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SD Card Progress

Now that other projects are out of the way, I decided to finally sit down and make some progress on the long-promised SD card drive.  The hardware has been done for months but getting time to do software was an issue until the long weekend, where I got up a bit earlier than usual to write some code before the family got up and wanted to do things.

Over the weekend I put the disk functions into the 6800 board’s SWTPC EPROM, along with a bit of code to load/run the boot sector from the SD.  I also fixed a couple minor bugs on the Arduino side and was loading my demo boot code from the SD.

The last couple of nights I wrote a real loader that resides in the first sector of the boot disk, and will load in FLEX from the SD image.  A few minutes ago it all came together… it loaded FLEX, started it, and I got the “FLEX 2.0” prompt along with it asking for the current date!

Woohoo!

The next steps are to debug the disk drivers, then move them over to the FLEX disk image, assemble there, and link a complete system.  Sounds like a job for tomorrow night.

 

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Web Page Changes

I’m starting to update the web pages with a new structure, more pictures, etc.  In the mean time you’ll find lots of empty pages or ones with words but no useful information.  None of the old pages went away but some are being moved to different places.

 

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Finally Getting Caught Up Again

Sorry for the extended down time, but my WordPress theme got corrupted and I finally got some help from my ISP to get the old stuff out of the way,

VCF East was a ton of fun, as usual!  We were set up in the vendor area.  For some reason I never took a picture, but fortunately others did:

Photo (it’s the very last one… number 64)

The terminal is a Wyse 30.  Yes, I know it’s way too modern, but it’s an ASCII terminal and worked great.  Next to it is the 6800 SS-50 system, then the 6809 system, and finally the KIM-1.  I drove up Friday night and got set up, then drove back up Saturday morning.  Unfortunately, someone coming in the other direction at a light decided not to wait and made a left directly into my car… totaled.  Three hours later I finally made it to the show in a rental car.  At least my entire display was already at the show.

More updates coming.  And a lot of work on the SS-50 product pages.  Probably won’t all happen until this weekend.