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Setting MESS using QMC2


jacquesg

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My suggestion to only use one controller is due the fact that I did not test what happens with two controllers run at the same time. Of course, you can get them working on different CRU addresses, but you have to remember that. A worse problem is what floppy drive is connected to what controller. Currently (with the legacy floppy implementation) we have Floppy Disk 1 to 4; these are associated to the floppy controllers, but I cannot say for sure which controller gets which floppy drive. See the problem?

 

With the redesigned floppy support we will get floppy drives as slot devices under the respective controller, so this will allow for a better control.

 

@Rich: In case of trouble, it always makes sense to strip down the configuration to the smallest set that is needed to run the software. Also, we don't have a SCSI emulation yet, you need not look for it. So if you want to use a hard disk, you should use HFDC in slot 8 and no additional BwG or TI FDC.

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My suggestion to only use one controller is due the fact that I did not test what happens with two controllers run at the same time. Of course, you can get them working on different CRU addresses, but you have to remember that. A worse problem is what floppy drive is connected to what controller. Currently (with the legacy floppy implementation) we have Floppy Disk 1 to 4; these are associated to the floppy controllers, but I cannot say for sure which controller gets which floppy drive. See the problem? <snip>

 

 

When a real HFDC is used in conjunction with a floppy controller, the CRU on the HFDC is changed to something else (generally >1200). The HFDC floppies then respond as DSK5 through 8. It's already in the HFDC DSR, MESS would just need to have those floppy drive choices added for it to work.

 

Gazoo

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The problem goes a bit further. The problem is that the MAME core loads the images via the "-flop1", "-flop2", "-flop3", "-flop4" command line arguments. At that point, the TI emulation in MESS is not even initialized. I guess (but I'd have to spend some deeper thoughts on that) it is not possible to find out what controller plans to go for DSK5-8 and what controller takes the DSK1-4. It could well be that "flopX" and "DSKX" only correspond for a single controller configuration.

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My suggestion to only use one controller is due the fact that I did not test what happens with two controllers run at the same time. Of course, you can get them working on different CRU addresses, but you have to remember that. A worse problem is what floppy drive is connected to what controller. Currently (with the legacy floppy implementation) we have Floppy Disk 1 to 4; these are associated to the floppy controllers, but I cannot say for sure which controller gets which floppy drive. See the problem?

 

With the redesigned floppy support we will get floppy drives as slot devices under the respective controller, so this will allow for a better control.

 

@Rich: In case of trouble, it always makes sense to strip down the configuration to the smallest set that is needed to run the software. Also, we don't have a SCSI emulation yet, you need not look for it. So if you want to use a hard disk, you should use HFDC in slot 8 and no additional BwG or TI FDC.

Thanks!

 

I will use only the HFDC then as no SCSI access exists. (I do miss the larger size and extra features that SCSI has over the HFDC)

I did include in RXB the command CALL SCSI(pathname,string-variable) and this fetches a 44 byte string from the SCSI controller and tells you everything about that drive.

I even included a RXB program that takes apart the string and informs you about it. i.e. # sectors, sector size, Vendor ID, serial number, Firmware ID, and 8 bytes internal info.

 

When you get SCSI emulation done I hope this command will work on the SCSI controller.

I also have the command CALL CUTDIR(pathname,directory) that will remove a directory and all the subdirectories and files in one command. (Dangerously usefull)

This was built into my SCSI controller so i implemented it. Does not work on the HFDC but hope a SCSI is done soon.

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The problem goes a bit further. The problem is that the MAME core loads the images via the "-flop1", "-flop2", "-flop3", "-flop4" command line arguments. At that point, the TI emulation in MESS is not even initialized. I guess (but I'd have to spend some deeper thoughts on that) it is not possible to find out what controller plans to go for DSK5-8 and what controller takes the DSK1-4. It could well be that "flopX" and "DSKX" only correspond for a single controller configuration.

How do I know what Disk controller was used for a .rpk file when I open it?

Is this just hit and miss?

Could this be why I get so many files I can not use at all?

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By the way no change MESS locks up and finally the only way to start mess is with the mess short cut with no GUI program and selecting

RXB 2012

32 Mem

HFDC

Does not see any floppy or Hard drive and only option is "Return to Previous Menu"

But the good news it sees the 32K memory. So other than RXB 2012 and 32K memory nothing works.


Looks like will have to reinstall MESS from scratch again for 3rd time.

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Rich,

 

it is sufficient if you keep your directory of disks and cartridges, remove the exe files and ini files, and simply install a fresh release over it. Don't kill your complete installation every time, you're doing more work than necessary. MESS does not change anything in the system outside of its folder, no entries in the registry etc.

 

Concerning the 32K mem, you should either choose whether you want to use the internal 32K (console mod) or the external 32K card. Also here, do not use both. You would not enhance your real console with 32K inside and then continue using the external 32K card either. The internal 32K is active by default.

 

RPK files do not have anything to do with disk controllers. RPK files can only be inserted into cartridge slots. Or did you want to write "which dsk file"? If so, I can say that as long as you use only one disk controller, the flop1 image is always used for the first drive, the flop2 for the second and so on, so this matches DSK1, DSK2, ... When we have more than one controller, each controller adds its drives to a list, and there will be more flop arguments. I'm not sure but I would expect that the card in the lower-numbered slot gets the first set of drives (like flop1...flop4), the next card gets the rest (like flop5...flop8). This has nothing to do with how the controllers internally map that to DSK1...DSKx.

 

===

 

Apart from that, Rich, we still have some loose ends here, and before you are digging up more issues, let's fix the previous ones first.

 

I'd be interested to learn why TIImageTool reports the "Negative seek" when opening your hard disk image. Can you send a copy of the image to me, or can you upload it somewhere? I expect the image has not been properly formatted. If this is the case, I can enhance the error output in TIImageTool to give more meaningful output.

 

Also, I'd like to know what you did to create that RXB batch disk.

 

And then, concerning the lockup, you should try to start it without GRAMKracker first and then see whether it still locks up. Select "single" as the cartridge slot option.

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Well got it re-installed and running from no GUI using only command line.

Carts work but now no floppy works at all?

 

Here is the files you asked about the BATCH was converted using TI IMAGE I think and the HD file was sent by Robert.

 

Rich

Batch&HD.zip

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No floppy: You did not forget to plug in a disk controller, did you? (-peb:slot8 hfdc) During runtime you can check that in the OSD menu, "Slot devices".

 

When you figured out what arguments you need for the desired configuration, you should write that in a batch file, and start that one next time. No need for QMC2.

 

===

 

The BATCH file is a TIFILES file which can be imported as desired (Edit/Import files...). I remember you had the problem that it is inside a RXB directory, so how come that? What did you do to get that result?

 

... Just checked your video clip (Posted Wed May 28, 2014 2:21 PM), you said: "All I did was I tried to convert it into an RPK". I don't understand - you wanted to convert a disk image into a cartridge? RPK files are cartridge contents (RomPacKages), so they have not really anything to do with DSK image files. I'd be curious to know what you actually did.

 

Also, in your disks subfolder there is this BATCH.dsk file. Could you upload that as well please?

 

The Harddisk.hd in the ZIP archive you uploaded is OK, I thought of the one that caused your "Negative seek" error message (HARDDRIVE1.hd in your MESS folder).

Edited by mizapf
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Yea the HFDC was tried in slot 7 and slot 8 with same results.

Robert and I have been having a private conversation back and forth each day and I am attempting to get it working.

(The snag is he is using Linux and I am using Windows 7)

 

I would like to thank anyone that can help in advance. And for the present assistance.

 

I took the source of RXB GRAM and tried to make it a .rpk file so I could load RXB 2012 into MESS, it failed to work.

Finally when I asked for help on AtariAge I did receive a RXB2012.rpk that did work, but no one ever explained how it was created.

(So as a GPL programmer using MESS that is going to be a future can of worms to open.)

 

The disk files were converted using TI Image Tool and Ti99Dir with so far no good results.

And yea the HARDDRIVE1.hd is the one that said "Negative seek" error but that only happened one time, and has been ignored since then by MESS even after a re-install.

 

Now I am testing files (180 TIFILES) and manually converted by changing .TIFILES to .dsk and hope this works taken from WIN994a packages.

I also deleted all Carts and only use the ones that worked before, which is a very small number like 10 in total. (At least RXB2012 still works)

I had to delete all the files I downloaded from Whtech as all of them failed to work. (turns out that .bin are no longer supported by MESS)

 

The Cart files on Whtech are all .bin files and all the .dsk files failed to open at all. Someone should take the time to look at this please.

 

How many others are using MESS on Windows 7?

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Rich,

 

I have MESS on an Acer 32 bit NetBook running from Windows 7 Student version. However I went about setting up all the MESS modules in a back-assed sort of way. I have a HSGPL card on my real TI which includes the latest version of the RXB files. These files are in snug format with 4 byte headers which are different than the 6 byte headers on GK formatted files. The HSGPL card comes with a program that will change 6 byte headers on module files into 4 byte snug headers. When I set up the HSGPL card on my MESS emulation I just installed the RXB and all other module files copied from my TI. This worked and I did not have to use any rpk files. I have not figured out how to create rpk files from the snug format files. My understanding is that rpk files are a zip of the .bin files plus an xml file. At this point I reach the limit of my understanding.

 

As I followed your discussion on working with the hd file from MESS, since no other disk manager seems to work and since we keep being told to use the HFDC I wondered if you also have to use the Myarc Disk Manager. This DM is supplied on one of the PC99 utility disks and today I started to transfer this disk from PC99 to MESS. I do not know if this will work but I have a feeling that it might. My problem is that I have never worked with any kind of hard disk files. My hope when I started this thread was to learn how to access hard disk files, set up Geneve and to use various 80 column programs.

 

I am also about to duplicate my present implementation of MESS (v148) with the latest version (v153, I think). At the same time I am trying to clean up my TI-99/4A installation so that MESS HSGPL implementation is a near clone of my TI system.

 

I will try and share any knowledge about setting up MESS that I have managed to gather to date. However you will have to understand that our goals may be different and that you and I have a four hour time difference.

 

Regards,

 

Jacques

 

Jacques

Edited by jacquesg
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I took the source of RXB GRAM and tried to make it a .rpk file so I could load RXB 2012 into MESS, it failed to work.

Finally when I asked for help on AtariAge I did receive a RXB2012.rpk that did work, but no one ever explained how it was created.

(So as a GPL programmer using MESS that is going to be a future can of worms to open.)

 

... (turns out that .bin are no longer supported by MESS)

 

It was most likely me who created that RPK file. I certainly explained it some times, but I'll give another short explanation here.

 

The RPK file is a ZIP file which contains the contents of GROMs and ROMs of a cartridge. In most cases this is a file for the complete GROM set, up to 40 KiB long for 5 GROMs, and one or two files for the ROM area 6000-7FFF. Also in the ZIP there is an XML file called layout.xml which declares which ROM files go to which memory area. I'd recommend to unzip the RPK file and to read the layout.xml to get an idea how to build an RPK file.

 

As for the format change, previously, there were the separate bin files which had to be mounted in different slots. This was the original way of working with cartridges. The RPK format is far superior to that way since you do not have to remember which ROM files to include, and into which slot they belong. Moreover, it opened the way to use more than one cartridge at a time, and also other enhancements like GRAMKracker became possible.

 

The RPK format was introduced by me in MESS five years ago, with release 0.131. Until release 0.146 of May 2012, that is, two years ago, both systems (RPK and the legacy bin format) were supported next to each other, at which point I pulled out the support for bin. A migration time of 3 years is definitely long enough. The removal of the bin support made the code much better maintainable and stable.

 

There is another cartridge format which is compatible to the RPKs to some extent, the ZIP files. They contain the cartridge contents without the layout.xml, which is now distributed with MESS as a single XML file for all cartridges.

 

 

And yea the HARDDRIVE1.hd is the one that said "Negative seek" error but that only happened one time, and has been ignored since then by MESS even after a re-install.

 

It happened with TIImageTool, not with MESS.

 

 

Now I am testing files (180 TIFILES) and manually converted by changing .TIFILES to .dsk and hope this works taken from WIN994a packages.

 

TIFILES are single files. DSK files are complete disk images. You cannot "convert" between those files; you have to save the TIFILES on the DSK image. This is possible by importing in TIImageTool: Open the DSK file, import the TIFILES files.

 

 

The Cart files on Whtech are all .bin files and all the .dsk files failed to open at all. Someone should take the time to look at this please.

 

The TOSEC cartridge bins are not useful anymore except for archival. I moved them into the "tosec" directory. The DSK files are OK - I picked 10 of them randomly and opened them in TIImageTool without problems.

 

In the /emulators/cartridges directory there are no more bin files, only RPKs and ZIPs (both kinds not intended to be unpacked).

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As I followed your discussion on working with the hd file from MESS, since no other disk manager seems to work and since we keep being told to use the HFDC I wondered if you also have to use the Myarc Disk Manager. This DM is supplied on one of the PC99 utility disks and today I started to transfer this disk from PC99 to MESS. I do not know if this will work but I have a feeling that it might. My problem is that I have never worked with any kind of hard disk files. My hope when I started this thread was to learn how to access hard disk files, set up Geneve and to use various 80 column programs.

My overly hopeful wish that the Myarc DM program would access a hd file is not to be. I guess that for now we will have to continue using TIImageTool to access files on a hd disk.

 

Jacques

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My overly hopeful wish that the Myarc DM program would access a hd file is not to be. I guess that for now we will have to continue using TIImageTool to access files on a hd disk.

 

Jacques

 

Both 'Myarc Disk Manager 5' and 'Disk Utilities 2k' work with Hard Drives in MESS. What sort of problem are you having using them?

 

Gazoo

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... Now I am testing files (180 TIFILES) and manually converted by changing .TIFILES to .dsk and hope this works taken from WIN994a packages....

 

Rich, Win994A uses an extension of .TIDisk for disk images, not .TIFILES. Changing the .TIDisk extension to .dsk and vice versa, for that matter, should work just fine with MESS.

... How many others are using MESS on Windows 7?

 

I use MESS on 32-bit Windows 7 Professional.

 

...lee

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Both 'Myarc Disk Manager 5' and 'Disk Utilities 2k' work with Hard Drives in MESS. What sort of problem are you having using them?

 

Gazoo

I have now downloaded DM2K v2.5 and tried to access a couple of HD files. One is an extremely large HD named all.hd that Michael uploaded a few months ago. The other was called HARDDISK.hd and was blank until I added one .dsk file. Since I have never worked with any kind of hard disk my problem is I do not know what to enter as the SRC file in DM2K.

 

Jacques

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I have now downloaded DM2K v2.5 and tried to access a couple of HD files. One is an extremely large HD named all.hd that Michael uploaded a few months ago. The other was called HARDDISK.hd and was blank until I added one .dsk file. Since I have never worked with any kind of hard disk my problem is I do not know what to enter as the SRC file in DM2K.

 

Jacques

 

WDS1. or WDS2. or WDS3. depending on where you've got them mounted. WDS3. might be read-only, so you may not want to use it.

 

Adding a .dsk file to a hardrive is not proper procedure. You want to mount the .dsk file as well as the .hd file in MESS, then use DM2K or MDM5 to copy the files from the floppy disk to a hard drive directory (create a directory on the hard drive first). It's very similar to copying files in Windows from a floppy to hard drive using explorer, but with a TI program like Disk Utilities.

 

Gazoo

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WDS1. or WDS2. or WDS3. depending on where you've got them mounted. WDS3. might be read-only, so you may not want to use it.

 

Adding a .dsk file to a hardrive is not proper procedure. You want to mount the .dsk file as well as the .hd file in MESS, then use DM2K or MDM5 to copy the files from the floppy disk to a hard drive directory (create a directory on the hard drive first). It's very similar to copying files in Windows from a floppy to hard drive using explorer, but with a TI program like Disk Utilities.

 

Gazoo

This what I am working on with MESS with RXB.

The idea is to use the RXB commands as it has full hard drive support commands:

 

CALL SECTOR has been tested on real hardware such as SCSI and HFDC for floppies and Hard drives.

CALL MKDIR makes Directories or renames Floppies.

CALL RMDIR removes directories (if all ready empty).

CALL RENAME will rename directories or Floppy files.

CALL CAT or CALL DIR will catalog hard drives or foppies.

CALL FCOPY will copy files from hard drives or floppies.

CALL CUTDIR will remove directories and all subdirectories and files. (But only presently works with SCSI Controllers)

CALL SCSI returns all the data from a SCSI hard drive such as ID, serial, size sectors, and formatting data.

 

Besides you can do stuff in RXB that you can not do in DM2K or MDM5, well except format a drive. That is only thing missing.

I will post video of this when I get MESS working, you will see...

Edited by RXB
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Simple copy operations between DSK and hard disk images are quite easy to do with TIImageTool (I was too lazy to start the emulation first every time, hence I wrote that tool.) Open both images, mark the files with the mouse (+ CTRL or SHIFT), CTRL-C, go to the other image, CTRL-V.

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With RXB I wanted the option to write a XB programs to catalog and extract files and move them from a single XB program.

 

Also I made a RXB Sector editor. Testing it on real hardware SCSI copied one hard drive to another to clone a hard drives.

I have cloned 1 hard drive into 2 others so had 3 exactly the same using RXB. (of course today emulators can do that faster)

A buddy tested it on the HFDC and said it worked perfectly to clone hard drives.

 

I demoed at a TI Faire RXB 2001 that I could copy 12 files from 12 different drives to other drives in one XB command.

i.e. SCSI with 7 Hard drives and 2 RAMDISK and 4 Floppy. (did not use one floppy)

 

I wanted RXB to work like a batch processor with files or drives.

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Gazoo said:

 

WDS1. or WDS2. or WDS3. depending on where you've got them mounted. WDS3. might be read-only, so you may not want to use it.

--------------------

Thanks, Tony, WDS1 works with both of my hard disks. Real cool. Its nice for an old dog like me to learn something new.

 

Jacques

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  • 2 weeks later...

Does anyone have a Windows 7 script to start MESS from DOS with all the option?

 

How the hell do you write the script to include option like get rid of the freaking 32K in the console, SAMS 1Meg and 32K cards will never work?

Also the Horizon 4000 will not work either because I really really hate the 32K in the console option and want to use other cards.

So far I can not get SAMS or Horizon or GRAM or EVPC to work as there is no save state in MESS after i set options and no file to look at the script as it never saves one?

You would think that after you configure MESS it would have a save configuration option?

 

I made a INI folder like MESS Docs suggest but MESS never puts anything in it ever?

 

Thinking it might be a permissions problem or a read only problem I went full out to fix this and it should write and has full write permissions.

Horrid way to spend 3 weeks getting a emulator to work and have so little help or documentation that says things like "FUTURE FEATURE"

 

I love the concept of MESS but my gawd what a pain to set up and use. Any help please!!!

Robert can not help much as he uses Linux and his scripts are gobbly gook to me using Windows 7

I guess I need some start up scripts for Windows so I can configure MESS and first step is dump the 32K in Consolle so I can use SAMS and HORIZON RAMDISK.

Please help 3 weeks is insane!

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