What to do...
Bob Devries
SECAD AS-68K from a company in Melbourne, Australia. It was supplied
with OS-9/68000 Professional.
There are times when the computer just sat on the shelf, and others
when it was in constant daily use.
Recently, it would appear that the BIOS/BOOT ROM chips fried. It
doesn't boot up anymore. The disks are fine; they checked out in
another 68K based computer I have. At the time this happened, I had
been working on hardware and software to implement an 8-bit IDE hard
disk controller and driver.
The owners of the company appear to be too busy with other tasks to
service a request for new ROM chips or a binary dump so I can program
my own chips.
Is there anything I can do to get my AS-68K working again. The boot
ROM need only be able to read the universal format boot disk using a
765 floppy chip. No screen output is necessary, but output to a serial
port using the built-in 68681 based serial ports would be nice. I
believe that I have the full technical specifications on hand.
I'm not a serious programmer, and I only tinker with this and other
"obsolete" computers as a hobby to fill my spare time.
If there are other AS-68K users out there who can help, please do.
kindest regards,
Bob Devries
Dalby, QLD, Australia
JackRubin
This is bad news, since I was hoping to get copies of your ROMs/PALs
to go with the bare board I got from Jim Adamthwaite. Have you dumped
the other programmed chips? Hope your plea turns up some other users!!
best,
Jack
Bob Devries
Jack,
I will keep pestering the author, and trying to find out for myself
some way of re-creating the BOOTROM code.
I do have another OS9/68K computer (two actually, if I count my packed
Atari STe and STf computers), so I'll try to see what is in the ROM of
those.
Regards, Bob Devries
Dalby, QLD, Australia
Lejavaman
We have got a few systems running on 68030 and 68040. The provider was
SBS - OR which is a German company based in Augsburg. The version of
OS9 we use is V2.9 with some modules of V2.4. I don't know if it can
be of any help if we copy the boot ROM. Let me know.
Christophe
Bob Devries
> We have got a few systems running on 68030 and 68040. The provider was
> SBS - OR which is a German company based in Augsburg. The version of
> OS9 we use is V2.9 with some modules of V2.4. I don't know if it can
> be of any help if we copy the boot ROM. Let me know.
>
> Christophe
Thanks for the offer, Christophe. However, the BOOT ROM is likely to
be highly specific to the hardware, which in this case is an XT/ISA
multi-IO card, an EGA graphics card and when I'm finished writing and
debugging it, and XT-IDE hard disk drive.
The AS-68K computer is rather special, but not unrelated to the PT-68K
(both use the ISA sockets for IO cards).
For instance, the floppy drive (via the uPC765) is addressed at
$00F003F0. There is a 68681 DUART on the mother board (useful if the
Multi-IO card won't behave).
In the future (provided I can get the AS-68K running again), I want to
write a floppy disk driver to use the WD37C65 to allow me to use
1.4MiB floppies.
Martin Gregorie
> In the future (provided I can get the AS-68K running again), I want to
> write a floppy disk driver to use the WD37C65 to allow me to use 1.4MiB
> floppies.
>
As a kind of parallel suggestion, have you considered using CF cards
instead? The reason I suggest them is that IDE - CF adapters are quite
cheap (much cheaper than a floppy drive) and fairly readily available.
They are just a small PCB with an IDE socket on one side and a CF card
socket on the other, typically mounted in a metal strip that fits a PC
adapter card slot. Use a card of 2GB or less and the standard IDE RBF
driver should work with it, either with the standard IO manager of the
PCFS one.
I have one of these adapters that I intend to use as for backups and to
transfer data to a Linux system - I just haven't gotten round to
installing it yet. Currently I'm using floppies for backups, but this
device is my way out when my OSK box goes bang and I switch over to using
os9exec under Linux.
--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
Bob Devries
wrote:
> As a kind of parallel suggestion, have you considered using CF cards
> instead? The reason I suggest them is that IDE - CF adapters are quite
> cheap (much cheaper than a floppy drive) and fairly readily available.
Indeed, this has crossed my mind also. I have yet to study the
documentation for a CF card to see if it can be set up with a
different file system, thus removing the necessity of using the PCF
file manager. It has an added advantage of being very quiet, so if I
can find a quiet XT power supply, it would be great.
I actually have some of the source code needed to produce a bootrom,
but I'm missing the vectors.a and boot.a files. I think that with
them, I could produce a replacement ROM.
Regards, Bob Devries
Dalby, QLD, Australia
Martin Gregorie
> On Aug 20, 5:43 am, Martin Gregorie <mar...@address-in-sig.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> As a kind of parallel suggestion, have you considered using CF cards
>> instead? The reason I suggest them is that IDE - CF adapters are quite
>> cheap (much cheaper than a floppy drive) and fairly readily available.
>
> Indeed, this has crossed my mind also. I have yet to study the
> documentation for a CF card to see if it can be set up with a different
> file system, thus removing the necessity of using the PCF file manager.
> It has an added advantage of being very quiet, so if I can find a quiet
> XT power supply, it would be great.
>
There's a lot of good information about CF-cards here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash
In summary, it seems that all CF cards contain a wear-leveling controller
and that all have a built-in PATA mode, switched on by the level on one
of the pins. Like most flash cards the default is FAT-16 for those
smaller than 2GB and FAT-32 for bigger ones but the article also confirms
that they can be formatted with any filing system and can be partitioned.
As I said, the adapter I have is mounted in a metal strip and is designed
to be fitted into a PC adapter slot but there are also CF card adapters
that allow a CF card to be used as a drop-in replacement for a 2.5" PATA/
IDE disk.