Post by retrobits on Jul 9, 2006 17:26:51 GMT -5
I've decided to move this to it's own thread so folks can read if appropriate.
News: DOSBox and PX8VFS - this might be the final solution. (Read on for more info...)
As you may know, I've been working with the two virtual floppy solutions for the PX-8 - PX8VFS for DOS, and vfloppy for Linux/Unix.
vfloppy runs better on modern hardware, but has bugs related to the handling of disk images and larger files. PX8VFS has issues on hardware that is too fast, but it and its supporting utility, PX8UTY, handle disk images very well. The PX8VFS disk image format appears to be a more faithful representation of a real PF-10 disk, although that means that a certain amount of space is wasted in the image (just like it was on the real disks).
Fixing vfloppy would mean patching code, which, while fun, would be time consuming.
On the other hand, fixing PX8VFS just means getting a hardware speed that wouldn't cause it to error out. (When the error occurs, it makes the disks appear to be read-only to the PX-8, which is not that handy.)
Enter DOSBox. For those not familiar, this is a multi-platform DOS emulator. It's designed primarily to run older DOS games, but it has a decent general emulation environment, and supports a direct link between the emulated and real serial port (unfortunately only on Win32). The emulated CPU cycle performance is configurable, so my goal was to make PX8VFS happy while retaining decent performance. Looks like I may have found a winner!
I will report more on DOSBox specific settings once the fine tuning is done. Right now, my serial1 is set to directserial mode, and the CPU cycles in DOSBox are set to 12000 (12 million emulated cycles/sec). With these settings, PX8VFS is happy in read/write mode, and performs reasonably well! Not to mention, I can run it on my main desktop machine!
More news to come, but this is definitely cause for optimism. ;D
- Earl
News: DOSBox and PX8VFS - this might be the final solution. (Read on for more info...)
As you may know, I've been working with the two virtual floppy solutions for the PX-8 - PX8VFS for DOS, and vfloppy for Linux/Unix.
vfloppy runs better on modern hardware, but has bugs related to the handling of disk images and larger files. PX8VFS has issues on hardware that is too fast, but it and its supporting utility, PX8UTY, handle disk images very well. The PX8VFS disk image format appears to be a more faithful representation of a real PF-10 disk, although that means that a certain amount of space is wasted in the image (just like it was on the real disks).
Fixing vfloppy would mean patching code, which, while fun, would be time consuming.
On the other hand, fixing PX8VFS just means getting a hardware speed that wouldn't cause it to error out. (When the error occurs, it makes the disks appear to be read-only to the PX-8, which is not that handy.)
Enter DOSBox. For those not familiar, this is a multi-platform DOS emulator. It's designed primarily to run older DOS games, but it has a decent general emulation environment, and supports a direct link between the emulated and real serial port (unfortunately only on Win32). The emulated CPU cycle performance is configurable, so my goal was to make PX8VFS happy while retaining decent performance. Looks like I may have found a winner!
I will report more on DOSBox specific settings once the fine tuning is done. Right now, my serial1 is set to directserial mode, and the CPU cycles in DOSBox are set to 12000 (12 million emulated cycles/sec). With these settings, PX8VFS is happy in read/write mode, and performs reasonably well! Not to mention, I can run it on my main desktop machine!
More news to come, but this is definitely cause for optimism. ;D
- Earl