Atom ROMs

[Boydie]

I've finally got round to imaging the expansion eproms in my Atoms. I would have expected the 3 Econet roms to have been identical, but they're not so there may be some eprom degradation going on...

ISTR being told in the early 90s that FP is some sort of floating point extension to Basic. ONLI allegdedly stands for Online Basic, but I really don't know.

No idea what the Mystery rom does - it's only a 2516

[IanS]

Anyone know Paul Bond from the Econet Roms

Code: Select all

 :   *
 :   * Copyright (c) Paul Bond
 :   *      1981     Topexpress Ltd
 :   *               1 Portugal Place
 :   *               Cambridge CB5 8AF
 :   *               England
 :   *               Tel CAMB 65128

Do you know if they work?
Seems to be Econet 2.40 ("04.2 TENOCE" near the start of the roms)

[hoglet]

MYSTERY is certainly new to me.

It contains the following commands I think:
START
KILL
RQIN
RCLK
HANGUP
DEFPORT
PORT
TIME
COLOUR
XADC
TIME
PORT
REACT

HANGUP, so maybe a modem ROM?

ONLI also contains those same commands.

Econet 1 and 3 are the same, Econet 2 looks like pin D7 is stuck at 0.

Dave

[Boydie]

Don’t know if the econet roms work. Having a running econet has been on the to-do list for the past 20 years at least. Before I found them under a store room table in 1993, the atoms had been used in undergraduate teaching on an econet administered by a system 3, so it’s pretty safe to assume they were functional at some time.

Wonder if the mystery rom was to allow it to work as a dumb terminal for logging onto the university mainframe (a rather primitive phx rom).

[Pernod]

The MYSTERY is ONLI, whereas ONLI is MYSTERY mirrored.

ONLI is mentioned for the System 3, could this be it?

Also, from the Acorn Computer Systems Catalogue:

ONLI Extension
This is an additional 2K byte program which adds statements to BASIC allowing the
control of experiments in real time. Designed to operate with laboratory interface
the state of each output or input is easily controlled and timed using the 10 mS
clock interrupt.

[jgharston]

Don’t know if the econet roms work. Having a running econet has been on the to-do list for the past 20 years at least.

As they are Econet 2 they will only be able to talk to other Econet 2 systems, the definitive Econet protocol is Econet 3.
Off the top of my head Econet 2 differs by:
* 1-byte station number (instead of 2)
* 16-bit address blocks (instead of 32)
* the Immediate Operations are in a different order (Eco3 is &80+x, Eco2 seems to be a random scattering of values)

[jgharston]

Doing a bit of digging to more clearly document the early Econet protocols (and translate Phil's Ian's Atom version 2 Econet utilties to version 3) I found some anomolies with version numbers.
There's the classic bug in BBC NFS 3.40 where the machine type was 3.35, but this is the Atom & System ROMs.

The MachineType operation (Econet's PING) returns a four-byte block with the machine type and firmware version. The firmware version is documented as being the BCD version ab.cd, ie NFS 3.60 returns &0360. However, the known version numbers returned by Atoms and Systems are:
Machine Version
&0002, &3450 - Atom Econet 3.50
&0003, &3450 - System 3/4 Econet 3.50
&0004, &344F - System 5 Econet 3.40

I'm wondering whether to change my *STATIONS/MACHINES programs so if the top byte of the version number if >&0F to swap the nybble so &3450 gets swapped to &4350 and displayed as 3.50.

Also, I have written up that "The Atom typically used NFS 3.1A". Has there ever been any sight of this beast, and where did I get the reference from?