[LMH] Nevermore status and ROM hunting

[Nyef]

Hello all.

I've been messing with Nevermore again. Some of you may have
noticed that the collection of framebuffer images at
http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/lispm/nevermore/ now consists of
8 bitmap files, including some showing progress getting more
tests to pass the SIB extended diagnostics (my current task
as far as Nevermore is concerned).

I'm now running Nevermore from SBCL, which now works fairly
well (certainly better than the last released version did).

To help tide you guys over until the next release, I put my
disassembly and symbol files for the boot microcode in the
same directory as all the screenshots. The files are
prom_disassem and prom_symbols. Feel free to try and figure
out the great swaths of uncommented code in there (and feel
free to try and fix the Nevermore disassembler to work with
the contents of the *prom-memory-a* and *prom-memory-m*
arrays instead of requiring a weird 'prom-combined' file,
and an actual .el file for working with the disassembly
could be neat, as would fixing the disassembler to work on
the .mcr files in the ubin/ directory of the explorer src
tarball or on a microload partition image... There are a
lot of possibilities here for an interested person).

The other thing is, does anyone have or could anyone make an
image of the Explorer I CPU config ROM? If nobody wants to
remove the ROM from their working system, would they (you)
be averse to running a short program to read the ROM into a
Lisp array and then figuring out how to send that array data
to me? Thanks in advance to those at least considering it.

(And, since we're on the subject of ROMs, can anyone get
images of the ROMs for an Explorer II CPU or MicroExplorer
board? Once Nevermore is basically working we might want to
try emulating the later systems as well...)

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm gonna go back to trying to
get a few more of those SIB tests to pass...

--Alastair