Small complications preparing to run the disk diagnostic program

LOADED THE 2310 DRIVE DIAGNOSTIC PROGRAM - 309 - BUT SAME CE PACK ISSUE

The diagnostic program also checks on cylinder 199 for the special CE pack signature that I experienced when I tried to load DIMAL onto a cartridge image. I used the standard 1130 utility to initialize the disk cartridge image (ZDCIP program) but it does not write the patterns expected by the diagnostic routine.

I discovered that there is a separate initialization program, a 2315 Initialization diagnostic - 308 - that writes those patterns. When I wrote just those patterns, I discovered that the program 308 must be allowed to write known patterns over most of the disk cartridge, because the 2310 test program 309 will check them. My first run got many compare errors when the known patterns had not been written.

One of many many errors

INITIALIZED A CARTRIDGE IMAGE WITH 308 FULLY

The initialization program is very long. On the simulator, which runs hundreds of times faster than a real disk drive, the program chugged along for over an hour before I terminated it and ran the routine to store the CE codes.

I used that image to run the drive test diagnostic 309 on the simulator, just to validate the process. I received a number of compare errors out of test 11. This test writes a full sector (321 words) of the sector ID 0x0010 and 320 words of x1313. It then writes a single word 0x0010 in the sector. The hardware should write zeroes for the remainder of the sector, but the simulator implementation of disk simulation failed this. It returned x1313 instead of x0000 for words 2 and onward. 

This is not a flaw with the Dimal image, it is a failure of the simulators disk code. Test 12 then failed which was a test writing 400 words to a sector, beyond the amount that can fit. The disk drive would terminate the write when it reaches the next sector mark pulse, then report an error in the device status word. However, the simulator did NOT report an error when the write was executed. 

I have to consider the pack ready for use on my emulation. Those two tests will be a good validationof how well my FPGA code matches the real disk behavior. Since the Dimal cartridge creation is considered successful, I am ready to move over to the physical IBM 1130 and my Virtual 2315 Cartridge Facility hooked to the disk drive inside. 

I created a microSD card with that disk image I built on the simulator. I also brought the core image dump of the 2310 diagnostic (309) so that I could load that into the real 1130 using my core memory loader feature on the 1130. 

In addition I built a virtual cartridge as a fresh install of DMS2 V12, the final operating software, which can be used on the machine once everything is restored.