mizapf

I don't have a section about TIPI on Ninermame yet, but I'll keep a note. By the way, I set up Ninermame (www.ninermame.org) to keep everything related to MAME a while ago, so you better watch that site for future updates on that topic, not Ninerpedia.

Have a look at https://ftp.whtech.com/datasheets and manuals/Datasheets - TI/9900-FamilySystemsDesign-1stEdition/9900-FamilySystemsDesign-04-Hardware Design.pdf pages 4-103 ff. The RESET operation in the CPU is a context switch; for the 9900 this means that the current status register, the current program counter, and the current workspace pointer are saved to the new registers R15 (83FE), R14 (83FC), and R13 (83FA). This can be nicely seen in the referred table. AB = Address bus, DB = data bus, NC = no change etc. See page 4-90 for the other abbreviations.

This is the already known EOF error (next to last line); I don't have a solution yet, but I will check as soon as possible.

I'm not sure which one was first, Extended Basic (100) or Editor/Assembler. The version 100 already lacks the feature to specify an address after "". Maybe there were different developers involved. Mind that the loader (subprogram LOAD) of Extended Basic does not support the binary encoding of the object code (aka "compressed format") either, while the E/A version does. I'm not sure whether this is really a matter of cartridge space, or whether the E/A version is just enhanced.

Easy to clarify: The PEEK subprogram from Editor/Assembler supports it, the one from Extended Basic does not.

No, I'd say this is an error. The file MDMXB is basically the same as MDM, but in uncompressed format so that the Extended Basic loader will take it. Both define a symbol "MDM", but no "SLOAD" which is referred to in CALL LINK, thus causing the error message. SLOAD is typically used for the SAVE utility, which required symbols SFIRST, SLOAD, SLAST to be defined. SAVE saves object code as a memory image code. Maybe the attribution with those symbols was forgotten in the MDM(XB) files.

From my experience, ChatGPT sounds to some extent like a student in an oral exam, asked for a topic that was announced to be relevant, but which was somehow subject to the "courage for the gap"*. So if you just don't have a clue, you take the name ("Zero-zap") and fantasize something around it. I think it did not even mix it up with Parsec. (*German "Mut zur Lücke", when one decides that the topics are just too much to learn, so this and that can be left out because it will surely never be asked. And if so, the professor is a &!%&$§.)

Buy cheap, buy twice.

If I remember correctly this is one of our Austrian friends, @kl99?

"Funk" in German is "radio" in English, so "amateur radio". ("u" like in "put", the word actually translates to "spark", which is from the early times when Hertz and Marconi used sparks to transmit signals. Not to be mixed up with English "funk".)

Did I already mention that TIImageTool is absolutely free, does not contain adware or spyware, and no subscription? Edit: Installing means simply to install a current Java runtime environment (if not already present; suggested to use OpenJDK); TIImageTool starts by double-clicking the jar file, that's all.

Originally I actually planned a collection of sounds that map to certain regions of the disk, not for each track, but maybe for each group of 5. This was a bit too ambitious for the beginning, when I was glad enough to get a believable step sound and the seek sound. In the end, it would be nice if we could have a kind of "sound font" for each drive so everyone may install the sounds of drive as desired. MAME currently does not support something like this, although I could imagine to set up a kind of archive file with all required sounds in a standardized format, and then you just drop that file into the samples folder.

I'm tired about discussing operating systems. I know which one is best for me.

Right, I almost forgot that I already put a boot EPROM 2.00 in the geneve.zip package. So the renaming to LOAD/SYS is only required for pre-2.00 boot EPROMs. One thing, there was also a LOAD-SYS in your DSK1 folder, and that one did not boot. Only when I copied LOAD-MFM to the DSK1 folder as LOAD/SYS, the Geneve started to boot (EPROM 0.98).

I still have a 1541 on the shelf, and one day I'll try to sample the sounds of that drive to be included in MAME (for the C64, of course). There's nothing like the head hammering of a 1541. 🙂

By the way, if you already have a hard disk image for working with the emulated Geneve, you may just copy the contents of this new HD image to your working image. In that respect, TIImageTool may prove handy. Note that you have to replace the LOAD/SYS file in the DSK1 folder and that the new kernel name is SYSTEM-SYS. If you use the HFDC emulation, copy the LOAD-MFM from the EPROM folder to the DSK1 folder, renaming it to LOAD/SYS. (Shall we call it kernel, just to sound a bit fancier? 🙂)

So now here is GeneveOS 7.40 on a hard disk image, which makes it easier for MAME users to enjoy the new operating system. You can boot with this image using the HFDC controller: mame geneve [... your options ...] -peb:slot8 hfdc -peb:slot8:hfdc:h1 generic -hard1 genos740.hd genos740.hd

Even worse, another MAME dev removed the write support in the HFE format support a year ago. https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/66c0222c690fb6fb0e093fad37d42a68fea66a2f Not even noticing me, guess I'm expected to check github and the forums all the time. 😞 Edit: OK, I got the info that the save code was stateful (i.e. depended on the previous load) which is a bad idea. Well, then, I'm going to rewrite that. But just clipping out without telling the file owner (and I'm clearly mentioned in the header)...

I just found out that on March 27 this year, someone removed the FM resync from the WD emulation, which was my fix for the Diskassembler in 2018. 😞 I left a note on Github and asked for discussion. Edit: In fact, it seems to be broken for a longer time, but no one noticed. DiskAssembler did load, that's for sure.

Anyone else who thought of some region in the Middle East when reading "West Bank"?

DSK images cannot be 100%, as they lack all data outside of sector contents. In that case you have to use HFE. I know that I got it working once; you can use the search function in the forum. By the way, what is a 44 KiB DSK file? This is certainly not supported, just because of its size. It must be 90K, 180K, 360K, or 720K. Edit: This was the thread: Interestingly, I cannot load Diskassembler, but the other ones (Advanced Diagnostics, Explorer). I found the Diskassembler image in a folder "notwork", even though that video proves the opposite. 5 years is quite enough time to start forgetting things, as it seems.

So how did you build it? Please note that "debug build" and "-debug" are NOT the same things. A debug build contains symbols in the executable and has no optimizations so that we can effectively debug MAME itself. This bloats the executable code and also leads to heavy performance penalties. I'd guess it is 3-4 times slower than the standard build (which means it can easily drop below the 100% emulation time, making sound choppy and the emulation slower than the real thing). The debugger that is launched with -debug is a build-in feature of MAME and is intended to debug the emulated system (not MAME itself). There is no build option to exclude that feature from building as far as I know. Clipping off parts of the executable does not sound good to me. I'd not recommend it, even if the thing is still running. After all, I also thought about dropping those TI-99 specific MAME builds and returning to the full build, because the effect of excluding the other drivers is really minimal. It should not really bother your computer if there is a lot of executable code that is never run; it is just static memory never paged into execution. So it should not really take away available runtime memory or otherwise decelerate the execution. The only advantage is that building is much faster, and the executable is loaded more quickly.

This is a bit like diagnosing a patient's mental state by a photograph. The problem is that you want to know whether the CPU is working, and this means to watch changes in the state of lines. As they happen in the scope of microseconds, a scope would be the logical tool to use.

@9640NewsIt is on my list, but not planned for a special time. My next-in-line for MAME would be the block DMA of SCSI, as soon as time allows. I'm currently spending some time on TIImageTool 3.

OK, you were referring to the exe file; I just looked at the archive files. I built the Windows version, yes. I included the drivers ti99_4x, ti99_4p, ti99_8, geneve, ti99_2, evmbug, cortex, cc40, tm990189, and tutor. Also, I let the tools build (TOOLS=1), i.e. chdman, imgtool etc. The tools usually pull a lot of code into the exe.