BIGMAC Bringup

Now that we have a goal in sight (bringing up BigMac in timely fashion), I thought we should formalize and agree on how we are to reach this goal. I see it as a four stage process. First is of course, the delivery of the breadboard machine on or about 8/15 to the software group. Second stage is to get some kind of debugging environment in the machine. Third is to download our version of The ROM into ram and get as much of it working as we can andlor as is necessary to boot. The last stage is to get the machine to boot up and hopefully run an application. I propose that we try to use the MacDB debugger from the MDS system. This debugger uses a Mac as a very intelligent terminal talking to a small monitor «1k bytes) in the target machine. This is a very powerful debugging system that is for the most part done and should require little to port to BigMac. The one thing that it lacks is the ability to disassemble 68020 code (ho'lVever I have a line on a possible updated version) but I don't see that as much of a problem as very little 68020 specific code is in the system. I have the sources to the monitor (Macl'~ub) and the debugger (MacDB) so that we can modify them as nee.d be. Tom will be providing a ROM image for BigMac to be downloaded and debugged. Rodger has been working on a debugger/downloader that we can modify to use the MacDB protocol for downloading the ROM image. Once the image is in RAM we can debug the initialization parts leading up to booting the disk. From my discussions with Tom and Rodger last week it was decided that we would boot from the hard disk. This is a win for two reasons. First it greatly simplifies the boot process by not having to get wrapped up in the Sony driver (and EEEK!, the IWM) and second it is too cool for words to boot from the hard disk. First pass is will be getting the Finder to run. With some luck their might be time to get Paint or Write to work. So much for my view of the world. Please let me know if you see any problems in this strategy or perhaps we can discuss it at the next BigMac meeting. team: Rodger Mohme Peter Ashkin Tom Saulpaugh Rich Page from: Mike Hanlon