www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

I am planning on buying VA for both myself as a single user, and for a number of machines for my workplace, to replace aging A3000's.

I have used VA5000, and am very impressed with the level of emulation.

However, as a part of my workplace purchasing the software, we would like to know if there is a direct access driver for Win98 that will become available soon.

We have a great many Arc Formatted floppies, and it would be counter productive to have to produce images for each one.

If anyone else has an other solution, that may assist, I'd love to hear it.

Many thanks
Steven Davison (A.k.a Stese)
ICT technician, Robert Mays School, Odiham

Whilst some sort of direct floppy access would be possible under Win98, it is only possible via the BIOS which is quite restrictive and hard to work with. I don't have access to a win98 machine any more so developing a driver would be quite hard, sorry.

Utilities such as ArcDisc will let you copy floppies to an image which can be used within Virtual Acorn.

Graeme

Well, the porblem with using ArcDisk is that I have to get hold of everyone of the disks that the Department wish to use and make an image of each one... I'd be doing this for hours!

Not being a very good programmer, i wouldn't know if this is possible, what abuot a program that could read/write/format Arc disks, in a similar way in which ArcDisk works, in a 'Explorer' type of window allowing copying of files directly to the HD4 drive on the acorn?

or am i suffering a conseptual problem?

The problem with ADFS format disks is that most of them use 1024byte sectors which is a completely alien concept for Windows which expects every disk device (with the notable exception of CD's) to use 512byte sectors. Once you've worked out how to get around this one problem, reading disks is not hard.

Being able to interpret the disk image means being able to understand that the disk contains an ADFS format filesystem, not just the layout of sectors. This is a whole level of complexity above just reading the disk.

I believe there is linux source to at least read ADFS format disks so it should be possible to write a disk reader but it's not a trivial task.

Graeme

Can I accsese floppys in VA5000 from the task bar (I Am Running Win ME)

I believe so, as ME is similar in tech level to 2000,

the only thing I can suggest is try it.

off that subject a little and back to the orginal, is there any update on whether WIN98 will EVER have Direct Floppy access?

thanks

Windows ME is a tarted up Windows 98 so suffers from the same problems. There may one day be some form of direct floppy access in win98/ME but we don't have the resources to investigate it just yet.

Sorry,
Graeme

Ok

thanks for the info... I'll keep checking back to see if there are any updates!

Hi all,
I have 3 partitions on my laptop - XP, Win98 and a data one seen by both OS. I have VA loaded in the data partition and can run it from XP and Win98. So, what's the prob for others with Win98?