CST Ram Plus eproms - CST QDisc v4 issue

[janbredenbeek]

The original specification requires that you compare address lines A14 to A17 against pins SP0 to SP3, and A18 and A19 should both be high, to access the bus. SP0 to SP3 are the Select Peripheral pins, which are all tied to ground on the QL's edge connector, hence your peripheral will be at $C0000 when directly connected to the QL. When using an extender module, SP0 to SP3 would indicate the slot number (0 to 15) for your peripheral card, so the space reserved would be at $C0000 + 16K*slot number.

Originally, the $10000-$17FFF and $1C000-$1FFFF areas were reserved for external I/O, so in principle free to use - but when connecting more than one peripheral there is of course the chance of a clash, so it's better to use part of your 16K space for it.

Miracle Systems put their Trump card ROM in the first 32K and the I/O in the second 16K mentioned, and switches on a copy of the ROM at $C0000 when the QL accesses the ROM slot at $C000, so the QL will find it and execute the initialisation routine, which jumps to the real code at $10000 and switches RAM back in at $C0000 - very clever indeed

[chriskgnr]

Hello again.
Finally the CST Ram plus board worked ok after it was populated with 16kb or 32kb eproms. It was needed to solder a 2N2369 transistor in place of Mp2 2369 and a 4.7KΩ resistor in place of the 47KΩ as the manual shows. Nothing else than 2N2369 works ok, so forget any equivalents. About the eproms, only ICE eprom didn't work.
Cheers.

[Wicksy]

.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

The Trump Card decodes all the 256K (16x16K) ROM slots and overlays its own onboard memory, thus disabling any ROM slot at $C0000.

The Trump card hardware ROM is located at the QL unused I/O memory, at $10000 and Toolkit 2 at $18000, leaving the ROM Port at $0C000 free, for 16K ROM expansion. See QL Technical Manual Page 56.

The Gold Card does the same thing as the Trump Card, except it double boots copying the ROM into the Gold Card faster RAM and pages out the onboard 68008 onboard CPU to use the faster Gold Card CPU, still the only location for ROM expansion is the 16K ROM Port.

the Supergold card, uses a different I/O decoding scheme, where ROMs can be added, like the Qubide can be configured to locate at $C0000, but needs through port and maybe a backplane to work. See Marcel Bog about the Supergold card boot system

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi. Am interested in what happens when you have a series of software as you listed running from the 4 eproms after you boot up and press F1?

Are they all loaded but waiting to be run by you or do some auto boot and are actively running?

On a normal non-Trump Card QL, the QDOS system after a RAM test, performs a ROM scan at: $0C000, $C0000 in $4000 blocks, which is 16 x 16K slots. Where the system finds a ROM header: $4AFB0001, it initialises the ROM into the QDOS system.

The Trump Card uses its own custom routine to load the Trump Card hardware and Toolkit II at $10000, $18000

So to load in a 256K eprom into QDOS, my guess would be to have the ROM Header ID: $4AFB0001 at the start of the ROM, at $C0000, which initialises the ROM, since no other ROM header exist, then the ROM scan only displays 256K ROM.

The 256K ROM, would need to have it own linking system to link all the internal programs as modules, like Quill, Archive etc...

[Wicksy]

Thanks Derek, I should of specified a non Trump / Gold QL.

[Derek_Stewart]

Thanks Derek, I should of specified a non Trump / Gold QL.

Chris has mentioned TKII, ICE, MonQL, SpeedScreen, Prospero(32KB) running, if done together would they be in a "run" state on boot up or loaded in memory but waiting for a run command?
TK2 is probably set up to autorun, all the others presumably would need modifying?

Do the individual programs have to be linked together as one module, ie can they not exist as individual items, presumably each with there own loader?

I believe that is what I said, the ROM module is linked into the operating system by the QDOS ROM scan, and depending on how the programmer of the ROM has seup the ROM initialisation.

ROMs can extend the Superbasic interpreter, or add functions to the QDOS system, by extending the screen driver for example, with Speed Screen or Lightning.

Toolkit 2 either installs all the commands to Superbasic or just a TK2_EXT command that loads the commands.

[Pr0f]

Usually TKII needs to be initialised by running TK2_EXT command - which is initially the only command added to the list of commands in SuperBasic - once you run that it will load all the other extensions. Interestingly - if you also have TK3 - it will also enable toolkit 2 as well as it's own extensions with TK3_EXT. What ROMS do when they are scanned by the OS can differ - you can add some extensions or a driver to Basic, or you can take control of the machine and not return it to the OS (QIMSI Gold does this), and so does the Gold Card ROM (Super Gold is a little different).

[Wicksy]

Thanks to you both.

[bwinkel67]

I have disassembled ICE rom, just tryingbto understand the assembler source code.

I did think about writing a PTR_GEN driver for the ICE mouse or is that Mice ...

Let me know how far you've gotten with it. One of the things I like about ICE is that it offers keyboard control of the GUI. With MICE they have gotten rid of that in lieu of the mouse. Would be nice to have MICE offer both as then I'd use it more, have the mouse to the side but on occasion use the keyboard to move the pointer as it feels pretty handy (like a poor man's trackpad). Curious if MICE ROM has enough space to merge ICE's cursor control.