Booting GEOS on the MEGA65

Ralph Egas, CEO of Abstraction Games has been helping to port GEOS to the MEGA65, using the disassembly of the GEOS 2.0 Kernal by Maciej Witkowiak.

This has been super exciting, because we have been wanting for some time to get GEOS running on the MEGA65, partly because we know that it should be VERY fast on the MEGA65, even without a RAM expander, because the SD card interface can transfer data faster than the REU on a C64 or C128 can.

However, we weren't sure that it would be easy to do, because GEOS is infamous for its horrible copy protection, which I hadn't realised JUST how horrible/clever it was until I read several pages at that link.

However, Maciej's disassembly of the GEOS kernal removes all such problems for us, and presents the disk drivers as nice discrete modules.  Thus, in theory, all that was needed, was to write a C65/MEGA65 disk routine.

For simplicity and speed of development, Ralph decided to make a version of GEOS that would access the floppy drive(s) via the normal CBM DOS routines,  without any fast loader. This allowed him to test that version under VICE, for very a rapid development cycle, especially since VICE could be run in warp mode, without having to exactly emulate the floppy drive, since it was only being accessed using the official C64 KERNAL routines.

Once Ralph had that working, the plan was to start implementing the MEGA65 SD card routines.  However, he decided to try this de-fast-loaded version on the MEGA65, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked:

This is because, like in VICE, by using only the official KERNAL disk routines, the C65's 1581 emulation DOS was able to service the sector reads. He only hit trouble at this point, when trying to write sectors, because the MEGA65's emulation of the C65's floppy controller currently has some problems with writing sectors to the SD card.  We'll fix that as soon as we get the chance to do so.

My first comment to Ralph, after congratulating him, of course, was how slow it was to load.  This was slightly tongue in cheek, because it clearly loads VERY fast.  However, it is still using the C65's 1581 DOS emulation routines, which context switch (very slowly!) on every byte read or written to the internal drive. This costs hundreds of cycles per byte, yielding a maximim disk speed of somewhere around 15 - 30KB/sec.  In contrast, the SD interface is capable (currently) of a theoretical maximum of 3MB/sec, and speeds in the 100s of KB/second are quite easy to achieve. Also, GEOS doesn't know about the MEGA65's DMA controller, and so memory fills are much slower than they could be*.  Thus, I think it should be possible to speed up the loading time by an order of magnitude or so, so as to seem instantaneous after hitting "return" after loading the program.

You can see the current state of the source code on github.  Ralph hopes to implement the native SD card routines soon, which would get us a fully working, and much faster booting GEOS.  He might then look into using MEGA65/C65 features, such as the extra RAM, DMA controller, and improved screen resolutions and colour depths.

* Probably "only" 1MB - 2MB/second using a typical 6502 memory copy routine.