[Coco] {coco} wordpak RS info needed

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 17 September 2005 04:25, RJRTTY at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 9/17/05 12:45:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>
>gene.heskett at verizon.net writes:
>>  That was one of the odd things about that card, the other two
>>  registers were at $FF76-77.  This of course meant that it tied up 2
>>  whole 4 byte wide i/o spaces, something I considered a huge waste so
>>  I did a bit of cutting and pasting and moved the $FF78-79 pair to
>>  $FF74-75 in my own copy.
>
>    Well,  one reason I think they did that was to simplify and cut
>cost of the PCB.

At the time there was an unused spare invertor available, and no
additional parts were required.  As the wire wrapping jumpers could
just as easily have been traces on the board, whose real estate was
already there, doing it properly *should* have been a no brainer as
the only other cost would have been the exposure mask makers time
once it was taped up, what, 15 minutes to tape & 5 bucks for a new
negative?

> The wordpak II board that came before it
>was more complex but took up four bytes in the upper part of FF9X space.
>       I had a hunch that FF76 and FF77 where involved because of
>the difference in activity on them between when the board was enabled as
>opposed to when it wasn't.
>
>>  I don't know about rsdos drivers for it as I never ran rsdos any
>>  longer than to type "dos", usually before the monitor was warmed up
>>  enough to show a pix.
>
>That's OK.   I know some like to avoid DECB but it has it's uses
>mainly because it boots up from rom and allows quick and DIRTY
>operation but you're right it's not a real OS like OS9 (Nitros9 now).
>
:-)

>>  There are os9 drivers for it on rtsi I believe.  One set in
>>  particular was the one I used as it allowed the WP-RS to be used at
>>  the same time as the regular color monitor and you had two screens
>>  side by side, both 99% functional.  The missing 1% was that the pause
>>  at the screen full when doing a listing didn't on the WP-RS screen.
>>
>>  Thats the driver set that gives wecho, but I don't recall the exact
>>  names of the other two pieces ATM.  I eventually merged them all into
>>  cc3io, saveing a page of os9 level 2 system ram in the process.
>>  They were done originally by Dennis Skala.
>
>Thanks for the info.   I'll check it out.
>
>>  Unforch, my drivers are still on the coco3's drive, never having been
>>  able to make a file transfer to this linux box for that stuff.  They
>>  would give you a larger screen than the stock drivers too, I'd
>>  played with the init data being fed to the video chip.
>
>    In my attempts at reverse engineering the board I have become
>proficient at altering the screen size, cursor position, etc. but the
>one thing I cant figure out is the use of the data latch.     In the
>wordpakII board you sent a dummy register number 31 to the
>register select address FF98 and then wait for a vertical refresh
>as indicated by reading bit 7 of FF98 until its set then writing to
>the latch which was at FF9B.     I think the vertical indicator bit
>on the Wordpak RS card is bit 5 (32) of FF78.    Is that right?   And
>can you remember which address is the latch, FF77 or FF76?

AFAIK, there is not any wait for vertical refresh on the WP-RS.
You can write to its data port at any time I believe.  IIRC there may
have been something in the scrolling, but it never got in my way.
If I can drag up the drivers I was using, you're welcome to take a
look as I should have full srcs in assembly, asm style IIRC.

Unforch, I just spent 1/2 an hour wandering around in rtsi, and it
appears that its been re-organized again, and there is a lot of stuff
missing.  However, now that I think about it a bit more, I believe
those drivers were originally published by Lonnie, so possibly a bit
of copyright protection housecleaning may have been done. 

Now I know I've got to get some of that stuff moved to this box. 
Currently, I've been hauling a floppy drive back and forth, its
currently hanging out of this box on the end of the cables.  Seems its
the only floppy I have that can make a disk that can be read by both
machines when its brought up here and plugged in.

I have to see if I can get my briefcase in shape to go reconcile what
I spent in upstate MI on this last trip and go pay off my credit card
in the next couple of days, but keep bugging me and I'll find what I
have & sneakernet it up here.  You do have a private address I can
use I assume?  Or is the aol address in the greeting ok?  No use
drowning the list with 100k of src code in attachments nobody but the
two of us will ever use.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.