Date   : Wed, 02 Nov 2005 16:08:57 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Adding copro support to BeebEm

David Harper wrote:
> The 32016 is a complex chip, but not much more so that the 80186 - the 
> databook for that extends to 48 pages. But then lots of other people 
> have written books about the 8086 family in (relatively) simple English.

Yep, it shouldn't be that horrible I would have thought. When I'm back 
in the UK I'll dig in archives for the details of the other chap I spoke 
to last year who was writing a 32016 emulator and see where they got 
with it...

> However, once you have an assembler, what do you do for an operating 
> system? I seem to recall that the 32016 board came with a system called 
> "Panos", but I don't know anything about that. 

Yep, Panos was the standard offering. I seem to remember it's not much 
on an OS going by any modern definition of the term, but it does provide 
a lot of resident hooks to do useful things.

Incidentally, I got hold of some floppies just before I left the UK 
which claim to have Panos source on them - remains to be seen whether 
they're still readable, or if they've been formatted (working out what 
host platform they came from is going to be interesting too)

> The obvious thing would 
> be to port Linux to it, but I am sure that would be a non-trivial exercise!

I can't remember where we were at in terms of establishing whether the 
32016 has the necessary MMU hardware built in or not. There certainly is 
a seperate MMU chip for the 32000 family, but maybe there's 
functionality in the chip which is good enough.

I know our Whitechapel MG-1 machines have a seperate MMU (they're 
32016-based Unix boxes, running 42NIX) - but perhaps it's not essential.

Hmm, random thought - but I'm pretty sure that GCC used to support the 
32016, which implies that somewhere in the old version of the toolchain 
there is a 32016 assembler at least. It'd be an interesting project at 
least, Linux on an ACW :-)

Other than Whitechapel, Tektronix are the only other people I can think 
of who had a 32016-based Unix out there. It never was a very popular 
chip; makes me wonder where Acorn might have gone with the business 
computer range if they'd gone for the 68000 instead...

cheers

Jules