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What I have So Far

A project log for Beckman DU 600 Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering process for a 68332 based system

joezatarskijoe.zatarski 06/06/2015 at 05:020 Comments

Here is a summary of everything I've done so far:

I have figured out quite a bit of the architecture of the thing. I know the addresses of the ROM, ROM card, DRAM, SRAM, SRAM card, EEPROM, both DUARTs, the parallel port, the keyboard controller, and the SVGA chip. Today, I also finished figuring out all of the external IRQ sources. Next is to figure out how the interupt acknowledge for all of them work. I suspect the DUARTs provide their own vector number, like normal, and all of the others likely autovector since the others are either discrete hardware or do not have built in functionality to provide it's own vector.


The first demo I ran was to blink some LED's about 1 time per second. The second I printed a test message over a serial port to my DEC VT420. The third, I initialized the SVGA controller and showed a picture in 640x480 16 color mode. I wrote a 4th demo to play a bit of music utilizing the 68332's built in Time Processing Module (TPU) by instructing the TPU to produce PWM waveforms of the correct frequency and 50% duty cycle. Next I ported EhBASIC to it, and messed around with that for a while.

Right now I'm working on porting a machine language monitor to it, zBug. Initially this was crashing right after it enabled interrupts. I edited the source and kept interrupts turned off, and sure enough, this fixed it. However, I decided it was finally time to trace out all of the IRQ lines. Here's what I got:

IRQ7 - goes to J3 and U27 pin 13. appears to be used for expansion, possibly the optional floppy drive interface.
IRQ6 - JA1 pin 26, KBD controller output buffer full interrupt, pin 35
IRQ5 - UART1 interrupt request
IRQ4 - JA1 pin 5, UART2 interrupt request
IRQ3 - RTC periodic interrupt
IRQ2 - U26 pin 4, parallel port /ACK interrupt. Indicates printer is ready for more data.
IRQ1 - JA1 pin 6, causes U14 on daughterboard to latch, U26 pin 2, used for 3 interrupt sources on the PSU board, two maskable, the third not.

IRQ3 is likely the one causing the crash. I bet it's firing shortly after the interrupts are turned on, vectoring to an unhandled interrupt, and then causing a crash. I'll finish up the IRQ stuff by figuring out the interrupt acknowledge stuff, then find the address of the RTC so I can turn off the periodic interrupt in my init routines and clear it.

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