ImageDisk under Win2k (was: Thanks again, Dave!)

Indeed I haven't looked into the gory details, however I expect that "HAL" just virtualizes an FDC and translates it's operations to the standard Win28 floppy driver - which means it works only as long as you don't configure the FDC in any way that the Win2k driver does not. I also wouldn't trust the virtualization to be "wonderful" in terms of real-time emulation (for example, I've seen the virtual serial port of the XP dosbox take up to 10 seconds to report a character received (needless to say this breaks lots of stuff). Under DOS, I take over the interrupt, and since I alone am controlling the FDC, I only get interrupts I expect - under Win2k, I expect you can't get a "real" interrupt vector (only a virtual one), and diddling with the chip may cause Win2k to see an interrupt and go poking around on it's own ... Are you sure? - you might have a "spare" processor, but what I was really getting at is "an OS that doesn't decide not to dispatch you for a while". I'm not convinced you can guarantee this under any flavor/configuration of winblows. I'd respond with a photo of my basement (all the machines depicted on my web site are there) - needless to say, they are not all set up and accessable at the same time (can you say "optimized for storage")! Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Vintage computing equipment collector.