Category: Technical Labour

This is kind of amazing.

This is kind of amazing. I had an older model Microbee which I used with a Z80 assembler rom. I find the idea that people are still working on these vintage machines incredible but I get it too. They were fun.

Originally shared by Alan Cox

Fuzix first boot to shell on the (emulated) Microbee 256TC (Which is the iconic Australian 8bit machine)

It’s a bit shaky still – it’s only using the most basic video features, floppy write eats the disk and only the TC works as I’ve yet to sort out the crazy lightpen keyboard trick the older ones do.

From a port perspective the core code isn’t too difficult. There is 32K of fixed memory and 32K banked, text mode 6545 video and a 2793 floppy controller.

It’s in fact very TRS80 model 4 like and the port is based upon that.

The WD1010 optional hard/floppy disk controller isn’t yet done (driver is done but needs debugging) while the modern CF ATA add on would probably work on a real Microbee but the ubee 5.8.0 emulator isn’t up to Fuzix usage of ATA. Need to check 6.0.0

The 256TC is ideal in many ways – it’s enough RAM to hold 6 processes without swapping while the older 128K ones can only handle two so will swap a bit under single user usage.