Support for adding/modifying SCSI drivers in APM images
Opened this issue · 5 comments
It would be really nice for the vintage Macintosh community if CiderPress2 had the ability to swap out the "SCSI Drivers" in APM drive images. There are a lot of Basilisk created images around that don't have any SCSI Drivers since Basilisk II doesn't require them that people would like to use in real hardware via something like BlueSCSI and so the ability to add the SCSI drivers to an image would be quite helpful. This would also be helpful in swapping between SCSI drivers such as HD SC, Lido, FWB, etc. or the different versions of the drivers in case of performance differences.
It would also be super nice if new APM disk images could be created with arbitrary SCSI drivers selected too.
It's possible to extract and replace specific partitions within an APM image using extract-partition / replace-partition. The replacement partition must be a multiple of 512 bytes so the file will be recognized as a disk chunk. For example, cp2 repart driver.iso mydrive.iso:macintosh replaces the contents of the partition named "macintosh" with the contents of driver.iso. I've never tried to replace SCSI drivers on a Mac hard drive, though, so I don't know if that's sufficient here.
Building the drivers into the CiderPress II binary could be problematic for copyright reasons, but they could be bundled up and distributed separately.
Creating new APM disk images is on the "to do" list for v1.1.
I figured drivers would need to be bundled separately for that reason. What I don't know is if the driver needs to be modified at all based on the size of the partition(s) or drive image. I have seen some indication this may be true. I'm also not sure if all drivers are the same size as I think I also saw that replacements needed to be the same size? I did notice that replacing partitions and extracting partitions was possible so I'm glad to hear you think this may also be do-able.
I'll put it on my list of things to play with further as I can find some time to do so.
Excited to hear creating APM images is in the todo for 1.1 :)
While we wait, there's an excellent tool called Disk Jockey that can convert real hardware images to and from Mini vMac/Basilisk II/SheepShaver images. It's been invaluable to me since MAME and DingusPPC actually emulate the specific Mac hardware and require a driver partition vs. Basilisk/SheepShaver that patch all the hardware drivers out of the ROMs. https://diskjockey.onegeekarmy.eu/
@rb6502 Thanks, I'm aware of it. However, it doesn't meet my specific needs of running on Linux (it's MacOS only) and it also is GUI based whereas CP2 is workable from the command line which I prefer for automation purposes amongst other things :)
@bfranske Ahh, but there's also a command line Linux version. https://diskjockey.onegeekarmy.eu/djjr/