Date   : Tue, 01 May 2007 11:15:03 -0500
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Arthur on 5.25" media...

Pete Turnbull wrote:
> I was going to reply to say I'd expect it was for an A500 but you beat 
> me to it. 

:-) I couldn't resist a quick prod at the image files... I'm trying hard not 
to get side-tracked until everything's safely archived, though.

 > The A500 is best thought of as a sort of prototype Archimedes
> that used a Beeb as an I/O processor.  I still have one of the Tube 
> podules that the A500 used. 

I have/had one of those Tube podules... I can't remember if I took it over to 
Bletchley or not. Having said that, I *think* that Dave Moore's A500 is 
actually a little bit different and has the Tube connection logic on the PCB 
itself - the later A500 systems gained a proper backplane and podule support. 
In other words, two distinct flavours of A500 exist.

> The Arm second processor (aka Arm Evaluation System) didn't run Arthur. 
>   It used the BBC MOS like any normal second processor, and had a very 
> simple Executive program; a sort of monitor which could set/clear 
> breakpoints, dump/fill memory, load, save and run programs, and not much 
> more.  

Now, was that the same as Brazil, or was Brazil different code completely? I 
seem to recall that the M4 and A680 have Brazil firmware, but is that true of 
the Arm Eval Kit?

i.e.

  1) AEK has Brazil in ROM, loads additional functionality from floppy,
  2) AEK has simple loader in ROM and loads Brazil from floppy,
  3) AEK doesn't use Brazil at all and has totally different code

 > If you want to see what the disks were like, the images of the
> disks and the co-processor's ROM are still on my web page at 
> http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/BBC/ARMeval.html

I do need disk 3 actually... I've got originals of the rest in the set, but 
that one's gone walkabout!

>> According to the card indexes I've got, there should be source to ADFS, BBC 
>> MOS,
> 
> I'd like to see that sometime. 

I'm sure a few would :) Hopefully I grabbed the relevant disks to match the 
card index (and hopefully they're still readable, and hopefully they haven't 
been overwritten).

cheers

Jules