Gregory's Serverexcellent progress today. I've been able to implement the "Get Diagnostic Status" command. it transfers the command block and handles the returning status block as well as the flags and interrupts. best of all, it works on real hardware using my diagnostic program!
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 @darryl_ramm it is a solid state replacement HDD that works with the weird IBM DBA-ESDI protocol (similar in concept to IDE)  @tubetime Cool, I would love to get a 701 butterfly. Had one for years at work.  @tubetime I’ve always wondered about that. I think your intuition is accurate since that would allow a smaller package size from less area outside the die needed to route to the external pads.   Meme image: good news bad news.jpg I have mainly reverse engineered things with user interfaces, so there’s always strings I can work backwards from. Doing something like a hard drive controller is playing the game on extra hard mode. so last night I identified the power on self test routines by inspection. it's not too hard to identify a checksum routine or a memory test routine. this helped me fill in the memory map. also, the POR test function stores the results at a particular memory location, and the codes match up with the POR error codes in the DBA-ESDI spec! the next step is to search the whole ROM for any instructions that read this memory location--this should identify the functions that generate the status block. @tubetime Out of curiosity, does the newer IBM BIOS have any similarity to the original IBM PC AT BIOS that they published in the AT Tech Reference from March 1984? Wondering if they ever did a full rewrite at some point. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_Reference_Mar84.pdf  @tubetime I've lost count of the things I've done that "sounds easy but the process uses DMA."  @tubetime @tubetime Almost makes you want to lovingly caress it's slightly sticky chemically degraded surface. 😉   The logic analyzer from the perspective of the PCB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYPX-QQR9Tg @tubetime it’s been so long since this experiment started I forget what you’re trying to do! so i don't know how this flag is getting set. my hack is to preemptively clear the flag right before starting DMA, and so far, it seems to be working. i think this code was "working" with the real ESDI drive because that one uses burst mode DMA and it finishes up very quickly, before the irq14wait routine can exit early. @tubetime @tubetime I implemented PS/2 DMA in an emulator good enough to get a Sound Blaster working a while ago and god help us all @luigithirty nice, you didn't even have to get burst mode working 😉   @tubetime A lot of early quad SMD packages numbered starting in the middle of the "top" side, and that was purely a (dumb) thing done by package vendors, and dice were always still mounted orthogonally. (or perhaps _almost_ always) |
Great progress! But help out simpleton me, I've lost track of what you are doing. Is this still part of reverse engineering things to get a SnarkBarker to work on the expansion port?? Or an entirely different project?