[E3-hacking] Knowledge of bootloader

[Mark Underwood]

--- David Given <dg at cowlark.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 19 January 2006 19:01, Mark Underwood wrote:
> [...]
> > Could someone let me know if there are any docs describing how I can use
> > the boot-loader to upload my own kernel into RAM and ideally also re-flash
> > it?
> 
> Yes, this has been fairly well reverse engineered. I wrote a tool called pblq 
> that would do this sort of thing; see http://www.cowlark.com/amstrad.html. 
> Someone else on the list has a very similar tool called pbltool which is 
> apparently more complete --- sorry, I've forgotten who and where!
> 
> Is there a decent set of resources for this kind of software, yet? The one 
> page I know about (Ralph's page on inputplus) has lots of information on the 
> hardware, but not much about software.
> 

Right, I now have my E3 talking to my PC :-) (hence the new boot logs) and have tried to run both
pbltool and pblq.

When I run pbltool it doesn't seem to pickup the right character at the beginning and just prints
lots of "Flushing: 0x**" messages while the E3 boots up and then "Prodding..."

With pblq it seems to get further. If I run "pblq -p /dev/ttyS0 -v ping" I get the following
response:

(voice and e-mail LEDS flashing)
Waiting for device to reset...
Handshaking...
Switching to 115200 baud...
(voice and e-mail LEDS stop flashing)
(10 sec pause)
(voice and e-mail LEDS start flashing again)
pblq: Protocol error: incorrect packet prefix (got C9, should be 02)
(Continues to boot)

If I set the fast baud rate to 9600 then it doesn't print the "Switching to 115200 baud..."
message. If my understanding is correct then this means the program has stopped the E3 from going
into it's normal boot mode and the PBL software should now be in a state to receive commands, but
it seems that any command that is sent to it is ignored (well at least PACKET_SETBAUD and
PACKET_GETVERSION). It couldn't be that my slow P120 Laptop is being outrun by a E3 could it (if
the response got sent from the E3 before the UART was read from would the buffer be flushed when
the read() call was made? I don't think this is the case)?!

Any idea's, please :-)

Mark


> -- 
> +- David Given --McQ-+ 
> |  dg at cowlark.com    | C:\DOS, C:\DOS\RUN, RUN\DOS\RUN
> | (dg at tao-group.com) | 
> +- www.cowlark.com --+ 
> 
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