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Victor 9000 'Emulator' ?

@donohoe00 I tried out your hard drive branch. I was able to create a blank drive with
/chdman createhd --output victor_60.chd --hunksize 4096 --chs 695,5,17
And then from inside the emulator I was able to use factoryf and hdsetup to format and configure the hard drive. I could then copy files over, and put an operating system on it with sys. Afterwards when I tried to boot the bios saw the hard drive but then it hung after the hard drive started to boot. If I boot from a floppy I can see the hard drive and interact with the files. But I wasn't able to get the system to boot from the drive. Did I miss something?
 
Using the same configuration (Tandon 703), I am able to boot from the hard drive. I didn't do the first step: I found you can just create a file with any old junk in it to start with, as long as the file is big enough. I installed DOS v3.10.

The attachment shows how I partitioned it.
 

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BTW in hdsetup, one of the partitions has to be marked as the boot partition. More of my setup:
 

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Thanks for that. It was my boot partition was too large. I brought it down to 10MB and it boots successfully. I'm able to boot my actual vintage Victor into a 256MB drive, but there must be something different in the ROMs. I was able to format a 256MB drive, and have the boot partition be only 10MB and then it boots fine.
 
I'm having some issues copying larger files (> 40K or so) between floppy drives in the emulator.

Getting Disk error or General error writing to drive B:

Windows 11, built from the victor9k_fdc_perf branch using the recommended setup.

Also seems to affect a stock Mame 0.277 intstall, although it takes so long it's harder to test.

Also tried on an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VM, same issues

Using the downloaded ROMs from archive.org referenced in this thread.

Doesn't seem to matter the DOS version or SS or DS disks.

Tried known good and blank disk images, re-copied each time to start fresh.

Always errors on the write.

Anyone else notice this?
 

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westveld said:
I'm having some issues copying larger files (> 40K or so) between floppy drives in the emulator.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the report! I was able to reproduce this, and finally got to the bottom of it. I've pushed the fixes to the same branch - let me know how it goes.

I think I'm starting to actually understand how the thing works now :-)
 
Windows build with @donohoe00 's FDC and HD code, and some tools: https://victor9000.com/files/mame-v9k.zip

See the victor9000 folder -

vic-hd.cmd starts with a dos 3.1 HD image, vic-flp.cmd a floppy one

inject-files.cmd copies the files in temp\ to the vichd.img hard drive image.

(it extracts the FAT bits with the V9000HDTools from @drdanj and pyfatfs to modify it, then V9000HDTools to copy it back to the Victor image)
 
donohoe00 said:
Not sure as I'm quite new to Mame development. Maybe if someone who's tested it successfully could mention that in a comment on the PR on mamedev?
Click to expand...
Done!
I feel like the format thing is a separate issue.
The speedup and HD support really makes it useful now.
 
westveld said:
Floppy formatting doesn't seem to work - possibly expected with perfect media.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's never worked. The Floppy Controller implementation had major issues several years ago. I got it to reliably boot and read/write disk images, but never got to fixing the format process. There's also a few weird bugs where just reading double sided disks occasionally will cause a corruption of the underlying disk image.
 
I wanted to speed up the emulator boot by skipping steps in the bios, but for some reason the emulator wasn't working with the F3F6 bios that we have the code for.
So....
https://github.com/IntergalacticMicrosystems/Victor9000-ROM-source-F3F7

Working on some speedups for testing / emulation too.

Random question - Anyone have the "issue" ROMs? I don't know if those were later than F3F7 or not.

Apparently the lo80 source that is out there is for the low 4k part.
 
When working on the floppy issues, I used the OpenWatcom C compiler to create test apps. The resulting .exe files will run on the Victor 9000 as well as IBM compatibles, since they use DOS interrupts for everything.

Since the write fail bug could take a long time to reproduce, I would pass "-speed 5" on the mame command line to speed up the emulation. However, this causes the keyboard repeat interval to decrease by a factor of 5, so you have to learn to type staccato :)
 
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