Date   : Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:55:31 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Torch Z80 ROM Images

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 20:12 +0100, Jon Welch wrote:
> To follow up on my earlier e-mail, 
> 
> I bought a Torch Z80 card many years ago but I thought I had lost it amongst
> all my other junk when I moved house recently. However, after spending a
> couple of hours in the loft this morning, it turned up in a box of bits.
> This card has the CCPN 1.02 ROM in and together with the 1.22 AMB ROM in my
> Master, the card boots fine. 
> 
> I have now managed to get the ROM image I wanted by putting the CCPN ROM
> into the motherboard and saving to disc. I originally tried it in my Viglen
> cartridge ROM slot expander thingy but this seems to have died in the
> process. And killed my SPY 2 ROM as well :(
> 
> However, the reason I wanted the ROM Image was not to put it in a Torch
> card.
> 
> I am currently converting the BeebEm emulator to run on my new Mac and I
> though it would be a good idea to emulate the Torch Z80 card as well ! After
> a bit of dabbling with the code, I can now boot BeebEm to the familiar
> 'NoNet:0A>' prompt. Pop in a Wordstar disc image and I am now running
> Wordstar under CCPN under BeebEm under Windows (and Mac OSX) !

Heh, nice work! Next task - emulate the 68000 board ;-)

I've just checked to see what I have here ROM-wise:

CCCP 0.94
CCCP 1.02
SBC Torch 750218 Rev A
ECO 3.35K
MCP 0.41
MCP 1.0AI
MCP 1.0CI
MCP 1.22CIL
Unix Host 1.0

it's possible that the SBC ROM is for the Quad X though and nothing to
do with Beeb-related matters.  I'm not sure what the suffix letters on
the MCP ROMs signify - anyone?

These ROMs are just in chip boxes amongst my spares and on stray boards;
I'll see if I get a chance to look inside actual machines later this
week to see if they have anything different.

The 68000 boards seem to have CCCP ROMs too. I seem to remember there
being something odd in the way the 68k runs - I have a feeling that the
on-board Z80 communicates over the TUBE (hence the reason it has the
same CCCP ROM as the plain Z80 board) and is responsible for dumping
initial 68K code into local memory in order for the 68K to execute...
I'll have to dig out my docs...

cheers

Jules