mizapf

Did you already try to configure the IDE drive in the TI-99/4A emulation? I did not thoroughly test it on the Geneve yet.

I did not understand what you meant by treating the IDE as NVRAM. There are NVRAM files, but they only concern the buffered clock chips or RAM chips.

May I suggest to set up a new thread so that the "New MAME release" thread may keep its original scope?

Specifying the CRU is done by setting DIP switches, as usual. When you plug in the IDE card, the DIP switches menu shows a new section for the DIP switches on that card (and a section for configuration options in the Configuration menu). The hard drive file name is provided via the "-hard" (or "-hard1") option, as with the HFDC. Or you can set it in the file manager (in the OSD). The only nasty thing is that you cannot directly specify which medium goes to which card. Each controller adds its media to the total count. If you have, for example, two floppy controllers, both with 4 attachable drives, the controller in the earlier slot picks the first four (flop1 ... flop4), and the next controller gets the remaining (flop5 ... flop8). The same holds for the hard disk cards. When you attach an IDE controller and a HFDC, the IDE will get hard1, and if there are hard disks connected to the HFDC, they will be accessed as hard2, hard3 etc. Note, however, that this has no implication on the drive name inside the TI emulation (HDSx or so) because MAME has no idea what a HDS or WDS or DSK or whatever is. In order to create an empty IDE drive image, you have to use the chdman tool. I'll have to add this feature to TIImageTool one day. For example, I set up a drive as 900 cylinders, 8 heads, 32 sectors per track, and 512 bytes/sector. (Not sure whether the IDE drives have to be formatted to 512 bytes/sector, but it works.)

Yes, and therefore, in the native mode of the Geneve, the video ports are the same for reading and writing because it was not necessary to pick two different addresses. These are the things that you simply accepted at first, but learn some decades later why it had to be done.

That's the big advantage of the TMS9995 in the Geneve; it does not need any read-before-write because of the 8-bit data bus.

Yes. All format 1 instructions have a read-before-write, even MOV.

I'm using this monitor/TV: https://www.samsung.com/de/support/model/LE19B450C4WXZG/ with my Geneve; I also attached my good old TI console (PAL) to it, and it worked perfectly. The problem may be how to find it; maybe ebay. See

I followed closely the specifications in the Horizon description. You should find the meaning in those docs. DIP switches (and jumpers): CRUHOR: SW1 = CRU base (default 1200), CRUPHOE: A second setting determines the Phoenix CRU base, you can set 1400 or 1600 or off (ff00). Default is off (ff00). MODE: JP4 Split mode (TI or Geneve) HIDESW2: SW2 Hide switch, off (0) or on (1), default is off (0). PHOENIX: JP2 Phoenix split, off (0) or on (1), default is off (0). The DIP switches do not determine the Horizon capacity. This is a configuration point; they resemble the DIP settings, but they do not represent real dip switches or jumpers. Configuration settings (type="CONFIG") CHIPTYPE: The RAM circuits used on the board. 128Kx8 (0) or 512Kx8 (1), default is 0. CHIPCOUNT: The number of RAM chips; you can choose any multiple of 4 (could have offered more, but that would make the selection too long). Default = 4 (16 chips) DSRSIZE: Size of the DSR chip (8 or 32 K), default 0 = 8K OPT32K: Optional 32K memory (off (0) or on (1), default off) RAMBO: RAMBO support (off (0) or on (1), default off) If you want 8 MiB on the board, you have to use 512K chips (you'd need 4 layers of 128K, which is not supported). So you have to select 16 chips (one complete layer). My advise is to try some setting in the DIP switch menu and the Configuration Menu, exit the emulation, and check the config file. Edit: Why are you trying to create or modify the cfg file? Wouldn't it be good to apply the desired settings and make a copy of the cfg file in case you later need it? I should mention that when you start a driver (ti99_4a, geneve, ...) with a different PEB setup, the previous settings will be lost (reset to defaults) because the settings for some card in slot X only make sense for that card, and not when you plug in another one. So you should create copies of your cfg file, or use different cfg_directories for your setups. Example: ./mame geneve -cfg_directory cfg1 -peb:slot4 horizon ...

Programmable Flash Memory Ehm ... I added PFM in different variants to the MAME emulation (PFM, PFM+, PFM512), but it turns out only a few people actually have it? I hoped it is at least feasible to rebuild it. See line 116ff in https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/geneve.cpp

The boot EPROM contains some code to paint the MyArt-formatted Swan picture on screen. If you want a different picture, you could either use my loader and add a suitable picture loader together with the desired picture, or you have to use a different boot EPROM - or use PFM and design a custom loader. The easiest thing would be to copy the 0.98 boot EPROM into the PFM and replace the picture data.

chkdsk What is that character after the A of ASSIGN?

Interesting - I just tried it, and it's finally working as intended. Browser: ftp://ftp.whtech.com (You can also use the HTTP server to access the same path by https://ftp.whtech.com ) If you use a FTP client, use name=anonymous and [email protected] or similar.

See my posting some weeks ago:

The TIC zip file on WHTech is the TIC source code; you'd have to build the compiler on the PC first. Here is the ready-to-use disk image for TIC. I suppose Alan will not object to have it offered here, as he already agreed to publish the source code. I seem to have lost my login to WHTech; I just sent Don an E-mail. I added the TASM (the version fixed by me) and QDE as a simple text editor to the disk image. Please read the manual to TIC before trying. You will most probably want to set up a script file that contains an invocation of TIC, then of TASM, then of LDR to get an executable file at the end. tic161.dsk Edit: When I said Don, I actually meant Alan Beard.

No, the OSD (on-screen display menu) is where you get when you press TAB in partial keyboard mode. Partial keyboard and full keyboard mode are toggled by ScrlLock. Sorry, I thought you knew about these points because they are really essential when using MAME (configuration, dip switches, change media, set volume, redefine keyboard etc.).

Go inside MAME, set the CRU address via the OSD, and then compare the file. Edit: You should see an element <port> with appropriate attributes and contents. When the setting matches the default, no entry is included in the config file.

Define "populus": How many percent of the people would you expect? I was glad that TIC covered at least a bit more of the C features, so I switched to TIC for the Geneve when it was available. As for the TI-99/4A, I really cannot say.

You cannot set the values of DIP switches or configuration switches from the command line, as far as I know. Those settings are persistently stored in the cfg/<driver>.cfg file (here, cfg/geneve.cfg). If you want to preserve them you should make a copy of this file and copy it in place whenever you need it. Or you have to try the "-cfg_directory" option which allows you to set a different cfg folder. This option can be put into the command line. (I never tried it, but it could help here.)

Also, C99 is far from ANSI C, I think not even full K&R.

Horizon: "-peb:slot6 horizon" or whatever slot is free. PFM: Have a look at the OSD, "Machine configuration" -> "Boot from..." Keep a bookmark on https://www.mizapf.de/ti99/mame/changes. You can easily see when a feature was introduced or changed. As for the Horizon, you should install at least 0.227 because I reimplemented the Horizon basically from scratch. An earlier version was available since 0.173, but it could happen that the nvram files (which store the contents of the card) do not properly work with the reimplemented version. If you already use 0.194 you can safely upgrade to the latest version. Keep in mind that I fixed an issue with the debugger for Geneve in 0.229, and as you obviously run the debugger window, this should be helpful for you.

With the TMS9995, things get yet another twist: The workspace registers may be put on the 256 byte on-chip RAM, the access is 16 bit wide and requires one cycle. There is not much difference to the hardware registers of other CPUs at that point.

For MAME it is "-cart moonmine".

Just as a hint, TASM itself is written in TIC, and my Arkanoid pre-alpha-prototype is written in TIC. It's no secret that I am not really a fan of Forth. But you need not be a fan of all programming languages around. 🙂

Sigh ... people just don't take their time 🙂 ... isn't it a moment of silent comtemplation while waiting for the assembler to finish? Mind that on the real iron, you still had the chance that the floppy failed.