C-ONE boot code / News: Recent posts

The code changes Tobias Gubener needed to do to get the boot code to run on his CPC core have been merged with the CVS tree. The tech docs on the c1boot site have been updated to reflect the changes.

The C-ONE boot homepage has been updated with a detailed I/O memory map, and information on how to write to the flash rom:

http://c1boot.sourceforge.net/c1flash.shtml

The hw bug in the keyboard FIFO was fixed, so the boot menu works correctly now. A small bug relating to FAT volume names was fixed - the code would end up in an endless loop if the volume name entry had the Archived attribute bit set.

The last known bugs in 1.0 were fixed, so all that's missing is the floppy driver. The code was branched, and the trunk is now the 1.1 development tree. The first new feature to be added is a boot menu. A screenshot of it can be seen here:

http://www.cling.gu.se/~cl3polof/sim-bootmenu.png

FLASH.BIN is now loaded if you hold down F when resetting. To accompany it is some API information - this was what was needed to implement the flash upgrade program. Now all that's missing is the floppy driver, and a few minor bug fixes.

The boot rom now loads a 0DRIVE.BIN file after loading the FPGA config and ROM images. This allows you to write programs that execute on the drive cpu after the main system has been booted, ideally suited for 1581 or HD emulation.

The homepage also got a minor update with some more tech info.

Primitive graphics support has been added. Everything I need to make a boot menu is now available. The simulator was removed from the main source distribution and put in its own module. Graphics emulation was added, using either SDL or Allegro.

The problem with ATAPI commands was fixed, and the C1 now detects CD-ROMs and can boot from them.

Two new filesystems are now supported, FAT12 (commonly usd on floppies and small flash drives), and ISO9660 (used on CDs). This is in preparation for the low level floppy and ATAPI support.

Selecting a boot config with 0..9 now works. Hold down a number key during power on or reset and you can select one of 10 configurations.

Thanks to the RS-232 boot rom development has picked up the pace a bit. The code has been cleaned up a lot, and many small (and some big) bugs have been fixed.

A new rom, boot232.bin, has been added. It allows you to upload the bootrom image over RS-232, for easier testing during development.

In order to speed things up a little, the baudrate was changed from 9600 to 38400.

The last FAT sector is now cached, which reduces loading time a little bit - 0.3 seconds on an infinitely fast drive, more on a real HD.