Firmware 0.6A-F14 now supports formatting the emulated HD20 disk from the Finder. This is handy for creating new hard disk images without the aid of programs like Mini vMac or Basilisk II. Just grab any random file of 100 MB or so (or create a new one using DD under Linux), name it HD20.dsk, and put it on the SD card. If you boot the Mac from another disk, it will see the HD20 disk image, but won’t recognize it as a valid Macintosh disk. The Finder will ask if you want to initialize the disk – answer yes. Be aware that formatting large disk images can take several minutes, during which there’s no on-screen feedback that anything is happening.
While working on this firmware, I encountered more mysterious errors and spontaneous reboots of the sort I described with firmware 0.5A-F14 on my original purple prototype board. But this time it was happening on another board. I rearranged some code, and the problems mysteriously went away, and even the balky purple prototype board started working fine again. I can’t explain what was causing those errors originally though, so maybe I fixed them, or maybe I just papered over them and there’s still a problem lurking somewhere. Please let me know if you experience any of these issues with this firmware 0.6A-F14:
- Emu consistently says there’s no SD card, when there is. Even after reboot, reset, reinsert card.
- Emu in floppy emulation mode says “no image files found”, even though there are disk images on the SD card
- Emu resets to the smiley face screen in the middle of disk I/O, as if you had pressed the reset button
Combo Firmware 0.6A-F14
Once again, if you try this firmware, I would appreciate feedback on what systems you tried it with and what the results were. Thanks!