[Coco] Xroar hard drives

[Ciaran Anscomb]

Robert Gault wrote:
> I just started looking at the xroar emulator v1.06 and have been able
> to boot to coco3 disk basic rgb output. Xroar docs indicate hard drive
> emulation but not what rom image or perhaps .dll is required.  Is it
> possible to use the rgbdos rom used by VCC and a .vhd used with VCC?
> That doesn't seem to work. Rgbdos will boot but says no hard drive can
> be found.

At the moment, XRoar needs IDE HD images to have a header on them: 512
bytes of magic, followed by 512 bytes if IDENTIFY information (a page of
information you can read from IDE drives with the right command detailed
in the ATA spec).

If you specify an image (-load-hd0 filename) that doesn't exist, it'll
be created when you try to access it, so you can extract the 1024 bytes
of header from that and combine it with a 512 byte-per-sector raw image.

That 512 byte-per-sector thing does also trip up some images that are
concatenated RSDOS disks (which are 256 byte-per-sector), which need
processing to pad out the sectors.

> Where is a source for the correct rom image for hard drive
> usage?

I've used hdblba.rom (from toolshed) and yados with success.

Michael Furman's been building IDE images of EOU that seem to work fine
(6309 version needs a bugfix that arrived in XRoar 1.0.4), which he
posted about in another thread.

...ciaran