WIP: A/UX 3.1.1 for the Atari Falcon030

[sascha.springer]

[agranlund]

Great stuff, that's incredibly cool!

[Steve]

Wow! Does it boot off a disk image on the Falcons HDD? Also do you think it might work on an 060 Falcon?

[sascha.springer]

Wow! Does it boot off a disk image on the Falcons HDD? Also do you think it might work on an 060 Falcon?

I will see if I can get it installed on a HD Driver partition on my real Falcon today.

[dml]

Nice - and the shell is working too :p

[sascha.springer]

I have now a SD card image ready for IDE equipped Falcons (14MB RAM + MC68882 FPU). Unfortunately that image requires an RGB/TV monitor. If someone wants to test it: PM me. Beware: I haven't tested it yet due to time contraints.

Code: Select all

# F030AUX on a card — write it, boot it

A/UX 3.1.1 for the Atari Falcon030, as a complete card image. Write it to a
CF or SD card, put the card on the Falcon's IDE port, and the machine boots
it: no HDDRUTIL, no driver to install, no files to copy.

This is bring-up software. It has been run under Hatari; **no part of it has
run on real hardware yet**, and you are the first. Everything it does is
reported over the serial port, so please have a terminal attached — that
capture is the whole value of a first hardware run.

## What the machine needs

- a Falcon030 with 14 MiB ST-RAM and a 68882
- TOS 4.04
- a CF/SD card of 1 GB or more on the internal IDE port (the image is 992 MiB
  and leaves the rest of the card unallocated)
- a terminal on the Modem port at TOS's baud rate, 8-N-1
- for the graphical part, the desktop in 640×480 with 16 colours; on a 15 kHz
  RGB monitor boot in a **50 Hz** mode first, or the bottom 80 lines of the
  A/UX screen are not shown

## Writing it

    sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
    zstd -d -c f030aux-card.img.zst | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync

`/dev/sdX` is the whole card, not a partition — check it twice with `lsblk`,
and unmount anything the desktop auto-mounted first. **This overwrites the
entire card**, partition table included.

## Booting it

1. Put the card in, switch on. The terminal should show

       F030AUX hd: the card's TOS partitions
       F030AUX hd: driver at 000xxxxx
       C: 00000040 0000f000

   and the desktop should come up with a hard disk icon. That line is the
   card's own TOS driver, in block 0: TOS has no partition mounter of its own,
   so the card brings one.

2. **Run `F030BOOT.TOS` from C:** — it is in the root directory. It is the
   fault probe: 13 stages of 68030 bus-fault behaviour that the port depends
   on. It writes `F030BOOT.TXT` and reports to the terminal. `result: PASS`,
   or please stop there and send the capture.

3. **Before trusting the card, check the byte order.** Run
   `C:\F030AUX\FINDER\F030INST.TOS` and let it get as far as the partition
   list, then quit with `q`. Two things to read:

   - the drive's model string. If the character pairs are transposed
     (`aHaticr DIsE` rather than a readable name), the Falcon's IDE interface
     swaps bytes relative to the host that wrote the card, and the image has
     to be written again with `dd conv=swab`. Everything else on the card is
     then wrong too, so stop.
   - the partition list. It must read `GEM start 64 blocks 61440` and
     `RAW start 61504 blocks 1970139`.

4. **Boot A/UX: switch off, switch on holding Alternate.** Keep it held
   through the boot. The loader takes the machine, the kernel comes up, and
   the A/UX Login window appears on the Falcon's screen. Log in as `root`,
   password `root`, and dismiss the two AppleTalk alerts.

   Without Alternate the machine boots TOS as usual and the card behaves like
   an ordinary TOS disk — the loader sees `C:\AUTO\F030AUX.INF`, finds no key
   held, and stands aside.

5. **Shutting down:** Special → Shut Down in the Finder. The shim reports the
   stop on the terminal; switch off after that. From a shell instead, `sync`
   three times before switching off.

## The other two kits

The card carries three, under `C:\F030AUX\`. The one the machine boots is
whichever `F030AUX.TOS` and `F030AUX.INF` sit in `C:\AUTO` (as `F030AUX.PRG`
and `F030AUX.INF`), so switching means copying two files from the desktop:

| Kit | What it boots | Touches the disk |
|---|---|---|
| `RAMROOT` | a serial shell on a RAM root — the disk is never read | no |
| `TEXT` | a 4 MiB text root: single-user shell on the serial line | needs `F030INST.TOS` to install its root first |
| `FINDER` | the 928 MiB Macintosh root already on the card — the one that boots as shipped | no, it is already there |

`RAMROOT` is the gentlest first test of all: it boots A/UX to a shell without
reading a single block of the disk.

## If something goes wrong

The serial capture is what matters — please keep it whole, including the
lines before the failure. Useful detail: which step, what the screen showed
(a row of bombs is worth counting), and whether the terminal had stopped
before it.

## Contents

    f030aux-card.img.zst   the card image, zstd-compressed
    SHA256SUMS             checksums of the image and the compressed file
    README-CARD.md         this file

The image holds A/UX 3.1.1 and a Macintosh II ROM image. Both are Apple's,
neither is mine to give away, and this card is for your own testing of the
port — please do not pass it on.