[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:29 PM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I've not tried it with DW3 but it should work to get booted at least
(the internet and other DW4 stuff obviously won't work, but the driver
negotiates with the server to determine whether to load this).  If I
get time I will try it on DW3.   You're limited to 115k on DW3 so make
sure your serial speed is set accordingly.. doubt you'd get that far
if it was wrong though.

Gary's disk controller checks the disk size every couple seconds.  If
you haven't waited long enough since inserting the disk, it might be
thinking it's a different size than it really is?


>> 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?
>

The default is 128MB heap, so that image would fail without allocating
a bit of additional memory.  Not sure why it's the default, but I
think that's standard on all platforms.

Someday I'll revisit the way we load disk images.. having them in ram
is nice for many reasons but does impose some issues with very large
images.

> As always, I'm open to suggestions!
>
> Steve
>
>
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