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Victor 9000 'Emulator' ?

1302L

1302L

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 8, 2023
Messages
188
Hi all,

having fun with my working V9K HDD Emulator, I was browsing through the software archive on archive.org and saw a few screenshots which made me curious, please find an example attached.

As this session in the the screenshot is obviously running on a Mac, I would like to raise the question, if there is some kind of emulator for the V9K/S1.

Thanks for your posts in advance.

Best,

Martin.
 

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  • Screenshot 2023-12-12 at 10.54.08 AM.png
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Hi Martin,
I created those screen shots using the mame emulator. Mame has support for a Victor 9000, but there's a few things that don't work. Most obviously is sound output is not yet emulated. You can run most programs and they seem to work well. There's a bug in the disk handling, every once in a while double sided disks images seem to be corrupted by the emulator. So don't use a disk image that you don't have another backup of.

You have to download a copy of the ROMs, I found my copy here: https://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/roms/victor-sirius/index.html

then you can start mame like:
./mame victor9k -ramsize 512K -flop1 /path/to/disk.img

where the ramsize parameter can be one of 128K, 256K, 512K, 640K, 768K, 896K. The disk image of course needs to be a bootable disk.
 
Dear Paul,

many thanks for your explanations, good to read from you again!

This sounds like a great project, I will try to get the emulator running, the infotext is even in German :-)

Cheers,

Martin.
 
Hi Paul,

tried to get the emulator running, by doing the following:

- Downloaded MAME from https://www.mamedev.org/index.php on my WIN 10 64-Bit Machine
- Installed it
- Copied the V9K S1 ROMs (.bin Files) into the 'roms' folder

Trying to run the emulator with a bootable image (MSDOS.img) brings the following error message:
(The Image file is in the same folder than the MAME emulator)
1715801812901.png

- What am I doing wrong, where should I put the missing files?

Thanks in advance,

Martin.
 
Last edited:
Thanks to you both, I will try this tonight.
Best,
Martin.
 
Hi,
downloaded the ROMs from Archive.org, now I tried it with a 612kB Disc Image (UserDisc),
please see the error message:
1715865341334.png
According to the error message, the Image file could not be found, currently I have the Image file in the same directory as the MAME Emulator, does it belong anywhere else to make it work?

Best and thanks,

Martin.
 
Martin,
You're passing in the path incorrectly. When you start with a / you're indicating this is at the root of the drive. If the file is in the same folder as mame, use ./UserDisc.img where the leading . is critical.
 
Hi Paul,
many thanks, sometimes a single dot makes the difference, now it works!
Regarding the speed of the emulation, I am comparing it to my real machine, the emulation seems to be a little bit slower than the real one.
Best,
Martin.
 
Another question in this context:
Is it possible to load additional software / files into a running emulation? I.e. I started the emulation with a simple DOS disk image and want to load Word Perfect afterwards.
Thanks!
Martin.
 
Yes, the emulation is quite slow. The code needs some significant cleanup in the disk handling. It is noticeably slower than the real hardware.

Yes, you can swap disks in a running emulation. There's a hotkey command to launch a menu that controls the emulator. Documentation Once in the menu you can swap the floppy disk image inside the machine. You can also boot it with 2 disks by using -flop2 in addition to -flop1.

On the Mac the key commands are Command-fn-Delete to enable the hotkeys, and then tab to bring up the menu. You then select the file manager and choose your disks. You blackout with the escape key, though if you hit it one too many times you escape out of the emulator.
 
Thanks for this explanation Paul,

Unfortunately the Hotkey from the Documentation for the menu does not work, do I need to run the MAME GUI for this?

Best,

Martin.
 
Hi Martin, What platform are you running mame on? If windows, I think instead of the delete key it's the Scroll Lock key to turn on the key recognition. I haven't ever run mame on windows so I'm not the best to advise there.
 
Hi Paul,
I am running MAME on Windows10 on my Lenovo Notebook.
Hi Paul, after some research (Scroll= Fn K on the Lenovo Keyboard) it worked, thanks for the hint!
Best,
Martin.
 
Audio is working now if you build mame from the latest master branch. I also have fixes for the floppy issues here:

github.com

GitHub - donohoe00/mame at victor9k_fdc_perf

MAME. Contribute to donohoe00/mame development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

And hard disk support here:

github.com

GitHub - donohoe00/mame at victor9k_hdc

MAME. Contribute to donohoe00/mame development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

There's a pull request open for each. Feel free to give it a whirl and let me know how it goes :-)
 
donohoe00 said:
Audio is working now if you build mame from the latest master branch. I also have fixes for the floppy issues here:

github.com

GitHub - donohoe00/mame at victor9k_fdc_perf

MAME. Contribute to donohoe00/mame development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

And hard disk support here:

github.com

GitHub - donohoe00/mame at victor9k_hdc

MAME. Contribute to donohoe00/mame development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

There's a pull request open for each. Feel free to give it a whirl and let me know how it goes :-)
Click to expand...
That's excellent! Thanks for pulling those together.
 
pdevine said:
That's excellent! Thanks for pulling those together.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't have happened without all the great prior work you folks have done! I actually signed up to this forum originally so I could download your 120M HD image for testing. I couldn't believe it when the C drive first appeared and I was able to list its contents! Getting the Floppy Disk to work properly was much more of a struggle.
 
I made an attempt at cleaning up the floppy code and didn't fully understand what was going on. I figured I'd come back some day and try to tackle it. Once I was able to get the emulator to reliably boot I lost some of my motivation. Thanks for plugging away at the improvements! I was just reading your pull request exchange with the mame folks. I'm going to see if I can get a hard drive working with your branch.
 
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