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POC Computer Version One

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 7:05 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

clockpulse wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

It would not sync the display with the Viewsonic 22 inch 16x9 LED monitor on our test bench, a monitor that is only about a year old—the display kept flickering. I didn't bother to try it with the 24 inch Viewsonic monitor on my desk, figuring it would have the same problem.

Images look good. Maybe something is going on with the horizontal sync.

Possibly. I noted that the 22 inch Viewsonic monitor reported a 39.7 MHz pixel clock, however it should be 40 MHz for an 800x600 display. I don't know if the 300 KHz difference is enough of a timing error to mess up the display. I reported this problem (as well as several others) to SECONS.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Tue May 07, 2013 5:25 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

POC V1.1 recently passed 150 days of continuous uptime. I still have a job that runs at eight hour intervals to access the disk and otherwise give the microprocessor something to do besides execute a lot of WAI instructions. I've been very busy on a major system conversion and hope to have it wrapped up by the end of the week. That'll give me some time to resume playing with my computer toys. :lol:

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Tue May 07, 2013 5:29 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

clockpulse wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Images look good. Maybe something is going on with the horizontal sync.

So far, no response from SECONS. I recall someone else here had said SECONS was unresponsive. Not a good thing for customer relations.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Thu May 30, 2013 6:11 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

So far, no response from SECONS. I recall someone else here had said SECONS was unresponsive. Not a good thing for customer relations.

I tried contacting them again, but still no response.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: POC Computer Display

Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 7:37 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

I decided to "retire" the WYSE 60 terminal that I have been using as the "human interface device" with POC V1 and have replaced it with a Boundless ADDS 4000/260 LFC, which has multiple personalities and does color. Here's a sample of its display:

Attachment:

adds01.jpg [ 897.8 KiB | Viewed 6055 times ]

Some of its personalities are VT/ANSI, which is real convenient, as I can use it to assist in developing and debugging an ANSI driver before I modify POC to use the SECONS µVGA module. Part of this process will be writing code to simulate the ANSI command that clears the display to the end of the screen, which isn't supported by the µVGA module. Fortunately, it does support clear to end-of-line, so some code gymnastics should do it.

I intermittently continue to try to squeeze more performance out of the SCSI driver and have gotten it to a hair over 500KB/second with 32KB loads from disk. One block loads average about 350-375KB/second, reflecting the effects of bus protocol overhead. I really need to figure out how to make a DMA controller out of a CPLD. :lol:

Meanwhile, POC V1.1 has just passed 198 days of up-time. That's definitely better than the average PC running Windows.

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Last edited by BigDumbDinosaur on Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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enso

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 3:03 pm

Joined: Sat Sep 29, 2012 10:15 pm
Posts: 904

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

So far, no response from SECONS. I recall someone else here had said SECONS was unresponsive. Not a good thing for customer relations.

I tried contacting them again, but still no response.

I really hate that thing... The fonts creep me out with those doubled-up pixels on some vertical lines... I've seen many ugly fonts, but these clearly win. I can't help myself - do you ever find yourself hating something so much you just can't keep quiet? :evil:

PS-bad customer service does not help.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 2:57 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

enso wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

So far, no response from SECONS. I recall someone else here had said SECONS was unresponsive. Not a good thing for customer relations.

I tried contacting them again, but still no response.

PS-bad customer service does not help.

Quit obsessing over the fonts! We know you don't like them—I'm not all that impressed with them either. However, they are perfectly readable and in the device's intended usage, are just fine.

As for the customer service—more accurately, the lack of it, they'll learn sooner or later after the boss gets upset because sales aren't picking up.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: POC Computer

Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2013 6:31 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

POC V1.1 continues to be stable and is currently being subjected to the indignities of my S51Km filesystem development activities. While I wouldn't go so far as to refer to POC as "crash proof," it is performing well, and so far, my coding activities haven't crashed it. I have had it get stuck in loops several times, but hitting the NMI input on the board recovers control.

Attached are a few screen shots that I've taken while monkeying around with the unit.

Attachment:

boot01.jpg [ 2.21 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

The above is the boot screen after POC has attempted to load an operating system. By default, it drops into the machine language monitor if the OS load doesn't succeed.

Attachment:

boot_block_image01.jpg [ 3.01 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

The above is a memory dump of the boot block that was read in from disk. The boot block is two physical disk blocks, so it isn't possible to display all of it on the screen. You can see some error messages that are part of the code. Also in the boot block is a filesystem table, with capacity for a maximum of four filesystems per disk. The S51Km design will support a maximum filesystem size of 64GB, which means a total of 256GB per disk can be supported. The disk currently attached is 36GB, so I can max it out with a single filesystem.

Attachment:

master_boot_code01.jpg [ 2.08 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

The above is the disassembly of part of the boot code. The code starting at $000462 uses a BIOS call (JSR $00E02A) to load the second stage boot segment, which is what will actually search for and load an operating system. All of this stuff is functional.

Attachment:

nonsense_code01.jpg [ 1.88 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

The above was some nonsense code I assembled to demonstrate how the machine language monitor's assembler works. It supports every 65C816 instruction and all addressing modes. Note how I goofed at $002010 when I entered the PEI instruction. When a mistake is made, the assembler prints the *ERR diagnostic and again prompts with the assembly address.

Attachment:

uptime01.jpg [ 1.28 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

One of the first programs I wrote for POC once I got the M/L monitor functional was code to read the real-time clock and display the time and date. I then added to it to read the 32 bit IRQ-driven uptime counter and display the uptime.

Also in that picture, I had just finished transferring code from my UNIX software development box to POC. As the transfer progresses the loader prints a dot for each Motorola S-record that is successfully processed. When the load has completed the start and end addresses are printed and the program counter is set to the starting load address. All that is needed to run the program is to type g and hit the return key.

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Last edited by BigDumbDinosaur on Tue Jul 09, 2013 2:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Filesystem Development

Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2013 6:36 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

Attachment:

filesystem_dev01.jpg [ 2.11 MiB | Viewed 5985 times ]

The above picture is the early phases of testing my build-a-filesystem code. The break point is after all of the filesystem geometry has been calculated. Prior to getting to this point, the program had to get the disk parameters (capacity, etc.) read the filesystem table in from the boot block and scan it to find an open slot. Also, the code had to verify that the filesystem name is unique. Once all those steps are handled a series of calculations are used to work out the filesystem structure. Displaying the results to the screen makes for more pleasant debugging than trying to read little-endian 32 and 64 bit binary integers in a memory dump and converting them to decimal.

The next step will be complete the code that will actually generate the filesystem.

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whartung

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 4:51 pm

Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 3:37 pm
Posts: 1004

Looks great BDD! I like the displays and formatting too.

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:40 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

whartung wrote:

Looks great BDD!

Thanks!

Quote:

I like the displays and formatting too.

The terminal device I am now using emulates the WYSE 325 and therefore is capable of understanding ANSI color escape sequences. You can probably see where I will be going with this. :lol:

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x86? We ain't got no x86. We don't NEED no stinking x86!

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: POC Computer

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2013 6:19 am

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

I just happened to notice that this topic has seen exactly 47,000 hits. Not sure if that means anything though.

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x86? We ain't got no x86. We don't NEED no stinking x86!

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 4:07 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

POC V1.1 is at 298 days of uptime. I'm shooting for a full year, although I don't know if that will be possible. I want to tinker with the BIOS some more, which means the unit would have to be shut down to swap out ROMs. May be I should build another unit and use that to fool around with the BIOS...

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whartung

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 7:14 pm

Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 3:37 pm
Posts: 1004

Start work on V2, you know you want to

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BigDumbDinosaur

Post subject: Re: POC Computer

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 8:00 pm

Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8506
Location: Midwestern USA

whartung wrote:

Start work on V2, you know you want to

Actually I do. However, work and health keep conspiring to prevent me from doing the "long burn" needed to finalize the logic, design the circuit, lay out a PCB and start soldering. V2 will be a much more ambitious device, what with one of Garth's 4MB DIMMs, a CPLD, hardware memory protection, embedded SCSI, etc. Just about when I think I'm going to have a block of time that I can devote to V2 something comes up. Earlier this year it was a massive system conversion for a client, followed by rewriting some of their (ancient) software. More recently, it was eye surgery, from which I'm still recovering (there's a complication with the right eye that may require more surgery to correct). Plus I've been having trouble staying focused on thinking-intensive things, probably an artifact of having messed-up vision. :cry:

It'll get done sooner or later, assuming I live long enough. :lol:

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