Foenix FNX1591 Disk Drive and F256K Software

hi it's Ian beta and today we're going to take another closer look at the Phoenix f256k I inspected in the previous video we are going to focus on the 1591 three and a half inch floppy disk drive that comes with the system and we are also going to look at some more sophisticated software that is available [Music] in the previous video I talked about the Phoenix f256k which is this newly produced retro style system that uses 8-bit processors all kinds of modern quirks but basically rooted in the design choices that the Retro computers from the 80s and 90s made just with kind of a modern twist and in this beautiful case with a nice clicky modern keyboard here and the FNX 1591 is the floppy disk drive that is available for the system this is a separate order obviously thoughts this is quite interesting in that it is a kind of a modern take on the Commodore 1581 which was commodore's three and a half inch floppy disk drive for the older Commodore systems like the Commodore 64 128 Commodore 16 you could also use it on the vic-20 I think because all of those systems have the IEC bus that's the bus that has these little din connectors so we're going to take an in-depth look at this in the first part of the video and try to make it work I'm also going to try it on a Commodore 64 I think and then we're going to take a look at some software that is in development or already developed for the f256k and obviously this is a really new system so there's not a lot of software yet that is completely finished but there are some really promising things and in the Phoenix retro systems Discord there are some developers that are really cool and are making super fun stuff at this very moment so there's lots of things that are being worked on for this and also there is the f256 junior which is the board only version of this computer but it is very much compatible with this there are some slight differences in the sound chips that they use but the programming is very compatible so there are games for the junior that should also run no problems whatsoever on this machine I'm going to take a look at that in the second part but first let's focus on the drive before I even try this I want to take a quick look inside and open this up to see what we got here there seem to be four screws these are hex screws actually I think there are some nuts on the other side so this is going to be fun maybe this is just clipped together and these are just holding the circuit board ah there's screws here okay there we go now it lifts off nice brass inserts here for the screws in the back there's also screws to hold the disk drive in which is a generic uh slim three and a half inch floppy disk drive I think they probably are still manufactured I would guess like for the kind of USB laptop this drive you still can get as new I think that's one of those so now we should be able to lift this up oh yeah there's our full circuit board and the screws on the bottom are really just to hold the circuit board in place and this is what's in here there's an fpga here which is a try on tat144 I think this implements all the stuff that is usually in Commodore drives like a CPU 6502 usually and uh 65 22 IO chips and this is a WDC wd1770 which is a generic disk drive controller I think this is the thing that communicates with the disk drive itself and then the Commodore stuff to make this compatible with a 1581 is in here and this should be a little flash tube I believe or no maybe this is a ram the Commodore drives usually have RAM and some logic here oscillator for timing everything and we have this assembly here which holds the LEDs which is connected through this ribbon cable so yeah not a lot but to see here most of the magic is happening in this trip I believe which is probably emulating it's not really emulation because it's Hardware level coding on these fpgas so it should be a very exact replica of the circuitry that's in a 1581 I believe and then the disk drive controller chip that actually does the communication so uh translates so to say the signals that come from the regular circuitry here and we have a power switch we have our power socket here we have a little USB controller and our USB port here to program the ROMs in here and we have our IEC bus thin connectors not much to see let's reassemble and give this a spin let me take a couple of seconds to thank the sponsor for this video PCB way my favorite manufacturer of prototype pcbs of all kinds they also do CNC Machining 3D printing sheet metal fabrication that can populate your boards they are very friendly people to work with and their prices are super reasonable so I highly recommend checking out the link in the video description back to the Phoenix it's a very nice compact design here I really appreciate that and the case uh just like with the computer portion is resin printed so it's really high quality basically feels like a mass-produced product which it clearly isn't because this is just a small scale operation so it's back together hope it still works so in order to make this work we are going to have to flash this with a kernel ROM and we can use all the ROMs for the 1581 that are available the drive doesn't come with a ROM for copyright reasons obviously the Commodore ROMs are still copyrighted so uh Stephanie who makes these is not willing to take the risk of shipping these with a ROM pre-installed it's pretty easy we're going to walk through the process and there is actually a way to get a 1581 ROM that is super compatible and even better than the Commodore ROM really the Jiffy dolls ROM is still available commercially so we're going to buy a kernel ROM flash it on here and then go from there and see if this thing actually works this is available from the Phoenix shop c256 phoenix.com for 275 dollars which is kind of a high price point but it is hand assembled every single one of these and watching the prices for a real 1581 this is kind of cheap I guess you can join the wait list and typical lead time for six weeks Stephanie is making these two order in batches so there's some wait time for this but you are able to buy this you are going to be able to buy this there's a wait list and you're getting an email as soon as these are available again so we need a little tool from this page that you find under support fmx 1591 installation and there's a tool available that's the FNX 1591 uploader we also need to install some USB drivers on our system here and as you can see uh this has the CPU 6502 which is on the fpga and the CIA is the 1581 actually uses 8520 which is an updated version of the 6522 or 6526 the cias and Vias in the older drives and the 8520 is actually the one that is also used in the Amigas commonly so that's just an updated version of the 6522 via in the end which runs at higher clock speeds and things like that and it has 8K of SRAM and 512k of flash so the flash is where we want to upload our current ROM this supports 16 kernel ROMs in the flash so there's plenty of room I don't think there's that many kernels available for the 1581 but there might be a ROM that is specially developed for this one which then if it ever comes through will be equipped with this drive Stephanie is working on that I think we're going to install the uploader thingy which is basically just an executable just extracting or executable and we need to install a little driver for the USB chip that's on here this definitely provides a little video on the support page here where everything is explained in more detail flashing the firmware because that's as I said you need to do that in order to make the drive work at all I'm not going to go through this you can watch the full video It's 22 minutes but there's links to all the stuff you need there's the Jiffy doors license I'm going to put these links in the description for this video as well there is the drivers for the little USB chip linked here that we're going to have to download xr21b 1411 so we're going to download these so this is the little USB chip that's in here and it's also the same USB chip used in the Phoenix F2 56k computer so we're going to have to download this driver once only the flashing software is only available for Windows I believe at this point so this is our little driver bundle and we can probably install this in somewhere install okay need to have the INF set up information I'm not a very good Windows user primarily using Mac OS so we should have the driver on here now you don't need to install the firmware tool that's just an executable you can put wherever you want on your system and obviously we also need dividors we can buy a license for that from go for retro and it's eight dollars US so it's not hilariously expensive and totally worth it add to cart or we can just use PayPal I'm going to do that so I'm just going to buy this I'm not going to show you my PayPal credentials but uh trust me I'm just going to spend eight dollars for this complete order so and I should be able to download this now go to downloads there we are that's our ROM image so that's how easy it is now we have a ROM image and you can actually find Commodore ROMs online but uh I'm not going to show you where to find them you are going to have to use your search engine skills for that I'm not going down that route because as I said the Commodore ROMs are still copyrighted so I'm not going to show you where to get that because that would be piracy so uh yeah without further Ado let's get into flashing this thing now we should have everything we need so we're going to have to power this on we're going to have to connect it to our laptop here and run the software I think so uh we are going to power this all this uses the same 12 volt Center positive power supply that the Phoenix computer uses just going to find myself a USB port I'm going to start the software and this is how easy the software is so we can now click on this connect button now it says disconnect because I already did that it's choosing the correct com port and we are just going to select a block on here block zero that's going to be our Jiffy dos I put these files uh I also found a 1581 ROM I'm going to send these to the trip yep I want to flash my FNX 1591 system reset there we go okay and we're going to flash our 1581 ROM into slot one so we have both on there the Jiffy Dodge Ram should be absolutely fine though we're just going to use that yeah and that should be all there is to it we should now have a ROM on there disconnect close the software and that's how you flash this thing I guess we're going to find out if it actually works now in order to select the ROM we have this little sticker on the back here and this row of dips which is so we can change the drive ID which are switches one and two on here this is the old Commodore numbering so in case we want to hook this up to Commodore 64 we can just select the drive ID with these two dip switches here and our kernel ROM that we're going to use is going to be Kern ROM zero so everything on off for dip switches five six seven eight the dip switch position for the ROM also changes the X activity LED color which is kind of a nice feature so we're going to have a wide activity LED color for our Jiffy dolls ROM I'm using one of these standard Drive cables for Commodore this drives this is a six-pin din IEC cable this actually came from a 1541 Drive I believe and we can hook this up to either one of these they are just connected in parallel in these drives and that goes into the Felix computer here let's see powering on the Phoenix powering on the disk drive we still have our SD card in here and we can change the drive to this one I think yeah we should put a disc in there and see if we can form it a disk with this so opening up a fresh pack of Xerox data disks here these are just a New Old Stock three and a half inch double density discs which should be exactly what we need this should also work fine with a high density disks because the disk drive in here is a high density Drive I suppose because that's the only ones that are available so put this in here and see what we can do so all the dip switches are now in zero position of uh so this should now be Drive 8 here and hopefully drive one on the Phoenix drive one directory doesn't do anything in basic oh it tries okay we get something it's actually accessing the disk let's go into dos we're going to change the drive letter to drive one drive one and make file system data JB so this should now run on the Jiffy dos system and we should be able to format this disk with this little command in the Dos kernel layer on the Phoenix f256k it's as easy as that let's hit return and see what it does huh it's formatting the disk I suppose let's see ah the sound of a three and a half inch floppy disk drive this is pretty nostalgic and obviously this takes as long as it takes as long as a proper disk drive which this actually is takes to format a disk in Commodore format this is actually formatting in Commodore format so you can use the disk you formatted here on the c64 or other Commodore machines that support the IEC bus yeah and that should be that we should have a formatted this no noise so let's see if we can read the directory yep we can let's go back into basic and see if we can uh address drive one from here as well yeah and it's showing Jan beta as the label uh so we can in theory go to drive zero again which is our SD card loads are a little Yan program that I put in there which is just a very tiny little basic program I made in the last video and we should be able to save this on drive one [Applause] and the drive is spinning up complete now we should have our yarn program on there yay it works nice so that's how you use this drive and it seems to work flawlessly you formatted the disk we saved something let's see if we can load it off there we're going to reset the system with the reset button oh the drive doesn't use that as well nice so uh yeah let's see this should be our SD card it's called Phoenix okay try one directory nice mode yen [Applause] yay there's my program nice and here's what it does not a very sophisticated basic program but that's my basic programming skills the next thing I want to try is to see if a genuine Commodore Drive actually works on the Phoenix which it should because it should be fully compatible with the Commodore IST bus so we should in theory be able to hook up a 1541 drive to this system and uh use it as the disk drive for the Phoenix also as an aside these two devices just look quite magnificent next to each other I like it I hooked up a real 1541.2 now to our system and it should probably work let's see I'm going to turn on the drive I have a random games this year none of the games are going to work on the Phoenix obviously but we should be able to access the drive one directory and indeed we get our Diana sisters directory yeah we can just access this as our disk drive here and obviously none of the games is going to work let's try another sisters on here [Applause] file on font oh it's case sensitive I guess [Applause] yep and this drive also has two videos installed so it is pretty fast uh we don't have nothing here because it's not a phoenix basic program but in theory you should be able to format disks on this uh through the Phoenix Dos and do everything we like and also save our Phoenix programs on a five and a quarter inch floppy disk with the genuine Commodore Drive here so yeah that's pretty neat so we don't need the 1591 necessarily if we want uh real floppy disks the real experience that we had back in the day we can't just use any Commodore Drive on this as well this is also set to device number eight so it's one in the Phoenix environment these also have dips which is the 1541 2 is pretty easy to set up as a device id9 which would be two in the Phoenix and you can daisy chain these uh all these drives have two din connectors for the IEC bus in the back so you can just daisy chain multiple devices So in theory we could just hook up both of these at the same time set them to different Drive IDs and access them from the Phoenix or a Commodore system for that matter but yeah just wanted to quickly check this if this is possible and it is so I got a Commodore 64 out that's also running Jiffy door's 6.01 that I also bought the ROM for and I have connected it to the disk drive let's see how it fares with this disk drive I'm using the disk I made previously on the Phoenix computer I'm just inserting this nothing changed settings wise or anything like that see if we can read the directory and indeed we can yeah this indeed seems to be a Commodore formatted disc we have our label in uppercase that means we can switch to upper and lowercase in the Commodore 64 and now we can read Jan beta and the JB that we put there and our program name let's see if we can actually load that file not found oh okay it's a sequential file that's indicated here where I move the cursor now so it's not a program file the file we saved on The Phoenix it's saved as the sequential file which is like a standard text file basically probably it's a basic program so it's probably saved as a text file that we would be able to open from a Commodore 64. if we made a little program in basic to open that but uh yeah let's let's try and format this disk I think on the Commodore 64 which should be pretty easy in the philos just the ad symbol and n colon then the disk name let's just call it Yan this time and uh A1 as the ID let's see yeah it started and this would be really quick considering that there's two videos on both the computer and the disk drive okay process is finished let's see our directory yay and that's a lot of block three actually compared to the 664 I think on a five and a quarter inch floppy just plenty of space for the Commodore 64. that's pretty cool actually let's see if we can write a little program here and save that just uh for testing so this is our little test program my usual and this would be device id8 as we said the iron beta comma eight yay we saved our little basic program let's see if we can load it again I'm just going to power cycle the c64 no strings attached so let's see if we can run this yay there we go sorry for the little uh overlay there that's my upscaler that I used for testing purposes here yeah that worked nice three and a half inch floppy disk drive that works flawlessly with the Commodore 64 and other Commodores that's all I wanted to check here back to the Phoenix I guess so I hooked back up the Phoenix f256k and we should be able to read our disk that we just formatted on the c64 let's see what that does yeah there we go volume name is Jan or Yan beta programs also on there uh okay it's case sensitive so the lowercase commodore is uppercase for the Phoenix it seems yeah there we go that's loading our program can't list it because it's not in the same format as the Phoenix basic programs which as we've seen are sequential files so text files basically that does work both ways which is nice that's going to be useful both for the Phoenix and for the Commodore machines I have so I finally finally have three and a half inch floppy just drive for my IEC Commodores which is pretty nice and as I said the original 1581 that was built back in the day for the purpose is quite expensive there are kits now which allow you to recreate a 1581 basically but this is kind of neat and it's also I think it's very much worth the money it seems expensive at first but I don't think that you can get your own one for much cheaper considering that this comes with a nice case already and the disk drive the actual mechanical Drive in there and everything neatly laid out a programmable kernels so yeah the final thing I want to show you in this video is some software that is being developed for the Phoenix system at this moment there's not a lot of finished software there are a couple of basic demos and things like that some machine code demos but there's also some more sophisticated stuff being worked on as we speak and that's some games that I want to take a look at so let's see how that goes in order to upload software directly into RAM on the Phoenix computer I had to download a python script that's the Phoenix manager I'm going to link that in below and we need to install some dependencies that that python script has and I also downloaded some pre-release software for the Phoenix that we are going to upload into the ram directly and start it from the Phoenix actually it actually took some time to figure this out for me so I'm not quite 100 sure I did it correctly but we're going to see I'm just going to turn on the Phoenix and I have my USB cable inserted in my laptop here and I have the script and I'm going to run it we can make this machine boot from Ram directly and we need to uh specify the serial Port this uses which is com7 in this case the target is the f256k this also works for other Phoenix computers that they made and it's a binary file let's see there we go for some reason I don't get sound output but this is a game in development method it's the simple like columns like game I think and yeah it uses the joystick in either part we just have to match three of the same and they disappear you probably know games of this type it's like very similar to columns and things like that Works beautifully Scrolls smoothly animation is smooth so this is the one example of what this system is going to be able to do in the hands of capable programmers not sure why we don't have sound output this is supposed to be a game with sits on playing but I don't get any I'm not sure maybe I set something up incorrectly or this is a version that doesn't have the sit sound yet I'm not sure which one I downloaded this came from the Discord the Phoenix retro systems Discord so there are a couple of things on there let's see if we can do something else here so this is another game in development let's zoom in on the screen for a bit yeah this is which rules the night so we have a little witch that we control and you can see there's three this green is split three ways so this is going to be a three player game I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do and this is very early work in progress so yeah you can see there's a lot of Sprites in here and I can somewhat stun my enemies by hitting the fire button I'm not sure that's some software for the Phoenix that's going to be available as soon as it's finished I guess oh okay I just killed the witch see if we can kill another enemy and though the little witch on top there by the way that's this scroll both ways yes it does yeah there's uh quite a few things that are coming for this system this is basically just a quick demonstration of that so definitely worth staying tuned I I guess some of these games are going to be available on cartridge even that's going to make the whole load process a lot easier than fiddling with Python scripts which I'm not the best at admittedly yeah I think that's it for today my second and probably not the last video about the Phoenix f256k this time focusing on the Flop you described in some of the games that are available I'm sorry usually these would have sound I think but my sound setup didn't quite work out I think my speaker has maybe the cable is broken or something I'm not sure we should have sound output from this but it didn't play yeah that's all I want to show you today thank you so much for your support on patreon and on Kofi and on the YouTube channel memberships page and elsewhere very much appreciated hope to see you again on this channel sometime I'm yamlita thanks for watching see you next time bye

Channel: Jan Beta

Views: 14,625

Keywords: Jan Beta

Id: e3ReLIuXocw

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023