MESS media handling

Using your TI and Geneve hard drive in MESS

If you are using a SCSI hard drive on your ASCSI or WHT controller, you can easily hook that drive as is to a SCSI controller of your PC. Using Linux, you can get a sector dump from the /dev/sda device (or similar) by using the dd command. Note that you do not have partitions, so you cannot access the drive by a file system driver. Within Windows, you need a tool to directly access the contents of the drive; Explorer won't do.

If you want to use a SCSI hard drive image in MESS, you cannot simply use your sector dump that you got from your original drive; you have to convert it. We have some instructions how to achieve this.

Formatting disks

MESS requires floppy image files, that is, the contents of the whole disk must be stored in a single file. There are two supported formats, the Sector Dump Format and the Track Dump Format. There are two ways to get a blank new image file:

• Use imgtool to create a SDF-formatted blank disk.
• Create an empty file and use the emulation to format the file, just as if you formatted a blank disk.

For the second option you just need a file of the appropriate size. Using Linux you can easily create such an empty file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=my_image.dsk count=<number of bytes> bs=1

For sector dumps, an SSSD disk has 92160 bytes; a DSDD disk has 368640. For track dump images, an SSSD disk has 130120 bytes, while the DSDD disk has 549760 bytes. Once you chose the size you have to use the matching format.

Note that in versions 0.137 and earlier, the HFDC controller cannot format a disk (because the emulation of the SMC HFC9234 chip lacks formatting support), causing the emulator to crash.