[Coco] Issues with NitrOS9 build

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 25 January 2014 22:44:33 Tormod Volden did opine:

> On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 9:28 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Saturday 25 January 2014 15:06:25 Tormod Volden did opine:
> >> Robert, if you mean Gene's and your stuff that we are massaging
> >> behind the scenes, the make-48-TPI-disk-readonly-on-96-TPI-drive
> >> patch has not been pushed to the repo yet because it hasn't been
> >> tested. Some of the other (unrelated) changes have been pushed in
> >> separate commits. I am /not/ just copying a "new rb1773" wholesale.
> >> We already found bugs and unconfirmed changes.
> > 
> > The original patch we sent, has been tested, I have at least 1 of
> > every style of floppy ever used on a coco except the original Texas
> > Peripheral junk yard dogs.  Those I bin on sight, maybe using the
> > motors for something else.  The "bugs" were old ones that existed for
> > yonks. The miss-matched spelling goes back at least to v3.2.6.  The
> > format of the downloads changed some, and my copy of 3.2.0 is .dsk's
> > only requiring I get DW to work again before I can really check them.
> >  I suspect the coco os9's have either been using write precomp
> > permanently disabled or permanently enabled for at least 20 years.
> 
> The bugs I had in mind were the omission of ",u". I guess the testing
> was successful even if that was wrong. OK, I am willing to commit that
> thing, I just had understood that you were going to test it once you
> had your coco running again.

The test was good.  The coco3 is booting, but drivewire isn't working, nary 
a flicker, not one from DW trying to see if the server is there at bootup 
time.  And the lack of a truthful internal wiring diagram for the SALT is 
killing me.  Whats in the manuals leaves out some important details.

The single most important item, is where the heck does it get the internal 
5 volt supply from.  One pin called out for the - 5 volt supply is even 
numbered, and the TX out pin is sitting at -5.78 volts with the ser/usb 
adapter plugged in, which is claimed to be -5.00 volts.  To me that is out 
of tolerance, even if its legal anyplace from -3 to -12 when idle.

I spent the evening at the radio station, and will need to hit the shack 
and see if they have a suitable transistor to replace a 2SC1096, used as 
the input stage of a darlington pair wired up as a capacitance amplifier.
I am beginning to see why LPB went belly up.  The level of true engineering 
in this 60 watt transistorized AM transmitter is scarily low.  Any failure 
or miss-tuning cascades back up the chain to find the cheapest possible 
part to blow as long as its not the fuse.  And makes itself LOOK like it 
was $132 dollars worth of final transistors.  Makes me want to discuss the 
designers family tree in very derogatory terms.

Anyway, its likely to be next week before I get a chance to rip the coco 
apart again, and restore the salts power feeds to what I put in 20 years 
ago, and which worked until I got it into an error loop that caused about 
1000 packets a second of error messages both ways, until the SALT's output 
circuitry overheated and signed off after 3 or 4 hours.

> The fixes for the precomp misspelling and more have already been
> pushed to the repo. Yes, precomp is disabled by default anyway.
> 
> The remaining part of that patch cluster (and what I meant by
> unconfirmed changes) is the delay time in FDCDelay. The comments says
> minimum 58 us but the current and suggested values make for much more.
> I don't know how often this routine is called and if the extra delay
> causes any performance drop.

That is Roberts field of expertise I believe and has something to do with 
fixing the crashing while formatting a floppy.  I think...
 
> Tormod
> 
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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)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

NOTICE: Will pay 100 USD for an HP-4815A defective but
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