Sunday, September 29, 2024

Tested cycle steal/DMA memory loader and used it to run some diagnostics

CHECKED WIRING TO BACKPLANE FOR THE MODIFIED MEMORY LOADER

Since this loader uses Cycle Steal Level 1 now, rather than level 0 as the earlier version did, it has to be wired to the appropriate pins on the backplane for this. Also, during my prototype testing I used a spare card slot for a gate but the logic is now onboard my shield, thus some wirewrap changes for that. 

TESTED THE LOADER

The loader worked perfectly. I can commit this plan on Github as a finished and ready to copy design. It is now in place inside the machine ready to be used whenever I have something to load into memory. Below is a video of the loader installing some contents into memory.

LOADED CORE MEMORY DIAGNOSTICS AND RAN THEM

I had the high core memory diagnostics - different from low core in that it doesn't test the first 512 words where the diagnostic program itself will sit. There is another version that is loaded high and is therefore called the low core test, but both of them test all but 512 words of the 8K. 

The program ran to successful completion, stopping on a wait instruction with 3002 in the Storage Buffer Register. That was good enough for me, I don't need to load and run the low core version since I have been using low core with everything I have run lately.


LOADED MY DEMONSTRATION MONITOR AND RAN A FEW DEMOS

The demonstration monitor was written for the System Source Museum in Baltimore to show off their 1130 as they don't have the peripherals to use it in the conventional way. Some routines make use of the console printer, which is not yet reconnected to the VCF 1130 so they won't run. However, I wrote a few that could be used when the typewriter was down. 

I ran one demonstration that performs millions of multiplications to demonstrate the speed of the 1130 for doing compute tasks. Another calculated the digits of Pi and displayed them in the ACC register, waiting after each digit for the user to read the value and push Prog Start to get the next. The final demo I tried allowed the user to type in a numeric value on the keyboard and translated it into binary in the ACC register. 


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