Need help with MAME with TI99 creating disks mapped to files on a disk (FIAD)

[mrvan]

Classic99 has a feature to map a disk to one's underlying OS file system. That's a pretty cool feature and eliminates multiple steps transferring files between the TI and the underlying OS. I like Classic99 actually a lot but I'm using a Mac and running a Windows emulator (Parallels in my case) is not a great setup. I only have had Windows loading to allow me to program my transmission and my radios but nothing else. 

 

So has anyone been able to set up MAME to use FIAD for a disk as Classic99 has?

 

Thank you in advance.

[+mizapf]

This is not possible. MAME file access is based on disk images only. For a more comfortable way of working with disk images, I wrote my TIImageTool program, but other disk image tools will also do.

 

There is one exception if you go via the TIPI emulation. You could push the single files to the TIPI drive and read them from there.

[+arcadeshopper]

7 hours ago, mizapf said:

This is not possible. MAME file access is based on disk images only. For a more comfortable way of working with disk images, I wrote my TIImageTool program, but other disk image tools will also do.

 

There is one exception if you go via the TIPI emulation. You could push the single files to the TIPI drive and read them from there.

setting up TIPI emulation: https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/emulation-installation

[mrvan]

On 3/4/2023 at 3:56 PM, mizapf said:

This is not possible. MAME file access is based on disk images only. For a more comfortable way of working with disk images, I wrote my TIImageTool program, but other disk image tools will also do.

 

There is one exception if you go via the TIPI emulation. You could push the single files to the TIPI drive and read them from there.

Hi mizapf, I use your TIImageTool quite a bit and it really does help. Because I'm writing SW for the TI on my host (a Mac) I'm writing to floppy disk images and in MAME I have to change disks to make it recognize the updated disk. It's not a big deal, but something that is more direct would be helpful.

 

The TIPI tool seems to be integrated into a RP-based MAME. Do I have that right? 

[+mizapf]

The problem is that the disk image in MAME is read into memory when you start the emulation or when you insert the image. In fact, the disk image is converted into a magnetic cell sequence, and it would mean an extreme effort to convert this back on the fly during runtime. For this reason, you cannot do external changes to the image while it is mounted in MAME, and I dare to say there is conceptually no way around that now, and possibly ever.

 

The TIPI support relies on a real PI on the other side, or on an emulated PI, and the file management of the PI is outside of MAME's reach, so everything is possible there.

 

Edit: I guess you mean by "RP-based" that it needs a Raspberry Pi. Not necessarily, you can use a QEmu emulation for the PI. To be more precise, you run MAME as usual on the PC, and you run a RPi in a QEmu emulation and connect to it via network or localhost. Also, the emulated RPi has to mount a drive that you share with your PC. So now you can move your files into that shared drive, and load them from TIPI in MAME.