Pages: 1 
|
 |
|
Author
|
Topic: Floppy driver for Native? (Read 2910 times)
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
 Offline
Posts: 55
|
Recently I've gotten into Retro/Native. For me, typing 'r' causes my system to crash after a short hard drive thrash.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Charles Childers
Administrator
Sr. Member
Karma: +2/-0
Offline
Posts: 745
|
Sadly I haven't been able to produce a working floppy driver yet. (There's just too many variable in terms of floppy controllers, timings, etc). If a VM86 subsystem existed, I'd be able to use the BIOS functions, but that's a kludge at best.
Can you send me any information on you hdd controller, hdd type/size, and cpu/memory information? This is the first report I've had of the hdd driver not working as expected 
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
Offline
Posts: 55
|
sorry, i don't know most of those specs, and besides, i don't plan on using either of the HDD's in that computer, since I have Windows and Linux on it. 
i tried it on a junk machine i have, but the bootable floppy hangs with the "floppy error" message.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
Offline
Posts: 55
|
BTW are you sure about floppies, Charles? Because I was just thinking about DOS and the BIOS and stuff - and doesn't the BIOS offer a standard way to access the floppy drive? Otherwise how could you boot floppy disks - and install DOS? Do you think it would be worthwhile to try to write the driver myself?
You mentioned that there are too many variables to do it - do you mean, like, settings that you're supposed to verify with the floppy drive in some standardized way?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
Offline
Posts: 55
|
well, i'm determined to use the floppy as a storage device for the time being, since i can't spare a harddrive. how come your pmode->real mode->pmode mechanism has not worked so reliably in the past?
i agree the idea of it is kludgey in one light. but on the other hand, the BIOS is so universal it's considered part of the platform, right? i think sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. kludge or no, if your method can be made reliable, i'd use it.
how much work would it be to add DMA?
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: October 24, 2005, 01:31:41 AM by RogerLevy »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Charles Childers
Administrator
Sr. Member
Karma: +2/-0
Offline
Posts: 745
|
I stopped work on the VM86 code back in 2004. Retro4 had a floppy driver in assembly, but I was never able to get it to work on my hardware. (My biggest problem now is a lack of floppies and only one machine with a working floppy driver). I've thought about "lifting" the driver in Dex4u, but that's still problematic in licensing (Dex4u is closed source currently)
I've attached the Retro4 floppy driver to this, though I have no idea what it'd take to bring it into sync with Retro8's changes. (It's for NASM, and would need minor tweaks to the source and adaption to use the 'code' macros and such to build the dictionary entries). If anyone has the time and patience to update and debug this, I'd be thrilled to include it with RetroForth/Native once more.
I'll give try to start work on updating it myself this week, but I have a full schedule at work this week (likely 65-70 hours!), so I'm not likely to get much coding done.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
Offline
Posts: 55
|
Thanks, Charles! I'll look at it. Happy to report that 'install' worked great on the junk machine i mentioned. That one is a 120mhz pentium with 32 mb ram and probably a 2gig hdd. It's really exciting to be able to boot right into a usable Forth.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Charles Childers
Administrator
Sr. Member
Karma: +2/-0
Offline
Posts: 745
|
Ok, I updated the floppy driver to work with rf8/native and linked it into the kernel (see http://retro.tunes.org/nightly to get a diskimage with it included). Under qemu it does load a cylinder from the floppy into the editor: try "there 0 readf"
A list of provided words (not all tested):
readf ( addr cylinder -- addr+ cylinder+1 )
writef ( addr cylinder -- addr+ cylinder+1 )
reads ( addr cylinder n -- addr+ cylinder+n )
writes ( addr cylinder n -- addr+ cylinder+n )
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
RogerLevy
Full Member
Karma: +1/-0
Offline
Posts: 55
|
way cool...
readf and reads both seemed to work. i haven't tested them out that hard but i got data into the blocks so that's encouraging. i plan on testing it thoroughly, but i have to do it later, because i have homework i should be doing ...
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pages: 1 
|
|
|
|
|
