MiSTer FPGA Forum

Bas

Build 92 just came down the pipes. It's functionally almost identical to build 64 from earlier. However: The YAML format changed and is now far more sensible and more in line with what is in the enclosed manual. The OS files now also get downloaded instead of being hardcoded into the binary. The downloader fully works and is now wired into the appl...

Bas

Are you 100% positive the exfat partition on your SD card is free of any and all structural errors? This seems a highly unlikely path because you already tried another card, started over from scratch and tried a USB drive, but still. It's in the critical path and is slightly different from having a physically defective card. A new card would happil...

Bas

I just read the LICENSE file. What in there makes the Nuked SC-55's license incompatible? I don't see anything in there that would preclude me from building it to run on a Pi, and connecting it to my MiSTer in a similar way that mt32-pi is. The license does preclude me from manufacturing and selling such a setup as a package deal commercially, but ...

Bas

That, or symlink /usr/bin/python to the one you do have. That's probably quicker and a one-off action.

Bas

386DX doesn't include an FPU, just a 32-bit data bus. The FPU came with the 486DX.

Bas

I haven't looked at the script, but Python may well be in a different place or have a different name from what the script expects. What's the output of the "which python" command on your system? If your system knows Python 3 by the name "python" it will tell you the path. If the script looks in a different place, you could duct ...

Bas

Jq is a package that queries JSON and should be installable through your distro package manager.

Bas

Oh and another thing. As long as you don't support things like long filenames and things like DR-DOS, there are lots of unused bytes in the directory entries FAT uses to store file metadata. You could try and pick a byte there to flag as your very own attribute or even fit a 32-bit timestamp in there. MS and IBM DOS won't be none the wiser until yo...

Bas

Mtools should work on MiSTer.

Bas

Dumb question maybe, but how is this conceptually different from using an already existing backup solution from the days of DOS? I love the idea at first glance, but it does not look all that different from existing backup tools to me. I must admit that I only just skimmed your design though. A potential orange flag I'm seeing is relying on accurac...

Bas

Interesting. This looks a lot more complete than the previous code, which was a steaming mess of versions all mixed together.

Bas

Just a quick update on progress. Lots of regression as I'm generalizing the method of writing files/dirs to the file system. So while it seemed that build 64 was really close, I had to rip out ever growing parts of the file system code to allow for the general pattern of: extract this ZIP file to a temp location, then copy everything from that loca...

Bas

My MiSTer also sits on a desk with an HDMI monitor. The MiSTer gives me the option of using all of its cores in a similar interface and environment. Definitely not all software emulation is created equal and I'm not looking forward to hunting down and configuring all sorts of different emulators on what is essentially my work desktop machine. I als...

Bas

Windows has a different idea about geometry than the AO486 core. The VHD footer likely won't match what DOS put into the BPB. There's a reason why I'm rolling my own from scratch. That said, if you need a tool that spits out an empty VHD of a certain geometry, let me know. It'd be trivial for me to rip my project apart and recompose the working bit...

Bas

That is seriously weird. Would using MOSLO from vanilla DOS help to correct this one in plain DOS.

Bas

Try mine?

https://www.area536.com/dosk8s/disks/mnkyvga.zip

Bas

It may not be in there, it may be different from what the OS did on there.. many things can fudge up disk geometry. To expand on this a bit. You can generate a VHD, then format it with a geometry that boils down to the same size in bytes but is composed of different ratios between cylinders, heads and sectors per track. This is what bit me when try...

Bas

Those are different for each VHD unless they are all the exact same size every time. A properly generated VHD contains the geometry in a footer field so DOSBox should be able to detect it. Not sure though, I don't use DOSBox a lot.

Bas

Wow, that was fast! I changed the build target over from glibc to musl, that helps apparently. Impressed with the speed of this thing on dinky MiSTer ARM!! Last build for today will probably be 72 if it succeeds in about 15 minutes or so, after that it's back to work for a whole week again so not sure how much time I'll have to keep going. The bigg...

Bas

Thanks for your testing! The error messages are funky because you're looking at Rust passing the error down the chain and giving up because I didn't yet write a nice formatter for it yet. That's my bad, but mostly cosmetic. You giving me checksums makes a huge amount of sense, but I just realized they aren't meaningful yet. Files are dropped into t...

Bas

Build 64 actually builds a working (in PCem, MiSTer untested) bootable Alley Cat VHD based on IBM PC DOS 2.00. This build is a partly hardcoded proof of concept that should prove a number of items. I would VERY MUCH appreciate some testing of the below functionality: Does this even run properly on Windows at all? I don't know, I don't have Windows....

Bas

I'm taking a small detour now. The current state of DOSContainer allows me to package just about anything from the dawn of time until about 1985. That's where I'll start, and I want the process be friendly to outside contribution. So in short: I'm completing the zipfile downloader feature on DOSContainer to enable the layered build architecture tha...

Bas

I'd be happy to host the whole lot. My uplink is 1Gbps from an actual datacenter.

Bas

Not yet but I'm certainly interested. And I'm following along with this collection as you seem to be doing the games while I'm building scaffolding from the other side in. At some point these worlds will meet and that'll be a huge load of awesome in a very short time.

Bas

The Bash thing was more of a proof of concept. It uses GNU Mtools and dd to create the disk + partitioning. When the Rust base is done, I'm looking at a GUI to hide the YAML step.

Bas

I wrote a whole script for that in Bash.. see the top of the DOSContainer thread. Insert YAML, get a baked-off VHD. Currently rewriting this exact thing in Rust so you get this as a single executable on all platforms.

Bas

Finally! PC-DOS 2.00 boots cleanly in PCem using nothing but the latest build of DOSContainer to create a VHD. This means you can pull the executable from my FTP server (build 59, currently in progress) and combine it with a simple testing YAML. I'm still quite a distance away from creating and filling subdirectories on these disks, but this is a v...

Bas

That's what always happens when I curl into a tearful ball of desperation on the floor in front of my computer: it gets unstuck. I just generated my first FAT12 file system from scratch with a file on it, and not even Norton Utilities finds it suspicious anymore. To be continued!

Bas

Anyone here up to speed on how to exactly compose a FAT12 allocation table? I'm sooo very close right now to getting PC DOS 2.00 booting correctly, but my implementation is ever so slightly off..

Bas

I'll dig into the code for a bit.. If there really are things in the core that are unreachable from SYSCTL, I'll submit a PR to get that rectified. The C program looks simple enough. I'll just have to hunt for the twiddly bits in the core's code fore a bit because I don't know any HDL.

MiSTer FPGA Forum

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