+D and DISCiPLE Emulation for FUSE

Legal Bit

This work is Copyright © 2005 Stuart Brady, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence version 2.

Instructions

To use the +D or DISCiPLE emulation, follow the instructions below, and after starting Fuse, select Options → Peripherals → DISCiPLE emulation and then Machine → Select → Spectrum 48K (you must do this even if the 48K was already selected.)

To boot DOS, insert the boot disk and enter ‘RUN’. To list the disk contents, use ‘CAT 1’.

The Code

You will need to apply a patch to CVS HEAD. There’s also a TR-DOS patch, which doesn’t work at the moment.

The code has not been thoroughly tested, so make sure you have backups of any disk images that you care about.

I’ve put this here so that people can help out if they wish to do so. I’m currently cleaning the code up and submitting parts of it to the patch tracker.

To do the cvs checkout and apply the patch, run:

To compile, run the following commands from the libspectrum directory, and again from the fuse directory:

The ROM Images

I’ve taken the DISCiPLE images from the Spectrum ROMs Collection (thanks, Phil), although I’ve moved things around slightly. disciple.rom is just disciple-common.rom with 8 KiB of trailing zeros. I’m not sure where the +D image came from.

I’ve gzipped them, so you’ll have to gunzip them. Place plusd.rom and disciple.rom in the roms directory in your FUSE tree.

I haven’t tried getting the HP and Epson ROMs to work, yet.

The Boot Disk Images

Firstly, thanks to Simon Owen for providing these images.

They are in MGT format (in the SAM Coupé world, these are called DSKs), which means that instead of storing each side contiguously, the tracks alternate between sides. This isn’t the most natural format for +D/DISCiPLE disks, but it is what ‘dd if=/dev/fd0u800 of=foo.mgt’ produces on a GNU/Linux distribution.

I’ve gzipped them, so you’ll have to gunzip them.

Other +D Disks

Some more +D disks. You should also be able to CAT some SAM Coupé disks, but I don’t know how well they’ll work.

Some Pointers

RAMSOFT’s DISCiPLE/+D Technical Guide is incredibly useful. (However, see this correction.) The +D and DISCiPLE disassemblies are also very useful. For more accurate information on programming the {WD,VL}-177X, see the WD-177x datasheets [NVG]. Although the VL1772 is very similar, I will upload scans of its datasheets, when I get the time.

TODO List

Completed Items

Unrelated Items

Stuart Brady

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