LisaList2

I don't have much to offer to help along this journey, but every time I see that there's another update to this thread I get pretty excited. Go Alex go!

It must be an inspiring site to see it go through the pre-boot hardware check and then come up with the "no keyboard connected"!

Okay, I'm very nearly to the point where I can get to the boot menu consistently!

In fact, the FDC and extended COP tests work great in simulation and I'm able to get to the menu there every time just fine, but I'm still having a minor problem on the actual hardware, although it's proving to be pretty annoying.

When running on the actual FPGA, sometimes the FDC RAM gets corrupted and causes the Lisa to fail the self-test with an Error 57, and other times it passes just fine and makes it to the "no keyboard connected" and then Startup From... menu. It looks like the problem has to do with setup time issues with the addresses going to the floppy controller RAM, which of course only show up in actual hardware where you've got propagation delays to worry about. I've tried some strategies to fix the address issue (like delaying the RAM CS signal so that it wouldn't arrive until a 16MHz clock cycle later after things are stable), which helped, but then that has introduced weird edge cases where things completely break if the 68K tries to access the floppy controller RAM at the wrong time and interrupts the delayed CS pulse from the 6504. So I'm now trying out another solution, which will hopefully do the job a bit better. I'm super close though!

Oh wow, that sucks! I've heard of someone having this happen and it frying just their CPU card, but not CPU, I/O, and the parallel card. That's pretty unlucky.

Interestingly enough, I've done this exact same thing more times than I'd care to admit, but aside from preventing the Lisa from turning on until I reposition the card properly, I've somehow never done any damage to anything.

Try looking through the boot ROM to see where things might be failing, and you might have some luck with repairing things. The CPU card might be a bit tougher given that it's not doing anything at all, but you should at least be able to fix your I/O board. I've been staring at the boot ROM so much lately thanks to the FPGA project that I can't keep things straight and can't say exactly where things are failing for you, but getting the click and not having that looping CPU board error (the one that shows up when there's no I/O board) means that the keyboard VIA and SCC are probably at least partially working at the very least. And it has to be setting the contrast too, so the parallel port VIA is probably showing signs of life as well.

Time for another progress update!

I'm in the process of testing and working out the kinks on the I/O board, and it's getting pretty far in its series of tests.

The boot ROM actually does a decent bit of testing on the I/O board before it even puts up the "Testing..." screen, with only a relatively small amount of testing happening during the "I/O board test" that you actually see occurring after the RAM test completes. Once it gets through that initial I/O board test, it actually goes back and does some additional CPU board tests (this is what's happening when the CPU icon is highlighted on the Testing... screen) and this exposed a few more minor problems with the CPU board. Namely that the "write wrong parity" and vertical sync interrupt circuits weren't working right, but those have now been fixed and I think it's safe to say that the CPU board is fully-functional.

It also completes the long RAM test just fine (the one that you see on the Testing... screen), so that's some additional confirmation that memory addressing and parity checking is working fine!

As for the I/O board itself, both VIAs seem to be working flawlessly, and the COP seems to be executing code and putting out its ready signal like it's supposed to. The boot ROM isn't making it to the in-depth COP test yet (that's the very last test that it does on the I/O board), but the preliminary test at least looks good.

Communications with the SCC seem to work fine too, although the SCC core I found from the NanoMac project is insanely limited, to the point that it doesn't even support the internal loopback mode that the Lisa uses during the self-test. For now, I've just patched the loopback test out of the boot ROM, and I'll come back and improve the SCC core later. Reading and writing all the SCC registers seems to work great though!

The only two tests left in the I/O board phase of testing are the floppy controller and extended COP tests, and it's stuck on the floppy controller right now. Up until yesterday, the floppy controller was actually completely dead, but I've got it in a much better state now. It's now happy enough that it puts its ROM revision in the shared RAM for the 68000 to read,  and the 68K reads the A8 just fine. And it seems to be able to address and control all the floppy drive control signals as well. I'm not 100% sure if the LS323/P6A PROM/LS174 state machine is working the way it's supposed to, but it at least seems to be running and doing something.

The current issue with the floppy controller is that it's failing its initial self-test, which the boot ROM notices when it reads the test results from the shared RAM, causing it to abort testing at that point. Luckily, I know why it's failing: for some reason, the floppy controller thinks a drive is connected, even though there isn't one, and so it tries to seek the heads back to track 0. But even after sending the seek command 80 times, the track 0 indicator bit still doesn't turn on (because there's no drive connected to turn it on), so the floppy controller thinks that either the drive or controller is defective and sets an error bit in the self-test result byte. So I just need to figure out why it thinks there's a drive connected when there's actually not.

After that, it's just the COP test, and then the I/O board should be done (aside from the SCC fix of course). The only thing left in the boot ROM's self-test after that is the scanning of the expansion slots for cards, but I don't have any cards "inserted", so it shouldn't detect anything and will hopefully just breeze through that test just fine.

At that point, we should be at the boot menu, where my next step will be getting a keyboard and mouse hooked up and interfacing with the COP so I can actually control things. I think I might try to hook up a USB keyboard and mouse, or PS/2 at the very least. And after that, I think connecting a ProFile would be a good idea. Not sure if this is even a thing, but if an ESP32 Verilog/VHDL core exists, I might even be able to integrate the functionality of ESProFile straight into the FPGA; no external drive or emulator needed!

Damn! Thanks for the heads up!

I picked up a Parallel expansion card and installed it in my Dafax Macintosh XL, which features both an XLerator and an LSAC. I didn't realize it at the time, but the Parallel card was missing its card stop. When I attached the ProFile's parallel cable the card shifted a little, but I thought nothing of it. I should have. Just like my previous experience with the Sun Remarketing SCSI card in a slot with a broken yellow cam, this Parallel card shifted in the expansion slot enough to short something and cause the machine to not boot. Power on, mostly dark screen with a little bit of snow-like artifacting, no CPU "pop" and... nothing. Yikes.

When the Sun SCSI card died, it took down some portion of the CPU board. Did the Parallel card kill this CPU board, and (gulp) take an XLerator with it?

Removing the Parallel card and powering up gave me an instant single beep and a dark screen. Uh oh... that's a new one for me.

I pulled the XLerator and LSAC out, then put a standard 68000 CPU in the socket. Power on and there's a screen with 19 vertical grey bars. That's... a new one for me, too.

So I swapped in a known good CPU card. Heard the CPU pop sound and the screen lit up (progress!), but POST would not execute. Just a grey screen sitting there with 3A in the title bar... not executing the full CPU, Memory, I/O and expansion card POST.

So I swapped the I/O board for a known good unit, too. After the I/O board was in, POST completed successfully. I moved the PFG to that replacement I/O board and powered up once again to confirm that, yes, POST still completed successfully.

The moment of truth... installing the XLerator onto the replacement CPU card (left the LSAC out for now). Powered on and... it worked! Whew! Reinstalled the LSAC into the expansion slot and it works, too. Pure luck.

So, because I was not paying attention to the missing card stop I have damaged a Parallel card, a CPU board, and an I/O board. This is the second time I have done this, and should have known better. Don't be me.

I have never seen a build for LOS. The commercial release was only available for Macintosh.

Hi

I am sorry if this has been covered before, was Alice, through the looking glass ever available internally at Apple or as a sales product for the Lisa OS?

How to make an Apple Profile Emulator (ESProfile) Volume.

Video Version:
https://youtu.be/eMKSRDPwqc4

Details:

Instructions for creating a BLANK profile.image file.


If you want a larger volume to use with your Apple Lisa profile/widget emulator such as the ESProfile, Pocket Beagle, Cameo/Aphid or ArduinoFile or similar these steps should assist you.

Credit: Sigma7, Ried and AlexTheCat

What you will need:

 Lisa Computer able to run MacWorks II+
 ESProfile
 SD card (high speed FAT32)
 MacWorks II+ install floppy image (or actual floppy)

Step 1

Create a raw file that will be used to create the disk image.

Images SHOULD be able to be created as large as 4GB but I have not and likely will not verify that.

If you want an image that will work with older versions of MacWorks 40mb might be the limit.

On a Windows machine from CMD (for a 100mb image to drive F:)

C:\Users\Tim>fsutil file createnew f:\profile.image 103914496

Or if you are NOT making an image larger than 100meg you can use the online file generator:

https://pinetools.com/random-file-generator

Use 103914496 as the BYTES size

If you wish to make an image larger than 100mg use the following method to determine the number of bytes for the image:

eg. say you want a 100 MB drive = a logical size about 100,000,000.
Dividing by 512, that makes 195312.5 logical sectors.
Dividing by 256 (to make a 'round' number) that's 762.9395 groups of 256 blocks. Rounding up to 763 groups of 256 we have 195328 blocks.
Multiplying by 532 bytes per block makes the raw file size 103914496 bytes


Step 2

Copy the raw file to your SD card making sure it is named profile.image

Step 3

Insert the SD card into your ESProfile and make sure the GREEN LED is on when the ESProfile is powered up.

Step 4

If you can boot to MacWorks II+ from another drive do so then mount the MacWorks II+ installer boot disk.
Alternatively, boot directly from the MacWorks II+ floppy.

Step 5

Run the MW+II install program (I used version 2.5.0)

Step 6

At this point you SHOULD get a menu allowing you to select the ESProfile that has the raw profile.image file on it.

Follow the steps to initialize your drive file. For a 100mb file it took my external ESProfile about 40 minutes to get through the “(this will take a few minutes)” screen. I read that the internal ESProfile cards might be faster but I have yet to verify this.

After the “(this will take a few minutes)” screen you will be prompted to install MW+II on the drive image and in a few minutes you should get a success message. When I used a file of the incorrect size for a profile it made it this far and then gave an error.

If you do NOT get the options from the MacWorks utility to select your ESProfile drive try booting off of a MacWorks+II floppy image if you have not already done so.

As a work around you can boot the Lisa with a premade profile.image file in the ESProfile then switch the DS card out for the one with the raw profile.image file and press the reset buttion on the ESProfile and make sure the LED goes solid GREEN.

Step 7

You should now have a new formatted profile.image file.

I recommend making a few copies so you don’t have to go through this again. Don’t forget that if you intend to boot from this file you will need to install a good working System Folder and make sure the folder is “blessed” (showing the correct System Folder Icon).