Getting Cubix to run on RC2014-6809

[Robin Hourahane]

Hi,

I was thinking about building a 6809 RC2014 but then noticed that there is an emulator for it, so I thought I'd give that a go before spending money on actually building a physical one.

Anyway forked EtchedPixels RC2014 (with a view to porting to Windows) and built RC2014-6809 on a VirtualBox Mint Linux without problems. Then cloned RC2014-ROM and managed to build the 6809 ROM.

I make a blank disk using:

makedisk 1 cubix.ide

If I try running the emulator using:

./rc2014-6809 -r ../RC2014-ROM/6809/cubix.512 -i cubix.ide -b

I get the following output and then it hangs:

[80] *[81] [83] [87] [8F] [9F]
[BF] [FF] ROM... Passed
RAM... Passed

CUBIX version 1.5

Copyright 1983-2005 Dave Dunfield
All rights reserved

If I omit the disk command parameters I can get to the * prompt but obviously get disk errors:

80] *[81] [83] [87] [8F] [9F]
[BF] [FF] ROM... Passed
RAM... Passed

CUBIX version 1.5

Copyright 1983-2005 Dave Dunfield
All rights reserved

Error accessing block 0 on drive: A
Disk format error
*format a:
Formatting Drive: A
Address=8, Cylinders=32, Heads=1, Sectors/Track=255
Interleave=2, Directory extension=3
Ok? y
Error accessing block 0 on drive: A
Disk format error
Rc=9

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks

Robin

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2021 at 14:15, Robin Hourahane <rhour...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I was thinking about building a 6809 RC2014 but then noticed that there is an emulator for it, so I thought I'd give that a go before spending money on actually building a physical one.

Anyway forked EtchedPixels RC2014 (with a view to porting to Windows) and built RC2014-6809 on a VirtualBox Mint Linux without problems. Then cloned RC2014-ROM and managed to build the 6809 ROM.

I make a blank disk using:

makedisk 1 cubix.ide

If I try running the emulator using:

./rc2014-6809 -r ../RC2014-ROM/6809/cubix.512 -i cubix.ide -b

I get the following output and then it hangs:

[80] *[81] [83] [87] [8F] [9F]
[BF] [FF] ROM... Passed
RAM... Passed

CUBIX version 1.5

Copyright 1983-2005 Dave Dunfield
All rights reserved

It's a weird little cubixism. You need to stop Cubix trying to autorun commands on the unformatted disk. During the memory test you need to hit escape. It'll then drop to the prompt directly and you can format the disk. If you mistype the format command it'll also go off into the weeds, but once format is run sanity prevails.

Something like NitrOS9 would probably be a lot more useful, but the Cubix porting instructions and drivers take no time to understand, the NitrOS9 ones baffled me so I went with Cubix. Probably a tool to assemble a Cubix filesystem/diskimage on a PC would make life a lot easier. Cubix does have some nice tools though including basic and a mini C compiler. It's also capable of self hosting - although that would need the driver code tweaking to that assembler and a 6809 flash writing app adding.

Alan