RAM problems due to Xilinx handling of tristates (again)

Wednesdays are when I meet with the 1401 Restoration team at CHM. We had problems with one tape drive, which a team member traced back to a bad SMS card; swapped the card and tape drive now working just fine. Overall, the systems are in fairly good shape - exceptional shape given their age.

XEROX ALTO - DIABLO DISK TOOL CREATION

I know that RAM itself works because I can write data via the Adept utility and retrieve it successfully the same way, but my logic to write each extracted word from the disk into RAM is failing.

As I set up instrumentation, I think I discovered the source of the problem. It is the incompetent handling of tristate signals by the Xilinx toolchain. There are quite a few places where the Digilent provided code treats output signals as tristates - emits Z unless the module is active. I also followed that practice.

HOWEVER, the signals as defined in the top level module are type OUT, not INOUT, which means they are not tristate pins. I suspect that nothing good comes from having two separate sources that are treating the signal as a tristate - only emitting values when active - but the actual signal is not tristate hardware.

After I changed everything to INOUT, the Adept function to read and write to disk no longer worked. Grrrrrrrr. All because I leveraged some reference code which insisted on this stupid tristate behavior and won't play nice if integrated.

It is time to write my own logic to replace at least some of the Digilent reference code. I will be successful when I can read or write RAM. Before I coded it all from scratch, I realized that I could take all the control signal assignments out of the Digilent provided code section, where they used tristate Z as the default, and reimplement them in my memory access FSM.

Any time my memory FSM was in the idle state, it would connect the signals the same way as in the Digilent code, yet not use Z for inactive. In other words, these assignments in the idle state were replaced in toto by my assignments in all the other memory FSM states.

My first stab at this didn't work correctly - reading and writing via the Adept utility is funky, which is the only way I can verify things right now. Don't know if my routine is writing correctly but can't retrieve it or if everything hosed up. Still trying to avoid writing a lot of logic from scratch.

I came up with an improved scheme and will implement it tomorrow.