DougIngraham
Veteran Member
I think what I am going to do is make SYS: the native CSD image which is a maximum size OS/8 image. This eliminates all the confusion about modified RK05 system images. The SYS handler will have two devices, CSD0: and CSD1:I can see uses for such a thing, but I also think it's extremely handy to have all those RK05 images useable, and I can't see how you'd do both. Maybe a command line flag or the like, with the default partition sizes like the RK05?
It's also imaginable to do "images" with more than two devices/partitions. (Maybe RL02-like?)
The non system handler will have a couple more CSD devices and RKA0:, RKB0: so an RK05 image can be mounted but not booted from directly. I will at some point add other devices to the non-sys handler, like an RX01, RX02, and DECtape device. But that is for a future release.
Yes, the idea that I have broken an RK05 image is what was making me uncomfortable. When I started thinking about it the reason I did that was it was an expedient way to bootstrap into a running system on a machine with no working mass storage. Now that I have it working I should be able to work around it pretty easily.I would make it an option. But I don't really like disk images which do not work on a real rk05. The disk images for Kyle's disk server also needed to be edited for the disk server. Within time people might confuse these images with real images. I have had problems with online papertape which were corrupt as well.
Ideally a disk emulator would work with original disk images. And images created with an emulator should work on real hardware. Otherwise there will be two pdp8 worlds I think....