Re: JR-IDE Rev.B & Rev.C + RPi-Zero Module
Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2016 7:43 pm
Two things:
1) Mike B. had compiled an email list of those expressing interest over the past year in a JR-IDE board. I have emailed most of those people over the past week and sold the 10 boards I had built up. I have more parts coming that should arrive Monday, Nov 14th. At that point, anyone who wants a board, another board, or a board in kit form can email or message me here. Wait until Monday please. I'll get the new boards built (for those that want) and shipped early next week. A few people already PM'd me here. I'll reply to you directly when I have boards boxed and ready to go!
2) I got derailed a bit on the Pi Zero project last week but came back to it today. As of now I have successfully created a 40MB flat file with zeros in it, run the disk server on the Raspberry Pi Zero, formatted, installed, and patched IBM DOS 5.02 and booted my JR from that image! But before you get your hopes up, there is a long way to go before the code is stable and mature for just disk access. There are a few ghosts in the machine that I've seen spuriously. There is a major initialization problem I need to address on the FPGA. And there is a ton of clean-up work on both the Pi SD card and my code base. But I'll tell you, it is REALLY NICE NFS mounting shares from my Linux boxes on the Pi and using both mtools and FAT loopback mounts + rsync to move DOS files to my Jr! Sure beats floppy-net! I've also done some raw bench marking and the speed is identical to the DoM I've been using (~350 KB/s raw using multi-sector reads).
It will be several months before we hit version 1.0 on the code base. And it will likely be a month or so past that point before I can start producing them in small batches. Standby for PCJr disk images on SD cards, master and slave emulated images, WiFi support, Ethernet support, console access to the Pi from a DOS utility, and perhaps many more features in the future.
1) Mike B. had compiled an email list of those expressing interest over the past year in a JR-IDE board. I have emailed most of those people over the past week and sold the 10 boards I had built up. I have more parts coming that should arrive Monday, Nov 14th. At that point, anyone who wants a board, another board, or a board in kit form can email or message me here. Wait until Monday please. I'll get the new boards built (for those that want) and shipped early next week. A few people already PM'd me here. I'll reply to you directly when I have boards boxed and ready to go!
2) I got derailed a bit on the Pi Zero project last week but came back to it today. As of now I have successfully created a 40MB flat file with zeros in it, run the disk server on the Raspberry Pi Zero, formatted, installed, and patched IBM DOS 5.02 and booted my JR from that image! But before you get your hopes up, there is a long way to go before the code is stable and mature for just disk access. There are a few ghosts in the machine that I've seen spuriously. There is a major initialization problem I need to address on the FPGA. And there is a ton of clean-up work on both the Pi SD card and my code base. But I'll tell you, it is REALLY NICE NFS mounting shares from my Linux boxes on the Pi and using both mtools and FAT loopback mounts + rsync to move DOS files to my Jr! Sure beats floppy-net! I've also done some raw bench marking and the speed is identical to the DoM I've been using (~350 KB/s raw using multi-sector reads).
It will be several months before we hit version 1.0 on the code base. And it will likely be a month or so past that point before I can start producing them in small batches. Standby for PCJr disk images on SD cards, master and slave emulated images, WiFi support, Ethernet support, console access to the Pi from a DOS utility, and perhaps many more features in the future.