MAME Geneve - creating MFM HD images

[RickyDean]

David came back with this message to me "mfm_util will convert emulator file to extracted data file. ext2emu goes the other way."

 

I would say these files are on the beagle bone sd card?

[Brufnus]

So... after quite some messing around with this, I finally succeeded in getting a 248 MB hard drive created, and MAME is even booting from it (I wonder where all the needed parameters can be found, peb slots etc, haven't been very lucky with that so far...)

 

Anyway, I'll throw everything into this image when I get it ready, and upload it to 9640News. c",) That should make it available to everybody, regardless of what they use - TI, Geneve, TIPI, SCSI, HFDC or whatever, through the use of MAME.

[RickyDean]

19 minutes ago, Brufnus said:

So... after quite some messing around with this, I finally succeeded in getting a 248 MB hard drive created, and MAME is even booting from it (I wonder where all the needed parameters can be found, peb slots etc, haven't been very lucky with that so far...)

 

Anyway, I'll throw everything into this image when I get it ready, and upload it to 9640News. c",) That should make it available to everybody, regardless of what they use - TI, Geneve, TIPI, SCSI, HFDC or whatever, through the use of MAME.

Look at the Mame release thread, @mizapf, gives a lot of information there about setting up Mame. Here is his website too: https://www.mizapf.de/en/ti99. Good stuff. Thanks for doing this for the community.

 

Could you release the files that work with the MFM HD emulator? I've built three and haven't tried using them yet, because I changed my voltage regulators on my two HFDC's to switching type and they are not functioning. I'm going to have to change them back till I see what's going on. These are supposed to provide 5 volts, but they don't turn on the cards.

Edited September 2 by RickyDean
added content

[Brufnus]

23 minutes ago, RickyDean said:

Look at the Mame release thread, @mizapf, gives a lot of information there about setting up Mame. Here is his website too: https://www.mizapf.de/en/ti99. Good stuff. Thanks for doing this for the community.

 

Could you release the files that work with the MFM HD emulator? I've built three and haven't tried using them yet, because I changed my voltage regulators on my two HFDC's to switching type and they are not functioning. I'm going to have to change them back till I see what's going on. These are supposed to provide 5 volts, but they don't turn on the cards.

Ah, okay thanks... I've been at his website now and then, but I apparently missed the Mame stuff.

 

I can release the MFM emulator files as well, no problem. Unfortunately I don't have them ready yet; they're quite messy and there's also some of Stefan's personal stuff that shouldn't be included of course. There may also be some cartridge dumps that could prove useful.

 

Anyway, I'll make the files available asap.  I think I'll just include everything that might prove useful - even MDM5, old MDOS versions, etc... then people can pick what they want and ignore the rest. That'll also speed up the work for my part.

 

[+mizapf]

Please see www.ninermame.org for more details about setting up MAME. I moved everything from my main website to this location.

[Brufnus]

5 hours ago, mizapf said:

Please see www.ninermame.org for more details about setting up MAME. I moved everything from my main website to this location.

Okay, so that's why I wasn't able to find much information about the parameters.  Thanks!

 

I do have it working now so that I can release our archives etc.; however, it's nice to know all the config options.

Anyway, it works pretty well and so does your TIImageTool - the latter is brilliant for populating the image once I'm ready to do so - thanks for this great program!

[Brufnus]

Perhaps I should purchase a TIPI.  

 

It seems that TIImageTool doesn't like the images I've transfered so far, except for the initial dump of my Rodime, which is a true image of the drive - that one, ImageTool reads perfectly fine. So, right now I'm trying to convert the "distribution" emulation file to a "proper" disk image, which ImageTool will accept.

If everything else fails, I'll use my recently purchased 84 MB ST1100 for the purpose - write everything to that one, dump an image, and make that available when ready. If it doesn't all fit on a single image, I'll repeat the process and dump yet another one. 

 

I do hope I'll succeed with this conversion, though - I believe David's software is perfectly capable of doing so, what may lack are my own skills.. but I am a slow learner.  

 

UPDATE: Okay, THAT WORKED! So, what will happen now is that I'll prepare one or two hard drive images, each with a geometry which says 16 heads/1024 cyl. - 128 MB on each, which should be readable in MAME, am I correct?

Edited September 4 by Brufnus

[+mizapf]

12 hours ago, Brufnus said:

It seems that TIImageTool doesn't like the images I've transfered so far [...]

What does it say? Or could you send me the image so that I can check?

 

12 hours ago, Brufnus said:

UPDATE: Okay, THAT WORKED! So, what will happen now is that I'll prepare one or two hard drive images, each with a geometry which says 16 heads/1024 cyl. - 128 MB on each, which should be readable in MAME, am I correct?

 

The "generic" hard disk in MAME is a magic drive that grows just enough heads and cylinders to be able to read the given image file. The limitation is 248 MiB total space per image, which is not from MAME but from the TI hard disk file system.

[Brufnus]

31 minutes ago, mizapf said:

What does it say? Or could you send me the image so that I can check?

 

 

The "generic" hard disk in MAME is a magic drive that grows just enough heads and cylinders to be able to read the given image file. The limitation is 248 MiB total space per image, which is not from MAME but from the TI hard disk file system.

Yes, I discovered that when I experimented with image sizes on the mfm emulator. At the time I didn't know about the limitation, so I created some images with 16 heads and 2048 cylinders - only to fail, of course. Then I remembered having read about the max size for the SCSI cards, and having lowered the cyl # to 1984, it worked like a charm.  

 

Anyway, what you write also means that MAME should be able to handle my images, at least if they're in the proper format. c",) I could test it myself of course.  

[Brufnus]

On 9/2/2024 at 2:25 AM, RickyDean said:

David came back with this message to me "mfm_util will convert emulator file to extracted data file. ext2emu goes the other way."

 

I would say these files are on the beagle bone sd card?

Hi, sorry I missed some of it... anyway, yes and no - if you make an image from a physical HDD, it will generate both; if you use the emu itself to create an empty image though, it'll only produce the image file.

But the two tools you mention are indeed capable of generating whatever format you want; the terminology and parameters might just be a bit confusing initially (but that part I've figured out by now). c",)

 

Except for that - it seems I'm finally in luck with respect to a SCSI card! I've been drooling over these for decades; yet I've always been at the wrong place at the wrong time and they passed right by my nose. 😥

 

However, Chris has the parts available for building one; this'll probably mean that one of my HFDC's goes into a PEB with a TI/99 console and a 84 MB ST1100, the other one stays in a Geneve with the MFM emulator, and the 2nd Geneve will be gifted with the SCSI card.