> Thanks for supporting TD0 in 86Box - however, most of my protected TD0 disks do not work there... Are you planning to improve that protection recognition per any chance?
Can you send me some of those images for testing my implementation of the
Teledisk format? Thanks!

If you're still there - would it be possible to add my modified version of the MFM format to HxC under some other extension, maybe MFMX or something? That would serve as a stopgap until eventually 86Box implements 86F version 2.2 and that is then added to HxC as well. I'm asking because the latter will likely not happen until next year, and mantaining a patched HxC on my own is not that easy (because of the difficulty of setting up the development environment for it, I can't really keep up to date with HxC's updates).

Ah, thanks! Indeed, I have checked the documentation before asking
Still, the fullscreen mode looks rather weird: for me it turns to 720x480 with lines getting out of the screen and being uncomfortably bright. Must be some SDL.dll problem. Can PCE use ddraw or something for that?

<ESC> f. I just noticed that this combination is missing in the documentation. I will fix this.



If this is for a CGA screen, then this is the correct ratio. PCE always saves screenshots in the native resolution of the emulated machine.

PCE loads the entire disk image into memory when it is inserted. All modifications happen in memory and when the disk is ejected (or the emulator terminated) the image is written back. That's the "writing back.." message you get when you have written to floppy disks.

There's a small utility included with PCE (tddec, in contrib) that can convert compressed td0 images to uncompressed ones.

The problem is, there's plenty of advanced compression TD0's already around.

If anything, 86Box's floppy writeback mechanism needs rethinking, perhaps do it on finishing a read or write operation, DOR reset, etc., instead of on every sector.

So, how about we remove that support for the sake of writability? I mean, how useful is this compression really? Other than getting no errors on 'unknown format' I see no other benefit. I think we should simply encourage everyone to use normal compression and if any mistakes made simply re-convert the files.

PCE emulates an 808x, you won't see much slowdowns there. 86Box however emulates a variety of CPU's, and when emulating a Pentium, there's a lot of slowdowns from such stuff.

Also, PCE does not support Advanced (LZHUF-compressed) TD0.

Hmm... I wonder how PCE does it. I don't remember any particular slowdowns there...

With games that read the exact track layout from a huge sector, TD0 cheats by storing that huge sector with the entire track in it separately. In 86F that's not doable, so a conversion is going to be bad. You would need to do analysis of the track layout from that huge sector, and determine the exact bitcell position of every sector, the content of the gaps, etc., and reconstruct the floppy surface accordingly. Even just the huge sector's contents in the TD0 are not enough, are you're missing every second bit (MFM encodes data into pairs of data and clock bits).

Also, anything writable won't work currently with TD0 because 86Box mounts TD0 as write-protected, because of all the forms of compression TD0 supports (some kind of RLE in addition to optionally even LZHUF for advanced TD0) and you would need to reconstruct the entire TD0 image on every write back (which occurs at the write of each sector), which could slow down the emulator a lot.

I didn't suggest that because honestly it's not a good way to produce 86Fs. It's best done if converted directly from Kryoflux or Supercard Pro and for that we need a CONVERTER, which is the initial purpose of this thread. If we have that then you will forget about all your problems

Sergey Erokhin (aka ESL) from Kharkov did make several utilities, like TD0 to Spectrum FDI conversion, but in Teledisk 1.0 itself I remember seeing a logo saying 'Made by Sergey Shmakov'. I could well be mistaken, too, though, as he could be the author not of Teledisk itself, but of some its utilities or a hacked version.
But I am pretty sure Dave Dunfield is not the author of Teledisk.


Ah, that should be one of the main reasons, thanks. Enabling that option does allow the disks to be mounted, although the game still does not work as it requires writing to the disks, and you say they are read-only there.
An expert from Old-Games.ru suggested converting the TD0 images to 86F and running the game that way - it launches fine, but still gives an error later.

Well, never mind then, sorry for bothering I do have both the original disks (that work on real old PC) and a cracked version (that works in DOSBox), so running it from protected images is just pure sporting interest.

I meant Teledisk, but yes, my mistake. It was actually brought by Sydex and Charles "Chuck" Guzis also known as Chuck(G) on several boards. Matter of fact, I knew about Chuck(G) being related to Anadisk and Teledisk, but for some reason I assumed it was Dave Dunfield's alias since both Teledisk and Imagedisk can be found on his website. Oops

And I never really heard about Sergey Shmakov. Perhaps you meant Sergey Erokhin? For all I know he made the TDCVT tool, not Teledisk.




First off, make sure you get the latest version of 86box because it has undergone profound change since version 2.00. You can get the full setup here with fresh roms and pre-installed DOS (make sure you run 86boxmanager to get to the profiles!).

Secondly, you have to make sure you set up the drives correctly in both BIOS and VM settings. Unlike PCE and DOSBox 86box emulates real hardware and can be very sensitive to misconfiguration. If it's a 360kb image then you should set up your drive(s) accordingly.

Thirdly, make sure you are running the correct architecture. If the games are really old (CGA & booters) then it's best to go XT mode. In fact, you should always start in XT mode by default. What makes PCE so incredibly flexible is the fact it's limited to 8086/80186 instruction sets. Ironically.

Finally, if you are still having issues try toggling 'turbo timings' in your VM drives settings. Sometimes this has to be used with incorrectly made dumps (different RPM, track spacing, etc). Incidentally, PCE will not help you detect that.

The only problem still existing with Teledisk support in 86box is inability to write to TD0 files. Yes, some games with write-hungry protection will fail to run, but those are considerably fewer and I doubt it's your exact situation.

You probably meant ImageDisk, not Teledisk? Teledisk was made by Serghey Shmakov, and Dave Dunfield created ImageDisk.


Thanks for supporting TD0 in 86Box - however, most of my protected TD0 disks do not work there... Are you planning to improve that protection recognition per any chance?

Thanks! Did not know that That 'monitor' / second window thing looks rather complex and unusual for me, after DOSBox.

Do you know how to switch the main PCE emulator window to fullscreen?
And somehow I do not get the correct ratio when making screenshots: I get 640x200 PPM instead of 640x400...


Sure, but the game I currently try to test in PCE with TD0/TC ('Forteresse') needs writing to the disk and won't run on read-only disks.

While the game is running the command CTRL+` will fall user back to the monitor. You will know this as the blinking cursor will now have a hyphen prompt before it. Then you will be able to type commands.

For example, I used PCE to test my copy of Space Quest II (v2.0a).

I prefer to mount images through the monitor so the monitor commands would look like this:

-m insert c:\pce\disk01.psi
-g

(-g returns user to emulator)

Once the game prompts for disk 2 I fall back to monitor and type:

-m eject 0
-m insert c:\pce\disk02.ima
-g

Once returned to emulator it will recognize disk 2.

I like this command to quit the emulator from the monitor:

-q

It is also important to note that PCE can modify the disk image upon ejection much like when installing some copy protected titles to the hard drive, high scores, etc. In this case the message "disk 0: writing back fdc image" may appear. I recommend assigning read-only property to disk images before using eject command.

Ah, that works, thanks a lot!
However, only from DOS prompt. How to change the disk, when a game is already running?


Well, it seems that I never saw that 'Monitor' Probably because I launch PCE via pce-ibmpc.bat. I only get a black window that launches alongside the PCE window and is named as 'C:\Windows\system\cmd.exe'. I see the cursor blinking there, but I can't type anything at the prompt.
A GUI would be much better indeed

Ok, thank you.

To clarify, I am using the latest version. (20191006)
The syntax I provided is not obsolete but the newest and the most streamlined.
The keyword "disk." can be omitted.

Ok, that worked. I previously tried the syntax provided by coolhaken, but he must've got it wrong or it's obsolete. I also had an older version, which is what you have on your download page, so I had to get a newer one from the snapshots.