Keyboard input and RAM disks make CP/M more useful

Wednesday, 16th June 2010

The hardware for the computer has changed in (mostly) subtle ways since the last post, with the exception of a PS/2 socket for connection to a keyboard.

Z80 computer with PS/2 keyboard socket

PS/2 keyboards (which use the same protocol as the older AT keyboard) communicate with the host by clocking data in either direction (keyboard to host or host to keyboard) over two wires, appropriately named "clock" and "data". An AVR pin change interrupt is used to detect a change in state of the clock line and either input or output a bit on the data line depending on the current direction of data transmission. Incoming bytes generally relate to the scancode of the key that has just been pressed or released. These scancodes are looked up on a series of hard-coded tables to translate them into their corresponding ASCII characters. CP/M accesses the keyboard via two BIOS routines: CONST (2), which checks whether a character is available or not, and CONIN (3), which retrieves the character. I initially implemented these by simply reading from I/O port 2 (CONST) or port 3 (CONIN).

As keyboard input is polled, CP/M was wasting a lot of time reading from the AVR. Due to the AVR's relatively slow way to respond to I/O requests this was slowing down any program that needed to periodically call CONST (for example, BBC BASIC constantly checks for the Escape key when interpreting BASIC programs). I converted this polling system into an event driven one by connecting the AVR to the Z80's maskable interrupt pin, /INT. When a new key is received by the AVR it pulls /INT low to assert it. The Z80 responds to the interrupt request by setting an internal flag to remember that a key has been pressed and acknowledges the interrupt by outputting a value to port $38 (the Z80's maskable interrupt handler resides at a fixed address of $38 in memory, so this seemed like a sensible choice). The AVR detects this write to port $38 and returns /INT to its high state. The CONST routine can now directly return the value of this flag when polled (rather than having to request the flag from the AVR) which noticeably speeds up running programs. The flag is cleared when a key is read by calling CONIN.

I did have some difficulty getting the interrupt system to work; the Z80 has a number of different ways of responding to interrupts, two of which rely on fetching a value from the data bus by asserting /IORQ before an interrupt is serviced. IM 0 fetches an instruction from the bus and executes it, and IM 2 fetches the least significant byte of the address of the interrupt service routine to combine with the most significant byte stored in the I register. IM 1 (which is what I'm using) just jumps to the fixed address $38. However, I hadn't taken this additional data read into account and when the Z80 attempted to read from an I/O device the AVR was either putting nonsense on the bus or (deliberately) locking up with a message to indicate an unsupported operation. Fortunately you can easily tell the difference between a regular I/O request and an interrupt data request by checking the Z80's /M1 output pin, so with that addition things started working a bit more smoothly!

BBC BASIC test session with the Z80 computer

I'm still using terminal emulation software on my PC to view the output of the computer, though as I now have keyboard entry the results are a little more impressive than the few boot report lines and a prompt that were in the last entry. I still haven't worked out why my PC switches off or blue-screens when programming AVRs over the serial port, so I've soldered together a parallel port programmer for the time being.

Programming hardware

The pinout of the programmer matches that of the website where I found the SI Prog design. The ATmega644P's SPI, power and reset pins that the programmer interfaces with are all adjacent, but not in the same order as the ones in the SI Prog, hence the small board to the right of the above photo which swaps the pin order around using wires soldered to its reverse (this saves a lot of breadboard space). The board in the middle plugs directly into the parallel port programmer and is used to program the 512KB flash memory chip I'm using for storage.

I haven't got around to implementing writing to this flash memory yet, unfortunately, though I have implemented a simple way to test a writable disk drive. The RAM chip I am using is a 128KB one, as Farnell didn't sell 64KB ones. The Z80 can only address 64KB without additional memory banking hardware, so I'd simply tied A16 low and was ignoring half of the memory. I have now edited the BIOS to expose two disk drives; the default A: (512KB of flash memory) and now B:, a 64KB RAM drive. A16 is now driven by the AVR; during normal operation, it is held low (giving the Z80 access to its usual 64KB) but during disk operations it can be driven high to grant the AVR access to the previously hidden storage.

Testing the RAM disk

In the above test I use the STAT command to check free space, the PIP command to copy BBCBASIC.COM from A: (flash) to B: (RAM) then run BBC BASIC from the RAM disk, save a program then run it again by passing its filename as a command-line argument to BBC BASIC. At the end I try to copy the new program back to A:, but as there is no writing support for flash it keels over with a fairly unhelpful generic CP/M error.

Now that I've finally got something working in a vaguely usable manner, I hope I can start to research ways to make it better. Sorting out writing to flash would be a good start (I'm sorely tempted by jbb's suggestion to use an EEPROM to map logical floppy sectors to physical flash sectors) and I certainly hope to dig out my 320×240 pixel graphical LCD and driver for output instead of relying on a desktop PC. I'd also like to upgrade to CP/M 3 (I'm currently using CP/M 2.2) but when I last looked at that it seemed like a much more involved process so I decided to keep it simple. There's a fair mountain of stuff I need to take in, but I'm certainly learning a lot as I go (I only just realised tonight that CP/M was capable of graphics output, for one). I'd be a very happy chap if I could eventually run WordStar on this computer!

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