mister-devel / archie_mister

Acorn Archimedes for MiSTer

Acorn Archimedes for MiSTer Board

This is the port of Archie core from MiST by Stephen Leary

Installation

Copy the *.rbf into a root folder of the SD card. Copy a version of a RiscOS ROM into the "Archie" folder, renaming it to riscos.rom.

Reset

• warm reset: short press ctrl-alt-alt or USER button.
• cold reset: long press of above. RISCOS ROM will be reloaded and memory will be cleared.

CMOS

CMOS is automatically saved to cmos.dat if any modification (configure utility or others) is detected. To revert settings to default remove cmos.dat and reload the core.

RTC

Core gets current clock setting from Linux subsystem.

Floppy disk images

The current version supports two floppy drives. Floppy disk images ADF format and of exactly 819200 bytes in size are currently required. This is the most common format for the Acorn Archimedes.

Hard disk images

Up to 2 hard disks images with extension HDF can be mounted. System has to be additionnaly configured.

1. delete any existing cmos.dat file from Archie folder.
2. Reload the core.
3. Open command line (F12 or ctrl+F12) and type: configure idefsdiscs 1 (or 2 if you use two hard disks)
4. Mount required image(s)
5. Make a cold reset.

To save currently selected images, use OSD option "Save Settings"

OSD Menu

If the ROM is recognized the core should boot into Risc OS. Press Win+F12 to open the OSD menu. You can move to other pages of settings by pressing the right arrow key.

License

This core uses the Amber CPU core from OpenCores which is LGPL. The core itself is dual licensed LGPL/BSD.

archie_mister's Issues

Graphical Glitches

Three examples of graphical glitching (possible screen mode errors?):
None of the glitches below exist using the same ADF Disk (or HDF Disk) & RiscOS Rom combination (3.10) in Arculator 0.99

1. James Pond - there are bars bottom and sometimes top of the screen with corruption.
2. Twinworld has corrupt graphics - it appears as if most colours are inverted

I can provide the ADF's/HDF's if required

HDF ADFS HDD images not recognized

Using MiSTer v200821, ARCHIE v200821.

Set IDEFSDiscs to 2 in CMOS. Assigned known working (RPC Emu, Arculator) hdf images to HDD 0 and HDD 1 in the OSD. Reset the core using ALT-ALT-CTRL.

IDE:4 and IDE:5 appear in the icon bar. When trying to access RiscOS responds "Disc not understood - has it been formatted?"

Is there a known working hdf file available?

Joystick Gets Stuck: Xenon II (all other games seem fine)

Hi, I've discovered a small problem when using a Joystick with the core. The Button/Key mapping works fine and for almost all games I have tested it with I've not experienced any problems, except for one - Xenon II.

For some reason, when playing Xenon II with a Joystick, the controls get stuck in one direction. Moving the controls back and forth will eventually resume gameplay, but by then it's game over.

I'm sure you have much more important requests to look at, but if you get a few mins, please could you see if there is a fix to be had.

NOTE: I've tested the exact same version of the game (same ADF) on physical hardware (A3020) and it works fine with a games pro controller. I've also tested it on Arculator v2.0 on Linux and Windows and that's fine too.

Thanks in advance,

Andy

Floppy images are ignored

Contrary to the instructions, the files ARCHIE/floppy0.adl and ARCHIE/floppy1.adl are not automatically inserted into the drives when the core starts up, though then can be inserted manually via the MiSTer menu. The ARCHIE/riscos.rom file is correctly detected however. The number of floppy drives always defaults to one as the CMOS memory is not preserved.

Support HD(1600Kb) floppy disk images.

Please, Add support Support HD(1600Kb) floppy disk images.
On this site http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads
have some Demos .( example http://acorn.revivalteam.de/Download/Images/Demos09.zip )

I found some information:
http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/cgi/download.php?sFName=0.9.1/rpcemu-0.9.1.tar.gz
In src/fdc.c
and
https://sourceforge.net/p/hxcfloppyemu/code/HEAD/tree/HxCFloppyEmulator/libhxcfe/trunk/sources/loaders/acornadf_loader/acornadf_loader.c#l110
90 line.
and
https://github.com/simoninns/OpenAcornExplorer/tree/master/OpenAcornExplorer

No cmos.dat saved when changing configuration.

I'm not getting any cmos.dat file saved when changing CMOS settings in RISC OS.

I created a cmos.dat file full of zeros, and this is loaded when the core first boots up, but if I make any changes, these aren't saved back to the file. Deleting the file loads the default settings from the core, but any changes aren't saved.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Universal Boot Sequence makes everything old

This is really confusing me. I have the Universal Boot Sequence from http://www.riscos.com/ftp_space/310/index.htm (the small version, I have tried others and they all do the same thing, including one that is definitely working correctly on an ArcEm install), and a RISC OS 3.11 ROM.

Without Universal Boot installed the results are as expected - just the basic ROM apps from 1992:
Contents of ROM Apps:

Version of !Configure:

With Universal Boot everything goes a bit weird. Apps contains things I'd expect to see intermingled with things I don't think are supposed to be there:

The !Configure icon is not one I recognise. Loading it up it's clearly very basic and the version reports as:

Given the ROM is from 1992, and the Universal Boot is from later than that (and doesn't contain any version of !Configure), where is it getting ancient apps from 1988 from?! The boot sequence is clearly working as it has changed to the NewLook window borders, and it has added !SciCalc which I can see inside !Boot and reports as being from 1994. If I run *Help !Configure it reports as being 1.41 from 1992, despite the desktop app being 0.21 from 1988.

This appears to be impossible!

For comparison, this is ArcEm with Universal Boot, so this is what I'd expect to see (some extra apps, the original ones still the 1992 versions):

MiSTer HDF Images with Arculator and RPCEmu

I am transferring files to HDF images via a hostfs feature in Arculator. When testing a MiSTer HDF in Arculator 2.0 or RPCEmu 0.9.3a both have issues reading the HDF.

I could not get RPCEmu to recognise the HDF -- that could have just been me!
http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/index.php

Arculator has a recoverable exception on configuration, allows the drive to be used but corrupts the drive image on exit.
http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/index.html

on pressing [No] button there are no more alterts and the drive is usable for that session (but gets corrupted on exit as above):

I don't know if this issue is related but when the drives are recognised after No/cancel to the alert, sometimes the drive reports random corruption e.g. when creating Spark images to transfer to the host machine. Sometimes the drive images don't report any corruption whilst in use. I have tried this on A3020 and A5000 machine configurations with 4MB RAM.

15khz mode switches on, then back to 31khz

Greetings,

I have been informed today on the misterfpga forum that tapping the zero key on the numeric pad during the Archimedes' boot sequence would set it to 15khz mode. I tried it and it switched to 15khz mode for a few seconds, then back to a higher Khz mode. Apparently it isn't the expected behaviour. My correspondent on the forum reports the MiST version works as intended on his setup.

I am using direct video output.
Disclaimer: I have never owned an Archimedes, and barely know the computer.

Cheers!

1.6MB ADF Floppy Images not supported

First of all, thanks for creating such a great Archie core.

Whilst I can read 800KB Floppy images fine, 1.6MB Floppy Images don't seem to work. Is this something that could be added as it would be useful for copying software, especially single disc games etc. - which even compressed are often too large for an 800KB image.

Best regards,

Andy

CPU Timing (Too fast?)

Several games appear to run very fast relative to a physical machine, or using the same ADF Disk (or HDF Disk) & RiscOS Rom combination (3.10) in Arculator 0.99.

For example, Pacmania and ChaosEngine

Also, as there were several Archimedes models would it be possible to have a CPU speed toggle like the AO486 core?

Thanks!

Risc Developments IDE interface

Please port this to MISTer.
mist-devel/mist-board@b5883c7
mist-devel/mist-firmware@a695a70
mist-devel/mist-binaries@83f397b
mist-devel/mist-binaries@ca892a6

50hz display option is missing

The two options for refresh rate are "variable" and "60hz", but when I set to "variable" some games like Cannon Fodder run at the 60hz rate and everything is sped up by 10%. Would it be possible to explicitly set the refresh rate to 50hz, as the original hardware would have run at?

Cannot select/mount hdf ide images

Readme states that

Up to 2 hard disks images with extension HDF can be mounted. System has to be additionally configured.

delete any existing cmos.dat file from Archie folder.
Reload the core.
Open command line (F12 or ctrl+F12) and type: configure idefsdiscs 1 (or 2 if you use two hard disks)
Mount required image(s)
Make a cold reset.

The OSD does not include an option to mount/select hdf images. Please include guidance on how to mount hdf images.

15khz output broken with latest commit

The latest commit that enforces VGA scaling breaks 15khz output. IMHO there's no need to enforce scaling. Most of the screenmodes of the Archie support standard PAL signal.
See http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Tech/Acorn_A3xA4xVideoSpec.pdf