I can claim success now. It was quite a challenge for me to get QUAD working really `really well. I will be releasing REX 4.9 revision 236 later today with tools to upgrade from prior 4.9, and tools to do a clean installation from scratch.
One major area of challenge was making the M100 behave like T200 at power up, where the computer remembers which bank you were using before power down. This was made particularly challenging because I realized while testing that QUAD does NOT always power up in bank 0. This little problem means that the M100 can power up in any RAM bank when QUAD is installed. This is truly a minor hardware defect; I could have designed a solution, but the wonderful thing about software is that sometimes one can overcome hardware problems! I managed to sort out a reliable way of taking control of the power up of the laptop, and I`m pleased to say it is working well. So, that is the last major enhancement to release 4.9. I may add bank-to-bank copy in one more small release, like the T200 feature (that would be an improvement to PC-8201 and M100 alike). After that, ``release 5` anchor feature is completion of the internal flash drive function, for adding true file storage to REX. My current thinking is that about half of the REX 1MB flash can be made available for file storage....which is quite a lot I think, all things considered. So, I`ll post a note when the REX Wiki page has the updated software available. regards, Steve On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 7:38 PM, Stephen Adolph <[email protected]> wrote: > I put on a push in the last 2 days to get REX release 4.9 to support > QUAD. I'm happy to say I have a candidate load that appears to be working > well. > I have some testing to do and some code clean up but overall the > mechanisms I added to make M100 a 4 bank machine are working. By pressing > TAB you can quickly access 4 different RAM banks, and have a different > option rom in each BANK. > > So, I'll post a note to the list when I have a load on the REX wiki page > available as a "beta". Be warned that you need to wipe your rex and > rebuild it, to get this latest load. That means basically all stored RAM > images and ROM images have to be purged and reloaded. > > > In other news, I have boards back from fab now for 4MB versions of REX. > The intent here is to have a bunch more flash, for use as a "flash drive" > allowing read/write of files to the storage. Software is still a dream at > this point however.. > > ..Steve >
