Thursday, November 24, 2016

Finishing read sector process for disk emulator role

Holiday interruption, just when I am returning from vacation interruption! To prepare for the US Thanksgiving holiday and guests, I had to disassemble and store much of my testbed and development area. On the weekend, when guests have departed, I can return my house to a laboratory. 

ALTO DISK TOOL

After I returned home from my vacation, I got back to coding of the disk emulator role for the disk tool. I have a few final bits to add to the process that emits a record - the preamble of words of zero, a sync word, the appropriate count of words for the record and the four postamble words of zero.

This will be triggered by a higher level process for the entire sector. That will set the preamble count, data word count and RAM address for the record in question, then trigger the record emitting process. The higher level process will run whenever the FileReady status is on, constantly generating each sector as it flies under the virtual disk head. It will only be interrupted during seek operations.

I spent a bit of time blocking out the higher level process which will read an entire sector, executing iteratively as long as the virtual disk is rotating and online. 

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