wayne.hortensiu@canremote.uucp (WAYNE HORTENSIU) (10/20/89)
My sincere thanks to all those who responded to my query regarding getting the REL utility in Turbo Modula-2 to work properly. To summarize; REL cannot be linked to a .COM file, and requires something greater than a 58K CP/M system to function, no matter how small the original assembler source. I have a stripped down floppy-only 61K system that does the job even on a 1500 line assembler program. Now if I could only get around having to reboot from floppy ever time I change something in the assembler module... TM2 is slooooow on floppies! To all those who wonder just what I was up to (including a reply from, I believe, Sweden!), I was attempting to get the planetarium program, SKY v3.2, running on my Ampro with a homebrew V9938 graphics card. I am happy to report success. Since my system supports grey-scale or colour graphics, I've extended the program to display the star magnitudes as different shades of gray, which looks quite nice. I also managed to get a Kraft micromouse hooked up and working, which was considerably easier than I had anticipated. And in a fit of inspiration, I buckled down and figured out how to use a sprite for the arrow pointer. All in all, a wonderful learning experience, lots of fun, and a remarkably useful program to boot. However (there's _always_ a however!), the time required to recalculate the positions of the 2000+ stars, planets and galaxies in the database is quite noticeable; about 3.5 minutes. Given the amout of floating point trig calculations required for each star, it's understandable, but I'd like it to be faster, if possible, without giving in and buying an AT. Has anyone had experience with interfacing floating point processors to a Z80 based system? If so, I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences, pro or con. So far, I've investigated the possibility of hooking up an 8088/8087 pair. The 8087 uses a real number format very similar to the IEEE format used by TM2. The only difference I've encountered so far is a difference of 1 in the biasing of the exponent. This does not seem to be a difficult problem in conversion, as far as I've been able to tell, but I don't know what else is available out there. So; any suggestions? --- * Via ProDoor 3.1R
greg.trice@canremote.uucp (GREG TRICE) (10/21/89)
Use the NS32081 FPU. This chip is designed for the NS32000 family but its interface is general enough to work with any cpu. It does not depend in any way on unique features of the 32000. You will have a lot of grief trying to interface an 8087 or 287 to any non-Intel chip, and not much less problem with the MC68881. But an interface for the 32081 can be done in 3-4 TTL chips or one PAL. National themselves publish an application note (I have a copy - if you have FAX I can send it to you). I have successfully interfaced the 32081 to both the HD64180 in my XLM-180 and the Z-280 in an experimental homebrew machine (an AT with a brain transplant). I've memory-mapped mine into an unused buffer area in the middle of the Z3 data areas and written a little routine that allows it to be called by a BDOS call. The beauty of this is that it makes code portable between FPU equipped and non-FPU equipped machines. Those without FPUs can intercept the call and substitute a call to an RSX that does the FP calculations in software. If you're interested I'll put together some notes on my 32081 applications. National now have the 32581 which is 10-15 times faster (but much more expensive) and needs a 32 bit bus. The 081 runs with an 8 or 16 bit bus. Hoping this is some help. --- * Via ProDoor 3.1R
wieland@ea.ecn.purdue.edu (Jeffrey J Wieland) (10/26/89)
In article <89102003371508@masnet.uucp> wayne.hortensiu@canremote.uucp (WAYNE HORTENSIU) writes: >To all those who wonder just what I was up to (including a reply from, I >believe, Sweden!), I was attempting to get the planetarium program, SKY >v3.2, running on my Ampro with a homebrew V9938 graphics card. I am >happy to report success. Since my system supports grey-scale or colour... Is it possible to obtain the sources to this program? I have Turbo-Modula 2 and I would be interested in bringing it up on my Kaypro using my MicroSphere Color Graphics Board (TMS 9918A based). I have written a small library of graphics routines for the board, but I would probably need to extend it to work with Sky. Thanks in advance. -- Jeff Wieland wieland@ecn.purdue.edu