LisaList2

Quote from: bmwcyclist on July 29, 2026, 04:31:12 PMthere is no LOS FTP client?

Correct, there is none (for now at least).

LisaTerminal is the only transfer option that comes to mind.

edit: and IIRC, Stepleton captured some LOS print output recently, and massaged it into text and graphics for a modern system.

Aside: How many of you would prefer a post like this be moved to its own topic, or do you not care if subject titles are less specific?

I have been unsucessful in getting my LISA FPGA to boot into LOS.

I have used a copy that works on my 2/10 "

Any suggestions?

Quote from: bmwcyclist on July 29, 2026, 08:11:58 PMI have been unsucessful in getting my LISA FPGA to boot into LOS.

I have used a copy that works on my 2/10 as well as the GitHub "LOS Compilation Base.image"

Any suggestions?

What brand/model of SD card are you using? Alex mentioned some don't work

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What brand/model of SD card are you using? Alex mentioned some don't work
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Several models all high speed.

Interestingly, I just got it to boot off of LOS 2.0!

Tim, have you tried downloading and using the LOS 3.1 disk image that I attached to this post?

Quote from: ried on July 18, 2026, 08:03:03 PMSince the pre-existing LOS 3.1 disk images didn't work for me - even those labeled "fresh install" - I went ahead and created a 10MB disk image and installed LOS 3.1 with all of the 7/7 apps. These should work for everyone if the LisaFPGA uses the same Video State ROM on all LisaFPGA builds. Cheers.

Quote from: ried on July 29, 2026, 09:28:25 PMTim, have you tried downloading and using the LOS 3.1 disk image that I attached to this post?

Quote from: ried on July 18, 2026, 08:03:03 PMSince the pre-existing LOS 3.1 disk images didn't work for me - even those labeled "fresh install" - I went ahead and created a 10MB disk image and installed LOS 3.1 with all of the 7/7 apps. These should work for everyone if the LisaFPGA uses the same Video State ROM on all LisaFPGA builds. Cheers.

No, I missed that. Thank you. I'll give it a try tomorrow!

Quote from: bmwcyclist on July 29, 2026, 08:11:58 PMI have used a copy that works on my 2/10 "

That's probably why! Either use an LOS image that was made on a 2/5, or install a jumper wire between GPIO0 and 3V3 on the board to trick it into thinking that it's a 2/10.

Quote from: AlexTheCat123 on July 29, 2026, 11:54:21 PM

Quote from: bmwcyclist on July 29, 2026, 08:11:58 PMI have used a copy that works on my 2/10 "

That's probably why! Either use an LOS image that was made on a 2/5, or install a jumper wire between GPIO0 and 3V3 on the board to trick it into thinking that it's a 2/10.

Thanks! I love this thing, I am learning quite a bit I never knew about LISA and the LOS!

ried's build works great! Thanks!

Still not getting the LOS Compilation Base.image to work even with the sm fcc180 00ff 0055 00aa PRAM reset.

Going to try the jumper next...

Compilation image DOES work once 2/10 jumper is installed on the FPGA! 

During my efforts to get Twiggy emulation working on ESFloppy, I discovered that the hang in LOS 1.0 is NOT because Twiggy drives aren't connected and was actually because of a bug in the LisaFPGA floppy controller. The 6504's stack page was set to the wrong place in the FDC's memory and was clobbering actual FDC data as more and more stuff got pushed onto the stack, causing the FDC to get stuck in weird infinite loops, randomly reset itself, and sometimes fail to respond to the 68K. Moving the stack page to where it was supposed to be fixed the problem, and now LOS 1.0 will boot regardless of whether or not Twiggies are connected! Make sure you have the 40 ROMs selected though; LOS 1.0 will still crash with the A8 ROMs and that's by design.

Oddly enough, this bug didn't expose itself with the A8 ROMs for whatever reason; only with the 40 ROMs. I guess 40 either pushes more stuff onto the stack or stores more sensitive info near the invalid stack location. Who knows?

The updated core is now available on GitHub, so go ahead and flash that to your board if you want to get LOS 1.0 running and unlock full Twiggy support!

Quote from: AlexTheCat123 on August 03, 2026, 02:31:27 PMThe updated core is now available on GitHub, so go ahead and flash that to your board if you want to get LOS 1.0 running and unlock full Twiggy support!

Will that update also give Sony 400/800k support under the other ROMs?

Thanks for all of the great work!

No, the 40 ROMs are designed specifically for Twiggies and the A8 ROMs are for Sony drives. You can't use Sony drives with the 40 ROMs.

Quote from: AlexTheCat123 on August 03, 2026, 02:31:27 PMThe updated core is now available on GitHub, so go ahead and flash that to your board if you want to get LOS 1.0 running and unlock full Twiggy support!

Thanks for the update! I had a look at the updater script, and I decided that it was a bit too presumptuous about installing things for my old-fashioned tastes: I wasn't going to run it on my Linux box directly. (I draw the line at curl'ing a script and piping it into a UID 0 shell without asking, even though that's fashionable these days. Actually I draw the line back quite some ways behind that.)

Since just running the script directly was a non-starter for me, I was hoping it would be possible to do in a virtual machine. I'm happy for the script to do whatever it wants in a VM; my actual permanent installation won't be altered. Here's how I got on:

• Using virt-manager on linux, I made a fresh VM and installed debian from an iso.
• While installing, I went to the instance's virtual hardware details tab and added a whole bunch of USB redirectors, since to Linux, a LisaFPGA is about four separate USB devices. (Actually it's five... forshadowing...)
• Once booted into my fresh new debian system, I installed git (and curl, make, and gcc, which are also needed) via apt and cloned the LisaFPGA repo.
• I plugged my LisaFPGA into my computer, then used "Redirect USB device" from the Virtual Machine menu to redirect four visible LisaFPGA devices (two Espressif devices and two devices with LisaFPGA in the name) into the VM.
• I did `sudo ./program_board.sh` and things were plain sailing until it attempted to find out which serial ports were the ESProFile and the ESFloppy, where it complained it couldn't find the CH334 USB hub ("is the board plugged in?"). It appears that there's no way to redirect the hub itself into the VM. But since the script only seems to use this to identify the serial ports, I eventually just decided to YOLO a guess that the ESProFile would be ACM0 and the ESFloppy would be ACM1. If I got it wrong, could it be all that bad? Aren't they the same ESP32 devices and couldn't I just swap them around and try again?
• So I `sudo ./program_board.sh`ed again and it all seemed to go fine.
• I undid the four USB redirects and restarted the LisaFPGA. All is well; looks like I guessed right about ACM0 and ACM1!

So it started well, then turned into one of those experiences I call "some Linux or something", and then all worked out in the end. (NB: I am not casting aspersions at the script, which is written for a different setup and system of preferences than my own; I essentially blame these kinds of experiences on the OS.)

For future VM-based upgrades, it looks like I'm going to have to do that same serial port YOLO unless there's a different device identification method that doesn't need the USB hub to be there. I'm a bit out of my depth to suggest something; I'm guessing you can't rename the "Espressif USB JTAG/serial debug unit" that you find in an `lsusb` listing, but I wonder if there's a way to match the corresponding bus and device addresses in the listing to a /dev/ device without involving the hub.

Either way, I'm probably a special case for wanting to upgrade from inside of a VM, so there are probably better things to do than to fix this.

Meanwhile, who remembers the mysterious, marvelous pablo_marx? This wizard came out of the woodwork in early 2025 and hacked the Monitor OS to boot from a ProFile instead of from floppies... then went from that to get the Apple Lisa Smalltalk demo from that Bitsavers twiggy disk image to run on the Lisa 2 from a hard-drive bootable Monitor. It all happened in this thread, and after these accomplishments our Marx vanished to start another revolution somewhere else.

I mention this because LisaFPGA rejects this form of Marxism by pitching an Error 75 when attempting to boot one of these Monitor drive images, or at least it does for me. I'm not sure why this would happen, and it's possible the problem is on my end, so I wonder: does it happen for anyone else?