Econet Enthusiasts Area

Welcome to the Econet Enthusiasts Area (EEA for short). My intention here is to document Econet, and to provide you with the information you require.

This area has been updated and given what the French cutely call a "relooking". I hope the changes bring the EEA into the 21st century, dragging the aging 8 bit hardware kicking and screaming with it!

IMPORTANT - DISCLAIMER
A lot of the information here has been derived from guesswork and fiddling with the hardware involved. Therefore, standard disclaimers apply. Errors & Omissions Excepted, etc, etc...
As some of this information is of a technical nature, it is up to you to ensure the correctness and suitability of the details before proceeding. All advice is given in good faith, but neither I nor my host nor anybody else will assume liability for errors in the information provided.
If you spot an error, do the good thing - TELL ME!

 

It is perhaps worth pointing out for 'foreign' readers that a large number of Acornites prefer to use the antiquated phraseology "pling" to describe the '!' character; hence you may come across references to "pling Run" or "pling Boot" (that, actually, being the name of a program too!).
On this website, the exclamation mark is called an exclamation mark. Or sometimes simply "exclamation" if necessary, though it is often easier to just write stuff like "!Boot" and let you read it however you like.
The secondary use of the exclamation mark is to denote inverse logic signals, such as !ACK and !STROBE in the hardware description. This follows the C style of using '!' to mean "not".

 

Introduction:

 

The Acorn "FileStore"

FileStore emulator ??? !
Check out the FileStore emulator project (a work in progress).

 

The SJ Research "MDFS"

 

Clocks

 

Bridges

 

Network interfaces

 

Software

With the exception of BudgieMgr, these are direct links to the software.
On a RISC OS machine, you can usually download files by clicking the link whilst holding down the Shift key.
Under Windows, right-click and choose "Save target as..." (or similar wording) from the menu that pops up.

By Alan Williams... By Rick Murray...
 
By J.G.Harston...

 

EPROM dumps, documentation...

Because of a growing number of EPROM dumps and related software, this section has been moved to a separate page.

Contained in the link above are: E01/E01S firmware, Level2/3 software, MDFS ROM and software, Bridge ROMs (SJ/Acorn), Print Server ROM, NFSs, DNFSs, ANFSs, plus various third party ROM images.
Documentation of the 6854 ADLC (fixed, works with Acrobat Reader), and the 14411 bit rate generator.

 

Source codes

Provided here are exact copies of the sources to the Econet module, as provided in the batch four release of RISC OS Open. The only difference is that these copies have been loosely colourised to make actually reading them more pleasant...
If you would like to assemble your own module, download the RISC OS sources, do it properly.

Please note that I do not know the value of some things such as the EconetController constant. Windows XP's search facility does not bother looking for text in files it does not recognise, and currently all of my sources have no extension... useful, huh?
Additionally, the software used to colourise is a text editor called ConText (v0.97.5) which does not seem quite powerful enough to correctly colourise APCS-style ARM code (it is aimed more at higher level languages and simpler assemblers) . . . it can't word wrap either! Some day I'll knock up some code to do it better (and by better I mean "like Zap" <grin>).

It does without saying that this is subject to the specified licence conditions; though I can't imagine you'd want to do anything other than read this - it isn't complete enough to assemble...

 

I did try to make a with-extra-commands version of the Econet module by setting the constants ErrorInfo, ControlBlocks, PortInfo, and Variables all to True (re. s.Module); but sadly this is as far as I got when trying my module on my A3000:

The first problem was my assembler didn't recognise the 'psr' value. I aliased this to '14', which should have worked for 26 bit builds (I suspect I may need a newer compiler!?!?); is address exception problem the Econet module build or is it some little thing which is specific to the ARM2/MEMC system while I'm adding ARM6/IOMD/MMU code, or something like that? I'll need to poke around and see what is being included, and why.
There's no need to worry about the 'using station 1' thing, I did a Delete-poweron because I'd not used the machine in a while.

Don't hold your breath waiting for my module. My RiscPC's floppy drive is not working correctly, so I copy stuff (via ethernet) to the PC where it goes onto a 720K DOS floppy where it goes into the A3000 where it then crashes. :-) Might have been easier if I had Econet hardware on the RiscPC, but I don't...
...unless anybody has an unwanted Econet podule? [mail me!]

 

 

Can YOU help?
I was very pleased to be contacted by somebody called Johan regarding the FileStore and the information on my site. This is what has prompted me to dust off the EEA (after eight years) and my FileStore (after five years) and look to revamping it all.
Johan also pointed me to a mailing list where it appears that the 8 bit technology is still going strong. This site is a useful repository for all Econet-related material, however it is not yet perfect - there are omissions.
CAN YOU HELP??? Can you provide any assistance? Data-sheets, disassemblies, source codes, hacks, photos, your own write-ups? Anything you can provide will be gratefully received and, with a little bit of luck, people will only need to visit here and J.G.Harston's site to be able to find all they need to know!

 

"Thank you"s to:
Alan Williams, Jonathan Balls, Philip Blundell, Glenn Richards, Owen Smith, J.G. Harston, Christopher Dawkins, Mark Haysman, and a big special Thank You to Castle for incrementally releasing the RISC OS source code via the RISC OS Open scheme...

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Copyright © 2009 Rick Murray