Great to see you guys dig into this overdue issue.  Just want you to know while 
you dig into that,  I’m currently working on an ISA->S100 bus converter board 
so that one day we will have an S100  bus VGA board.  Also for those wondering 
about the V2a 68K board,  I have completed the slight mods, waiting for Andrew 
or Malcolm to help me on a slight Gruber file generation issue.  Hang in there.

 

John

 

 

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of yoda
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2014 1:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:4195] Re: A windows based program to write a CPM3 image to 
a CF card for the S100 IDE board

 

Sorry for previous  - web posted before I was ready

 

The diskdefs are:

 

diskdef s100ide

     seclen 512

     tracks  256

     sectrck 64

     blocksize 2048

     skew    0

     boottrk 1

 

I think the problem is the -1 but I am not sure - Track 1 sector 1 should be 
0x40 not 0x3F but I am not sure - tried commenting out the dec 1 but that did 
not seem to help either.  I have included my hldrbios.asm as well

 

Dave

On Saturday, June 14, 2014 2:13:22 PM UTC-5, David Fry wrote:

Hi Dave,

 

thats right on a 64 sector border, this may be where my -1 or +1 sector 
correction may be wrong.

 

regards

 

David Fry
On Saturday, June 14, 2014 8:00:09 PM UTC+1, yoda wrote:

Hi David 

 

Sounds like a plan.  I have made one and when it boots with debug CPMLDR.COM 
reads LBA 3F and 40 then stops - that is where I am at.  Let me dig up an image 
and  I will post here for you to look - at - think it is pretty close

 

Dave



On Saturday, June 14, 2014 1:48:33 PM UTC-5, David Fry wrote: 

Hi Dave,

 

If we can get the 'No holes' CF card layout to be compliant with cpmtool then 
that has to be the way to go as it will make life much easier.

As I said in a previous post, I welcome this 'no holes' lba to be picked apart 
to get it right before we go too far down the road and find problems later.

 

I'm a little busy at the moment with various other aspects of my S100 system 
with the little time I have to spend on it,(summer is coming after all :-) )

If you can knock together a quick image with a CPMLDR.COM and CPM3.SYS (doesnt 
matter what system it's for) then we could take a look to see how the layout 
differs.

My layout was derived from where CPMLDR was looking to find data.

 

regards

 

David Fry
On Saturday, June 14, 2014 7:30:00 PM UTC+1, yoda wrote:

why not take a look at the cpmtools set.  It has a program called mkfs.cpm that 
will make a file as a cpm filesystem.  You can specify a boot image which it 
will lay down in the boot sectors.  You can then use cpmcp to copy files to the 
cpm filesystem.  Then you can take the file and write it block by block to the 
CF card.  I did this originally to get my system up and running.  I actually 
used dd (a utility on linux or Mac) to write it to the CF.  I actually wrote a 
little script to take the file image and add the "holes" back in so it would 
work with your BIOS.  I went back and tried it with the no hole version and had 
some difficulties that I have not straightened out yet.  I don't know if I did 
something wrong or David Fry's LBA routine is not doing what I thought it did.  
I have not gone back and investigated yet but with David's help we can probably 
probably get this resolved.  The procedure  would go like this: 

 

1) mkfs.cpm -f s100ide -b dummy.file -b CPMLDR.COM s100.dsk

 

where s100ide is an entry in diskdefs that specifies the geometry of the drive

dummy.file is a 512 byte empty file to get CPMLDR.COM to be in the correct 
sector start.

s100.dsk is the file that represent the disk image.

2) cpmcp -f s100ide s100.dsk CPM3.SYS 0:

    cpmcp -f s100ide s100.dsk <cpm file> 0:     copies <cpm file> to user area 
0 on disk image

    continue until you have all the files you want on the disk

 

3) use a disk image write tool (dd on Linux or Mac) to write s100.dsk to CF card

 

Here is a link to the cpmtools:  http://www.moria.de/~michael/cpmtools/   These 
tools run on Windoze for those that use that OS and easily compiled for Mac or 
Linux.

 

This is the way I am building my images for CP/M 68K that I am currently 
working on.

 

I think getting the diskdefs set write and a good writeLBA routine and we 
should be able to get the procedure down.

 

Dave


On Saturday, June 14, 2014 11:31:49 AM UTC-5, monahanz wrote: 

Guys, it’s great to see all the progress and uptake this simple little IDE 
board has generated.  Thomas in particular congratulations on putting so much 
time and effort into “hammering into shape” the process for first time 
installs.  It helps tremendously but I think it will still be difficult for 
some people to do.   We all should remember how it was when we first started!

 

I’m wondering if somebody out there could spend the time writing a PC/MSDOS 
based program to setup a CF card for first time users.  If we agree the IDE 
board ports start at 30H, the only variable would be the console I/O.  This 
could be either spliced into the final disk image with the above program 
(leaving room in the base code with NOP’s) or by answering a Q&A session and 
inserting code like the old XMODEM programs did.  A CF card is laid down as 
Dave describes and is checked out. Once the image is laid down it can be dumped 
sector for sector any  CF card (no holes of course).  The image can even 
include a few CPM programs.  Probably best to start with a non-banked CPM3 
image.  This program would run on a standard PC, format the CF card and write 
the image sector by sector.  Not sure if Windows 7,8 allows you to do that 
easily but there must be a way.

 

This would allow anybody not as sophisticated as some of us, to get going right 
away and allow them to write more elaborate CPM3.SYS files that include a FDC, 
printer etc. in the BIOS for their own hardware.

I think something like this would be a tremendous asset for first time S100 
users.

 

Any volunteers?

John

 

 

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"N8VEM-S100" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"N8VEM-S100" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to