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My C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 10:33 pm
by Steve Gray
My C4P software archive.

Thanks to Mark Spankus for archiving all my tapes and disks, and for the excellent WinOSI update!

I've been spending the last week or so loading my old disks into the emulator and re-learning how to use the OSI C4 all over again! It's been fun.
I know Dave will be posting some of the stuff here on OSIWEB.ORG, but I thought I'd put up a little sub-webpage off my main OSI C4P Page with some of my old games, game conversions, and utilities, along with some of the original OSI OS disks etc. Basically everything I had is available.

I'm starting to run the various programs and making screen-shots of some of the interesting ones. I will be adding more as I go, but I thought I'd make them available now. If you want to check it out it is available here:

http://www.6502.org/users/sjgray/comput ... tware.html

If you have any thoughts, or comments please let me know.

Steve

Re: My (Steve J. Gray's) C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 9:46 am
by RedskullDC
Hi Steve & Mark,

Many thanks for posting, and your efforts in recovering the contents.

I'm quite keen to take a look at this one in particular:
"OSI Dos v3.3 with Hires support for the Mittendorf graphics board."
to see if it has any worthwhile pointers to how the gfx board operates.

Cheers,
Leslie

Re: My (Steve J. Gray's) C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 6:54 pm
by Steve Gray
Cloning the Mittendorf board is still on my (very big) TODO list...
My experience is that the graphics board simply pumps out whatever is in the ram as a pure bitmap. There doesn't seem to be much else it can do.

Steve

Re: My (Steve J. Gray's) C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 1:55 pm
by djones60
Steve Gray wrote: Fri May 18, 2018 6:54 pm Cloning the Mittendorf board is still on my (very big) TODO list...
My experience is that the graphics board simply pumps out whatever is in the ram as a pure bitmap. There doesn't seem to be much else it can do.

Steve
Yes, I have one of those boards. From what I can remember and looking at it, that's all it does. It looks like it just clocks it's bits out with the character bits from the OSI video. Does anyone have a manual for one of those boards? I've either lost mine over the years or just can't find it again.

FYI, I started trying to draw the schematic for that board in KiCad. But, I got side tracked with other projects. I suppose I should get back on it one of these days. Part of the problem is that I was trying to learn KiCad while also reverse engineering the board.

Re: My (Steve J. Gray's) C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 4:55 pm
by Steve Gray
Yes, my manual seems to have disappeared as well. It's possible it's stashed away at my parents place.

I love Kicad. There is a bit of a learning curve but i found if I learned the keyboard shortcuts it was easier to use.
I've designed about a dozen pcbs with Kicad and reverse-engineered a couple boards (a couple more are in the queue).

I'm curious how you are reverse-engineering the mittendorf board. Did you de-solder all the components or are you manually tracing connections and/or using a meter to check?

Steve

Re: My (Steve J. Gray's) C4P Software Archive Page

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 2:52 pm
by djones60
Shame about the manual :(

I probably should have started out with something simpler to start with in learning KiCad. Then tried this board once I get the hang of it. I guess it's not too late to go that route, get the hang of KiCad and then try again.

As far as reverse engineering goes, I'm just looking at the traces and using a meter. I didn't want to take a chance damaging the board by de-soldering everything. Most of it looks pretty straight forward, like the memory chip array, buffers, etc.

David