Usagi Electric | Coding Assembly on a 1980s Business Minicomputer @UsagiElectric | Uploaded March 2023 | Updated October 2024, 18 hours ago.
The ‘ol Hawk drive on the new mini Centurion has been giving me all sorts of grief, so it’s time to get a little more methodical in my troubleshooting approach. And one of the steps that I took to get a handle on the drive, was writing a little assembly program to automate some drive operations. I wanted it to setup the drive, do a format write, read it back, and tell me what the status was. Then increment to the next sector and do it all over again. Sounds easy, right? Well, assembly can trip even the most seasoned programmers up, but I think we skated by with relative ease this time!
Centurion Wiki:
github.com/Nakazoto/CenturionComputer/wiki
If you want to support the channel please hop over to Patreon:
patreon.com/usagielectric
Also, we now have some epic shirts for sale!
my-store-11554688.creator-spring.com
Come join us on Discord and Twitter!
Discord: discord.gg/p7UsfHD
Twitter: twitter.com/UsagiElectric
Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
2:10 A refresher on the CPU
3:40 Let’s write some Assembly
6:15 The top of the program
9:19 How to do long delays
11:28 Setting up the cylinder address
13:24 Starting the main loop
14:43 Speedrunning the main loop
16:04 Checking if we had a successful read
17:50 What happens if the read is bad?
20:09 Incrementing the cylinder/head/sector
21:42 Our delay subroutine
22:31 Assembling it
24:57 Giving it a test
27:00 Kitties!
The ‘ol Hawk drive on the new mini Centurion has been giving me all sorts of grief, so it’s time to get a little more methodical in my troubleshooting approach. And one of the steps that I took to get a handle on the drive, was writing a little assembly program to automate some drive operations. I wanted it to setup the drive, do a format write, read it back, and tell me what the status was. Then increment to the next sector and do it all over again. Sounds easy, right? Well, assembly can trip even the most seasoned programmers up, but I think we skated by with relative ease this time!
Centurion Wiki:
github.com/Nakazoto/CenturionComputer/wiki
If you want to support the channel please hop over to Patreon:
patreon.com/usagielectric
Also, we now have some epic shirts for sale!
my-store-11554688.creator-spring.com
Come join us on Discord and Twitter!
Discord: discord.gg/p7UsfHD
Twitter: twitter.com/UsagiElectric
Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
2:10 A refresher on the CPU
3:40 Let’s write some Assembly
6:15 The top of the program
9:19 How to do long delays
11:28 Setting up the cylinder address
13:24 Starting the main loop
14:43 Speedrunning the main loop
16:04 Checking if we had a successful read
17:50 What happens if the read is bad?
20:09 Incrementing the cylinder/head/sector
21:42 Our delay subroutine
22:31 Assembling it
24:57 Giving it a test
27:00 Kitties!
