10 Jan
2006
10 Jan
'06
9:58 a.m.
Rumor has it that Dave Dunfield may have mentioned these words:
This discussion is purely for academics... ;-)
Which the HAL doesn't provide. :-/
Now the bad
news: I thought I could "cheat the system" by running
ImageDisk
on Windows 2000, as I have some WordPerfect 6.1
disks I needed to try
to image. Yes, Right there in program documentation it says it won't run
on any Winders OS that uses good ol' HAL - that's the Hardware Abstraction
Layer for y'all that run the "good" OS's. ;-) Well, I tried to run it
in a
Winders98 install under VirtualPC under Winders 2000. I was hoping that
VirtualPC would open up the HAL enough on floppy access to allow ImageDisk
to do it's job. Well, it still didn't work. It tried awfully hard, but the
HAL just confused the bejeebers out of it. (At times, ID thought it was
reading a Single Density disk!)
IMD needs:
- unrestricted access to the floppy disk controller hardware. - Nobody else messing with the FDC hardware
That might be possible, but...
- /interrupts while it is active.
There's certainly no guarantee for that.
- to not be held-up while some other task decides to
hog the CPU for
a little while (there are real-time critical aspects to the analysis
phase)
At least on this, I could *guarantee*... I have a dual-processor box
(2xAthlon MP 2600+), so any processes wanting to hog 1 CPU won't affect the
other. ;-)
Winders 2K fails on pretty much all of the above. I
haven't tried VPC, but
I would expect that the low-level floppy control remains with the host OS
(winders) and it's virtualized just enough to read/wrote PC disks. I also
would not expect it to stabalie the real-time charactistics of the system.
That is perzactly what happened. It was worth a try, tho... ;-)
[[snippety of a) ramdisk, b) network and what I might
do is c) rebuild one
partition to have a small FAT16 area for DOS... ]]
Btw - you can reduce the space requirements a lot by
using a KVM
switch . (I put one on my test-bench last year and eliminated two
monitors/keyboards - very handy).
Yup. Got one on my desk at work - but my space & power requirements at home
for the most part belie the area for a second micro-tower, and KVM switches
don't help with the CoCo[1] or Amiga problems... ;-)
I should take a picture of my desk
Now all I need is more time to tinker... ;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
[1] There should be a CoCo-RGB -> VGA upconverter available soon, and with
an AT keyboard interface for the CoCo, a KVM switch might be useful in the
CoCo world soon... Is there an Amiga -> AT keyboard adapter? Isn't the
Amiga keyboard pretty much an AT keyboard but with different scan codes and
pinout?
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers