Date   : Fri, 24 Aug 2001 19:16:18 +0100
From   : "Richard Gellman" <r.gellman@...>
Subject: Re: INF and UEF formats

[apologies to roy collett for receiving this twice - i forgot to change the
reply to adress.. stupid outlook 2000]

>>Firstly, I'd like to say that I welcome both INF and UEF formats, and hope
>that they both stay around. Both have different uses, and I would welcome
>>any emulator which is able to handle as many formats as possible.
>>
>> I like
>>the idea on an emulator being able to run the DFS ROM exactly as it was on
>>the BBC, and the low-level disk access routines being provided by the
>>emulator code, instead of the emulator needing to provide it's own DFS ROM
>>code.
>>
>
>I agree.
>
>The primary function of an emulator is to emulate ONLY the hardware. The
>ROM firmware and software being the original code. DFS and ADFS would be
>used as on the original machines and the host system would only be used
>to emulate the controller chip to map to a disk image on the host FS.
>
>Other native host file formats are nice but they are not the original
>machine warts and all.

I also agree here. All of the emulation in BeebEm is directly of the
hardware as originally used, no interceptions or anything. However,
something that did occur to me, (and Robert Schmidt will concur here I'm
sure) is that not everywhere provides software for download as a disc image.
In my experience the software for download on TBL! is in zipped file+inf
format (aka archive format), which cannot be read by emulating the fdc
hardware (at least not without extensive translation of files in a host
directory into catalogue information, absolute sectors, etc, which would
involve building a temporary discimage in memory, and is a tad complex).
Here a proprietary ROM would come in useful for being able to directly
access these files.

I believe David Devenport's BeebInC emulator reads its files in this way,
using "Emulator DCDFS".

-- Richard Gellman

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