#Mickey AMOUSE
4 messages in this thread
Don,
I have some of your setup. I also got in on the big '386 BridgeBoard
(BB) rush last year. On my system there is a separate hardcard with two
20 Meg drives. The OS is DRDOS 6.0 with SSTOR PRO data compression on D:
drive with C: (uncompressed) as my boot drive. Amouse won't work with
WordStar 7.0A but does work with WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. The screen is
CGA emulation on the Amiga 2000HD with a 1084S monitor. I have GVP's
G-Force 30 (25MHZ) with all the 5 Meg of 32-bit memory mapped as extended.
There is 7 Meg of 16-bit or autoconfigure RAM (1 Meg CHIP, 2 on A2091, 4
Meg on a GVP half-card). My Janus Handler is also 36.85; library, also
36.83.
I have not noticed the 32 Meg Jlink virtual drive simply because the
largest I have ever attempted is 1 Meg. Although I have Elite
Microcomputer's multi-function card with VGA, I don't have a monitor yet
for it.
What have you tried?
Sincerely,
(Mr.) Gayle Lee Fairless
'Perfessor Fearless' from the Rocket City!
via AutoPilot 1.03a
A fellow gave me the Trantor SCSI controller that came with his MO drive.
I'm going to try that with an old CDC 170. That ought to be an
adventure!
You mapped all your 32 bit mem for BB extended mem???? How'd you do that?
Doesn't the Amiga step on it or the BB step on the Amiga? Neat trick if
it works. Does that mean I could have more than 8 megs on the BB w/o
physically adding to the 5 on it now? I remember seeing something (that I
forgot about until just now) that did an expanded mem trick. Dunno.
As for what I've tried with the mouse, well, I looked at the 2 files with
a debugger on the respective sides. The MouseServ in PC/Services doesn't
tell me much, but the BB's \Janus\AMOUS.COM has an interesting set of
strings/data areas. Goes like this:
VideoMode : $`
Number : $`
Columns : $`
Rows : $`
Char size : $`
Page size : $`
Sequencer : $`
Misc. reg : $`
CRTC reg. : $`
Attr reg. : $`
Graphics : $““““““““0123456789ABCDEFMonitor type :
$Colour$Monochrome`
$(Enhanced)`
$`
VGA card : $`
EGA card : $`
CGA card : $`
MDA card : $`
Hercules card : $`
Hercules information unreliable for multi-mode card`
$inactive`
$H Kb RAM installed : $
That suggest that there's some code someplace to fill in the blanks. I'm
not the hacker I used to be (Thank you, Commodore! <grin>), but I betcha
there's somebody around that could get a new number plugged into the
'rows' entry. The hard part would be getting him interested.
As a practical matter, I'll probably end up using the Elite Multi-function
card I recently got on a UseNet deal for its mouse port. sigh
-DonM – On Autopilot from 1Q1 –
Chickenlips doesn't sell Amigas, we just buy them!
Don,
Sometimes the only method is 'Change and try' and 'Don't fix it once it
finally works!'
My Amiga probably has a gap between the 7 Megs of 16-bit Autoconfig
memory and the 5 Megs of 32-bit memory on the GVP G-Force 030 to
accomodate the 386 BridgeBoard (BB). I accidently tried booting w/o
pulling the jumper on the 32-bit memory, and, of course, it would not
work. Now this is distinctly Amiga-only memory. The gap has the
interface memory between the BB and the Amiga. You might call it 'memory
I/O' between the Amiga and BB.
Now the BB has its own memory. The interface memory appears in its
memory map within upper memory which is between 640K and 1 Meg memory
addresses. Upper memory typically has video memory, BIOS ROM's, a memory
frame (if needed) for expanded memory management [Remember that expanded
memory is really just banked or switched memory], and probably several
other odds and ends.
The 5 Megs on the BB is determined by the ZIP RAM chips physically on
it. Mine just came with the 256K x 4 ZIP chips in the first 4 rows. This
adds up to 1 Meg total (Trust me!). I put 1M x 4 ZIP chips in the last 4
rows which now gives me a total of 5 Meg for the BB. If I replace the
256K x 4 ZIP chips with 1M x 4 ZIP chips then the BB would have a total of
8 Megabytes of memory.
From the total (whatever it is) 1 Meg is used for lower and upper
memory. In other words, that is the first 1M of address space. The rest
has memory addresses above 1 Meg and is called extended memory. (There is
also high memory right at the beginning of extended memory.) BTW, an IBM
PC and other ancient 8086 or 8088 machines can NEVER have extended memory
because the 8086/88 CPU can't address that high! That is the reason why
expanded memory or memory banks switched into a page frame within upper
memory addresses came into being to get around the addressing limitations
of earlier machines. Some programs still require this expanded memory.
For those programs, software (LIM stuff) was used to make extended memory
emulate expanded memory to give downward compatibility.
Any additional memory for the BB would have to come from a memory card
plugged into a slot. For example, I have a Rambank card with 2 Megs from
DFI to use as expanded memory with the appropriate software drivers.
Someone else's board might give me more extended memory.
As for the mouse problem, your idea of using a separate mouse from the
Elite Microcomputers Multi-function card is probably the best way to go
since using a mouse is critical for you. For me I'm used to using
WordStar w/o a mouse since I first used it on Apple CP/M which did not
have a mouse. Also, the Amouse has been working for WordPerfect,
Microsoft's PWB in FORTRAN 5.1, AM (Arcmaster from New-Ware), etc.
Sincerely,
(Mr.) Gayle Lee Fairless
'Perfessor Fearless' from the Rocket City!
via AutoPilot 1.03a
Don,
I'm using DOS 6.2 here and it maps the 32 bit memory just fine. When I
tried using the EMM manager included on the BB disk, it didn't want to
work at all. On a lark, I tried the one included with DOS 5.0 and all of
a sudden, things started working. With DOS 6.2 I have my memory above
1024K mapped as both Extended and Expanded memory and it trades off
accordingly. You may want to look into it.
Brian
bjbart@watserv.ucr.edu