Friday, October 20, 2017

Harddrive Access!

Major milestone here as we introduce being able to access an IDE harddisk.  Here's a video:


Right now Im communicating to the driver by POKE-ing to location 2 (unused on the 64), but that will change later as we modify the kernal to support the drive.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Emudore 64



Commodore 64 native emulator operating system for the x86 PC
WHAT:
This is a C64 emulator that I stripped down to run bare metal on a PC. Turn your blazing fast PC into a Commodore 64 by booting up via CD-ROM or flash drive. Why? Well, why not? We have linux and android running on everything, so why not a C64? We have taken a core OS, and mashed it up with a C64 emulator as the kernel.
STATUS:
Emulation works, although CIA2 doesnt do IEC.
DEMO:
As a working demo, just burn the iso to a CD-ROM, and boot it up, or use something like rufus to convert to a bootable flash drive. You should quickly be seeing the ol' C64 screen. Attach an IDE ATA drive (primary master), formatted to FAT32, and you should be able to load and save to drive 8. This does not currently work with AHCI SATA drives.
TO DO:
  • Proper keycode scanning - right now we are just injecting into the keyboard buffer
  • IO to load and save - this will undoubtbly be the biggest area of work
  • Scaling so that the border can be rendered. Right now the code works at 320x200 disallowing the border
  • Take advantage of the multitasking and other low level OS features to provide new & interesting capabilties
  • Continue to work with the emudore team to improve emulation
  • Consider a different core OS layer, depending on needs over time
  • Cross compiling for different architectures
  • QEMU and some real hardware wont switch properly to 80 col text mode when ESC is pressed. Not sure why.
BUILDING:
  • Code compiles for an x86 linux system using gcc 4.8.4
  • Will automatically initiate VirtualBox and start a VM called "emudore64" (see makefile)
UPDATES:
9/21/17: Fixed some keyboard codes so that double quotes, home, and backspace work
9/23/17: Fixed color palette & more keycodes
9/24/17: Text mode screen can now be activated by pressing ESC key. Will later use this for an ML monitor and other functions like loading D64 images, etc. Appears to be some issues with this switch on various systems.
9/25/17: Keyboard code moved, start of ML monitor
9/29/17: Prep work adding rudimentary FAT32 filesystem. Eventual capability to load/save
10/31/17: Large amount of work done adding support for LBA48 drives, and FAT32 support. Work continues.
CREDITS: