PC88 Core

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 4:49 pm

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After several tries and trial and error I have finally shown the characters in Basic.
The point is that my rom only works with N mode.- Nor N88V1L, N88V1H and neither N88V2

LeftEmpty · Unread post by **LeftEmpty** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:00 pm

I have tried building mine and have the exact same issue. (garbled screens and all)
I wonder if the graphfont.bin included in the core's .qar might not be different from the one we can extract from font.roms.
I can't test it though, since I'm not running Windows and unable to use quartus in any way.

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:22 pm

hi

i create my boot.rom with

copy / b n88.rom+n80.rom+n88_0.rom+n88_1.rom+n88_2.rom+n88_3.rom+font_8X16.rom+graphfont.bin+mh_disk.rom+8KO_BLANK_FF.ROM+8KO_BLANK_FF.ROM+kanji1.rom+kanji2.rom boot.rom

n88.rom 32768 a0fc0473 3b31fc68fa7f47b21c1a1cb027b86b9e87afbfff
n80.rom 32768 27e1857d 5b922ed9de07d2a729bdf1da7b57c50ddf08809a
n88_0.rom 8192 710a63ec d239c26ad7ac5efac6e947b0e9549b1534aa970d
n88_1.rom 8192 c0bd2aa6 8528eef7946edf6501a6ccb1f416b60c64efac7c
n88_2.rom 8192 af2b6efa b7c8bcea219b77d9cc3ee0efafe343cc307425d1
n88_3.rom 8192 7713c519 efce0b51cab9f0da6cf68507757f1245a2867a72
font_8X16.rom 4096 b5a15b5c e5f071edb72a5e9a8b8b1c23cf94a74d24cb648e
graphfont.bin 4096 cdd1be6b c013d22c22aebbbea0474d418397fe70ac66fe02
mh_disk.rom 8192 a222ecf0 79e9c0786a14142f7a83690bf41fb4f60c5c1004
kanji1.rom 131072 6178bd43 82e11a177af6a5091dd67f50a2f4bafda84d6556
kanji2.rom 131072 154803cc 7e6591cd465cbb35d6d3446c5a83b46d30fafe95

i think caracteres are good but i can have ok for basic commandline like on your screenshot ?!?

LeftEmpty · Unread post by **LeftEmpty** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:28 pm

Ah I think I got it.
But since we don't have the graphfont.bin, we can't build it. Oh well.

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:32 pm

This was my way:

cat N88.ROM N80.ROM N88_0.ROM N88_1.ROM N88_2.ROM N88_3.ROM FONT.BIN GRAPH.BIN DISK.ROM BLANK16K.ROM N88KNJ1.ROM N88KNJ2.ROM > pc8801mk2sr.rom

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Won't it be a core problem?

LeftEmpty · Unread post by **LeftEmpty** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:35 pm

I don't think so, but unless the graphfont.bin file is taken out of its qar prison, I can't comment on it.

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:40 pm

LeftEmpty wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:35 pm I don't think so, but unless the graphfont.bin file is taken out of its qar prison, I can't comment on it.

I did, but this is like a scary story, every time i make a new rom the behaviour is totally different

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:57 pm

OK, I DID IT !

cat N88.ROM N80.ROM N88_0.ROM N88_1.ROM N88_2.ROM N88_3.ROM FONT.BIN GRAPH.BIN DISK.ROM N88KNJ1.ROM N88KNJ2.ROM > pc8801mk2sr.rom

Works FIne !

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ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:03 pm

OK, this seems to work fine. Was a nightmare.
Disk paddings are not necessary.

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ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:33 pm

HI ! after a light testing, now works like a charm. Even better than before.
Internal SD works fine, .D88 loads ok. Disk Basic, Demos, Games, 40 and 80 columns, CP/M and IDOS.

So, Puu this was a great improvement. Congratulations. Was a bit difficult to solve the rom issue but the core works very well. Thank You

Sorry for the pics.

very poor quality

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lomdar67 · Unread post by **lomdar67** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:35 pm

ron wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:03 pm OK, this seems to work fine. Was a nightmare.

Any chance you can somehow share this rom?

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:50 pm

@ron, can you compare your rom sha with mine please ?

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:51 pm

@LeftEmpty & @lomdar67 & @breiztiger , PM. Good Luck

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 7:04 pm

OK, just in order to help:

cat N88.ROM N80.ROM N88_0.ROM N88_1.ROM N88_2.ROM N88_3.ROM FONT.BIN GRAPH.BIN DISK.ROM N88KNJ1.ROM N88KNJ2.ROM > pc8801mk2sr.rom

4f984e04a99d56c4cfe36115415d6eb8 N88.ROM 32768
2ff07b8769367321128e03924af668a0 N80.ROM 32768
d675a2ca186c6efcd6277b835de4c7e5 N88_0.ROM 8192
e844534dfe5744b381444dbe61ef1b66 N88_1.ROM 8192
6548fa45061274dee1ea8ae1e9e93910 N88_2.ROM 8192
fc4b76a402ba501e6ba6de4b3e8b4273 N88_3.ROM 8192
56262bd422155391e995e2116f72b583 FONT.BIN 4096
83b2d2e6f050cf869efad605c2170632 GRAPH.BIN 4096
f553ae258c4a93de4e64dc35830d9737 DISK.ROM 8192
d81c6d5d7ad1a4bbbd6ae22a01257603 N88KNJ1.ROM 131072
41d2e2c0c0edfccf76fa1c3e38bc1cf2 N88KNJ2.ROM 131072

Disk paddings are not necessary.

pc8801mk2sr.rom filesize is : 376832

LeftEmpty · Unread post by **LeftEmpty** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 9:35 pm

Thank you very much for the explanation. Can't tell you how relieved that makes me feel!

weirdocollector · Wed Jul 15, 2020 7:49 am

ron wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:51 pm @LeftEmpty & @lomdar67 & @breiztiger , PM. Good Luck

Hi ron! Good to find you here

Could you also help me with the bios roms for the X68000 and PC88 cores ?

Thanks!

ron · Unread post by **ron** » Wed Jul 15, 2020 4:38 pm

Weirdo, that's right ! nice to see you here old friend.

puu · Unread post by **puu** » Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:43 am

There is a bug in the disk emulator that seems to destroy the image when written.
I have uploaded a modified version, so please update it.
http://fpga8801.seesaa.net/article/476375569.html

pcfreak324 · Unread post by **pcfreak324** » Sun Jul 19, 2020 4:38 pm

First of all thank you puu for this core. It's really fun to play games on these old Japanese computers and relive the excitement we never had in the west. I hope that someday we will see a core for the Sharp X1 as well.

I tried a few games and while the joystick input worked on most games, there were some games that could only be controlled by keyboard (for example Castle Excellent, Mario Bros. Special, Punch Ball Mario Bros. and The Castle). Is this expected behaviour as these games never had joystick support or am I doing something wrong?

LeftEmpty · Unread post by **LeftEmpty** » Mon Jul 20, 2020 10:03 am

I think joystick became an option only with the later SR series, so it makes sense for 8801 games to not support it. I wouldn't think of playing the Castle games with the potential fear of pressing a wrong jump input anyway!

You could remap the keyboard numeric pad and Z, X, C keys to be done by the joystick in the OSD menu though.

toolboc · Unread post by **toolboc** » Sun Jan 17, 2021 1:46 am

@ron,

>f553ae258c4a93de4e64dc35830d9737 DISK.ROM 8192
Where / how can this disk.rom be obtained? I've noticed 8KB and 2KB disk.rom images floating around, but neither matches the reported md5sum (either as-is or with padding of either 1's or 0's)

Also, what is the md5sum for the resulting pc8801mk2sr.rom?

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Sun Jan 17, 2021 9:02 am

the real name is m2mr_disk.rom

boot.rom
CRC32: 70657ae0
MD5: 9132c648f78e5bdc33b4a28c6877ebad
SHA-1: d8544b462d71f0af13e47ca6f10b8b67b8c81bdf

toolboc · Unread post by **toolboc** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 2:50 am

Interesting,

It looks like m2mr_disk.rom can be found in the pc8801mk2mr set. I was able to find what I need and produce a boot.rom with matching md5sum of 9132c648f78e5bdc33b4a28c6877ebad, this had me feeling confident but there's actually an extra step required to produce a proper image.

Specifically,

Disk paddings are not necessary. -@ron

I was a bit skeptical that disk padding / alignment is not necessary, puu's source indicates offsets expected at the following:

Code: Select all

package addressmap_pkg is
	constant ADDR_N88			:std_logic_Vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0000000";
	constant ADDR_N80			:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0008000";
	constant ADDR_N88_4_0	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0010000";
	constant ADDR_N88_4_1	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0012000";
	constant ADDR_N88_4_2	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0014000";
	constant ADDR_N88_4_3	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0016000";
	constant ADDR_FONT		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0018000";
	constant ADDR_GFONT		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0019000";
	constant ADDR_SUBROM		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"001a000";
	constant ADDR_KANJI1		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0020000";
	constant ADDR_KANJI2		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0040000";
	constant ADDR_BACKRAM	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0400000";
	constant ADDR_MAINRAM	:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0408000";
	constant ADDR_SUBRAM		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0410000";
	constant ADDR_GVRAM		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0420000";
	constant ADDR_EXTRAM		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0480000";
	constant ADDR_ADPCM		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0600000";
	constant ADDR_FDEMU		:std_logic_vector(27 downto 0)	:=x"0800000";
end addressmap_pkg;

A misaligned boot.rom may properly boot disks, but would expect to produce errors when the core attempts to reference anything in the kanji romsets if kanji1 does not start at 0x20000.

In fact, using the boot.rom with md5sum 9132c648f78e5bdc33b4a28c6877ebad results in improper kanji when loading up Snatcher in the PC88 core. You can verify this by pulling down this romset https://www.myabandonware.com/game/snat ... e#download, then set Mode to N88v2, Speed 8MHz, and then mount disk 1 to FDD0 and disk 2 to FDD1, set Disk boot to enable, then reset as shown below:

: 1UO32Hd.jpg (1.69 MiB) Viewed 42046 times

When using the boot.rom with md5sum 9132c648f78e5bdc33b4a28c6877ebad, the game will load, and you probably won't notice but the blue kanji text will be completely malformed, eventually you will be presented with a screen that contains yellow text but you will see chars that look like a p and q, where it should look like a 0 and 1 respectively (FYI, press "0" , then "1" to start the game).

Using the boot.rom with md5sum 9132c648f78e5bdc33b4a28c6877ebad will produce the following inaccurate characters:

: wYs2vZ9.jpg (1.34 MiB) Viewed 42046 times

In summary, alignment / padding is absolutely necessary. Just because you see text that looks like Japanese characters on the screen does not mean that they are the correct characters.

To create an accurate boot.rom, I used the bios files contained in a release by the name of pc88srl.zip (which matches all of @ron's supplied md5sums with exception of disk.rom), this will produce a working bootrom with proper kanji sets using the common 2KB disk.rom (untouched md5sum: 793f86784e5608352a5d7f03f03e0858) by padding it with 0x5810 (0x20000 - 0x1a7f0) of zeroes to properly align (padded md5sum: 989d98e8126da4e878a52083b1694750), then run the following to generate the image:

Code: Select all

cat n88.rom n80.rom n88_0.rom n88_1.rom n88_2.rom n88_3.rom font.bin graphfont.bin disk.rom kanji1.rom kanji2.rom > boot.rom

The resulting md5sum for this image is badbe6abe5c3178ce299b68049c48514

Place this boot.rom in /fat/PC8801mk2SR and you're good to go!

Using this image yields the correct characters as show below:

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If you made it this far, you've learned two very cool things, the importance of padding / alignment and how to load Snatcher with this core!

: nnx1fwV.jpeg (1.83 MiB) Viewed 42046 times

BTW, we might as well start posting the core .rbfs in this thread, there is nothing proprietary in the core and it could certainly open up the PC-88 to a larger audience. The X68000 thread is doing it, we should do it too.

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:10 pm

i think you mean 0x5800 not 0x5810

pgimeno · Unread post by **pgimeno** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:57 pm

toolboc wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 2:50 am To create an accurate boot.rom, I used the bios files contained in a release by the name of pc88srl.zip (which matches all of @ron's supplied md5sums with exception of disk.rom), this will produce a working bootrom with proper kanji sets using the common 2KB disk.rom (untouched md5sum: 793f86784e5608352a5d7f03f03e0858) by padding it with 0x5810 (0x20000 - 0x1a7f0) of zeroes to properly align (padded md5sum: 989d98e8126da4e878a52083b1694750), then run the following to generate the image:

Thanks. That had to be 0x5800 for me, not 0x5810. Rather than padding the file, I just generated a pad.bin file with 0x5800 zeros (attached) and included it in the 'cat' command line. Since my romset is the merged one from MAME, my command line was this:

Code: Select all

cat pc8801mk2sr/mk2sr_n88.rom pc8801mk2fr/m2fr_n80.rom pc8801mk2fr/m2fr_n88_0.rom pc8801mk2sr/n88_1.rom pc8801mk2sr/n88_2.rom pc8801mk2sr/n88_3.rom FONT.BIN GRAPH.BIN disk.rom pad.bin kanji1.rom pc8801mk2sr/kanji2.rom > boot.rom

That should generate the boot.rom with MD5 badbe6abe5c3178ce299b68049c48514.

I'm amused that the MD5 of the ROM that Ron generated ends with "bad" and the one you generated starts with "bad".

I was unable to find FONT.BIN and GRAPH.BIN anywhere. I extracted them from a working boot.rom that someone kindly provided. Any idea where these can be found? Because otherwise the instructions above are useless for users who don't have them. I found a pc88srl.zip from an old MESS version but it didn't have them.

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:23 pm

Can someone provided the last pc88 build please ?

wark91 · Unread post by **wark91** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:30 pm

Last version of PC88 Core

breiztiger · Unread post by **breiztiger** » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:45 pm

thanks

pcfreak324 · Unread post by **pcfreak324** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 5:49 pm

pgimeno wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:57 pm I was unable to find FONT.BIN and GRAPH.BIN anywhere. I extracted them from a working boot.rom that someone kindly provided. Any idea where these can be found? Because otherwise the instructions above are useless for users who don't have them. I found a pc88srl.zip from an old MESS version but it didn't have them.

font.bin = hn613128pac8.bin from MAME romset pc9801f.zip

OhPoorPup · Unread post by **OhPoorPup** » Sat Jan 30, 2021 2:59 am

Hi! Using toolboc's instructions I was able to generate a boot.rom that matched the md5sum (badbe6abe5c3178ce299b68049c48514), but unfortunately on boot I'm getting some really intense visual glitching and screen flashing.

Doesn't respond to any settings changes, and if I've booted the Zet98 core beforehand the bottom half of the screen will contain whatever was last displayed there. At the top of the screen you can see the text from the PC88 core, so clearly it's booting.... Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

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