Introduction && issue with Floppy
Posted: Mon 20 Mar, 2017 9:37 pm
Hi All,
Quick intro: I have been in software and hardware development since, oh, 1985 or so, and now that I am semi-retired,
can finally spend some time on projects that I never had the time for, and which need cleaning up. Its that horrible,
nasty feeling that you did not fully "close" a project, and you feel you must
Anyway. I have been deeply involved with the development of Minix, and, later on, Linux in its early years, and one
of those 'unfinished projects' was my Minix system. It ran on a 286/20 clone, and after three disk crashes in a row,
I gave up, switched to a new 386DX25 board with two new Conner 80MB drives, and started on Linux.
In early 1991 I was able to salvage big chucks of those crashed disks, and saved the data. In 2004 I was able to do
a restoreation onto an old laptop (adding in an IDE driver and SCSI driver while at it) and then ran out of time.
When moving to the U.S. I had to dump all my old PC stuff, so dont have any more of that here.
However... PCem to the rescue! I was able to set up a 286 clone machine that sorta mathed the system I had, and
I was able to restore my Minix system on it. I then upgraded to the 386SX clone which worked mostly well once I
updated its BIOS with the one distributed for 86Box - the one I had for PCem did not write parameters to the hard
disk, and so DOS kept seeing my 80MB drive as a 325 drive. Hint: that wont work
While working on things, I noticed that PCem often has trouble dealing with the diskette images I create, and it
turms out (by reading the relevant parts of the source) that the diskette emulator actually looks at what's in the
BPB on a diskette. That won't work when dealing with non-DOS-ish media.
Is there a reason why we have both a "Diskette A:" and "B" setting in the configuration, __and__ some auto-detect
thing in the actual driver? Would it not be easier to have an "Auto" setting in the configuration(-dialog) to enable
the BPB and/or image-size detection, or, if that is not enabled, just use the settings as per the config value?
Just wondering here,..
I might go and work on the code myself, if I can get myself to installing MinGW. Alternatively, I might see if I
can add a Microsoft C build env setup to the source distrib, and submit that...
(Admin: please let me know if that is useful to the community, and I'll work on that..)
All in all, so far so good with the virtual pee-cee !
Cheers,
Fred N. van Kempen
Quick intro: I have been in software and hardware development since, oh, 1985 or so, and now that I am semi-retired,
can finally spend some time on projects that I never had the time for, and which need cleaning up. Its that horrible,
nasty feeling that you did not fully "close" a project, and you feel you must
Anyway. I have been deeply involved with the development of Minix, and, later on, Linux in its early years, and one
of those 'unfinished projects' was my Minix system. It ran on a 286/20 clone, and after three disk crashes in a row,
I gave up, switched to a new 386DX25 board with two new Conner 80MB drives, and started on Linux.
In early 1991 I was able to salvage big chucks of those crashed disks, and saved the data. In 2004 I was able to do
a restoreation onto an old laptop (adding in an IDE driver and SCSI driver while at it) and then ran out of time.
When moving to the U.S. I had to dump all my old PC stuff, so dont have any more of that here.
However... PCem to the rescue! I was able to set up a 286 clone machine that sorta mathed the system I had, and
I was able to restore my Minix system on it. I then upgraded to the 386SX clone which worked mostly well once I
updated its BIOS with the one distributed for 86Box - the one I had for PCem did not write parameters to the hard
disk, and so DOS kept seeing my 80MB drive as a 325 drive. Hint: that wont work
While working on things, I noticed that PCem often has trouble dealing with the diskette images I create, and it
turms out (by reading the relevant parts of the source) that the diskette emulator actually looks at what's in the
BPB on a diskette. That won't work when dealing with non-DOS-ish media.
Is there a reason why we have both a "Diskette A:" and "B" setting in the configuration, __and__ some auto-detect
thing in the actual driver? Would it not be easier to have an "Auto" setting in the configuration(-dialog) to enable
the BPB and/or image-size detection, or, if that is not enabled, just use the settings as per the config value?
Just wondering here,..
I might go and work on the code myself, if I can get myself to installing MinGW. Alternatively, I might see if I
can add a Microsoft C build env setup to the source distrib, and submit that...
(Admin: please let me know if that is useful to the community, and I'll work on that..)
All in all, so far so good with the virtual pee-cee !
Cheers,
Fred N. van Kempen