MiSTer PCXT

[jca]

@spark2k06
Thanks for the info. This is what I suspected and my plan was to create the HDD image, start the core and run the script. From what you say the script must be run before starting the core, is this correct? At this time as my MISTer is waiting for the upload I suppose I do not have to do anything with serdrive, it should automagically work by just running the script.
I will give it a try.
Thanks again for your work.

[breiztiger]

As for the HD controller, I would settle for having a proper implementation of an 8-bit IDE interface on the 300h I/O port, so that I can use it with the XTIDE Universal BIOS in its default configuration.

Pc xt has st506 not ide for thé real world

[remax]

Do you mean "Total Dos Launcher" or "Total Dos Collection"?

Total Dos Launcher. The early alpha was accompagnied with a tight portion of TDC that is quite nice to start testing the core.

EDIT : Not a good idea in fact... The core is not stable enough to handdle decompression without error...

[spark2k06]

@spark2k06
Thanks for the info. This is what I suspected and my plan was to create the HDD image, start the core and run the script. From what you say the script must be run before starting the core, is this correct? At this time as my MISTer is waiting for the upload I suppose I do not have to do anything with serdrive, it should automagically work by just running the script.
I will give it a try.
Thanks again for your work.

Correct, the script must be run before launching the core.

[spark2k06]

@spark2k06, I found one game doesn't seem to have the right color in color mode CGA.
It is Fire and Forget
20220623_202507-screen.png
20220623_202518-screen.png

You will find below the YT version with the color quite different
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaDxA8Wlgs

Thanks !

Are you sure? Don't always trust YouTube videos, sometimes they are run on emulators in VGA version, which doesn't modify the CGA palette according to the game code. Try it with PCem by selecting a CGA card.

[spark2k06]

As for the HD controller, I would settle for having a proper implementation of an 8-bit IDE interface on the 300h I/O port, so that I can use it with the XTIDE Universal BIOS in its default configuration.

Pc xt has st506 not ide for thé real world

The question is whether it's really worth it beyond the fact that, perhaps, the original IBM 5160 BIOS will work fine...

[breiztiger]

i think also popcorn hasn't got real color as on my pc1512

[jca]

No luck so far. I made a disk image under ao496, checked that it boots. I ran the script, started the core but no luck. One thing worries me as it does not detects MASTER or SLAVE at COM.
As my stuff is on USB and I use symlinks I checked the script, saw that the servdrive is started from there, I replaced the .. in the script with /media/usb0, rebooted MISTer just to be sure, ran the script, started the core but same thing. I realized that my hdd was .vhd as ao486 uses vhd, renamed it to .img, rebooted, ran the script, started the core and same thing.
I created the image using dd to create a 100MB file, may be it is too big, used fdisk, format, sys and copied commands to the drive. It works under ao486 so besides the 100MB size I do not see what it can be.

[remax]

you can't have serdrive on usb, cause you can give it linux execution rights as i discovered recently.

I put it in the script folder on the SD card and edited the script.

If you want to be sure, manually launch in a console prompt the command beetween the quotes in the tmux command line in the script and look for errors

[wark91]

@spark2k06, I found one game doesn't seem to have the right color in color mode CGA.
It is Fire and Forget
20220623_202507-screen.png
20220623_202518-screen.png

You will find below the YT version with the color quite different
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaDxA8Wlgs

Thanks !

Are you sure? Don't always trust YouTube videos, sometimes they are run on emulators in VGA version, which doesn't modify the CGA palette according to the game code. Try it with PCem by selecting a CGA card.

Ok I will check ! thanks !

[jca]

Rats! I completely forgot about this NOEXEC flag in the mount options. Thanks a lot, I will try and I guess it will work.

[wark91]

i think also popcorn hasn't got real color as on my pc1512

PC1512 on Mame is not on the Ibm5150 family
maybe they have differences also on color output.

For lemmings as example you have this screen before to start the game with cgalemmi.exe

20220623_201332-screen.png (33.62 KiB) Viewed 4117 times

[breiztiger]

i can forgive but popcorn hav'nt special mode of pc1512

[jca]

It still does not work, running the command manually in the console gives:
ERROR: '/media/usb0/games/PCXT/hdd.img', file size does not match standard CHS geometry (x:16:63), please specify geometry explicitly with -g

I think someone mentioned having this error but it still worked for him. Should I try with a smaller disk, like 20MB?

[remax]

well, edit the script like that :

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
tmux new -d './serdrive -g 615:4:17 -c 1 -b 115.2Kb /media/usb0/games/PCXT/hdd.img'
echo hdd.img has been mounted on COM1

I think we have nearly the same configuration. Of course, change the C/H/S settings to match your HDD (mine is for a 20Mb HD but you can have much larger)
And i have serdrive in the same folder than the script like i said

[remax]

Did you try "digger" by any chance?

Digger works as far as i can see

[wark91]

The color of the core is same as PCEM for Fire and Forget so it is good !
I will check against PCEM next time.

Screenshot from 2022-06-23 22-35-23.png (43.57 KiB) Viewed 4043 times

[flynnsbit]

The TDL image on oldskool's FTP seems to be working okay. I did have to add FREESPT to my image I am testing to speed up the initial disk calculation when you run a DIR on a larger disk. I am sure running it from COM is where a lot of the slowdowns are. This is cool.

FreeSPT for those that want to use it: https://github.com/ChartreuseK/FREESP under releases. I use it on my older systems that I put larger packs onto like the PCJr and 286 machines.

MyMenu also works great if you set CGA=T and LFN=F in the Mymenu.ini file. I haven't gotten any of the screensavers working yet.

[Mills]

Thanks for this awesome core!.

I tried everything, but this won't run for me most of the time (I'm testing with a 32MB SDRAM).
Sometimes the core will boot and pass all checks using test roms, but you don't really know if it will work or not, it is completely random.

[pgimeno]

Perhaps with a lot of effort it could be added to the ao486 project, but there are several reasons why I personally am not interested.

The KFPC-XT project of @kitune-san seems to me incredible for this project to have a reliable PCXT. ao486, apart from being huge, is too dependent on the Linux part, which makes it difficult to port it to other FPGAs, just what I want to avoid with this core.

Now with beta 1.0, I have made it a bit Linux-dependent, but I hope that at some point we will have IDE and floppy so we can avoid it.

I have to say that I'm delighted with your attention to detail in replicating the machine.

[pgimeno]

It still does not work, running the command manually in the console gives:
ERROR: '/media/usb0/games/PCXT/hdd.img', file size does not match standard CHS geometry (x:16:63), please specify geometry explicitly with -g

I think someone mentioned having this error but it still worked for him. Should I try with a smaller disk, like 20MB?

That error means that the size of the file you created is not a multiple of 516096 bytes.

The standard geometry it's talking about is x cylinders (x varies), 16 heads, 63 sectors per head. A sector is 512 bytes. Since the only parameter you can vary is the number of cylinders, the size must be an exact multiple of one cylinder, that is, of 16*63*512 = 516096 bytes; otherwise you have to specify a different geometry (cylinders, heads and sectors) with the -g parameter by editing the serdrive command in the script that mounts the disk.

[NML32]

It still does not work, running the command manually in the console gives:
ERROR: '/media/usb0/games/PCXT/hdd.img', file size does not match standard CHS geometry (x:16:63), please specify geometry explicitly with -g

I think someone mentioned having this error but it still worked for him. Should I try with a smaller disk, like 20MB?

That error means that the size of the file you created is not a multiple of 516096 bytes.

The standard geometry it's talking about is x cylinders (x varies), 16 heads, 63 sectors per head. A sector is 512 bytes. Since the only parameter you can vary is the number of cylinders, the size must be an exact multiple of one cylinder, that is, of 16*63*512 = 516096 bytes; otherwise you have to specify a different geometry (cylinders, heads and sectors) with the -g parameter by editing the serdrive command in the script that mounts the disk.

What's the easiest way to create a raw disk image that has the correct geometry? I'm having the same issue with every raw file I create.

[jca]

This thing is driving me crazy:
On Github for serdrive I found default is a 32 MB disk, with CHS geometry 65:16:63.
I tried it but it did not work. After calculation it happens this is not 32MB but 33.54624MD.
My disk is 33,554,432 bytes, how do I calculate the damn thing?

[pgimeno]

What's the easiest way to create a raw disk image that has the correct geometry? I'm having the same issue with every raw file I create.

With Linux, try with:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=<target_name> bs=516096 count=<number_of_cylinders>

For a specific size, divide the required size in bytes by 516096 and round up to obtain the number of cylinders.

For example, for 20 MiB, that's 41 cylinders because 20*1024*1024/516096 = 40.63492...

[Mills]

This thing is driving me crazy:
On Github for serdrive I found default is a 32 MB disk, with CHS geometry 65:16:63.
I tried it but it did not work. After calculation it happens this is not 32MB but 33.54624MD.
My disk is 33,554,432 bytes, how do I calculate the damn thing?

You can use the emulator called pcem, it will tell you these things if you load an image.

[kitune-san]

It still shows error 101 in the BIOS of the IBM 5160,

Really?
I'll check again...

[jca]

Thanks to all. While you were posting I went the other way around:
I took the -g 65:16:63 which is 33546240 bytes and made another disk image of that size and it is working, that was faster than trying to figure out the geometry of my real 32MB drive.

[jca]

It reminds me of the old times: my first computer was a PC XT clone. As the PC XT BIOS did not support hard disks but could scan for BIOS extensions the HD controller had such an EPROM which had to be matched to the hard disk in use as this geometry was burned into the EPROM. My hard disk was a huge 5MB one and when I say huge it was really huge: 5-1/4 full height and weighting a ton.
Since then things changed.

[bbond007]

MyMenu also works great if you set CGA=T and LFN=F in the Mymenu.ini file. I haven't gotten any of the screensavers working yet.

Perhaps it is a RAM issue. Does this core have 640K now?

Maybe try to run the screensavers outside of MyMenu...

[spark2k06]

It still shows error 101 in the BIOS of the IBM 5160,

Really?
I'll check again...

On the previous occasion I had merged it incorrectly, it is not giving 101 error and everything works perfectly. Thanks!!!

https://github.com/spark2k06/PCXT_MiSTe ... dc45a112a2

I myself have made a pull request and accepted it. As a curious note, I have placed XTIDE Universal BIOS in E800h, because in F000h it conflicts with this IBM BIOS... and now I can see how it tries to detect the IDE, however it does not find COM ports, it is curious because in Juko ST and Sergey's 8088 it does find them and loads without any problems. It's as if the IBM BIOS doesn't work with serial ports?



What has returned with this change is the INT 0 failure, but only in the Supersoft test, in the Ruud test it passes this test without a problem. Still, as the general functioning of the system is correct, I have accepted the change... there will be time to improve it