PC88 Core

[patamar4]

I believe that most already know, but to leave registered the Puu converted the core of PC88 to Mister and update x68k

http://fpga8801.seesaa.net/

[AmigoMexicano]

Yes! Found out on the facebook group. Trying to test it, once the family goes to sleep haha This core needs SRAM card? The one I ordered is taking some time to arrive...

[zomgugoff]

I tried to compile it, but it didn't produce a .rbf file for some reason. I was able to compile the updated F68k core, however.

[Cebion]

Here are some tips for configuring it: (Taken from another post)

BASIC Mode: N88 V1H (V2 if you mostly play V2 games, but V1 games won't tell you that you are running in the wrong mode if you try to launch them in V2, while V2 games will usually display a message if you need to launch in V2 mode)

CPU Clock: 4MHz (most PC-88 systems until late models are 4MHz only, and many titles assume 4MHz)

[puu]

Due to copyright issues, some files may not be included in the archive.
I'm sorry that the attached document is written in Japanese. (Because I can understand only C, VHDL and Japanese)
Probably the missing one is the font file.
Save the 8x16 dot font file as Font/fonth.hex.
Since there is an 8x16dot part in FONT ROM(0x0800-0x17ff), I think that you should extract that part with a binary editor and save it as .hex.

[LFT]

I love that core. Thank you puu

[Televicious]

is there a .rbf download somewhere? I don't have quartus installed.

[ron]

Thanks puu !
Core runs very well. Was a bit complicated to concatenate the Roms, so after that, everything was fine !
There were some .d88 with weird behaviour and requiring for V2, so the rest worked fine, even CP/M-

Great Work ! Amazing.

ありがとうpuu！
コアは非常によく動作します。 Romsを連結するのは少し複雑だったので、その後はすべてうまくいきました！
奇妙な動作とV2を必要とする.d88がいくつかあったので、CP/M-

cpmpc88kunihiko.jpg (28.05 KiB) Viewed 143589 times

[Sorgelig]

@puu,
do PC88 and X68000 use NEC uPD765 as a floppy controller?

[puu]

Yes.FDC is same.

[ExCyber]

Can this boot at all without the I/O board? I get a blank screen, but I'm not sure whether I made a mistake with fonth.hex/boot.rom or the core just never starts unless it can mount the secondary SD card.

edit: Okay, it gets to the ROM BASIC interpreter with "Mode" set to something other than "N". And then if I switch it back to "N" and reset, the PC-8001 BASIC does boot (although sometimes with glitches in the function bar). But if I load the core with Mode "N" it does not boot. So I'm not sure what's going on, but it's roughly the result I was going for (i.e. not being able to run disks but being able to play around with the ROM BASIC).

[AmigoMexicano]

I'm also getting black screen, but after mounting a disk and reload the core, nothing shows... already activated auto boot of the disk, and also changed terminal to basic with no disk at all, I don't get any output. Does this needs SDRAM card? Mine is on transit.

[puu]

This core can boot without I/O board. When without 2nd SDcard, ROM BASIC will boot.
When press F11, Is core display "SD CARD DISK EMULATION UTILITY" ?
If only the border is visible, there is no font file or missing.

[puu]

SDRAM board is required.This core read from SDRAM every 8 dots in the horizontal display. The latency is too long for the DDR SRAM on the ARM core side.
Of course, the original DE0-CV does not have DDR SDRAM on the ARM core side.

[AmigoMexicano]

I have I/O card. So 2nd SD is installed with disk images. Yes, F11 displays the SD Card utility. It just goes to black after selecting a disk and reload the core.

(and sorry, I meant SDRAM board in my last post)

[AmigoMexicano]

SDRAM board is required.This core read from SDRAM every 8 dots in the horizontal display. The latency is too long for the DDR SRAM on the ARM core side.
Of course, the original DE0-CV does not have DDR SDRAM on the ARM core side.

That's my problem. Ok, I'll have to wait until my SDRAM board arrives.

Thanks!!

[zomgugoff]

Due to copyright issues, some files may not be included in the archive.
I'm sorry that the attached document is written in Japanese. (Because I can understand only C, VHDL and Japanese)
Probably the missing one is the font file.
Save the 8x16 dot font file as Font/fonth.hex.
Since there is an 8x16dot part in FONT ROM(0x0800-0x17ff), I think that you should extract that part with a binary editor and save it as .hex.

Sorry, I am a little confused. There is a fonth.hex in \PC8801\Font already. It needs to be replaced?

[puu]

It seems that things that should not be seen are visible. Yes. It is necessary to replace it with the one extracted from the actual machine you have.
Previous versions didn't include anything that wasn't in "Files" in the archive, but are recent versions looking for something specified by IP?

[LeftEmpty]

Congratulations on your work puu, it is really very impressive! I didn't expect the compatibility to be this good.
The PC-88 (and particularly the PC-80) are amongst my favourite 8-bits computers. I'm totally psyched about your project!

[ExCyber]

I tried to compile it, but it didn't produce a .rbf file for some reason. I was able to compile the updated F68k core, however.

I thought that I had answered this in my previous post, but I guess I deleted that part before posting. For whatever reason, the archived version of the project is not configured to produce a .rbf file. To change this, I added the following line to PC8801/v17/release-MiSTerDemu.qsf:

Code: Select all

set_global_assignment -name GENERATE_RBF_FILE ON

In principle you're not supposed to edit this file directly (definitely don't do it while the project is loaded in Quartus!), but the GUI flow for changing this setting didn't work for me because simply opening the dialog changed the target device to an incorrect one, and the correct device wasn't listed for some reason. I don't understand why it happened that way, but adding the line to the .qsf directly did generate a working .rbf file (with the caveats noted in the edit to my previous post).

[LeftEmpty]

I can't confirm it since I don't have a Windows computer to compile quartus executables, but Puu released today an update to support external font (although I don't have the readme to see the details), and he fixed that output error while he were at it.

[zomgugoff]

I can't confirm it since I don't have a Windows computer to compile quartus executables, but Puu released today an update to support external font (although I don't have the readme to see the details), and he fixed that output error while he were at it.

I can confirm, Puu made the change in the latest release. The 8x16 font is now added to the boot.rom file instead of being compiled in. I guess that means the .rbf could be distributed legally now.

Speaking of the boot.rom file, I made a little Python script to build it for this release, if anyone wants it.

[wark91]

Thank you Puu for this core and the X68000.

@Zomgugolf, I'm interested by your script. I tried yesterday to build the boot.rom but with no luck.

[puu]

I did:
cat N88.rom N80.rom N88_0.rom N88_1.rom N88_2.rom N88_3.rom CFONT.bin graphfont.bin DISK.ROM blank8k.bin blank8k.bin KANJI1.rom KANJI2.rom >boot.rom

[wark91]

thank you Puu !
Is it possible to have the sha1sum of each part to be sure I have the correct inputs ?

[wark91]

I finally build the correct boot.rom with helps ! Thank you for the informations.

[DanHero]

can someone do a little tutorial for this core? I'm currently running out of ideas. I have the rbf file in the main sd, a boot.rom file obtained by renaming one of the many bios for the system and the .d88 disks in the secondary sd. At the moment the core automatically starts the disk manager, so I mount the disks, press f11 to close the manager, reset the core and nothing, black screen. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

[puu]

The hardware is highly compatible, so I think that any version of the BIOS will work, but the PC88's BIOS has many different versions. So checksum will be difficult.

[suverman]

Ys (Ys1,2,3) doesnt seem to want to load at the moment. Rest all seem running perfectly for me.

[zomgugoff]

Thank you Puu for this core and the X68000.

@Zomgugolf, I'm interested by your script. I tried yesterday to build the boot.rom but with no luck.

pc88_bios.7z

Python 3 boot.rom compiler

(856 Bytes) Downloaded 938 times

It's written for Python 3. Put all of the needed files in the same place. You'll have to edit it and change the list of variables to match your filenames. When you run it, it should output a boot.rom file. If it finds one, it will exit without doing anything.