REV 3 - REV 5 - The beginning (ST536)

[ijor]

Its Claude opus. Costing £90 a month

Ah, yes, I am aware about Opus. Note that you don't necessarily need the higher tier to use Opus. But with the lower tier, Opus will probably consume your daily quota pretty fast.

There are some news that they are releasing a brad new much more powerful model. If we are lucky that would mean that Opus would be "downgraded" and would be cheaper then. Or may be not, may be Opus will still be expensive, and that new model even more!

All AI models have the same flaws.

What i hate about all those LLMs, is that they are pretty much useless for helping you to use the LLM itself. You want to copy a chat automatically, they can't. You want to split a chat, they can't. You want to print or export a whole long chat ... that is a real nightmare!

[Darklord]

What is it with your STacy :lol:
Does the original 208 do the same?

I think it's like the story of Icarus and Daedalus. I've done so many mods
to my STacy now that I'm "flying too close to the sun", perilously perched
on a knife's edge with stability on one side and instability on the other.

:)

I did not try v208 - I will do so later this evening and report back.

Thanks.

[exxos]

@Darklord I wonder if it's the pak TOS causing the issue rather than the hardware. Does paktos run in hatari? I think I have a rom somewhere with it on. I could try it on my 536 but might not be compatible anyway.

[Darklord]

I honestly don't know if the modified TOS v3.06 in the Pak boards will work
under Hatari or not. I don't use Hatari...sorry.

BTW, did go back and try v208 from a clean setup. Version 208 runs a little
bit longer - it allowed me to do a <shift> A, then backspace and delete it but
after about 15-20 seconds it gave a bus error and locked up as well.

Like we said though, at least <shift> works now. :)

[exxos]

Thanks @Darklord will try and find a moment at some point investigate that issues some more...

[exxos]

Been trying to get flashy clock to work with the ST536. It was because flashy clock was failing to list the correct ROMs. Even though three banks were blank, it was like duplicating the first bank and not switching banks.. It would not even erase the flash , never mind program a new ROM image.

Long story short, I just pasted the lot into AI and let it have a bash at it. It basically found the problem straightaway. The problem was my ST536 ROM shadow was mirroring the full 4096 ROM, which conflicts with flashy clock programming block. Basically the ST536 ROM shadow was overriding whatever was in the flash banks. The ST side was never saw that access at all !

Anyway, I need to change the TOS to only copy half of the 4096 ROM now. I originally copied the full ROM, even though it's unlikely there is going to be a 512K ROM for it anyway. While ST536 has always had the 512K option, it has never been used or even tested so I'm just going to remove that functionality in later buildings as it is going to cause unnecessary problems.

[exxos]

Flashy clock is now happy and I can easily program a flash bank with TOS updates to try rather than keep wasting OTP ROMs !

Currently working on a new experimental feature..

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Basically I just used a spare IO pin on the ST536 to drive the DD/HD select lines. This is instead of hacking on the select wire on the floppy drive.

The functions are actually already in TOS, but they are a little bit hidden away because it checks for the machine being a STE and if the jumper is set on the MSTE motherboard to allow that feature for automatic density swapping.. So currently unravelling all that stuff.

So far booting up is "stuck" in 720K mode. But currently I booted from 720K, put in a HD disk, and formatted it on the desktop! So the switching works! So got some more code tracking to do yet.. but at least the idea works 8-)

EDIT:

Got it all working and then realised that programs like FCOPY bypass TOS routines.. So it would not function, which would be a bit crap!

Then I realised there was actually a mechanism to basically do this anyway with the PSG ! So decided to ditch the MSTE register approach and go more with what we should be more standardised approach..

[macsonny]

Ok, dumb question but where can we get these ST536 boards?

[exxos]

Ok, dumb question but where can we get these ST536 boards?

They was in the store up until about 4 days ago, I took them off sale as they were basically BETA boards and I don't plan to support those boards BETA anymore.

[exxos]

FCOPY PRO now happy with DD/HD switching *and* TOS :D


Follow the purple wire.....

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It took some doing because of the amount of chaos which happens..

So currently:

Booting from DD or HD works.
Swapping discs on desktop also works automatically. (**)
FCOPY is also happy (bypasses TOS routines)

(**) Because media detection is likely unreliable, it is always assumed that when the motor is turned off, that the disc might have changed. So the detection always rechecks if density has changed or not and switches the "dirty bit" accordingly.

But I was most surprised about is how quickly the density select actually works. It is pretty much transparent !

I have no idea if EMUTOS implemented that feature by default or not , but I would assume it would work "out of the box" if so...

EDIT: seems not.