the expansion board to slot 2, but didn't detect any other strange behaviour yet.
pser1 wrote: Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:46 pm I need to know a way to assert that [the Race expansion] is plugged in
The only way I found is very cumbersome: switch to ram/rom mode, poking 0 to 3 to $feff and checking whether the "signature" of what is "between" $c000 and $fefe changes when you poke a different value to $feff. Of course, it will not detect the Race expansion if all cartridges there are pure I/O without ROM or if there are no cartridges at all (but it's not very interesting to detect it in the latter case, is it? )
Pernod70
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by Pernod70 »

MaestroSoftware wrote: Sat Jun 12, 2021 3:04 pm
Pernod70 wrote: Sat Jun 12, 2021 11:33 am I'd be surprised if it doesn't respond to other addresses apart from $FEFF.
I'm going to check on this asap. I found out that READING $feff switches the expansion board to slot 2, but didn't detect any other strange behaviour yet.
I'm only questioning it as the review in Dragon User mentions POKEs, as in plural! What does reading $FEFF actually return?
pser1
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by pser1 »

hi, all!
I see nobody has talked about the RACE expansion explaining if there are other addresses that could be tested and what values
should be expected ...
This info would greatly help to implement compatibility with this multipack expansion in the DOSPlus5.0 extended
Thanks in advance for any info/hint you'd want to share
cheers!
pere
sixxie
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Re: RACE Electronics Peripherals

Post by sixxie »

If it uses discrete logic, photos of the PCB might help?
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