[Coco] OS9 on EP4CE6 board

[Neal Crook]

Hi Dave,

just to clarify, my work has been on a Cyclone II board:

https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:sbc:multicomp:cycloneii-c:start

Here is the current status for you (and anyone else who's interested)

Level 1 boots reliably. It supports multiple virtual floppy disk images
from an SD card (including booting from track34 on on of those disk
images). It supports the serial ports and the pseudo-serial port VGA/PS2
hardware. It gets its periodic timer interrupt from logic that I added to
Grant's original design. I wrote a utility to initialise the time from the
RTC chip (this can be done by a script at startup).

I wrote an MMU that is functionally compatible with the COCO MMU but I have
not made any progress on a Level 2 port. Bill Nobel started looking at it
but the last update I heard from him was in February so I suspect that
(like me) he has become distracted by other projects.

In the mean-time, leveraging work by Tormod and Brett Gordon, I have ported
FUZIX to the cyclone II multicomp. This is running quite nicely (and makes
use of the MMU code). The FUZIX port includes Drivewire support (again,
porting stuff from Tormod and Brett) which makes me confident that I could
easily add drivewire support to my NitrOS9 Level 1 port.

In addition, I have extended the exec09 emulator that I use for development
so that it can now work with non-blocking I/O and can support a timer tick
interrupt -- both of these were to help my FUZIX work but they also solve
problems that made it difficult for me to develop the Level 2 code in
emulation.

All my code changes are available on request to anyone who wants to examine
or extent them. I think that I should attempt to get them into the official
sourceforge tree. Everything else that I've mentioned here (board design,
RTL, and all the otehr source code) is already freely available from my
github repository and its associated WIKI.

https://github.com/nealcrook/multicomp6809
https://github.com/nealcrook/exec09

regards,

Neal.



On 9 September 2016 at 20:51, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:

> So, Neal, I am eager to hear about what's been going on with the Cyclone
> IV project.  Last I heard you had been successful in booting Level 1 on
> it.  Any further progress?  Do you have the SD card working under OS9?
>
> Dave
>
>
> On 9/9/2016 8:43 AM, Neal Crook wrote:
>
>> cheers,  brett
>>>>
>>> aka Mr D. Morgan
>>
>>
>>
>
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