I got a CUMANA Board, now what ?

This is the right place to discuss on how to implement hardware vsync, adding a VIA or AY chipset, puting multiple roms, or how to design a new flash expansion card.
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ibisum
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I got a CUMANA Board, now what ?

Post by ibisum »

Thanks to Twilighte (Really, THANK YOU mate!) I now have a blank Cumana PCB sitting on my desk, begging me to fill it with parts and hook it up to my Atmos .. ;) So that is what I'm going to do as soon as I can possibly get all the parts together - may not be so easy, as many of the parts are so outdated that it could be a while, but I'm going to try ..

Anyway, the question is: what do I do once I get the board built, a floppy hooked up, and so on? I'm guessing I'm going to need a boot-floppy with Sedoric on it .. but how do I get that boot floppy made? From another system, perhaps through the generosity of another Cumana/Oric user?

My main purpose for bugging Twilighte to send me this board was so that I could finally get a disc interface for my Atmos and hack around with it, and thats what I'm going to be doing - if it works out, I will use this rig to figure out how to make a floppy emulator using either a FPGA or some other Micro-controller so that we can use SD cards .. but it just dawned on me that even if I get this card built and working, I still have a bit of a hurdle to jump over, software-wise. As in, I'll need someone who has a similar working setup to send me a floppy! :)

So what do you guys think? How should I proceed with getting this system bootstrapped? I'm on the hunt for parts now, so I hope we can discuss this in the meantime ..
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Post by Dbug »

Easy, use WriteDsk to create a physical floppy from the sedoric/demo/game you want to see on the oric, then insert the floppy on the oric disk, boot :)
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ibisum
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Post by ibisum »

Ah I did not know it was so easy! Great! :)

One thing though, I'm guessing I need the ROM BIOS code for the Cumana interface from somewhere .. anyone know where that is floating around?

Sorry to be asking all these dumb questions, I'm just trying to get things together so I can, in earnest, get this project done as quickly as possible ..
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Post by Dbug »

You have it in your euphoric ROMS folder, look at the microdisc rom, 8 kb file :)
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ibisum
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Post by ibisum »

ah, that is good news, thanks for pointing that out to me .. ;)

really looking forward to building this thing! hope i can get by with a 3.5" HD disk though, DD's are really hard to find ..
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