Raspberry PI PICO ATARI ST Hard Drive Emulator (WIP)

[exxos]

Those RW values are terrible. I'd expect to be seeing around 800 KB/s for reads and around 500 KB/s for writes

No clue what it's supposed to be. I'll try xferate later.

EDIT:

910 kb/sec.

[exxos]

Just posting this here as it might be useful to fellow PICO drive users.

Could be common knowledge for all I know. Apologies if I'm trying to teach you to suck eggs :D

The consensus seemed to be that ICD Pro didn't like DOS partitions but I thought I'd give it a go since I read in several places that it should be able to handle FAT16.

FAT partitions created under Windows didn't work at all, but those created with Linux/fdisk did. Here's my transcript:

Code: Select all

# assuming this is a fresh sd card, the first partition will become /dev/sda1
# change device as necessary
# n.b. fdisk is interactive. fdisk prompts replaced by comments
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
# new partition
n
# primary
p
# number
1
# first sector
2048
# last sector
+32M
# change type from linux to fat
t
# hex code
4
# save
w

# format the partition
sudo mkfs.fat -D 0x80 -F 16 -M 0xF8 -S 1024 -n DOS1 /dev/sda1

Now assuming you haven't allocated all your drive letters to disk 0, ICD will recognise the DOS partition at boot time on the second disk/card.

I should add that reads/writes to/from TOS drives seem fine but TOS throws some weird errors if you try and delete from the FAT16 partition. I assume ICD handling of FAT is a little lacking. Fine for transferring data but I wouldn't keep anything precious on it.

Maybe this problem is related to bigdos ?
http://rainer-seitel.onlinehome.de/bigdos.html

I've not tried ICD with DOS partitions yet. But would be useful to know if it can work better.

I will try and allocate some time to investigating it a bit more next week.

Incidentally, does anyone know if the ICD driver source code was ever released or found ? I'd assume not as from what I remember ICD wasn't willing to open source anything. Their site seems long since gone now.

Would be nice to just have a simple lightweight driver which is freely available and just does the job needed.

[chronicthehedgehog]

Maybe yes.

I had read a little bit about it in DrCoolZic's guide but skipped it as I thought it required a driver that could handle >32Mb DOS partitions. However, reading it again it looks like it may be of some benefit.

I'll give it a go at some point.

[exxos]

The ICD tools seem weird. Tried a 500MB PC partition. Basically after loading the drive we seem to look up.

Then tried a 200MB partition which then successfully got to the desktop. C: drive showed up. but when I save desktop is saved it to drive A: not C: :WTF:

I also cannot seem to run any programs. says I need a version higher than "ICDBOOT 6.5.3" even though actually running version 6.5.5 :WTF:

Another program asks me to run ICDBOOT but while it does run and finds C:, it doesn't solve the problem. So no idea whats going on.

EDIT:

Downloaded the ICD tools from jookies site and these seem to be behaving better now.. so will try again.
http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=306

[exxos]

Been playing around with ICD all morning. it really does not like having GEM and BGM partitions for some reason. if I get the partition setup on the Atari, windows then does not find the partition. if I set up on Windows, ICD finds the Partition but then when I save desktop it goes to A:.

ICD Audition seems hellbent on putting its own default values rather than reading what is actually on the drive which makes it difficult to make any changes without destroying the whole drive :roll:

So likely the easiest solution is to use 2 SD cards. The main Atari one with all your partitions. Then use a second card with DOS partition as a "swap drive". Then copy stuff from the swap drive to the Atari drives.

Alternatively a commercial driver is the better alternative. either PP driver which is just simple to use and better for beginners, but likely difficult to buy. I think it was £10. Or HDdriver at I think £40 ( at the time of typing the page was coming up internal server error) Which does more and more complicated to setup.

I don't know if anyone successfully used AHDI in GEM and DOS formats ?

Or anyone know if its possible to port EMUTOS driver to a standalone driver ?

[chronicthehedgehog]

So likely the easiest solution is to use 2 SD cards. The main Atari one with all your partitions. Then use a second card with DOS partition as a "swap drive". Then copy stuff from the swap drive to the Atari drives.

This is what I do - at least until I get an HC CPU. I found Windows 11 to be completely useless at creating usable FAT partitions tbh.

I've found DrCoolZic's HD manual to be quite useful along the way. Contains some good info on the drivers etc.

Attached for anyone that needs it. Can't remember where I found it tbh

[exxos]

I've found DrCoolZic's HD manual to be quite useful along the way. Contains some good info on the drivers etc.

IMPORTANT WARNING: A TOS&DOS partition is not a regular TOS partition and therefore it should
only be accessed on the Atari with the matching hard disk driver. For example using the ICD
AdSCSI hard disk driver gives the impression to access TOS&DOS partitions correctly (it even
report correctly the size) but if you try to read beyond the first 32MB of the partition you will get
incorrect results and even worse if you try to write you will definitively corrupt the partition.

I remember the 32MB thing, but thought it was 32MB for the BOOT partition. Looks like TOS itself is the limiting factor.

Problem for me, if I create partitions in ICD, windows can't then find them. If I create partitions in windows, ICD finds one drive but saving desktop goes to A:. So doesn't seem to work regardless of what I try :(

[sporniket]

About the 32MB limit beyond which there are problems, it reminds me what was writing PP (from here https://atari.8bitchip.info/ASTfamMS.html)

The limitations: (...) Sadly, compatibility goes only for partitions up to 32 MB size, above it it is not compatible, and the reason is 16-bit sector addressing used in TOS filesystem (16 bit addressing means exactly 32 MB with regular sector size of 512 bytes). So, above 32 MB TOS uses so called large logical sectors like 1 KB, 2 KB ... 8 KB (TOS 1.00-3.06, 4.02) or even 16 KB (TOS 4.04) . And that's not good.

So maybe related with the difference between genuine DOS FAT and TOS FAT ?

[exxos]

So maybe related with the difference between genuine DOS FAT and TOS FAT ?

:shrug:

There is also
http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=306
http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=345

But that only mentions 16MB for the BOOT drive :stars:

I did follow that page, but then I can't access anything in windows. :stars:

[exxos]

I have followed Jookies guide again. I have C: 16MB, D:250MB showing on the GEM desktop. But Windows doesn't see anything but a 32GB "RAW" partition.

IMG_1044.JPG

I also tried 32MB BGM but same problem.

EDIT:

Now I am wondering if BGM isn't DOS as its "Big GEM" AFAIK :roll: