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Supersoft HR-40(b) hi res graphics board

AndyG

AndyG

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UK
Hi

Do any of you have any documentation or have written down anywhere information that describes how to use the Supersoft HR-40 high res board ?

In particular, the POKE commands (setting the board graphics config plus accessing UD11 etc) and also the various draw commands and expected parameters ?

I know SYS 59650, SL, 0 ,0, 160, 100 draws a line apparently. The SL stands for something which is probably a sloping line but not sure. however you have to enable high res mode and not sure what the POKE location and value should be plus what the other draw commands are.

As always, thanks in advance
 
I have dumped the ROM but do not know how to Paste into this Page.

It is a 2532 EPROM ....

Please PM me if you would like a copy to review as I would very much appreciate someones help in working out how to enable and use this board.

Cheers

Andy
 
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With the help from Steve Gray, Mike Naberezny & David Viner, this is what we did to get my Supersoft HR-40(B) High resolution Graphics board working (Caution:- I have no idea if there are differences between HR-40(b) boards or other variants so this applies to my setup only).

Installation for my board

My board came already installed onto a non working 4032 Motherboard but I wasn't sure that some of the connections were correct. I found a post by Anti Florian on CBM-Hackers where possible connections were listed

http://www.softwolves.com/arkiv/cbm-hackers/13/13565.html

These were almost identical to mine, which gave me confidence they were right. Exceptions were, UB8 wasn't available on my board (80 column only) so I selected UB3 instead.
Also on my board I wasn't sure of the correct location for the blue DIP header (as mine appeared to be 1 pin down on the 6454 CRTC IC. ie pin 1 of the DIL aligned with pin 4 of the 6454 instead of pin 3 suggested in the post). I therefore tried those suggested in the post (as it made more sense). My connections are summarised below starting with a "standard" motherboard board configuration

• Removed the edit and character ROMS from UA3 / UD7

• Clipped Red wire to Pin 11 UB3

View attachment 38913

• Connected the board by pushing the 2 headers into the respective UA3/UD7 sockets

• Clipped the Yellow wire to Pin 11 of UE4

• Connected Blue/Purple wire into Pin 17/18 of J4. Purple to Pin 18

View attachment 38914


• Connected Grey wire to Pin 14 of J9

• Connected White and Black cable to Pin 21/22 of J9. Black to Pin 22

View attachment 38915

• Connected the Blue DIL adapter onto CRTC IC 6545

o Pin 1 of the DIL aligned with Pin 3 of the CRTC chip

o Pins 2 – 11 of the DIL then connected to TA0-TA9 (Pin 4 – 13 on CRTC)

Steve disassembled the ROM and found $EFFF may be a write register. There was a review article from the ICPUG magazine which gave a basic description and detail about how the board worked and included an example draw command which I tried. Steve's disassembled code identified other potential draw commands though the syntax was not clear (more trial and error to follow entering commands to see what happened)

Display Modes

With help from Mike and Steve, we started to try out different settings through trial and error.....

The register appears to have 5 modes available. To set the register

POKE 61439, n where the integer number n =

Below is what I have found from trial and error ...

n=1: Use the On-board 8K RAM for own programmes – address $9000- $AFFF

n=2: Blank screen but can still draw and write text but nothing will be shown until you poke register
with 5 or 7

n=5: Basic Text and Graphics

n=7: Graphics NO text

n=8: Access On-board Option ROMs at $A000 and $9000 – no graphics. Graphics ram appears to be preserved so when select 5 or 7 it reappears.

We also confirmed by writing directly to the boards RAM that it was indeed working.

Draw Commands

HR = 59650.

View attachment 38916

Scan Courtesy of David Viner - this article is the best we have to date on the commands available.

Mike is starting a Web Page to document this further with additional information as there is far too much to cover in this post

http://mikenaberezny.com/hardware/pet-cbm/supersoft-graphics-board/

A very big thank you to Mike, Steve and David for helping me out here - great teamwork & support as it wasn't easy!
 
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Attached is a photo showing it works at least

IMG_2029.jpg
 
OK - been a while but finally found the time to upload a number of photos of images created using the Supersoft HR-40B board. I adapted graphics drawing code designed for other Computers such as the BBC Micro, Atari and C64. Adapting C64 bitmaps was challenging as the pixels had to be remapped, as was converting the animation programmes written for the Dubbel W Board. For those I had to extract each image in Vice and write new compression/decompression code to display them on the Supersoft board. A little trial and error to get to what is close to the optimum image redraw rate.

I hope some of you enjoy them -

Can be found at:-

https://www.flickr.com/photos/138413235@N02/albums/with/72157692375923024



Cheers
 
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Thanks Andy! Progress has been slow, but I'm still hoping to clone this board. You can see my progress on Github:

https://github.com/sjgray/SuperSoft-HR

At this point most of the actual operation and software is known, and the next step is to reverse-engineer the pcb. I have started based on photos of the boards as supplied by Andy and Mike. However more needs to be done. I have to trace each connection and if the connection goes under a chip I have to either guess where it goes or leave it for later when more of the other traces are known and the connection is more obvious. I'm hoping at some point we can get a blank board to speed things along.

Steve
 
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Yes ... if anyone has a board lying in a box in a non-working condition can you let me know..... ?

I have uploaded a few more images, added another animation, and updated the link. They are now divided into two albums. One containing photos of the actual board and the other contains the hi res images I took from the PET screen

Andy
 
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Not sure if this warrants a new thread but .....

The 64k RAM expansion board is said to work on the FAT-40 4032 (Universal motherboard) as well as on the 8032. Does anyone have experience using this extra memory board including a working memory manager program or other code ?

I have been thinking of adding it to my Supersoft HR-40B configured PET with the aim of having extra memory storage for more complex graphics displays (just for fun) .... I strongly suspect there will be issues, for example,

(1) power management.... will the presence of both boards be too much of a power drain ?

(2) the Supersoft board 8K RAM is mapped from $9000 to $AFFF, so live drawing from the expanded memory to the HR board is going to be interesting (may need screen blanking or copying from expanded memory to normal memory then live drawing for example) .... though I have seen from the Supersoft Product Magazine (Winter 1982) that there was a HR-80 board that worked on the 8032 and 8096 so must be possible.

Its a thought right now
 
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Hi Andy,

(1) I don't think power will be an issue. Most power-hungry boards (including the 64K ram expansion, the SuperPET board(s), and the Madison Z-RAM) all have their own built-in voltage regulators fed directly from the transformer. Since the SuperSoft board already works by itself, the 64K board (with it's own power regulators) shouldn't affect things at all.

(2) Mapping could be a problem. The PET has a "NOROM" line which it uses to turn off the internal ROMs, including the Option ROMs at $9xxx and $Axxx. Masked ROMs in the option ROM slot should be ok, but EPROMs alone most likely don't support the NOROM line. So, basically we have to figure out if the SuperSoft HR board handles this line properly. We know that the SS board already supports selection of ROM or RAM for these addresses, but we don't know for NOROM.

You'd have to do a test, by grounding NOROM and see if the SS RAM is visible. Since NO ROMS will be visible on the system, you'd have to write a test routine in RAM that disables interrupts and doesn't call any ROM routines at all...

Steve
 
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OK, I ran the memory test program for the 8296 - this exercises the 64K board and reports any faults.

I used this previously on an 80 column machine to test the board and found 2 faulty ram chips which I replaced. I essentially followed what I found on http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/pet/repairs/pet_repairs_ext_ram.htm

Whilst the code expects an 80 column display, so the text on the screen will not be formatted correctly, it reported no problems with each memory bank. Importantly I also created a simple graphic on the screen from the Supersoft board and the graphic remained intact throughout the test. This gave me confidence that they might work together.

I wrote a simple machine code program that took an 8K image from the main memory (located at $5000) and copied it into the expansion memory (Bank 0, $8000). Then another, that copied it back to another location in the main memory ($2000) to confirm nothing had changed, and then copied it to the HR board memory ($9000) for displaying ... all went well. I disabled the interrupts until the code had finished.

I then modified the code to now, copy each byte from the 64k board memory to the HR board memory (enabling and disabling the 64k board each time, whilst keeping interrupts disabled), until 8K had been copied. Again the image displayed correctly, confirming the two boards can co-exist and be used to store additional images.
 
Thanks.....

I have now taken the Add-on loader source code from Zimmers (came as part of the 64k Ram board to load different versions of BASIC into the upper memory) and compiled it, fixed a few bugs and changed it to load only and not try and boot the code from the extended memory. I then took an image file, changed it load address to $8000 using a HEX editor (which has been great in building the animated images into a single file) and successfully loaded an image directly into the upper memory direct from disk.

The display program I used in the previous post displayed the image directly from $8000 without any issues.

The loader program will be very useful as I will next stack a few images and change the display code to loop images to emulate a simple screen saver ......

Cheers
 
I know this is a old thread but if anyone is interested I have a 2001 PET and it has one of these Supersoft hi-res graphics cards in it too although mine is a older 1981 version "HR40" (not B).
I think its all working but looking at it closer up its a bit of a tatty fitting job but what the hell its working so its a case of leave it alone unless it gets problems in the future. If anyone is interested I can upload all the manuals and fitting instructions that came with it. Myt 2001 PET also has a PETSET reset button on the side and a superchip rom as well that gives alternative (abrieviated) commanmds and hot keys to execute commands with a single keypress. I dont know how to test the graphics card and i dont have any software to run on it. There are even more goodies that came with this inclusing something call a audiogenic VoxBox that is a voice synthesiser and many other interfaces like Centronics etc. Here are some pictures of my HR40 graphics board and some of the other adaptions If anyone wants any more info on what I have here and other manuals etc. just ask.
 

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roadrash said:
I know this is a old thread but if anyone is interested I have a 2001 PET and it has one of these Supersoft hi-res graphics cards in it too although mine is a older 1981 version "HR40" (not B).
I think its all working but looking at it closer up its a bit of a tatty fitting job but what the hell its working so its a case of leave it alone unless it gets problems in the future. If anyone is interested I can upload all the manuals and fitting instructions that came with it. Myt 2001 PET also has a PETSET reset button on the side and a superchip rom as well that gives alternative (abrieviated) commanmds and hot keys to execute commands with a single keypress. I dont know how to test the graphics card and i dont have any software to run on it. There are even more goodies that came with this inclusing something call a audiogenic VoxBox that is a voice synthesiser and many other interfaces like Centronics etc. Here are some pictures of my HR40 graphics board and some of the other adaptions If anyone wants any more info on what I have here and other manuals etc. just ask.
Click to expand...

As Steve mentioned any documentation would be great. I too have that version also now.

Try the following. First do this from a cold boot as the board doesn’t like any of the add on chips enabled as the onboard memory is mapped from $9000- $a000.

SYS59650,5 to initialise the card. Your screen should have lots of vertical solid lines and some other garbage dots displayed. This is essentially displaying the onboard memory whilst showing the native PET screen.

To clear the on board memory,type (you have to guess you are typing it correctly as the characters will be partially obscured by the lines etc.)
SYS59650,C

If it clears then your card is probably working. A quick test would be SYS59650,SL,0,0,150,150

This will draw a diagonal line.

Interestingly for your installation, you have wires soldered to the ic’s ... mine has clips.

Cheers
 
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Thank you for that info Steve & Andy, I will give that a try and let you know what happens. I think the guy who owned this PET was a bit of a BUFF. There are a number of circuit boards some with LED's on and various adaptions like a speaker connection. and other unusual things. There are lots of manuals for the PET and peripherals like the 4040 drives and CBM printer. What is best I think is if I open a new thread for each of these items in case someone wants to investigate them all further and maybe conduct experiemnets on them each. This will keep this thread just about the Hi-Res graphics card that way. OK the first one I will post up shortly, its a Musek Sysnthesiser and manual.




































































































































































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