65816 in a 800XL

[sloopy]

i just got a 65816 working in my 800XL, and put the '816 OS by drac030 in it (so maybe he could respond, probly know the answer best :') when i boot the machine with the stock XL OS it runs fine, but with the 816 OS it goes through the devices to find a bootable device, only shows D2:-D15:, D1: shows status read in APE, but then gives me a black screen says system halted, and press reset to reboot...

 

sloopy.

[atariksi]

i just got a 65816 working in my 800XL, and put the '816 OS by drac030 in it (so maybe he could respond, probly know the answer best :') when i boot the machine with the stock XL OS it runs fine, but with the 816 OS it goes through the devices to find a bootable device, only shows D2:-D15:, D1: shows status read in APE, but then gives me a black screen says system halted, and press reset to reboot...

 

sloopy.

 

You could try out 16-bit code after booting with XL OS to see if 16-bit mode is working.

 

Is it a complex circuit for plugging in 65816 into Atari 800XL? Perhaps, I can try it out if it's not too much soldering.

[sloopy]

i got it to work, APE had to be put in 1x sio... the circuit is very simple a 74LS00 and 74LS74 here is the info (if you read polish) http://hardware.atari8.info/65816.php the schematic(first link says 'schmat...' ) has all the info you need except the R/W line needs to be run (pin 36 on 816, pin 34 on 6502C)... works pretty well with stock xl os so far as a 6502C replacement...

 

sloopy.

[UNIXcoffee928]

I wonder if you could control the Apple IIGS as a slave computer by running the PBI signals out of the Atari directly into the processor expansion slot for the IIGS... think of the possibilities, you would have a cheap, well constructed expansion chassis with well defined slots, and probably have access to all of the features in the box. 

 

Even if you just used the IIGS as an expansion box, it would be useful. ...but really, you could probably interface directly to most of the hardware capabilities of the IIGS.

 

I just thought of this when I noticed that there had been a PC emulation board made for the IIGS, back in the day. I would venture to say that an inexpensive cable running from the Atari PBI directly into the IIGS slot would give you full control of the IIGS.

 

This is all purely theoretical, I'll have to dig up a hardware manual for the slots in the IIGS & post a link. My guess is that it would work, and would only require a small driver on the Apple side. 

 

Comments?

[Rybags]

It'd be a way oversized peripheral for the Atari.

Or should that be the other way 'round... the Atari would be a slightly oversized keyboard for the Apple.

 

IIgs is somewhat rare and given the money you pay for them, not too many would be wanting to hack away at the guts of them.

 

What form factors is the 65816 available in? Maybe the ideal situation would be a plugin board that can be made relatively cheaply in bulk, then have the end-user just plug or solder in the CPU themselves.

[UNIXcoffee928]

It'd be a way oversized peripheral for the Atari.

Or should that be the other way 'round... the Atari would be a slightly oversized keyboard for the Apple.

 

IIgs is somewhat rare and given the money you pay for them, not too many would be wanting to hack away at the guts of them.

 

What form factors is the 65816 available in?  Maybe the ideal situation would be a plugin board that can be made relatively cheaply in bulk, then have the end-user just plug or solder in the CPU themselves.

 

Ha, I know it's a funny concept. Really, though, a 600XL would be a 'normal' sized keyboard... & the Apple IIGS normally goes for about $30-50 USD, so, it's not all that over the top.

[UNIXcoffee928]

... & the other thing about this is the beauty of the design. No physical hacksaws needed! lol. Just a PBI cable attached the 600XL or 800XL's PBI port on one end, and to a Apple II GS card edge connector on the other end of the cable. Simplicity!

 

Ah ha! I was going through the hardware manual for the IIGS, and found out that my guess was right.

 

Check the attachment for the snippet from the .pdf:

 

 

Might seem like a crazy idea, but, hey, it's not really that much bigger of a peripheral to the Atari than the 1090 Expansion housing. In fact, it looks like it is about the same cubic volume, since the IIGS was shorter than the 1090.

 

 

For an out of the blue kinda idea, this is actually pretty neat... I bet that it would work.

[+Allan]

Of course you could just clone the 1090 and use some other case to hold it. Then you could make memory cards, 80-column cards, Hard-drive cards, USB cards, Memory card cards, etc, etc, etc, etc.

 

Allan

[sloopy]

hmmm make a backplane board for the PBI that fits into a GS case and uses the case and P/S for the expansion system...

 

 

sloopy.

[UNIXcoffee928]

 Well, you could mess with the 1090, but, first of all, what boards are available, and where can you get them? Second of all, it can't be spec-ed anywhere nearly as completely as a production system like the IIGS, since the 1090 is essentially a prototype.

 

If you were to instead just adopt the Apple interface, there would be tons of cards already AVAILABLE to find on ebay. All they would need would be drivers... and more people are software people than hardware people... so it's much more likely that drivers would appear, than all of a sudden having 1090 boards magically appear. 

 

Besides, the DIY concept of Apple II boards is SO well documented that even a novice could throw something together, hardware-wise, in short order.

 

 

 

 

Theory of Operation:

 

The Atari would be controlling the IIGS hardware, directly via PBI. So, the IIGS no longer would be an "Apple IIGS", as such (OS-wise)... it would now just be a range of memory addresses to the Atari.

 

When you write to those addresses, the IIGS performs the hardware action that you telling it to do. It is a MASTER/SLAVE setup, the Atari is the Master Computer, the IIGS is the Slave Computer.

 

So, essentially, all of the features (and more) normally available via the Apple IIGS specification sheet, are now ADDED to the features of the Atari, on a separate RGB display (so you would be running two LCD panels, or CRTs). 

 

This is because of the flexibility of the Apple IIGS bus. It is so flexible that it allows the ENTIRE COMPUTER ITSELF to be used as another computer's peripheral. 

 

From the standpoint of the Atari User, it's just like hooking up & using a printer. Except, what you get is an entirely new Feature-Set to play with (everything on the IIGS spec sheet, including a separate 65816 with it's own memory).

 

Here's a mock-up of how the components look together:

[sloopy]

how would you connect it to the GS system? through the cpu socket? or put a card in one of the slots?

 

sloopy.

[UNIXcoffee928]

how would you connect it to the GS system? through the cpu socket? or put a card in one of the slots?

 

sloopy.

Just like I said above, it would connect directly into one of the IIGS slots. Just a cable with a IIGS card-edge on one side & a connector for the Atari PBI on the other side.

 

Might need a few resistors on some lines, depending on the compatibility of the signal voltages between the two systems. It's just a cable though. If you wanted to get fancy, you could make a GS card with a connector, and plug the cable into that, just so you don't have a cable running into an open hole slot, but that would be more of a superficial than a functional requirement.

 

On a systems level, you would need a small loader and a bare minimum OS on the IIGS... the amount of work depends on how much of the OS is in ROM on that machine. The machine had 3 ROMs over the course of it's lifecycle, ROM 03 is the ideal IIGS config for such a project, since most of the IIgs Toolbox is on the ROM. I'll look into seeing if there were any alternate loaders for the IIGS. 

[sloopy]

thing is ROM03 machines arnt that easy to find... and its not like you can put a ROM from a 3 machine in a 2 or 1, as the term is used for defining the revision of the mainboard for the GS... i have 3 IIgs's here, none are ROM03 machines, and looked for a while, but none were reasonable in price like a 1 or 2... i also have a complete GS setup, HD card, a ramkeeper, hand scanner, 2 800K 3.5's 2 5.25", a 1.44HD floppy for the GS (AE HD+), and several other things i cant rem right now (unfortunatly i sold the transwarp GS i had... sucked i drove 45miles to sell it to a guy and after i left his house 10 miles away my timing chain broke and all the money i made on selling it i had to use to tow/fix my car :'(

 

sloopy.

[UNIXcoffee928]

thing is ROM03 machines arnt that easy to find... and its not like you can put a ROM from a 3 machine in a 2 or 1, as the term is used for defining the revision of the mainboard for the GS... i have 3 IIgs's here, none are ROM03 machines, and looked for a while, but none were reasonable in price like a 1 or 2... i also have a complete GS setup, HD card, a ramkeeper, hand scanner, 2 800K 3.5's 2 5.25", a 1.44HD floppy for the GS (AE HD+), and several other things i cant rem right now (unfortunatly i sold the transwarp GS i had... sucked i drove 45miles to sell it to a guy and after i left his house 10 miles away my timing chain broke and all the money i made on selling it i had to use to tow/fix my car :'(

 

sloopy.

Wow, that does suck, sorry to hear that. 

 

Well, yeah... Being an Amiga guy, all I knew about IIGS ROM revisions was what I read in the IIGS Hardware & Firmware Reference books as I was typing up the post. Afterward, I had searched ebay for ROM revision 03, and took note of the fact that they are considered gold in the IIGS community.

 

 

...however, ROM rev 3 is desirable for different reasons than ours, so it's not that big of a deal. The only reason that I had suggested it was because it has very little that needs to be loaded from disk. It's Toolbox ROM is more complete than rev 00 & rev 01.

 

As it seems to turn out, there is no QNX, no Linux, no Minix, no tiny OS of any sort that was written for the IIGS. There's ProDOS 8 for the 8-bt stuff, ProDOS 16 for the 16 Bit, and the standard Apple GS/OS which rides on top of the ProDOS filesystem. There was one version of "UNIX", but it was more of a compatibility-layer that rode on top of ProDOS & Apple GS/OS... so that's out too.

 

Initially, I was hoping that a small loader & OS, like an early version of QNX or something would be available, which is a reasonable enough assumption, since most other systems have something like that available.

 

...but it looks like nobody bothered with the IIGS.

 

Looking at the hardware manual, though, Apple gives you complete access to programming the hardware directly, if you choose to. The Toolbox is just a convenience.

 

The bad news is that you would have to have the IIGS running as a IIGS to do it, since no other OS besides the above listed ones seem to exist. Too bad, too... I know back in the day there were many talented hackers who wrote their own Apple II loaders, to give their games full access to hardware, with no OS bloat.

 

Maybe you are one of those guys. I wasn't an Apple guy. If you know the system at that level, you could disassemble one of those games to make an ultra-barebones loader. I just don't have the time to get that involved at this stage of the game, but, I can tell you that that's what would need to be done to achieve maximum efficiency using the IIGS as a slave computer.

 

Then again, maybe it can't be done at all. It all depends on aspects of timing and tricking the IIGS hardware into accepting that the Atari plugged into the slot is actually a board which assumes total control of the IIGS system, like the PC board did. Maybe that had it's own loader... I doubt that the system ran Apple GS/OS and had the PC in a window. If you could find the software for that PC card, that would be a big step in the right direction.

 

It gets a lot trickier to make the GS running Apple GS/OS accept that the Atari Plugged into it's slot runs the show. It requires a lot more coding on the Atari side, as well.

 

Anyway, it doesn't really matter what revision ROM is in the system, all of the firmware revisions cover the slots, and standard system housekeeping functions. Since you have three IIGS computers, you seem ideally suited to try to figure this one out. Just read the Hardware & Firmware manuals, which are available online. Your background as an Apple enthusiast that has been following things in appleland will fill in a lot of the blanks.

 

If an alternate loader cannot be found, my guess is to base it off of straight ProDOS 16, with nothing else. The whole thing is, you need to know what the IIGS expects to find when it looks at slots, when it looks for slots (I believe that there is no polling of the slots, that it is only interrupt driven, I could be wrong).

 

From there, you need a fast driver that exists on the Atari, one that will send the correct data as a result of the IIGS's slot queries. The Atari driver needs to send data within the timing restraints of the IIGS bus. Maybe it is possible, maybe it is not. The IIGS needs to be able to give control to the "board" (the Atari via PBI) in it's slot. Then the Atari can send values to the IIGS bus that will make the IIGS do things, like use the synthesizer, etc.

 

The actual hardware, in this, is minimal... pretty much just a cable. It's the software (on both systems) that requires the time, effort, & thought, since you are dealing with system-level data manipulation.

 

You may want to send some good Apple hackers this way, together we might be able to suss the whole thing out. From the manuals, it does seem like it could be done, but who knows how difficult it would be to actually do it?

 

I'm planning on doing some more technical reading about the IIGS. ...but someone more familiar with the system could probably answer things quicker.

 

All in all, the goal is to achieve total control of the IIGS hardware via it's expansion slots. Since you've got the hardware in front of you... if you want to mess around with this, this would be a good place to talk about it. In the mean time, I'll be looking up the fine details of the IIGS bus.

[UNIXcoffee928]

Oh, and, to just achieve the goal of the Atari having a standard expansion bus, alone... it would be easiest to just clone the Apple II expansion bus (a small bus board with just connectors & traces), put it in a box, and be done with it, since the Apple II series expansion bus is so well documented, it would be straight-forward to reverse engineer it to the Atari.

Edited November 27, 2009 by UNIXcoffee928

[JamesD]

There is an FPGA board that plugs into a IIgs slot. If you had a Atari core you could run it on that.

You could add a daughter board with Atari custom chips if you couldn't have the full thing in the FPGA.

http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html

 

But it seems pretty expensive to add a slow Apple II buss with some odd timing to the Atari.

 

 

The IIgs didn't have "QNX, no Linux, no Minix," but it did have GNO/ME.

http://www.hypermall.com/companies/procyon/gnome.html

Edited November 28, 2009 by JamesD

[sloopy]

heh no i wasnt that much of an appleII enthusiast, i went atari, amiga, mac... i only got into the GS for a short while cause i found one at a pc repair place that i was the sub-contractor for all their mac work... i played with them for a while, but didnt do anythign serious with them... i had a II+ waaayy back in the day someone gave me cause the roms were bad, but got it working and sold it for A8 stuff... i picked up the other IIGS's because i was working on a programming contract that did something similar to an old game that was available for the appleII and GS's were more easier to find then IIe's and the 2 other people involved didnt want them when we were done... but i did learn a bit about them in that short time i used them...

 

the machine can be taken over by an external system (see the many '816 accel card available) but all the decent ones you have to remove the cpu and run a jumper from the cpu socket to the accel card... but just makeing a backplane connector and useing the apple II cards is probly more doable, but most of the roms on those cards are design (and probly hard coded) to use the CX00 (x being slot num) area of memory (i think this is correct i havnt played with one in a looong time...) not to mention the slots in a appleII use the same 50pin connection the PBI uses on the XL (just different signal positions/some different signals...)

 

one thing i always thought interesting was, the ROM03 machine was more valuable and collectable then the 'Woz signature edition'

sloopy.

[+bob1200xl]

Re-directing the Cx00 addresses wouldn't be such a problem. Why would you want a whole computer just to run the cards in the slots? Can't you just use the cards directly? If they are already designed for a 65816, you should not have any real issues. The IDE interfaces that we use now are really PC card equivalents, without any DMA capability.

 

What kind of cards are available that would be useful?

 

Bob

 

 

 

heh no i wasnt that much of an appleII enthusiast, i went atari, amiga, mac... i only got into the GS for a short while cause i found one at a pc repair place that i was the sub-contractor for all their mac work... i played with them for a while, but didnt do anythign serious with them... i had a II+ waaayy back in the day someone gave me cause the roms were bad, but got it working and sold it for A8 stuff... i picked up the other IIGS's because i was working on a programming contract that did something similar to an old game that was available for the appleII and GS's were more easier to find then IIe's and the 2 other people involved didnt want them when we were done... but i did learn a bit about them in that short time i used them...

 

the machine can be taken over by an external system (see the many '816 accel card available) but all the decent ones you have to remove the cpu and run a jumper from the cpu socket to the accel card... but just makeing a backplane connector and useing the apple II cards is probly more doable, but most of the roms on those cards are design (and probly hard coded) to use the CX00 (x being slot num) area of memory (i think this is correct i havnt played with one in a looong time...) not to mention the slots in a appleII use the same 50pin connection the PBI uses on the XL (just different signal positions/some different signals...)

 

one thing i always thought interesting was, the ROM03 machine was more valuable and collectable then the 'Woz signature edition'

sloopy.

[sloopy]

this wasnt my idea, i just suggested ideas for/about it... like i said in the post you quoted, would be better to just make a backplane aith A2 spec slots and then go from there... personally i feel using the whole machine is kinda pointless, but using the slots and the cards that go in them would be more an interesting hack then a overly useful one, as most of the things A8's need are highly sought after in the A2 world too... and the other less useful things we already have in large quantities or ant that useful... but making a backplane that is A2 slot compatable would do one good thing, make the prototyping cards for A2 useful for A8 stuff, to a point.

 

sloopy.

 

Re-directing the Cx00 addresses wouldn't be such a problem. Why would you want a whole computer just to run the cards in the slots? Can't you just use the cards directly? If they are already designed for a 65816, you should not have any real issues. The IDE interfaces that we use now are really PC card equivalents, without any DMA capability.

 

What kind of cards are available that would be useful?

 

Bob

 

 

 

heh no i wasnt that much of an appleII enthusiast, i went atari, amiga, mac... i only got into the GS for a short while cause i found one at a pc repair place that i was the sub-contractor for all their mac work... i played with them for a while, but didnt do anythign serious with them... i had a II+ waaayy back in the day someone gave me cause the roms were bad, but got it working and sold it for A8 stuff... i picked up the other IIGS's because i was working on a programming contract that did something similar to an old game that was available for the appleII and GS's were more easier to find then IIe's and the 2 other people involved didnt want them when we were done... but i did learn a bit about them in that short time i used them...

 

the machine can be taken over by an external system (see the many '816 accel card available) but all the decent ones you have to remove the cpu and run a jumper from the cpu socket to the accel card... but just makeing a backplane connector and useing the apple II cards is probly more doable, but most of the roms on those cards are design (and probly hard coded) to use the CX00 (x being slot num) area of memory (i think this is correct i havnt played with one in a looong time...) not to mention the slots in a appleII use the same 50pin connection the PBI uses on the XL (just different signal positions/some different signals...)

 

one thing i always thought interesting was, the ROM03 machine was more valuable and collectable then the 'Woz signature edition'

sloopy.

[UNIXcoffee928]

 Oh yeah, here's a nice Atari Fuji badge that I made the other day, when I was making the mock-up. Feel free to make use of it:

 

[+poobah]

one thing i always thought interesting was, the ROM03 machine was more valuable and collectable then the 'Woz signature edition'

sloopy.

 

The only difference in the Woz edition is that it says Woz Edition on the front (inside is same as every other IIgs)

But I still keep it around 'cause it looks cool.

[sloopy]

one thing i always thought interesting was, the ROM03 machine was more valuable and collectable then the 'Woz signature edition'

sloopy.

 

The only difference in the Woz edition is that it says Woz Edition on the front (inside is same as every other IIgs)

But I still keep it around 'cause it looks cool.

 

yeah because most A2 people consider woz a diety, i would think things with his name on it would be more, just like mac fans (usually) think of jobs as a diety... i personally am not too into the A2 so i guess it isnt something i will understand... as for Mac/Jobs, i dont care much for him, but i think he has done alot for appple and the mac... (yes i have met him, and our meeting wasnt exactly 'friendly' ;')

 

sloopy.

[+poobah]

gratuitous pic from the poobah collection...

 

[sloopy]

heh nice poobah, i have seen them, had a chance to own a couple but wasnt interested... i saw a auction on ebay for one back in i guess ~1999 a guy had one with actual woz signature next to the printed one, its starting bid was insane like $1000, this is when they were only going for 75-100... i think they should have made it special, like some thing extra built in, but alas, they were normal machines...

 

 

sloopy.