From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 9 3:22:12 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net (anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.90]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AD7AA37B405 for ; Wed, 9 Jan 2002 03:22:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from [62.49.251.130] (helo=herring.nlsystems.com) by anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 16OGo0-000FGj-0W; Wed, 9 Jan 2002 11:22:04 +0000 Received: from herring (herring [10.0.0.2]) by herring.nlsystems.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id g09BKm903096; Wed, 9 Jan 2002 11:20:48 GMT (envelope-from dfr@nlsystems.com) Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 11:20:48 +0000 (GMT) From: Doug Rabson To: Matthew Dillon Cc: Subject: Re: Oh my god, Google has a USENET archive going back to 1981! In-Reply-To: <200201081932.g08JWNF60649@apollo.backplane.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Matthew Dillon wrote: > : > :That brings back memories. We wrote our own firmware for the 1541 since > :the commodore DOS was so slow. I forget what transfer rate we managed but > :it was much better than the standard code. Bit of a sod to debug though. > : > :-- > :Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com > : Phone: +44 20 8348 6160 > > Yup. Remember Bryce's 1541 Flash? He was working on beefing up > the C64 serial link while I was working on beefing up the PET's > (software driven) IEEE-488 link. We both managed to increase disk > bandwidth by an order of magnitude, mainly by synchronizing the > computer's 6502 with the peripheral's 65xx and then just stuffing > data into the ports without bothering with any handshakes until the > very end. That old usenet posting I posted has some references to it. I wasn't really into the C64 scene (it cost significant money just to get Usenet access in the UK in those days). I was working on a C64 game at the time and I remember spending many unhappy hours trying to fix some problems with the drive firmware. That was a pretty cool project actually. The game was a text adventure originally written in 68k assembler and we wrote a 68k emulator and VM system which paged the game's 128k address space from the floppy into the C64's teaspoonful of memory. All the development was done on a Microvax running 4.2BSD. The vax generated C64 disk images which we downloaded via the C64's serial port. Those were the days . -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Phone: +44 20 8348 6160 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message