[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Steven Hirsch]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Steven Hirsch wrote:
>>
>>> I'm going to try and get DW working next.
>>
>> DW is _trying_ to do something.  First mistake was assuming it needed a
>> crossover (aka "null modem") connection.  In fact, a straight-through is the
>> ticket.
>>
>> The board is _trying_ to do something, but I'm not clear on which image
>> needs to be mounted on the server.  There are two files floating around that
>> look like they're intended to be OS9 volumes, but one is too big for DW4 and
>> the other hangs at boot.
>>
>> What exactly are folks using at the server end with a DE1?
>>
>
> You can use any DECB disk, and for NitrOS-9 use one of the "becker"
> disks from the NitrOS9 CVS or prebuilt every night at:
> http://www.nitros9.org/latest/

Not cooperating all that well so far.  I setup the DW3 server with:

nos96809l2v030209coco3_becker.dsk

as Drive 0 and start the server.

Then, I download the FPGA code.  The board resets and gives me the Basic 
splash screen and OK prompt.  I enter 'DOS'.

There's brief bit of activity.  The screen clears, then gives me green 
against a white background. In the center is the expected "NITROS9 BOOT". 
At the top I see:

REL Boot Krn tb

and.. that's it!  The server shows

Last OpCode     :  OP_NOP
  Sectors Read    :  24
  Sectors Written :  0
  Last LSN        :  0
  Read Retries    :  0
  Write Retries   :  0
  % Good Reads    :  100.000%
  % Good Writes   :  0%
  Last GetStat    :  $FF (None)
  Last SetStat    :  $FF (None)

  CoCo Type       :  CoCo 3 (115200 baud)
  Serial Port     :  ttyS0
  DriveWire Mode  :  3.0
  Print Command   :

  Disk 0          :  nos96809l2v030209coco3_becker.dsk
  Disk 1          :
  Disk 2          :
  Disk 3          :

Interestingly I'm not seeing the marching dots I'm used to during the OS9 
bootstrap.

If I wait, sometimes I'll see one or two sectors more being read.  But the 
display never changes.

> On a side note, how big was the file you could not load with DriveWire
> 4?  The only size limit *should* be available ram, but for very large
> images you may need to give the virtual machine more room with a
> command line argument to java:

It was one of Gary's OS9 volume images from the Yahoo group.  Size was 
~129MB.

> java -Xmx512m
>
> for example to grant 512MB ram to the process.

That would probably have done the trick.  Why does Java behave so stingy 
on a 64-bit box with 8GB of memory?

As always, I'm open to suggestions!

Steve