5 Apr
2010
5 Apr
'10
2:56 p.m.
Dave Dunfield wrote:
>> Where can I get ahold of the image for that ROM monitor?
Without a bootable disk he can't do anything! The
only resident rom is
the disk booter all 256 or 512 bytes depending if its SD or DD.
Minimally a monitor on a rom card (or cpu) with a minimal monitor is
needed.
This has been the challenge for all new people aquiring NS* systems
without media.
We've been specifically talking about a tiny (<500 byte) RAMless monitor
which can be put into the 2708 socket on the N* ZPB CPU card.
The other problem is without a CW card one cannot make
a bootable
disk using a generic PC as it's hard sectored.
Once you have the ROM monitor working in the CPU card, it can be used to
download into RAM a copy of N*DOS with my NST client - then you can use
my NST utility on the PC to transfer images over the serial port and have
the system write them to disk.
My solution is a CPU (compupro Z80, of SBC880) with
Eprom monitor
or using a card like Compupro System Support 1 that can carry rom
and provide a system monitor/debugger. Of course any rom card
can carry the needed code.
Good point that I failed to mention earlier - if you have access to another
working S-100 system, you can put your NorthStar controller into it, load
the software into memory by whatever means can be done on that system, and
then launch it to write the N* disks ... My simulator has fully configurable
serial I/O (can make it look like virtually any UART) so you can use it to
configure and test a version of N*DOS and the NST client which would work
on that other system.
Dave
--
dave09 (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Classic Computers: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/