Need your opinion regarding GR8NET capabilities

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Por Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

Imagen del Eugeny_Brychkov

10-02-2016, 19:14

Thank you!

There's new flash chip firmware upgrade available, please check the web site. Update should be performed offline. Please check the following sections of the manual: MSX-DOS integration (new chapter) and offline firmware update (I added that for Turbo-R it should be done in Z80 mode). For easy download you will find file update.rar in the firmware/GR8NET/bloadable directory.
There's also FPGA firmware upgrade available with fixes and improvements in SD-card and SCC.
Both updates have V.00.03 version code.
To know your flash chip version use NETFWUPDATE command without parameters.
To know your FPGA configuration version use NETVER command.

Important changes from the firmware version of V.00.02: I moved all direct firmware calls from the beginning of the ROM to the end of the GR8NET's bank 0.

Por edoz

Prophet (2465)

Imagen del edoz

10-02-2016, 21:01

Hi Eugeny! Wow what a progress! Unfortunately i didn't had any time to upgrade it last weekend. I will retry it again upcoming days! It's amazing how we get all the support from you! Many Thanks! Cool that MSXDOS is now included! .. and what a big Manual .. amazing !!

Por Prodatron

Paragon (1836)

Imagen del Prodatron

10-02-2016, 21:42

Thanks for the update Eugeny! I am impressed that MSX-DOS integration is available now! Could this mean, that SD card support (at least for FAT12/16 partitions) would be possible soon, too, as you already made a big step into this direction?

Por Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

Imagen del Eugeny_Brychkov

10-02-2016, 22:00

Prodatron wrote:

Could this mean, that SD card support (at least for FAT12/16 partitions) would be possible soon

There's one question with it. Cards have specific format, which format should be used with the GR8NET? Generally big cards are formatted with max 4 primary partitions which I can support (like I do with GR8STORM in GR8BIT), but I saw some smaller cards being formatted for DOS5.0 (yes Smile! ), or there could be cards with other custom formats. Also, if I am going to support several partitions (up to 2GB with 23-bit sector addressing), how would you like to select them/change during operation?

Por Prodatron

Paragon (1836)

Imagen del Prodatron

10-02-2016, 23:03

AFAIK an MSX-DOS device can have multiple drives. When a disc ROM is initialized it returns the number of available drives (in this case 1-4). So you can use one drive for each primary partition (which results e.g. in A,B,C,D on MSX-DOS side if there are 4 primary partitions).
Does DOS5.0 use another partitioning system? I would recommend only to support the official MBR structure and unpartitioned media (without MBR). I think you even don't need to take care about the filesystem at all, just about sector read/write, or maybe I am wrong?

Por Grauw

Ascended (10699)

Imagen del Grauw

11-02-2016, 00:15

Nextor DOS2 has FAT16 support built-in, and drive and partition mapping when provided a native driver. It also supports standard PC partitions.

Also, I think the SD specifications are quite explicit about the standard formatting, so there isn’t too wide a range of default formattings to expect. And, they can always be reformatted, though the flash controller chip may be optimised for the default formatting (so reformatting may not always be wise from what I heard).

Btw maybe I’m new-fashioned but I can’t deal with any more than 1 partition nowadays :). Glad we’ve got FAT16.

Por Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

Imagen del Eugeny_Brychkov

11-02-2016, 12:42

Prodatron wrote:

A,B,C,D

With DOS1 it is not a good idea to have 4 drives. DOS1 allocates space for all drives' FAT sectors, thus having 4 images of the standard floppy disks will cause 512*3*4 = minus 6 kilobytes from available BASIC RAM.

Prodatron wrote:

I think you even don't need to take care about the filesystem at all, just about sector read/write, or maybe I am wrong?

It is a case when there's DOS2 adapter installed into the system. In case GR8NET is the only adapter... which runs DOS1... see my text above.

Grauw wrote:

the standard formatting

So we assume that cards you use with GR8NET should be readable and writable with standard PC.

Grauw wrote:

I can’t deal with any more than 1 partition nowadays

I can implement it at the level of another Disk-BASIC command, like CALLDSKSDPCH (sd-card partition change).

Anticipating your questions why I did not integrate DOS2 into the GR8NET. I did it for the following reasons:

  1. I know DOS1 stuff relatively well, and there's less work doing it to single page DOS1 than to multiple page DOS2;
  2. DOS2 uses 32K of the top of mapped RAM, which may not be desired case in all the circumstances;
  3. I can not implement Nextor because I did not get reply/permission from Nestor.

Thus if you want DOS2 with GR8NET you just install another device which has DOS2 ROM in it. For example, Turbo-R machines have DOS2 built in, and they boot from GR8NET "media" into DOS2.

Por edoz

Prophet (2465)

Imagen del edoz

12-02-2016, 12:56

Cool! I did the update for the FPGA using the Altera USB Blaster and the update for the gr8net flash part! And all seems fine! Good thing is that i can read and write now every Micro SD type cards! Also in SymbOS it works now for me to read and write the FAT32 filesystem!



The DOS1 boot part (with F4) work very cool! Still It would be nice if you can boot from the SD! I'm very surprised how easy everything works!

Por Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

Imagen del Eugeny_Brychkov

13-02-2016, 11:38

Victor reported some issues with new version 20160206, I fixed bug with NETSNDVOL not being stored in the flash on NETSAVE, and also increased timeouts with flash chip so now you can perform NETFWUPDATE and NETSAVE in Turbo mode.
NETSNDVOL is very useful for Turbo-R machines, where SCC (and external device's) volume is usually louder, thus you can permanently lower volume of the GR8NET's SCC by issuing CALLNETSNDVOL(,&h60):CALLNETSAVE

edoz wrote:

Statement "firmware NOT suitable" shows mismatch between FPGA firmware version and flash chip firmware version (V.0.2 and V.0.3 respectively, you can see it on the picture) but it is not a fatal error, you still are able to update the flash chip.

Por Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

Imagen del Eugeny_Brychkov

16-02-2016, 22:11

Small note: those who updated flash chip firmware may have issues running SAVE.ASC program. It is because when improving the code I changed configuration variable locations but SAVE.ASC accesses bloaded image size directly (thus accesses wrong data now). I have introduced new command to know the size of bloaded image CALLNETVARBSIZE(S). New version of SAVE.ASC uses it, please download it from the website. Special thanks to Victor who found this issue out.

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