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Do you still need me to test the modded wutil 3.2 on my Rainbow?

Warner

You've got PM

Just updated my mame sources to the latest after getting a new mac and rebuilt... And the venix image I'd saved away from last time fails to boot with blocked interrupts....

Anybody else using this?

OK. I just recreated the partition, and have the same issue. Venix installs its own bootblocks, it seems, overwriting the ones I'd installed. I think I have the modded 3.2 wutil, so I'll see if I can make it bootable by booting to that... I hate WUTIL, though, because it only used weird function keys that only exist on the Rainbow, and the keyboard mappings is always opaque enough that it's a hassle. I guess I'll have to see if I can hack it to also support simple letters for its operations as well... Maybe put out a 3.3 with the boot fix and that ....

I tried to map the keyboard 1:1 whenever possible (with few exceptions like Alt and Control). As the PC keyboard has less keys, some rarely used function keys were left out.

Click to enlarge


The result is debatable, yet a few applications / games rely on key positions and inconsistent assignments create even more hassle IMHO.

Download
keyboard layout

PDF with some quick notes for people who want to test drive the Rainbow-100 driver. A review would be very helpful.
PDF: First steps on the Rainbow-100

Sources for PDF (in OpenOffice and Word6.0/97 format):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ux62z46f86tvri5/First_steps%20-%20Dec_2017_Bavarese.zip?dl=1

Does the right Alt key generate a distinct key code on US keyboards (like Alt Gr)...?

Sorry for not responding. It seems there are only about three Rainbow users left

Bsdimp wrote

- the venix image I'd saved away from last time fails to boot with blocked interrupts....

Do you have details how this happened? I suspect the hard disk image was not cleanly unmounted. Did the framework crash and leave you with an unsync'ed file system?

Best advice i can give is to "unmount" the hard disk via internal GUI or via the debugger interface (requires '-debug' option) before exit.

A telltale sign is the BIOS starting with defaults (128 K), because of invalid NVRAM content (-> indicates a partially overwritten NVRAM file).

That said, hard disk corruption often goes undetected with the FAT formatted disks i use. Maybe i should give VENIX a try.

- - - - - - - - On another note, i need to find out if the WD1010 controller can do look-ahead (non-consuming) reads of single bytes.

Question: does the patched WUTIL work on a real machine?

- If yes, my disassembly of the BIOS is correct, and the loader must be 513 bytes long (because 1 NOP is eaten away by the BIOS check)

- if no, the controller can do single (byte wide) reads without incrementing the internal buffer counter (-> unemulated, because docs are a bit fuzzy here)

Currently, the buffer counter is reset after an overflow (>1024 bytes read or written) or after a hard disk controller reset (separate from the WD1010 chip, via an external memory mapped register located within the 808x mem.range).

The 1024 byte wrap around was determined by trial and error. Which is odd - as there is a 2 K chip on the WD1010 boards..

EDIT: there is a sector editor built into WUTIL. A comparison of the HOM, BOM and other relevant areas could clarify things. You can't modify sectors, and it is slow on real machines.
Apart from short comments in the Wutil sources, i haven't found a concise description of these special sectors.

@Bsdimp: you have mail

Just FYI. I had so much fun with the Venix stuff last year, I started up this repo to try to recreate the Venix sources. I doubt I'll ever get the compiler back, but other things should be easy. https://github.com/bsdimp/venix/ which also has all the Venix 86 disks I could find (both Rainbow and IBM XT). There's also a 8088 disassembler (but it just groks the Venix variants because I'm lame), and the start of a Venix user-mode thing as well, but that's very early days.

Thanks, you've put up a great online resource there!

Being a relative Unix noob, i can't find a way to partition disks from inside the VENIX boot disk.

Disk 1 never touches the hard disk in MAME, or initializes the WD2010 controller. Weird.

Startup should begin with a file system check, right?

Guess i have to edit 'inittab' (or sth. similar)...?

The only complete documentation i found is the Programmer Reference Manual for the Pro - hardly a good reference for end users.

BTW, you should be able to boot from the - supposedly - lost partition after the following source patches (last 2 lines before ENDIF).

Dump the WUTIL version with the 513 byte boot sector (LDX) and use regular v3.2 from the archives then. You'll see the WUTIL boot menu if everything is set up correctly.

Still hope to get things fixed in MAME/MESS - where a speedup of 4 times relative to an original Rainbow is feasible (startup params -nothrottle -frameskip 10).

For the record: a newly introduced UI bug prevents keyboard reassignments on the emulated LK-201 (it definitely worked in 0.186)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5v5sjcgv49rryhk/UI%20Bug%20mit%200.197%20X.jpg?dl=0

You should be able to boot vbswx1.flp. It's a copy of the 'recovery' disk that's been enhanced to recognize any winchester drive size. The vxfer*flp disks will work too, but are the simple version and only recognize an RD51 10MB drive (or at least, it assumes it's a RD51, regardless of what it really is).

http://www.vintagecomputer.net/digital/VENIX/VENIX_Install.pdf has basics. The BSW stuff is a little different, but not that different. Mostly, it requests more disks at the end of the process to load the enhancements from BSW. I think that it's decent. I have no power right now, but if it's not so good, I'll walk through things on MESS and post screen shots.

http://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread_record.cfm?id=675&tid=5 has some more details as well, though the xhomer project linked from there seems to be off the air.

I'd love to have a faster MAME/MESS rainbow running as well.

Hmmm, I'll have to run through what I've done in the past... there's a step to create the raw image, wutil it with a venix partition, marking it bootable, then booting venix restore...

../git/mame/mame64 rainbow -flop1 ~/git/venix/dist/rb/vbswx1.flp

gives me a screen that asks if I want to format the Winchester Drive then gives me an error because I don't have a hard dive connected.... I'll try to write more later.