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Nice pickup! Hopefully the flat-cable driver is on there in addition to the OmniNet one.

Wow.

Note that the current Corvus implementation in 'rainbow.cpp' totally relies on info borrowed from TRS-80 groups - and the binary driver for DEC's flavour of CP/M 86/80 V1 from the Maslin archive.

See patch description on page 12 of
Rainbow-100 first steps (January 2019 edition)

The patch could certainly be adapted for CP/M 86-80 V2.0, yet i don't know enough about the internal structures of CP/M

Corvus controller bits were derived from disassembled drivers. I had no documentation. Same goes true for the ClikClok.

First hand info is always better.

I have the data sheets for chip that's inside the ClikClok (the DS1315), if that would help. There's also the Venix driver for it, which lays bare how it works if you'd like, but it's working, eh? I think it was also derived from the DS1315 datasheet plus looking at the DOS driver, though.
July 4th's master branch is working in with Venix for me, as well as MSDOS. I've not tried CP/M yet.
Thanks for the serial trick: I'll be able to transfer things back and forth more easily now.
I also just purchased a PC1XX-AK for my Rainbow 100A. It allows up to 832k of memory. The board has 8087 silk screened on it, but the 8087 spot wasn't populated (I had high hopes when I read the description).
The disks will be here in a few days. I'll let you know what I find.

OK, I get errors when I try to use -bitbngr on the command line.


So what am I missing?

-- edit --

the option is now called -bitbanger

We have an explicit emulation of the DS1315 in MAME which the Rainbow and the Apple II both use. (On A2 it was called the "No-Slot Clock").

After a day of working with this I'm impressed.

The emulation gets almost all of the issues with using a 9600 baud connection on a real Rainbow correct (it's easy to overrun it at that rate). I'd hoped I could set the baud rate to 19200 and get 1920cps transfers, but no matter the baud rate I'm maxed out at ~(speedup * 170)cps. Real rainbow hardware has similar performance, at least when transferring to Venix (I max out at around 180-185cps).

You emulate the bad baud rate stuff as well. When Venix is running its default getty at '7' is is using 2400 baud. The default serial rate is 9600 for MAME, so you get garbage characters, exactly like you would when you do this IRL.
I get several interrupts off messages. More than I get on real hardware, but in similar circumstances. I think there's a race or two left in the Venix winnie or ca drivers that we're faithfully emulating.

Venix still has all the annoying issues of being a V7 port coupled with the unforgiving (by modern standards) error paths in the installation.

So color me impressed. I wish there was a way to "improve" on some of these issues, but I can't think of any that don't reduce the fidelity of the emulation. I may implement a deep invisible rx and tx FIFO for the upd7201 though and see if never dropping a character improves the speed, or reveals more bugs.

Yeah, we've been having fun emulating serial at the wire level, with real clocks and stuff. So we're emulating all the annoyances that come with it :-)

Not everything is converted yet, but one day, one day...

FYI: I've scanned the Corvus Systems manuals today. I've uploaded them to Corvus Manuals.

I've not yet scanned in the diskettes yet. Here's the files that I uploaded. Hope this is helpful.

• 7100-04929-corvus-systems-omninet-network-station-installation-guide-dec-rainbow-100-Jul83.pdf
• 7100-05026-corvus-systems-network-station-users-guide-dec-rainbow-oct83.pdf
• 7100-05089-corvus-systems-system-managers-guide-dec-rainbow-100-Oct83.pdf
• 7100-05283-corvus-systems-omnidrive-diagnostic-guide-Feb84.pdf
• 7100-05692-corvus-systems-multiple-server-update-guide-Feb84.pdf

Cool!

The DEC Rainbow 100A ROMs have finally been dumped by user tradde on the vcfed forum and confirmed by another Rainbow A user. I've added them and issued a PR.