General Category > LisaList2
Monitor format for ProFiles
stepleton:
I've tried the Monitor ProFile images on my Lisas (Lisa 1, Lisa 2/10, both with 1 MiB of RAM) and am not getting very far: immediately after trying to boot from the drive image, it gooses the screen contrast in one direction or another (probably sending it uninitialised data from RAM), beeps, and then sends the machine into a boot ROM boot failure dialogue (or at least it seems to do that when the screen is still visible).
I've tried serving the images from a Cameo/Aphid or an ESProFile with the same outcome. In both cases I am booting from the I/O board's own parallel port.
Alex, how are you minting your hard drive images? I'm using dc42_to_rraw (note two r's) from LisaEm at HEAD and applying it to the .dc42 ProFile images that pablo_marx has shared.
I expect you must be doing something to make your own images, since pablo_marx's raw hard drive images have interleaved sectors and are not bootable when served by an ESProFile or a Cameo/Aphid: you can tell since the third word of the image isn't $aaaa. I can produce exact duplicates of these files by applying dc42_to_raw (note one r) to the .dc42 files.
One last thought: Alex, you seem like someone who might have 2 MiB RAM fitted in your Lisa, and I know these images require a specific amount of RAM...
stepleton:
--- Quote from: pablo_marx on April 12, 2025, 01:01:40 am ---I've attached a zip containing the assembler output files (the listing, object and symbols file), as well as two 5MB Profile images (raw and dc42) and an 800KB image. While I've been successful running the assembler in lisaem with both floppy and Profile images, the output files are only correct when ran from the Profile image. On the 800KB, it looks like random bits of memory were written instead of what should've been, and on subsequent launches of lisaem it complains about invalid checksums in the dc42 file. Hopefully these are lisaem issues with 800KB disk handling. If somebody would like to try the floppy image on hardware, afterwards you could probably search the dc42 file in a hex editor for FILE:monitor.TEXT, or use the Python script from https://github.com/d235j/lisa-utilities, or send me the file.
--- End quote ---
I attempted this build with the 800K image served to my Lisa 2/10 by a Floppy Emu. Historically I haven't had problems reading 800K disk images on my 2/10 even though it is in a stock 400K configuration; I can't recall now if I've done much writing, though.
You weren't kidding about that cup-of-tea thing: the build process takes a couple of hours!
Unfortunately it was early in the "assembley"'s "pass one" that the whole show was brought to a halt by a disk error. By then it was quite late at night (I had actually dozed in bed for a bit), so I didn't have the wits to take a photo exactly of what it said.
stepleton:
On second thought, I'm not certain how dependable the 800K disk result is. It's been a very long time since I've updated the firmware on my Floppy Emu and it's possible that there are some old bugs there.
I just tried using BLU to read a whole 800k disk into RAM and then write it to a new disk image. Both operations appear to have completed successfully, but then a failure was encountered when I tried to verify the newly written image with the image in RAM. I will see about upgrading the RAM and then try again if I still have time.
UPDATE I retract the retraction :-) it seems that at some point I had actually updated the Floppy Emu to the latest version. Is anyone aware of poor experiences when working with 800k disk images on a machine with the stock (400k) ROM? Sunrem must have issued a patched ROM for a reason, I suppose...
AlexTheCat123:
--- Quote from: stepleton on April 17, 2025, 06:29:12 pm ---Alex, how are you minting your hard drive images? I'm using dc42_to_rraw (note two r's) from LisaEm at HEAD and applying it to the .dc42 ProFile images that pablo_marx has shared.
I expect you must be doing something to make your own images, since pablo_marx's raw hard drive images have interleaved sectors and are not bootable when served by an ESProFile or a Cameo/Aphid: you can tell since the third word of the image isn't $aaaa. I can produce exact duplicates of these files by applying dc42_to_raw (note one r) to the .dc42 files.
One last thought: Alex, you seem like someone who might have 2 MiB RAM fitted in your Lisa, and I know these images require a specific amount of RAM...
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I used dc42-to-rraw as well. It's been a few days, so don't quote me on this, but I believe I used either the -i or -d option to interleave or deinterleave the image.
I do indeed have 2MB of RAM in my Lisa, so I guess RAM size could play a role too. We know these images also work with 1.5MB because of LisaEm, but I'm not sure if anyone's gotten it to work on anything less than that.
stepleton:
The -d flag for dc42_to_rraw appears to have done the trick!
The Smalltalk ProFile image boots on my Lisa 1 and Lisa 2/10 both: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Koh6G3KLBQNxJmqf7
It's great how quickly Smalltalk loads, but I'm afraid that speed prepares you for a let-down when you actually try using the system! A speed demon it is not.
All functionality appears to be present in any case, except for at least one thing. I accidentally selected "snapshot" from the "yellow button" menu, which ought to dump the current VM memory image to disk. Either it froze completely or it just takes ages, much longer than the several minutes I gave it.
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