WinUAE 1.4.2 public beta series

[turrican3]

great work toni

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by mark_k

Hi,

See http://la.causeuse.org/hauke/macbsd/...ios_53c710.pdf

Also some tech notes in the http://la.causeuse.org/hauke/macbsd/symbios_53cXXX_doc/ directory might be relevant.

Perfect, thanks.

[fmcpma]

As always, I am astonished at the pace with which new features are added to our great emulator. Thanks, Toni.

But as things get more technical, I have some difficulty in understanding some aspects. In this case, what is the difference between old hard disk emulation and these two new modes, IDE and SCSI emulation, and what advantages have they got?

Thanks for any answers.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by fmcpma

But as things get more technical, I have some difficulty in understanding some aspects. In this case, what is the difference between old hard disk emulation and these two new modes, IDE and SCSI emulation, and what advantages have they got?

Partly it is for completeness, you can emulate exact same hardware as (for example) a real A1200 with exact same memory footprint without any extra "alien" software somewhere in memory. (like UAE "boot rom" when using "UAE" harddrives), A4000T Kickstart will work without patching, makes possible to run non-AmigaOS operating systems (very limited because of no MMU)

Partly because I want to do it

[fmcpma]

Hmmm... So old hard drive emulation used a proprietary hardware interface and an extra rom, is that it? Never realised that. And emulating real scsi or ide hardware allows some software, which knows and drives that hardware directly (as is the case of an alternative OS), to run correctly. Is that it?

As for "because I want to do it" -- hey, that's the only way to do anything well! Keep it going, my friend.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by fmcpma

Hmmm... So old hard drive emulation used a proprietary hardware interface and an extra rom, is that it?

Yes and no. It does not have normal hardware interface but magic traps in "UAE ROM" space that switch to native side and back. (Every "expansion" uses same interface to switch between emulation and native)

When CPU emulator sees the "magic" trap command inside UAE ROM space ("trap" command works normally outside of UAE ROM space, of course), it does its black magic and calls normal C-code, emulation continues normally when call returns. C-code has full access to complete hardware state, including CPU registers.

There are two "harddrives", directory harddrive that is basically network filesystem without network and hardfile that emulates trackdisk.device-style device (with full >4G support)

Never realised that. And emulating real scsi or ide hardware allows some software, which knows and drives that hardware directly (as is the case of an alternative OS), to run correctly. Is that it?

Yes.

[fmcpma]

Sweet ;-)

[Toni Wilen]

1.4.2 released. I am sure there are some stupid bugs left but it is better to release it before I break it too much by playing with SCSI and some other interesting stuff