RetroBrew Computers Forum
Discussion forum for the RetroBrew Computers community.

Home » RBC Forums » General Discussion » Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot
Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot [message #7992] Sat, 03 October 2020 20:20 Go to next message
thedrip is currently offline  thedrip
Messages: 9
Registered: September 2020
Junior Member
Hello all!

I've been stumped by my build of the Micro8088 and ISA-7 backplane build.

Currently I have the backplane, a Micro8088 card and a Oak Technologies 077 installed.

On power up I get the regular POST, then the system goes through ram check.

Once RAM check finishes I get a message about IOCHK NMI detected and no response from the keyboard.

I believe my biggest issue to begin with is getting the keyboard working.

Its is a generic HP branded keyboard that came with one of the workstations from the office. It worked on the Dell desktop it was attached to and also works on my desktop here at home.

Turning the power on I get a flash of the 3 status LEDs. I tried booting without the 12F629 and had the same flash so I'm not sure if that indicates anything beyond the 5v power is working.

Booting with a POST card I get FF every time, sometimes followed by DF and CF

EEPROM, CPLD and 12F629 were all programmed using my G540 programmer.

The G540 software has poorly translated English so I am not 100% sure the settings are correct on the PIC, this is the first PIC I've programmed with it.

I have tried the 0.9.7 bios plain and with XT-IDE included, no luck with either BIOS software.

Thank you for any help and tips you can give!

Re: Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot [message #7994 is a reply to message #7992] Sun, 04 October 2020 18:29 Go to previous messageGo to next message
thedrip is currently offline  thedrip
Messages: 9
Registered: September 2020
Junior Member
After more trial and error I'm really thinking the failure is in the PIC programming step.

The G540 software gives an unusual error

None Configuration worde in the HEX file.
Please Set it after loading

After some googling on the issue it seems there are a number of config options that need to be set when the PIC is written and I just do not know what those settings should be.

The G540 software in all of it's poorly translated glory is pretty vague about what these settings should be.

Has anyone successful written the PIC for an AT2XT with a G540?

[Updated on: Sun, 04 October 2020 18:32]

Report message to a moderator

Re: Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot [message #7995 is a reply to message #7994] Sun, 04 October 2020 18:31 Go to previous messageGo to next message
thedrip is currently offline  thedrip
Messages: 9
Registered: September 2020
Junior Member
Here is a screen shot of the config options. The PIC_CONFIG.doc file mentioned only specifies what half of these options do.

https://i.imgur.com/vCBwyye.png

[Updated on: Sun, 04 October 2020 18:33]

Report message to a moderator

Re: Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot [message #7996 is a reply to message #7995] Sun, 04 October 2020 20:00 Go to previous messageGo to next message
tingo is currently offline  tingo
Messages: 111
Registered: February 2017
Location: Oslo, Norway
Senior Member
Have you looked at the VCF thread http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?26426-AT2XT-keyboa rd-converter
Perhaps the relevant info is in there somewhere.


Torfinn
Re: Sergey's Micro 8088 stuck halfway through boot [message #7997 is a reply to message #7995] Sun, 04 October 2020 20:36 Go to previous message
thedrip is currently offline  thedrip
Messages: 9
Registered: September 2020
Junior Member
I fixed it .... not by figuring out the Genius G540 software but by remembering that I have a before now unused PICkit3 in the electronics projects box.

All better!

The Genius G540 programmer is handy for how cheap it was almost 10 years ago but has proven unreliable for anything other than EPROM/EEPROM programmer and 74xx chip testing.

It takes about 10 tries to program a 16V8 GAL correctly, so no surprise that it wasn't playing nice with the PIC.

[Updated on: Sun, 04 October 2020 20:39]

Report message to a moderator

Previous Topic: Help with booting OS-8 on SBC6120 Community Edition board
Next Topic: Chipset based IBM PC/XT compatible 8088 board


Current Time: Fri Mar 29 00:52:22 PDT 2024

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.00784 seconds