CP/M-80 drivers for WD33C93 ???

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sun Nov 28 11:40:33 1999

<Yes, that part of the task is quite clear. However, if you have an ACB407
<with, say, a 60 MB drive attached to its other side with some very specifi

Ok thats a EDSI controller. The key question is do you talk to the bridge
board in blocks or CHS? Most SCSI disks (like my RZ22s are blocks) and
the drive logic dows things to make that into CHS for it's internal use.

<number of cylinders, heads, and sectors, there's yet another task to handle
<It would really be slick to figure out some combination of partitioning,
<simple arithmetic, and some form of sleight of hand, to map the sector
<number and track number you get from the BDOS into the physical drive layou
<directly, then derive a parameter for the benefit of the SCSI side of the
<controller to munch while fetching the appropriate block. The DR-supplied

For current SCSI and IDE I just map SPT at something binary and that set
tracks to a number I can easily work with. Since TRACK and SECTOR are both
16bit values (or can be) this makes it pretty easy.

Watch out for track (one head) and cylinder (n many heads).

For something like the old Xybec bridge you working with raw CHS so
something like 16 physical (64 logical) sectors per track (what it
formatted to on a ST225) and 4 heads can be sent to the bdos as 256spt
(4h*16sectors*4logicalsectors per physcial block). That means there
will be 615 tracks. Very straightforward. This gets a bit messy if
there are say 17spt (512byte sectors) but then if there are 4 heads that
makes 68 physical sectors times 4 (128 byte logical sectors) or 272 sectors
per track... awkward but manageable (note the sector value is 9bits so the
bios will ahve to capture the full 16 bits passed in DE from the BDOS).

Myself unless I'm working with floppies I give the bios table (disk
prarmeter block) numbers like 256spt and say 2047 blocks (8mb logical disk
with 4k allocation size). That means the concatination of TRACK and SECTOR
passed to the bios will be a pure binary number of the logical sector
(0-65535) the BDOS wants. I can then in the BIOS translate that to what
ever mapping I need. Generally for SCSI disks I add some number of blocks
to that to get the track offest for partitioning or system tracks.

<code (DEBLOCK.ASM) will handle the selection of the right 128-byte block
<easily enough.

You can do better than DEBLOCK. If you have space caching larger that
physical blocks give a real performance boost.

<Barry Watzman was kind enough to root through his BDOS listings to assure m
<that while the sample BIOS's in every case use only a byte for the sector
<number and track number, those are developed to 16-bits and passed as such
<in and from the BDOS and to the BIOS. This means one has to make no
<concessions to CP/M about contiguous block numbering. It gets ugly, though

Barry's examples are practice VS what the BDOS actually does. The BDOS
passes 16 bit values for both track and sector. If the SPT happens to be
set to less that 257 then you can be assured the BIOS will recieve a 16 bit
sector with the upper byte of 00. Why not take advantage of the BDOS doing
this work? For all the BDOS cares SPT can be 1 or 65535! all it does is
crank out a different "track" value for those cases.

Hint in the past I've use 4 spt! that means the sector number is an index
into a physical block for a 512byte sector (for deblocking). Track has the
relative block (0-16384) for me to crack into physical head, sector, track.
Or in the case of most SCSI disks the actual block I want from the drive.

The one thing that is hard limit is there will be 65536 sectors MAXIMUM to a
logical disk under cpm 2.2. If you have P2DOS, ZRdos, Novados, CPM3 those
all increase by a minimum of 4 to 32mb and can be as large as 1gb for
logical disks (if you can live with a allocation size of 32k and have the
alloc table space).

<if you want to fit those nice, neat numbers into a scheme supporting 7
<heads, 1117 cylinders, and 26 sectors of 512 bytes into it.

It will not fit as that is a 1Gb disk! Reality is the BDOS (V2.2) can
only deal with a 8mb partition of that (some 128 partitions would be
needed and CPM is never going to do all of them <limit of 16>). Also
while some of the CPM clones will address a disk this large the granularity
is really bad as they want to use 32k allocation blocks. It can be done
but you going to have to create a "different" bios that will allow ony of
the 16 logical drive to be assigned to any physical drive (or a partition on
one).

I've done this enough times to know what the book says, what people have
done (not all good either!) and what the BDOS really does (read the code!).
What the BDOS sends back is reflective of the Disk Parameter Block and those
numbers do not have to have any relationship to the physical device other
than some consistancy on total device size. Keep in mind the BDOS has no
concept of heads (you have to deal with that in the bios) and could care
less about the geometry of the disk as that is something the bios writer has
to decide.

There are few hard rules for the CPM bios and a great deal of flexibility
if you care to take advantage.

Allison
Received on Sun Nov 28 1999 - 11:40:33 GMT