acadiel
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Posts posted by acadiel
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12 hours ago, FarmerPotato said:I love this. A*Maze*Ing was my first module. I can just imagine another childhood containing these tiny printed mazes. (How about a Complex maze?)
Thanks!
An older test I did with narrower paper...
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Here's the direct EPROM dump. I'll attach pics shortly of the board. If I get time, I'll move back over to the TI to try a PI dump.
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18 minutes ago, Flottmann1 said:if you bought the BSM, I would like to send you a donation
Thank you, Bernhard!
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Someone drove up the eBay auction at the last minute (m***n(285)) but I had bid quite high on the BSM - so it should be headed my way so we can compare true operation of Bob's module with the UberGROM adaptation that we're doing.
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These DRAMs seem like the most problematic thing. Is there a way to yank all eight of them and replace them with one?
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Current to-do's:
- BASIC Support module adaptation - Rich Gilbertson is helping me get this working with the UberGROM
- Labels! Who wants to get some labels made for all the images that I made? Need someone to design what they might have looked like if TI would have released them.
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It occurred to me that we don't have all the UberGROM information in one place, after trying to help people on the Facebook TI Group. So here we go:
0) Who made this originally?
It was a collaboration between Tursi, Ksarul, and myself over the span of 5+ years.
1) Where do you get them? Arcadeshopper sells them here:
2) Where's the code/binary/image to burn to the 1284P?
http://harmlesslion.com/software/ubergrom
3) That's nice, but is there a manual that talks about what this thing is?
512K ROM-GROM Cartridge Board Manual V0.8.doc is the latest draft.
4) Um, ok. So, how do I program it?
Follow this tutorial. You have to use either the GROMCFG or GROMLOAD programs to load info on an UberGROM. You have to set the banks accordingly. Read htis article:
5) No, no no... I don't want to load files on the TI! I want to "burn the roms" on my programmer!
- Premade UberGROM images can come in one or two parts. You always have a 1284P image (132K), and optionally a ROM image (512K). The ROM portion doesn't always come with the GROM, so it may or may not be there. If it IS there, it's required.
- To burn the UberGROM image onto an AtMega 1248P on your favorite EPROM programmer, set the fuses like this on the 1284P (Extended: F8, High: D8, Low: C2). YMMV based on your programmer.
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- If the ROM exists, burn it to a 29F040 or a 49F040
6) Where can I get some prebuilt UberGROM images from?
Right here:
7) What else exists for this currently:
- UberHDX uses the serial port on the UberGROM: http://www.ti99-geek.nl/Projects/ti99hdx/ti99hdx_ubergrom.html
- TIMXT can (partially) use the serial port on the UberGROM.
8] But you still didn't answer my question?
Post it below. Someone will likely answer it.
-jg/hexbus/acadiel
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Here's a surprise for all of you. Enjoy.
Background ---------- The UberGROM simulator (http://harmlesslion.com/software/ubergrom) is a cartridge board with many functions, including the ability to simulate GROM. (For more functions, please see the manual (available on AtariAge's TI-99/4A forum.) During the 1983-1984 era, many cartridges were prototyped by TI and other companies. These prototypes had GROM images that were likely loaded into a GROM Simulator (functioning as GRAM) to test the programs before the GROM ICs were manufactured. These programs cover the gamut of programs including things such as: * Cartridges which were only released in Europe (Advertizer, TI-CALC, Test Trainer, etc.) * Cartridges which were largely finished but never published (Disney games, Plant Genetics, Germ Patrol, Crossfire, etc.) * Prototypes which were never meant for publishing (Simon Says) * Prototypes which had test runs or small runs but which never got published widely (SMU Electrical Engineering, Crossfire) * Demonstration cartridges (MB Gamevision Demo) * Internal TI cartridges (Basic Support Module) * Programs people converted from 32K to ROM (Lasso, Lobster Bay, etc.) What's inside? -------------- All of these images are comprised of one or more of the following: * UberGROM image (132K binary image for an Atmega 1284P) * ROM image (512K binary image for 29F040 or 49F040) * Diskettes (Advertizer, Test Trainer, and SMU need these.) Please Note: ------------ Make sure that if a cartridge has both an UberGROM image and a ROM image that you burn both. If it just has an UberGROM image, you only need to burn that, and the ROM is optional. The Diskette required programs will NOT work without the diskettes.-
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On 4/13/2020 at 7:33 PM, Tursi said:If you can, give this a try. It looks like the ROM is only 4k, so you may need a 4k EPROM instead of 8k.
There seem to be only two places that verify the record length. I changed them to pull the record length from >4001 - so the second byte of the ROM, and set this one to >1E (ie: 30).
Beyond that, I can only say it doesn't crash. Classic99 doesn't emulate the hardware of the Thermal Printer nor do I know how it works, so I can't check it formatted the output correctly. But it loads the PAB and then times out gracefully. If the PAB is right, based on what I see above, good chance the rest will be.
TIThermalMod.zip 2.17 kB · 9 downloads
The thermal printer mod appears to work when printing a 40 character line from BASIC. A-Maze-ing also works!
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I’ll take the EPROM out and dump it again for ya.
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7 minutes ago, INVISIBLE said:I'll link & update this one when it has the 512K image for the 49F040 in the UG.
It's a 30K image. Unless someone makes a "run from 32K" that can squeeze that whole thing in 32K and run a GPL emulator - I don't think it's going to get a ROM image.
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2 minutes ago, InsaneMultitasker said:When I disassembled the 8K ROM image, I noticed that the DSR is only 2K. And it is pretty well crammed into that 2k window... did TI produce a 2K ROM? My thought was they created the DSR with 2K in mind but used 4K hardware?
I'm going to socket it this weekend and try a 2532 and see if it works.
I can only guess - nobody has ever found any schematics or service manual for the TP.
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2 hours ago, Pheonix said:Looking at the cartridge pinout, starting to see the 8K limit. It only has access to address lines 3-15 (missing 0-2.) So, only 8K can be address at a time. Using one address bit (A15 for example) could make the lower half access a ROM while the upper accesses RAM (for direct addressing.) I never took such a close look at the pinouts
I'm gathering there's no way to tell the TI to map that 8K elsewhere then.
The sidecar has all the address lines. Ksarul and I have talked in the past about making an 'ubercart' expander that would be a passthru where we could fit regular or 'expanded' cartridges to hit all the data and address lines, as well as audio. (It would have been backward compatible with regular carts, too.) The intent was whatever 'cartridge' you plugged in there would have the buffer chips/etc that it needed onboard, and you could literally do anything you wanted with the cartridge - add RAM, whatever.. it would be an ultimate prototype jumping board for expansion. It never got beyond the exploratory phase, in the meantime we got a 32K, TI PI, and SAMs that all use somewhat of a modular connection - we could probably easily build another 'module' on that if we wanted to.
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1 minute ago, Airshack said:from the seller of BASIC SUPPORT cart:
I worked at Texas Instruments and the internal 99/4 club had these for sale to us. I don't remember any details about what capabilities they added offhand. There are people that have the code and they may have more information. I just bought it because it was not generally available and I always try and get things like that in case a need arises but it never has. Some of the people who know the most probably won't be too forthcoming at this point in time as the last thing they want is to encourage more competition.... and this is why Rich and I are trying to get this same cart working on the UberGROM. I strongly feel that the community should have access to this piece of TI history. We have way too many 'collectors' out in the wild who buy these things to hold onto them, and never do anything useful with them for the community (sharing pictures, schematics, dumping the ROMs, etc.) I know that some of the people who resemble that previous statement are reading this, and shame on you for hoarding and not sharing with the community.
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4 minutes ago, Ksarul said:One other useful tidbit: I'm pretty sure I still have a pair of the circuit cards used for this one as bare boards. It uses a standard TI EGROM circuit card. Pretty much any true prototype TI cartridge was built on variations of this circuit card before it was committed to silicon in the form of GROM chips.
Which tells me that they also were able to do 8K with this instead of 4K/4K. Unless they actually did 4K/4K =8K and "stacked" chips. I don't see a cart ROM/RAM chip space on there, so not sure how they did that part...
If they did do 4K+4K to make a single GROM during prototype, then that just tells me they cheapened out in making GROMs 6K to save on some of the masking cost. LOL
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3 minutes ago, Pheonix said:I've seen circuit designs that used 3 2k chips as 6k ram banks. I've also seen circuits where 8k chips were set up with parity control turning them to 7k chips. Finally, GROMs are 6K standard.... OK, answered while I was typing.
If cart RAM can only be 4k then the Mini-Mem must overwrite part of its RAM, or hide it somehow (it's 4k battery backed RAM @ $7000-7FFF.) Going to have to take a closer look at that.
CART ram can live anywhere in >6000->7FFF, or 8K total. Mini memory uses half for ROM and half for RAM of that 8K address space.
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19 minutes ago, Pheonix said:Ick... I wasn't very clear
I was asking how much RAM (be it RAM, GRAM, VRAM, etc..) could be mapped into the TI at once. For example, could the full 32K expansion area (8K @ $2000 & 24K @ $A000,) be mapped out as cartridge RAM. Could this, then, be expanded to include the Mini-Mem area (4K @ $7000.) Would it be possible to play RAM/ROM banking tricks like other computers do (set a bit, and that bank becomes RAM, clear it to restore the ROM, etc...) Of course, I'm already aware that these can be banked with like (multiple (G)ROMs banked into the same address, etc...)
RAM addressable space (not including scratch pad) includes:
>2000->3FFF - Lower 8K memory expansion
>4000->5FFF - DSR space - things like the SAMS card can use windows in this to their advantage with bank switching
>6000->7FFF - Cartridge space
>A000->FFFF - upper 24K memory expansion (can also be bank switched with SAMS)
These are the other areas in the memory map:
>0000->1FFF - is the console ROM
>8000->9FFF - this is scratch pad RAM, the memory mapped devices (i.e. VDP, speech, GROM/GRAM, sound)
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14 minutes ago, RXB said:NO ONE MAKES 6K chips so using 6K * 5 * 16 = 480K is just silly at best.
EVERYONE USES 8K Chips so you are way off 8K * 5 * 16 = 640K
I have no idea why people keep saying this as where the hell would you get 6K chips?
Does anyone even make them anywhere?
Why do people saying this silly stuff?
TI GROMs were 6K. So, it's not silly. It's the way they made them.
GRAM emulation extended this to 8K (PGRAM, GRAM Kracker, GROMulator, etc.)
I've never seen a 6K GROM malfunction from being extended to 8K - that's just 2K of empty nothing. So, other than TI cheapening out by saving 2K of mask ROM space, I have no other explanation on why they did it that way.
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On 8/18/2017 at 11:26 PM, PeteE said:Ok, I think Desktop Publisher is mostly working, there were some more unexpected writes to >(6000-7fff) that were throwing off the bank switching. Would someone please check the manual for how to exit Picture Maker mode: Back doesn't work but Quit does?
Stargazer 3-in-1 converted Ok.
Beyond WordWriter is going to need some more debugging...
Hey PeteE, did you ever get Beyond Wordwriter banking correctly with the Write to ROM method?
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45 minutes ago, Pheonix said:Asked in another thread & pointed here:
What is the limit (amount & location,) of RAM (GRAM, VRAM etc...) that can be placed in a cartridge? I've often wondered....
Depends on how much you want to support. This is a ROM and RAM discussion. (This is based upon my understanding, and some may be incorrect, which I'll lean on the titans to help correct me if needed.)
TI made eight GROM addresses available. GROMs 0-2 are the console, and 3-7 are available in the module. From the TI Tech Guide:
GROM 0: >0000-17FF - console boot/OS GROM 1: >2000-37FF - console TI Basic GROM 2: >4000-57FF - console TI Basic GROM 3: >6000-77FF - cart GROM 4: >8000-97FF - cart GROM 5: >A000-B7FF - cart GROM 6: >C000-D7FF - cart GROM 7: >E000-F7FF - cart
For the five GROMS in a cartridge, you can have up to 30K (if you use 6K GROMs) or 40K (if you use 8K GROMs.)
There are also 16 "sets" of the cartridge GROMs that can be used (i.e. "REVIEW MODULE LIBRARY"). 16 that are decoded, 256 I think are technically capable. >9800, >9804, >9808, etc. up to technically >9C00.
So, to me that means 6K * 5 * 16 = 480K of GROM in 6K increments, or 8K * 5 * 16 = 640K for all sixteen banks the stock console will recognize via Review Module Library. Or, for the max of 256 - 6K * 5 * 256 = 7680K for 6K GROMs or 10240K (1M!) if using 8K GROMs. Anything past 16 needs custom code. These bases could also very well be GRAM.
So, that's GROM. ROM/RAM is a bit different. There's only an 8K window available for ROM/RAM. Common carts ROMs can go from 8K all the way to 2M using bank switching circuitry (we used all the data lines). Tursi's Dragon's Lair even went further by using address lines as well as the data lines - he pushed it to probably its very limits. We implement our bank switching for ROMs by writing to certain RAM addresses (which wouldn't work with RAM - we'd overwrite stuff).
For RAM, we've built supercarts that allow for 8K or 32K in the 8K cartridge ROM space of >6000. The non CRU based supercarts use switches to manually switch between four 8K banks. The CRU based one (SuperSpace) probably can only go to 64K (maybe 128K) with the technique it uses for CRU bank switching.
Then, you have the UberGROM. If you use the basic GROM/GRAM functionality, you can map any of the five banks as GROM or GRAM. You can have up to 40K (5 banks) of GROM and 2 banks of GRAM (8K/7K). There's also some small flash EEPROM space and other functions (Serial, Timer, ADC, etc.) I'll let Tursi chime in if he wants to explain the additional GROM bases and limits there, because the ATMega 1284P only has so much space on it.
Does this help?
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11 minutes ago, Pheonix said:Not to drag the conversation too far off topic, but am sort of curious.... What is the limit (amount & location,) of RAM (GRAM, VRAM etc...) that can be placed in a cartridge? I've often wondered....
To avoid dragging the eBay thread into that type of discussion, please go here:
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12 minutes ago, INVISIBLE said:Would you be open to accepting a suggestion for the inclusion of one small, but useful addition that would be of benefit to a substantial portion of the current TI population here at AtariAge?
This likely is going to be a two phase project.
First, Rich and I have spoken about preserving the cartridge pretty much as-is on the UberGROM. We have to make some changes to get it to work.
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We will map G4 in the UberGROM as GROM.
- We will move the lower 4K of the GROM G3 (from the original BSM cart) to the UberGROM's G4 GROM bank.
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We will map G3 in the UberGROM as 8K of GRAM.
- A powerup routine in G4 will copy/unroll the 4K GROM of the BSM from G4 into the lower 4K of G3 (which is GRAM)
- The powerup routine will branch to the selection screen so you can see the three menu items (or BASIC)
- When you get into BASIC, you should be able to use the "GRAM" on the cartridge, which is (now) the upper 4K of G3 (GRAM). You could also potentially wipe out the lower 4K of G3 where the BSM stuff is (because this is GRAM as well.)
The above should make the module work as originally intended.
Secondly, Rich has some great plans for enhancing the module way beyond the capabilities it originally had. I'll let him detail those plans, but from what he told me over the phone, it sounded freaking awesome.
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We will map G4 in the UberGROM as GROM.
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15 minutes ago, Pheonix said:Still begs the question... What is it? If you are recreating it, maybe you know what it is? Thank you
Yep, we know exactly what it is. It's kind of a proto Mini Memory. The manual is here - but the source code attached is likely for a later version of the module (it wouldn't fit in a 4K GROM.)
In essence, it's the following: 4K of GROM and 2K of GRAM all in the G3 address space. The lower 4K of G3 is GROM (which is all the routines you can use in BASIC) and the upper 2K is GRAM (where you can load data into, and run GPL from). It works on a stock console, but can also use the 32K memory expansion and the disk controller if present.
It has two functions:
a) Three menu items on the selection screen to run GPL or assembly from the 2K GRAM space (we haven't tried these yet). The third is to run assembly from the >6000 Cart ROM space (which this cart doesn't have - but the UberGROM could; I plan on testing this soon.)
b) BASIC calls to manipulate memory, read/write VDP, CPU RAM, read and write sectors on disk, etc.
We do know that a lot of the GPL CALL routines are broken. Rich Gilbertson has been looking at repairing them so that they actually work.
So, really, it's not near as useful as say - it might have been before the Mini Memory and Editor Assembler were released, which I think was what this module's purpose was for. We're working on fixing it to where it will work in an UberGROM (with the first use of the UberGROM's GRAM space).
I'm hoping whomever buys this can produce high resolution scans of the PCB and dumps of the ROM so we can compare it to the two that Ksarul has. I'm considering bidding on it to simply preserve it and possibly reproduce the PCB.
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7 hours ago, Airshack said:Love how the item description says "...made for club members..." yet makes no mention of the club? Dallas area too.
Rich Gilbertson and I are recreating this module with the UberGROM - so it won't be unique for long.
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Awesome! I probably mis-dumped it long time ago (2008 if that's the true date I did it). Back then, I had a different programmer. Thanks!!!
Edit: I think that's about all the DBT CRU Bankswitching carts now are converted.
Anyone know of any of others >16K CRU Bank switched carts? I know a few Magic Memory ones got out there, but they're likely buggier than TI Workshop (which is pretty buggy...)