Major updates coming in next emulator release

Lorin Millsap · Post by **Lorin Millsap** » Mon Aug 03, 2020 2:50 pm

I’m not posting this as an official update announcement as it’s not finished but wanted to whet your appetites. Also big shoutout to @Michael Steil and @Frank van den Hoef. Frank wrote the main driver which was way faster and more complete than the old one and Micheal extended its functionality. The next emulator release has major improvements to the DOS for the SD card filesystem. The main ones are:

A lot of progress has been made with the X16 DOS. It's almost feature complete, and almost has feature parity with CMD floppy and hard drives.

• Long filename support

• You can open files for reading (OPEN2,8,2,"FILE") or for writing (OPEN2,8,2,"FILE,P,W"), read and write data, have four of them open at the same time, etc. etc.

• Overwriting files is done with "@:".

• You can copy files (DOS"C:BACKUP=ORIGINAL"), concatenate files (DOS"C:ALL=FILE*"), all with wildcards.

• You can rename files (DOS"C:NEW=OLD").

• You can delete files (DOS"S:R*,Q*").

• You can lock/unlock files (DOS"L:R*" or DOS"F-L:R*"/DOS"F-U:R*").

• Like on CMD devices, create directories (DOS"MD:DIR), delete them (DOS"RD:DIR), change them (DOS"CD:DIR).

• You can use paths everywhere (DOS"C//BACKUP/:FILE.TXT=FILE.TXT", DOS"$//BACKUP/:A*")

• All commands and paths support drive/media numbers (DOS"$1:*"), but only 0 (current) and 1 (only supported partition) work.

• You can get partitioning info (DOS"GP"+CHR$(1)) like on CMD hard disks.

• You can even read/write DOS memory and execute code in a DOS context (M-R, M-W, M-E). Yeah, not that useful.

• All error messages on the status channel (just type "DOS") are consistent with 1541/1571/CMD drives, e.g. 01, FILES SCRATCHED,05,00 etc.

What's missing:

• Open file for appending (,P,A).

• Show/change disk name.

• mkfs (N)

• fsck (`V')

• timestamp support

What's missing that I'm not sure should be added:

• REL files

• block read/write API

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Yuki · Post by **Yuki** » Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:42 pm

That looks pretty cool, can't wait ?

DusanStrakl · Post by **DusanStrakl** » Mon Aug 03, 2020 8:57 pm

Sounds great. Any news on the Keyboard driver? Will we be able to read all CX16 keys?

Thanks,

Dusan

Lorin Millsap · Post by **Lorin Millsap** » Mon Aug 03, 2020 9:02 pm

The keyboard (and mouse) driver is being improved and yes there are a couple ideas bouncing around on that but the most prevalent is to set the driver to have two modes. The main default mode works like the setup we have now. Then the RAW mode pushes the actual RAW PS/2 data to the buffer instead of the interpreted codes. So to see if a certain key is being pressed you need only check the buffer. However that code hasn’t been written yet as the dev team has been very busy on other projects.

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JohnGill · Post by **JohnGill** » Mon Aug 03, 2020 11:04 pm

Great news! Thanks for the update. Will this build include a fix so that the banked area of memory $A000-$BFFF can be saved to a file?

rje · Post by **rje** » Wed Aug 05, 2020 3:33 am

Sweeeeeet. This is just awesome. I've put sequential files on hold until OPEN was supported.

Of course, now I'm just enjoying loading binary data straight into RAM banks! But being able to save small pieces of data will certainly be welcome!

Thank you!

ppescher · Post by **ppescher** » Wed Aug 05, 2020 11:55 am

The DOS command for Copy looks the same as Rename. ?

Which one is which?

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Wed Aug 05, 2020 8:37 pm

The correct CBM-DOS syntax for renaming a file is "R0:New_Name=Old_Name". Copying a file is similar, but without a C in front: "C:New_File=Original_File" or "C0:NewFile=C0:Original_file"

Also, to be compatible with the CMD hard drive and SD2IEC, the left arrow should usable as backpaths. Specifically, it should be syntatically identical to the ".." in Unix or Windows.

"cd ←" should go up one directory, as should "cd .."

CMD did not allow for embedded backpaths, so LOAD "←/file_in_parent.prg" does NOT work on a CMD drive. I'm not sure about SD2IEC, but it generally uses the same syntax as CMD hard drives.

Here is a shot of the CMD hard drive manual, showing usage of the left arrow:

https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/cmd/CMD_Hard_Drive_Users_Manual.pdf

Subdirectory command start on page 68, or 9-17.

*** edit 8/17 - the first manual I read apparently had missing text, due to a poor PDF conversion.

Lorin Millsap · Post by **Lorin Millsap** » Thu Aug 06, 2020 4:19 am

Very valid points. Making it MSDOS like May seem more familiar but will break compatibility with legacy IEC devices which is a design goal even if that doesn’t resonate with everyone. So I think these are excellent points to bring up and any mistakes do need to be corrected.

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Cyber · Post by **Cyber** » Thu Aug 06, 2020 5:00 am

35 minutes ago, Lorin Millsap said:

Making it MSDOS like May seem more familiar but will break compatibility with legacy IEC devices

As far as I understood @TomXP411 did not mean to break compatibility with IEC. Rather he proposed to make design be somewhat compatible with both IEC and CMD. Not all commands will work in both standarts anyways, so it would be just some compatability.