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FreHD - Update 13/7/13 - LS-DOS auto boot on 4P a success

T

TRS-Ian

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Sep 10, 2011
Messages
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Location
Melbourne, Australia
Hi everyone,

Great news, after much help from Gazza in Sydney, I now have a successful auto-boot LS-DOS 6.3.1 image for the 4P. It's been tested on standard and modified 4Ps and works well. LS-DOS 6.3.1 naturally has Matt Reed's the date patches to 2079 and comprises of 4 partitions with a total storage capacity of around 32Mb.

See video of LS-DOS and CP/M 2.2 auto-booting on my 4P:

Also included is a easy-to-use DOS Shell program.

Thanks to Gazza and JAQuinn for all their help.

FreHD owners with 4Ps may email me for a zip-file of the image from tomorrow. The image will be included on all subsequent Support CDs provided with future FreHD sales.

So I think we can finally answer one of the most frequently asked questions about FreHD: YES it does auto boot on a 4P.

Ian.
 
Very impressive :) Is the FreHD providing standard ATA emulation, or is the PIC logic doing something else? If these images are padded to 512-byte sectors, might they work with my board?
 
FreHD uses a file on the SD card, hard4-0, typically created by XTRS/SDLTRS and is in a format known as HDV1, created by Matt Reed.

The file has many benefits, like being able to easily load it into an emulator on a PC to transfer files to and from (though the FreHD also comes with utilities to copy files to and from the hard4-0 file to the FAT32 file system. Backing up the image file is a piece of cake, and no longer a chore like with the old Radio Shack 15meg disk system requiring some 80 floppy disks to back it up.

Ian.
 
We should give Adam Rubin a BIG pat on the back for the hard work he did. Without him this little project would never have got off the ground.
Now, can someone nut-out how to get LDOS & Newdos to boot directly off the FreHD:grin:
Gazza
 
TRS-Ian said:
FreHD uses a file on the SD card, hard4-0, typically created by XTRS/SDLTRS and is in a format known as HDV1, created by Matt Reed.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I was asking though about the TRS-80 side of the adapter, whether that is emulating ATA (rev?) or WD1010, for example.
 
Ok yep I get it now. So the FreHD emulates the HDC in the TRS-80 15Meg disk system. The HDC is a Western Digital product and is called the WD1000-TB1. The main brains of the WD1000-TB1 is the WD1010 HDC chip. Because the WD1000-TB1 is also compatible with the earlier 8X300 HDC from the old TRS-80 5Meg disk system, it turns out that FreHD also emulates the 8X300.

Ian.
 
Thanks, how did you make that so? Did you build microcontroller emulation for it from scratch?
 
The project looks simply brilliant :)

So we don't still know if a 4P can boot from an ATA disk then.
 
I'm still keen to get myself a Lo-tech "Cheap-O" IDE interface to play around with. Would like to look into applications where the Lo-tech is more applicable than FreHD (I can think of at least one), and also do a side-by-side speed comparison. We know the FreHD is a thoroughbred in the speed stakes, easily outrunning the old Tandon TM-series MFM hard drives in TRS-80 hard drives. My highest-tech MFM hard drive (replaced with a 42Mb Voice coil hard drive from NEC) is almost as fast as FreHD. Keen to see where Lo-tech fits into this.

Ian.
 
TRS-Ian said:
I'm still keen to get myself a Lo-tech "Cheap-O" IDE interface...and also do a side-by-side speed comparison.
Click to expand...

The speed should be the same - near zero command latency with CompactFlash and direct port-mapped IO. Loop unrolling and multi-sector transfers would improve throughput, though these obviously require BIOS re-coding or perhaps some loadable driver (sorry I have little or no knowledge of the TRS-80 platform).
 
FreHD sounds really interesting. I have two basic and probably quite dumb (apologies in advance) questions:

1. Does/can it connect directly to a TRS-80 Model 1 or do I have to have the expansion unit?

2. Does/can it connect directly to a TRS-80 Model III?

Thanks in advance!
 
>1. Does/can it connect directly to a TRS-80 Model 1 or do I have to have the expansion unit?

At the moment the FreHD works with the Model III and Model 4. We are currently testing with the Model 1 but at the moment and we still have a couple of issues to work through. You will need to have an expansion interface unless you plan to do some serious mods to the machine. All these machines with the exception of the 4P need to boot the operating system off floppy and then load the hard disk drivers. You need the EI for the floppy disk controller. Also unless your Model 1 has been modified internally to have 48K RAM it will not have enough memory to load a disk based operating system and do any real so you need the EI for the extra RAM.

2. Does/can it connect directly to a TRS-80 Model III?

Yes it connects to the 50 pin expansion connector on the bottom of the Model III and 4. Your blog says you had just acquired a Model III and want to add floppy drives. If yours is a tape only machine which this suggests you won't be able to use the FreHD at the moment because it needs to boot an operating system from floppy and then load the hard disk drivers. That may change in the future.

Hope this helps. Nice web site.

Regards

Andrew
 
Audronic said:
@ ChrisCwmbran.

With tongue in cheek

Or Load the O/s From Cassette. or an Boot Rom (Yet to be Written)
Now there is a project.

Yours :: }}} Ray
Click to expand...

I was thinking more along the lines of getting someone do to a hex dump of the O/S and entering it manually each time I want to use the system :)

Actually, as you can see here:

http://www.micromuseum.co.uk/index.php/aquisitions/81-trs-80-model-4-eventually

I hope to have found another alternative solution :)

Fingers crossed!
 
Audronic said:
With tongue in cheek

Or Load the O/s From Cassette
Click to expand...

That (or something similar) is not as preposterous as it might sound. If you don't have a 4P and you want the reliability of a completely magnetic-media-less system (or you simply can't get any of your floppy drives to work), then the simplest way to go might be to connect the "cassette" jack to the output of an old smartphone or digital-music-player on which you have a two-second wav file that contains a tiny bit of code for loading the first sector of the FreHD "hard disk". If the code used one of the well-known techniques for making a System program autostart, then you could boot with a mere 11 keystrokes (H ENTER S Y S T E M ENTER X ENTER).
 
I'm just finalizing the details now, but I'm very much looking forward to adding this to my Model 4. I was debating between that and the 4P, but I ultimately decided that I'd rather pair it with the 4, since I always loved the III/4 format factors...
 
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