Closed FrankTaylorLieder closed 4 years ago
Blast. That's what happens if you format the disk on the NC200. I believe it's a problem in that the NC200 uses non-standard sector skew and for some reason these don't load; not sure why. I've been trying to avoid finding out because debugging that stuff is painful.
I suspect that your USB floppy drive uses a similar non-standard sector skew. Do you have another one you can try?
Thanks. I'll see if I can dig out an old laptop and format the disk there.
Excellent. Having found an old laptop and booted in safe mode as the BIOS was crashing in a full boot. I formatted the disk... and it now works!
Is sector skew a function of the hardware on the drive, or the software driving the format?
It's a software issue, but USB drives typically don't allow you to configure this (although I could be wrong, the UFI spec is madness). I should probably investigate what's happening here...
Same here, Bios has a few linkage errors that manifest themselves depending on platform. Worked ok on bare S100 crate with FD1791 (CCS California Computers Corp) but crashed on a SB180.
BIOS is the one area that will be hardware specific.
This should now be fixed. I rewrote, well, everything which was wrong which was quite a lot. Unfortunately the downside is that disks formatted on a PC have much poorer performance than those formatted on the NC200 itself; both will work, though. See arch/nc200/README.md
for information.
I tried to boot cpmish on my NC200 and just got a message saying "Preparing memory." in a centralised box on the NC screen. The disk drive motor stays on and the machine power button no longer works... I assume it's crashed.
I created a boot disk on Linux (USB disk drive) using: ufiformat -f 720 /dev/sda dd if=nc200.img of=/dev/sda
I've tried the image in the current github distribution. I also managed (after some hacking) to build the image (on Raspbian). Both images have the same results.
Any ideas?
Many thanks, Frank.