Superboard Expanded on S-100 motherboard

[davisgw]

Mark,
After going through the DOS/65 documentation I'm reminded of the copyright protection by the author. Could the reason nobody has posted digital copies of the floppies be due to the copyright or simply that nobody is interested in using it? From the lack of knowledge provided me in my rebuild quest, I'm inclined to think the latter. However, the author has posted a digital copy at
https://github.com/osiweb/DOS65/commit/ ... 2886a42ab4
in 2020 and has made comments on licensing.
Comments are appreciated....

[Mark]

As far as I know the OSI port of DOS/65 was frozen due to lack of interest/demand even though there were updates to the OS available on other platforms after that. Richard Leary said he doesn't have a problem with anyone posting diskette images for hobbyist use. He clearly states that DOS/65 is freely distributable for non-commercial use.

There are already old versions around for the 48K C4P, and your version for a 40K ? C1P would be interesting for comparison. I'm not aware of any 8" versions around yet. (Now that I am reminded of the DOS/65 thread on OSIWeb, I see a newer version for C1P may have already been posted by Richard!)

I'm really most interested in this as somewhat unique software and as a snapshot of OSI history. It's rare to find working software/disks after all these years. Feel free to archive or not as you desire though. I know how much time it takes!

Cheers

[update: Yes Richard posted a working DOS/65 v3 for SuperboardII/600D back in 2017]

[davisgw]

Mark,
I tried to bring up DiskTool and was able to get it running with RealTerm....until I tried to transfer DiskTool5.65d to write it to disk and discovered that XMODEM is not supported. And I was surprised that the options list comes up on the PC on the RealTerm window, not the OSI screen as I had assumed.
So I got a good copy of TeraTerm and tried the same thing. After several attempts to transfer DiskTool5.65d by XMODEM, both at 300 baud and 4800 baud it begins sending but after about a minute has only sent 128 bytes and the transfer rate gradually drops to 0 bytes/sec. Also when I switch to 4800 baud
TeraTerm does not redisplay the options list again like I see with RealTerm. Maybe it's the default VT100 terminal type.....
Can you explain what's going on? I'm just spinning my wheels.

[Mark]

Sorry to hear you're having difficulties.

After switching the OSI to (F)aster 16x mode using option 6 on the Disk Tool menu, and setting the TeraTerm port speed to 4800, you should only need to press a key or two on the terminal to redisplay the menu. If it receives garbage characters at the wrong speed TeraTerm may need to be "Reset" using the "Control/Reset terminal" menu item. Also try using 8N1 with DiskTool.

After loading disktool you should see something like this on your terminal

MemTop=$9FFF


OSI Serial Disk Tool
----------------------
1. Dump Raw Image
3. Receive Disk Xmodem
4. Select Drive
5. Set Drive Type
6. Set Serial Divisor
7. Xmodem/Hex xfer opts
8. Exit
L. View log

Drv=A/5.25 Baud@1x Xmdm

Then select option "3"
--->3

Send Disk via XMODEM
Insert WRITABLE disk in drive A
ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!

ESC KEY OR ^X ABORTS

Press any key when ready
At this point one non-obvious step is you have to actually press a key, like SPACE to begin the Xmodem transfer process. It's a hold-over from OSIDump's HEX dump, but it gives you time to insert the target floppy without having the transfer process time-out.
Afterwards you should see

Begin XMODEM/Checksum transfer. Press <ESC> to abort...

At this point, on TeraTerm, select File/Transfer/Xmodem/Send.... and select the file "DiskTool5.65d"

After which transfer should begin and the disk should be written one track at a time.
The program will try to verify each track and rewrite it a few times if it detects an error.

Xmodem transfer

xmodem.jpg (83.95 KiB) Viewed 43707 times

If transfer is terminated early, I've found the OSI can miss the End of Transmission message from the host. You may be able to return to the menu with a few ^D characters sent from TeraTerm.

The disk only needs the first 5 tracks to hold the program data, but will fill the rest of the disk, and write a pseudo directory on track 12.

A log is created mirroring data sent to the OSI display which you can view using the 'L' option.

Eventually you should see
Transfer Complete!


;DONE ... REMOVE DISK

So how far in this process do you get?
Does the transfer being?
Does the floppy drive power up/step to track 0 when transfer is about to begin? (Otherwise you should see an error message).
Does the drive activate and try to write track 0?

If not can you try dumping a few tracks of a disk as a hex dump to see if the disk hardware is operating as expected?

Good Luck!

[davisgw]

Mark,
I get the menu at 300 baud and when I change to 4800 baud it is not re-displayed, even after typing something other than a menu selection or doing a reset terminal. But I get the expected query when I type option 7 to set xmodem/crc mode. Then I type option 3, type "Return" for the "Any key" prompt, and the floppy drive seeks to track 0. At that point I start the transfer and only ever see 128 bytes transferred. See the picture of the terminal screen. The same happens if I leave it at 300 baud.
The bottom "press any key" prompt wrote over the prompt for "changing serial divisor" prompt and the garbage after was the response to "F". Then I changed the terminal port to 4800 baud.
Of possible relevance is that my version of TeraTerm is 4.105

[davisgw]

Mark,
I noticed the only difference between your instructions and my experience is the "Spacebar" response to begin the transfer instead of "Return". I tried that at 300 baud and it started OK so I tried it again at 4800 baud and only got the usual 128 bytes transferred. So I started again at 300 baud and the transfer and disk writing completed!! Apparently typing "Return" is not an expected response. Then I booted the disk and got the "OSI...." message....
I did not try anything more.

Is the menu supposed to display on the terminal?
And how do I change the port to 4800 before transferring the contents of a floppy?

[Mark]

I'm glad you were able to write a floppy! I just retried this procedure again with real hardware but did not experience any glitched screens or communications problems.

On reset the OSI computer initializes the ACIA with an input clock divide by 16 setting. On cassette based systems this yields a baud rate of 300bps although it can be wired for other speeds depending on the specific hardware (C3-OEM systems may use 9600 by default for example). We can alter the ACIA clock divisor setting for divide by 1, thus instantly changing the speed to 16x faster. This gives you 4800 baud on a normally 300 baud system.
To do this:

After booting DiskTool and seeing the menu, select option 6 "Set Serial Divisor"

OSI Serial Disk Tool
----------------------
1. Dump Raw Image
3. Receive Disk Xmodem
4. Select Drive
5. Set Drive Type
6. Set Serial Divisor
7. Xmodem/Hex xfer opts
8. Exit
L. View log

Drv=A/5.25 Baud@1x Xmdm
--->6
Set (N)ormal or 16x (F)aster? >
The enter 'F' or 'f'
The OSI immediately changes the baud rate from whatever it started with to 16x that speed and redisplays the menu.
You will not see that menu because your terminal is still talking at the slower speed. At this time you need to change your terminal communications rate.
If you were using 300baud, you must now change to 4800 baud. If you are using 9600 baud, you need to go to 153.6K! (which is too fast for a 1Mhz 6502 most likely.) If you were using 2400 baud, you need to switch to 38400 baud.

tt1.jpg (34.98 KiB) Viewed 43652 times

Having just pressed 'f' I can no longer communicate at 300 baud. So I change the terminal speed in TeraTerm

tt2.jpg (37.71 KiB) Viewed 43652 times

tt3.jpg (62.77 KiB) Viewed 43652 times

The DiskTool menu will only redraw when it receives a printable character (space to ~) it ignores carriage return, line feed, null etc.
So I press <space> (or any other character) and the menu is displayed again.
The menu status like will show Baud@16x

tt4.jpg (44.5 KiB) Viewed 43652 times

At this point all communication should be done at 16x. You should not change speeds when starting a transfer.

When prompted to press Any Key, you can literally enter any character. It is just waiting for the next input from the ACIA. Space works fine as does Carriage Return. Not sure why you are experiencing different behavior.

What PC serial port hardware are you using? I understand some USB to RS-232 adapters have problems and bad or even intentionally sabotaged drivers!

[davisgw]

Mark,
It took awhile to get the magic incantation but eventually I got it working.
My PC is connected to a Prolific PL2303GS USB to RS-232 serial adapter. Not sure why I had so much trouble writing the DiskTool floppy
but the receive seemed to work well. Here are the first 2 floppies. Let me know if they look good and I will post the rest. I had to rename
them from type .65D to .txt to attach them here.

[Mark]

Glad to hear your got it working! Thanks for posting your files!
You can compress them in a ZIP archive for uploading as it is a supported format. (Right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select "Send To Compressed (zipped) folder") to zip them up in an archive.)

For the most part the disk images seem intact. I was able to clean and boot disk1 using the Dos65 C1 loader created last September. The loader disk looks to be an almost complete DOS65 disk except track 0 is not as expected, neither DOS65 nor OSI boot track. The disk seems to be an almost standard DOS65 formatted disk with DOS65 files and the OS starting on track 2.

One oddity I discovered is DOS65 on the disks expects the C1P polled keyboard at $DC00 instead of the usual $DF00. I don't have a C1 to see if the polled keyboard address decoding works at DC00-DFFF maybe someone can fill in those details? I'll have to take a closer look at the schematics sometime. Or could it be something unique with your setup? I may need to update WinOSI's C1P memory map.

Attached is a copy of Disk1, cleaned up with OSIHFE, (with the keyboard address changed from DC00 to DF00 so it works with WinOSI). ( I see WinOSI's Dos65 directory reader needs an update to view the directory contents correctly.)

Here's a screenshot of your DOS65 Disk1 booting.
Cheers!

Dos65 2.02 booting

screen0003.gif (32.65 KiB) Viewed 43621 times

[davisgw]

Mark,
After I completed transfer of all 10 floppies I discovered that the drive head needed to be cleaned, probably from the lengthy process of the transferred.
So there could be data errors in the files. Also your questions about the loader disk may be answered in the OSI document that was included in the set.
See section 3 on how to boot a C1P.

Here is the complete set. Let me know if I need to re-transfer any of the set.