Retrochallenge wrap-up

For this Retrochallenge, I got two different 8008 CPU board PCBs designed and fabricated, and got one fully assembled, working, and running small 8008 test programs. The second board is not yet fully assembled, but I am about to start testing it.

Here’s a photo of the second board, with only the CPLD and surface mount capacitors soldered down by my friend John D:

smt_installed_front

There are other photos of both boards in the same album.

The next step for the second board will be to install the bus connector, 3.3V regulator and capacitors, and 20 MHz oscillator, and start testing the CPLD, verifying that all the I/Os I use work properly.

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Blog unreliable due to Mariadb mysteriously exiting

This blog has been unavailable quite a bit because the database, Mariadb, keeps spontaneously exiting. I’m not sure why; there’s nothing in the logs to explain it. Some people suggest the Linux OOM killer will do that, but there are no OOM killer messages in the log either.

The Mariadb server is started by systemd. Apparently whoever wrote the systemd service file for it didn’t expect that it would ever crash or exit, because they didn’t put a “Restart=on-failure” line in the service file. I’ve now tried adding one, along with “RestartSec=5″.

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flash SF

They went back to experience Woodstock, the Gettysburg Address, the Sermon on the Mount. They found the same thing at every major historical event: the audiences consisted entirely of time travelers.

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Retrochallenge progress

Not only have I not posted any Retrochallenge updates here, but I just noticed that the MariaDB instance was down, for no obvious reason, preventing the blog from working. I started it up again. The real reason for the lack of updates here is that it’s so much faster and easier to tweet about the progress.

I’ll try to gather up some of the stuff I’ve tweeted and write it up here, but here’s an overview of the progress:

  • Drew up schematics and PCB layouts for two boards, and submitted both to fab
    • The stage 1 board is a very simple double-sided board that interfaces an 8008 to an FPGA board, which has a Xilinx Artix-7 XC7A100T FPGA, and will make it relatively easy to test my RTL code.
    • The stage 2 board is a smaller four-layer board with a CPLD that interfaces the 8008 to a Z80-style bus. This board took much more effort to lay out. I originally intended to not send it to fab until the stage 1 board was working, but then there would have been no chance of having it back before the end of the month.
  • Received the stage 1 board and parially assembled it: photos
  • Started debugging the stage 1 board. Errors found so far:
    • I screwed up my Eagle footprint for the DIN 41612 type R male connector. The rows (A, B, C) are correct, but the pin numbering (1 through 32) is reversed. Fortunately the FPGA board uses a symmetric layout so the power rails and ground are still on the correct pins. I just had to redo my Vivado pin constraints file. The 20 MHz oscillator output unfortunately does not end up on one of the FPGA’s global clock inputs, which causes an error, but that can be overridden by another constraint.
    • The data bus signals being driven by the FPGA look funny. While trying to track that down, I discovered that the 74HCT245 data bus buffer was hot enough to burn my finger. There must be one or more shorted outputs, which I now need to track down.
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Retrochallenge project: an 8008 CPU board

My RC2019/10 project is to design and build a new CPU board using the Intel 8008. The 8008 was Intel’s first 8-bit microprocessor, first announced in April 1972. The 8008 architecture was based on that of the Datapoint 2200.

I’ll try to get the LLL DODT monitor running on it, or something similar. It would be nice to have other demo programs, but I haven’t decided what to write.

I reviewed the 8008 datasheet last week. Because the 8008 is a PMOS chip, it requires two power supplies, +5V and -9V, but does not have a ground pin. Effectively it runs on a single 14V power supply, but referenced to +5V. All of the 8008 signals are almost TTL compatible. Vil(max) is 0.8V, which is fine, but Vih(min) is 3.5V, which cannot be guaranteed when driving from bipolar TTL families. However, given how slow the 8008 is, for all pins but the clock, adding a pullup resistor would probably be sufficient to solve that problem.

While most early microprocessors required multiple-phase MOS level (high voltage) clocks, I had forgotten that the 8008 clock inputs have the same electrical requirements as the logic signals.

For my CPU board, I plan to use two SN74AHCT245 8-bit bidirectional bus buffers, one for the data bus and one for the other 8 unidirectional signals. (Bidirectional buffer chips make perfectly fine unidirectional buffers.) Being CMOS, the AHCT family will drive outputs high to nearly 5V, easily meeting the 8008 Vih(min) requirement. The “T” in AHCT indicates that the chip will accept TTL input levels, rather than requiring CMOS levels. The AHCT family is similar to the HCT family, but much faster; the SN74AHCT245 maximum propagation delay is 8.5 ns, vs. 28 ns for the SN74HCT245. Not that the 8008 needs fast timing.

The normal 8008 operates with a 2 us clock cycle. While there are various constraints on the timing of the clock phases, there is some flexibility. There was a speed-binned 8008-1 which was rated to operate with a clock cycle as short as 1.25 us. To operate the 8008-1 at the minimum clock cycle, there is no flexibility in the clock phase timing at all.

I can derive suitable timings for both 2 us and 1.25 us cycles from a 20 MHz clock input, using a counter and decode logic.

The first version of my 8008 CPU board will be designed as a daughterboard to plug into an FPGA evaluation board I have on hand, to let me easily develop the HDL code that I will later put in a CPLD in a later version, which will be much less expensive.

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Reverse-engineering the Apple II emulation disk for the Apple ///

I’ve been curious about some details of how the Apple II emulation disk for the Apple III works, so I’ve been working on reverse-engineering the code. I’ve just put it up on github.

The first 1 1/2 tracks of the disk get loaded into memory from A000..B7FF. That loads the Apple II ROM images into memory from 2000 up. Then it gives the user a chance to change some configuration options. Finally it copies the ROM images into place, does some more hardware configuration, sets the hardware Apple II emulation mode, and jumps into the Apple II monitor ROM.

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Changing interleave of Apple II (and Apple ///) floppy disk images

On Twitter, Mike Finger (@Retro2Neo) mentioned that he used a Python script dsk2po by @paulhagstrom to convert the sector order of Apple II floppy disk images. I just needed to do that this week for Apple III images, and not having been aware of dsk2po, a few days ago I wrote reinterleave.py a to do the same thing. Currently it can convert between physical order, DOS order (which is what most .dsk images are), and ProDOS/Pascal/SOS order.

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Using BMOW Floppy Emu on Apple ///

Because of the lack of working Apple III floppy drives, I made a cable to connect a BMOW Floppy Emu to the Apple III internal floppy connector. The Apple III uses a 26-pin cable to the floppy drives, while the Apple II uses a 20-pin cable. Pins 1-20 are wired identically; the extra pins on the Apple III are used for additional signals for daisy-chaining extra drives (up to three total) and supporting Apple II emulation mode. I took a 26-pin cable, split off six wires at one end, and installed a 20-pin header.

BMOW Floppy Emu in use on Apple ///

After copying some Apple III floppy images to the MicroSD card, I was pleased to find that it works just fine. I’ve been able to boot SOS 1.3 with Business BASIC 1.23, and Pascal 1.1.

Apple /// running Business BASIC 1.23

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No working internal floppy drive for Apple ///; spare motherboard

In addition to the internal floppy drive that came in my Apple III, and which does not work, I have three additional spare internal floppy drive mechanisms. Today I tried all of them, and found that none of them work well enough to boot an Apple III disk written from a disk image file by my Apple IIe. The disk format is identical to Apple Disk II 16-sector 5.25-inch format, and the Unidisk 5.25 drives I’m using on the Apple IIe haven’t had any trouble reading and writing any other disks from a large collection from various sources, so I’m pretty sure the drive on the Apple IIe is not the problem.

Having four non-working drives made me think that perhaps the floppy controller, an integrated part of the Apple III motherboard, might be bad. I switched to my spare motherboard, and didn’t have any different results.

I also have an external Disk III drive. I tried cabling that to the internal drive port, in place of the internal drive, and was able to successfully boot the Apple III Dealer Diagnostics disk. That mostly worked, and I was able to test the RAM and ROM of both motherboards. Both are the later 5V configuration, one with a 5V 256KB memory board, and one with a 5V 128KB memory board (which could easily be expanded to 256KB).

I say “mostly worked” because the drive did give I/O errors trying to load some of the diagnostics, or to display a CATALOG of the diagnostic disk. So really, I have five Apple /// floppy drives that aren’t working properly.

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Floppy drive spindle motor speed measurement

The floppy drive in my Apple III is not working well enough to boot floppies written on my Apple II. I think the spindle motor speed may be off. I’m hoping that’s what it is, since it’s the easiest thing to fix. I’m putting together a timing strobe light to measure it, using a microcontroller and an inexpensive Harbor Freight LED flashlight.

Continue reading

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