19 Jan
2007
19 Jan
'07
1:19 a.m.
--- Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
No doubt there would complications. Oi
Sure dude. I'll get right on it. LOL LOL
Not necessarily. The BIOS INTs are mostly in ROM.
The OS INTs are loaded
in a later stage of the bootstrapping.
Even if they weren't all in rom, I'm guessing I could
isolate them *wherever they hide* and burn that into a
modified system rom.
Note this would be *real* difficult w/a Tandy 2000
due to the fact that the bios is loaded from disk. But
conceivably *that* could be stitched into the
preexisting system rom for a real groovy smorgasbord.
That pog is winning new respect in my book, if for
nothing else it's zaniness.
My point was
all the facilities
for formatting tracks, and reading and writing
individual sectors is present there.
In general, yes. You might run into a few
complications with setting
configurations. Are you sure that it can read PC style MFM without
loading significant
additional software?
No. AAMOF at this point I'm sure it can't. Learned
from a hoser yesterday that there was even an add on
card that gave the Vickie IBM compatibility like the
NEC APC III and the Zenith Z-1x0 series.
Note that there was a portable version of the Victor
9000 known as the Vicky.
And of course
you'd need to add the code
to a custom eprom. In theory it should work.
IF it can read PC style MFM, then I would recommend
rewriting the boot
code to boot from an MFM diskette. Most bootstrapping these days seems to consist of
ROM code sufficient to
display on the screen (THAT makes life easier!), and
sufficient disk I/O
in ROM to copy the first sector of a disk into a
fixed RAM location and do
a jump to that location. IF that code can handle
MFM, then I'd recommend
making a modified version of it that expects MFM.
Then you can write any
programs that you need in the first sector of a
floppy disk, and expect it
to be loaded into memory and jumped to. As you've
mentioned, you can
accomplish a LOT in 512 bytes. If THAT isn't
enough, then you can include
code in the first sector to load x additional
sectors. Once you've
written a bootstrap routine, the rest just follows
from there, although be
aware that porting Windoze to the Victor 9000 would
be a helluva lot of
work, and not well received by some. :-)
These days?
Writing a DEBUG ROM would be especially useful.
Sure would. And which version of Windont am I porting
to the Vickie? Vista maybe. LOL LOL LOL. Curious if
there ever was patches to allow Win 1.x to run on it.
Yes, you're right, the necessary code could simply be
added to a floppy disk, and the facilities inherent in
the bios could be utilized also (but you would have to
make absolute jumps...there is no interrupt vector
table, so and INT ain't possible, right?).
Yes sir I would love to figure out how to make the
thing recognize mfm formats. Oi I think I'll have to
hit the books a bit more. This is all for fun you
know. Someone did volunteer to send me the bootdisk.
But it's DOS 1.25. Now just have to figure out how to
get the images of 2.? to run.
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