Re: [MiNT] Diskette Image Mounting

["Michael Bernstein" <mint@mbernstein.de>]

Hi Paul,

> betaDOS would be the way to go, but I am sure that the guy who wrote
> MetaDOS still has his sources (saw a DVD driver update somewhere)

The guy who wrotes MetaDOS was Julian Reschke. I did not switch to
betaDOS because the version i have still installed was not able to load
.slb. I did not really need slb librarys at that time but because
MetaDOS has more funtionality i did not switch to betaDOS. For develop
.bos driver there are no differences. But after you point again to
betaDOS i took a look at betaDOS and found, that my version was a
little bit outdated and the actual version of betaDOS has also SLB
support.

But one problem still exists which was for me the reason to make a
break in my work. A BOS driver was quite simple. But as a professional
software engineer i had learned to be lazy. If a solution for a problem
exists, i reuse this solution. And my spare time is limited. If i look
at the traffic at this list, i got the feeling i have less spare time
than many writing at this list ;-)

I need a FAT filesystem driver to access the disk image. In the TOS (or
MinT) kernel is a FAT filesystem driver present. But both, metaDOS and
betaDOS, dont provide a solution to connect the built in FAT
filesystemdriver to a metaDOS/betaDOS bios driver. I can only connect a
metaDOS/betaDOS DOS (filesystem) driver to a BOS driver. I did not
find any FAT filesystemdriver for metaDOS/betaDOS. So i had also do the
work to write a FAT driver for metaDOS/betaDOS. I can do this because
my little program to access a disk image also contains code to access a
FAT filesystem. So the knowledge was present. But my hope was to avoid
additional work. And if i start a FAT DOS driver, there is also the
next step to add VFAT support. And i think this driver should be really
good, fast and stable because someone could get the idea to use this
driver for other new bios devices.

> There are possibilities for SLB or related (LDG), have a hunt around,
> maybe chat to or ask someone. Your driver (if it were to be an .xdd)
> may be the required catalyst to get dynamic libraries in the kernel...
> (maybe)

I did not need SLB support for my driver. A BOS driver was quite simple.
Only a few bios functions which reads from a file. And if someone needs
SLB support he can use betaDOS. For convert the BOS driver to a .XDD i
have to fetch some informations about how to write a .xdd. If i can make
GEMDOS calls to read/write a file, i expect not much problems and the
driver will be quite simple.

Best regards
Michael