Nostalgia Rules! Ok
Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2021 7:42 pm
Hello and thank you for letting me join your forum. Wow...what a wealth of knowledge, and memories stored among these messages.. I like many intrepid explorers before me embarked on the beginnings of an interest( and career ) by purchasing a UK101 kit as promoted in Practical Electronics. I built it and had it up and running in about 5 - 6 hours. I learnt a lot about the 6502 and it's peripheral devices on that UK101. As with most things it retired to the attic and was thrown out at a later date as having no value ( How naïve!!) I missed it and set about building a complete new system on stripboard..I even persuaded two colleagues to do the same and we then had a little club of homemade UK101s. Along came memory expansions and a Floppy Disk system. OS65Dv3.1. We even coded a BASIC 5 extension, new DOS,EPROM Burner and printer interface. Eventually we lost touch and those stripboards became unusable and were dumped. I am a 6502 junkie and couldn't just let it go..nostalgia is much too much of a drug, so I built FPGA versions from Grant Searle's amazing web pages, but really hankered for my own 6502 Dev Board. PBW65C02v1 rapidly morphed into PBW65C02v4 and now sports 32KRAM 32KROM 19200 bps serial interface with a modified Cegmon Monitor. I found my original 3M Floppy Disk with OS65Dv3.1 on it and the temptation was too great. I designed and built a Floppy Disk Interface based on the Elektor Junior/OSI schematic, and lo and behold after relocating the serial ACIA from F000 to 8000(where mine sits) and setting IO to serial, and Ramtop from BF to 7F I have a DOS3.1 up and running. My >30 years old disk still remembers its code!!. I now have a Gotek running as drive 0 and the 5.25 drive as drive 1 so I can hopefully read/copy some of my old program disks.
I am trying to modify the OS65D3.3 image so I can run that but have hit a snag. Initial boot hangs and entering via monitor and $2A51 gives A* so that appears ok. BA loads Basic (It shows 50817 bytes free !! and trying to load a program gives OM Errors) EM works fine, but AS hangs. Does anyone have an explanation of the boot process up to the point of running BEXEC*? i.e. Track 00,1 loads to 2200, track 01,1 load to 2A00 etc etc.
I still cannot believe my Master Floppy has all its software intact after all this time. I did mark it as a 'Master Disk' and write protected it but I thought any magnetic information would have decayed by now... Thanks again and I hope to contribute regularly to this excellent forum. KRs Paul
I am trying to modify the OS65D3.3 image so I can run that but have hit a snag. Initial boot hangs and entering via monitor and $2A51 gives A* so that appears ok. BA loads Basic (It shows 50817 bytes free !! and trying to load a program gives OM Errors) EM works fine, but AS hangs. Does anyone have an explanation of the boot process up to the point of running BEXEC*? i.e. Track 00,1 loads to 2200, track 01,1 load to 2A00 etc etc.
I still cannot believe my Master Floppy has all its software intact after all this time. I did mark it as a 'Master Disk' and write protected it but I thought any magnetic information would have decayed by now... Thanks again and I hope to contribute regularly to this excellent forum. KRs Paul