Recently I got my hands on a working 3.5" SCSI drive. That allowed me to complete my ressurected Ampro LB/Z80+ system. I'd had an ST251N back in the day, but even back then it was developing bad sectors. Today... today I was happy to get anything off it before powering it down for the last time and putting it out to pasture for good. It has earned its final rest.
Here, you'll find some of the updated software that I've either recovered from the ST251N, or from the floppy backup (which wasn't quite as up to date as what was on the old hard drive), or created fresh as new needs arose.
I can't imagine that most of this will be of anything more than minor historical interest to anyone but even so, here it is.
Please note that some of the utilities depend on the reordered arrangement of the BIOS' I/O setup table in my custom BIOS. They will not work with a standard Ampro BIOS.
Starting with the last official AMPRO BIOS (3.8), I've added the following:
- Interrupt driven serial I/O
- Interrupt driven keyboard input
- Interrupt driven ZRDOS compatible clock
- Extended BIOS calls for reader input status, punch output status, and sending a BREAK to the serial port.
With the addition of interrupt driven I/O to the BIOS, it became obvious that the DART/SIO wasn't been set up to quite properly to work with interrupts. After some light reading of the Zilog Z80-SIO Technical Manual the solution became apparent; rearrange the order that the registers were being initialised in, and adding a couple of channel resets to the mix. Doing this (and keeping all the other offsets in the BIOS data block the same) meant updating both the CONFIG and SET utilities to match. To say nothing of my ZMP and MEX overlays...
New versions of HGEN and SCSIBOOT. HGEN has been extended to install SCSI controller initialization in the hard drive boot sector. This allows automatic booting from non generic SCSI controllers, such as the Xebec 1410(A) and the DTC 510(A/B), as well as generic SCSI controllers.
A bug in the SCSI routines in the V1.2 boot EPROM that prevented the SETPRAM routine from functioning has been corrected in the V1.3 EPROM. V1.4 re-uses the EPROM select bit in the control register to reset the floppy driver controller when the boot process switches from floppy to hard drive. (This requires a cut and jumper on the PCB, but the software change is harmless w/o the hardware change.)
A utility to allow use of a large hard drive without giving up too much of your precious TPA via 'mountable volumes''. In my system, I have two hard drives; A: and B:. 4 different volumes can be mounted (1 at a time) for B:.
A utility to move the console from port A to B (and back again), as well as setting up my Retro WiFi Modem to allow dialling in from a remote system.
With the changes to the SIO initialization in the BIOS data block, SET had to updated to reflect the new register order as well. Also corrected a bug in the original software that wasn't setting things up properly for 450 baud.
Sets the BIOS clock from the Retro WiFi Modem. Time zone is settable from the command line (whole hours only), and mostly DST aware (US/Canada rules).
I use ZTIME a lot on another Z80 box running ZSDOS. I really like the stopwatch function, and thought it would be handy to be able to use it on the AMPRO (which is still running ZRDOS) as well. So I made ZTIME ZRDOS and ZSDOS aware.