CFX

[thewiz]

Received my brand spanking new CFX last night. Looking forward to plugging it in at the weekend.

[Martin A]

Any issues, problems, ideas do let us know.

It's had a lot of testing, but the more people try it, the more confident I'll be that my changes to the original SDX and FDX code don't do anything silly or unexpected.

[1024MAK]

Hi Mark,

any news on using your CFX yet please?

regards
Dave

Yes, I have news!























It's very distracting, being able to loose at even more games, more quickly

I'm trying to do work outside while the weather is good, but have construction to do as well.

Here's some pictures:-

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Mark

[1024MAK]

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[1024MAK]

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The only problem I have had, is I forgot to clean the edge connector on my "work horse" MTX. It was a bit dusty and dirty, which meant the MTX ignored the CFX and booted to BASIC, or I got a silent black screen

I should note that this MTX is a "MTX512" made with a MTX500 32k byte main board and a 32k memory board soldered on to the internal edge connector. It normally gets used for tinkering. After cleaning the external edge connector (I used a quick drying solvent electrical cleaner) the CFX worked correctly. No other problems so far...

Well apart from my eyes are getting old and the CPM silly small characters make my brain spin...

Well done to Martin for another great design. And thanks to Dave for supplying the kit.

Mark

[Dave]

Hi Mark,

thanks for the update - it appears to be working then

Great stuff.

What I didn't do on your card was to set it up for the other CF card partitions too. You will find that the next partition also has data on it - from Andy's MEMU package, so a lot of the stuff is Spectrum related which won't run without REMEMOrizer or MEMU.

In case you hadn't worked it out, you can expose the other partitions be entering (from CP/M)

STARTUP RECONFIG B:18, C:19, D:1A, E:1B
That will create drives B:, C:, D: and E: using the first four partitions.

The next time that CP/M is booted, the other drives will be visible from CP/M.

You will need to format D: and E: before use, e.g., REFORMAT D:

As the card has 128MB, there are also another four partitioans that can be used, but only 4 at any one time, so
RECONFIG E:1C would use the next partition for drive E.
You can use the total 128MB of storage that way.

regards
Dave

[Dave]

Hi Mark,

yes, the small characters are hard to read, so not recommended for writing your next novel with NewWord, but, as you will have seen, loading .COM games from CP/M is MUCH faster than loading from SDX BASIC.

regards
Dave

[1024MAK]

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Ahh, these got missed due to the forum limit of only three attachments...

Mark

[Martin A]

And you can use the first 4 partitions as drives B to E from the SDX rom too, CPM has to be used to prepare them as there's no SDX format command (well there IS but it'll just return with "mistake")

If you accidentally access any drive higher than E, you'll get an error message straight out of CPM BDOS ERR ON x: and if you then access a valid partition, it'll sometimes just keep up with the BDOS message. Just do a ROM 5 to reset the CF if that happens.

[1024MAK]

If there is anything you would like me to test, let me know.

But if it is complex, keep in mind it would be helpful if you tell me exactly what you would like me to do (my CP/M-fu was basic at best and I do confuse myself from time to time as result of using Linux, MSDOS, Acorn/BBC MOS, various Sinclair machine DOSes, and AmDOS... etc... ).

Mark