Re: [hatari-devel] Re: Problems with GEMDOS drive support

["Roger Burrows" <anodyne@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 Sep 2018 at 10:33, Vincent Rivière wrote:
>
> Hatari should have an option to disable its automatic byteswapping for
> emulated IDE drives, then everything will be fine.
>
There still has to be a fix in IDE_Init()/HDC_Partition_Count(), because Hatari
now reads the disk in two different ways: when passing the data to the user, it
byteswaps, but when analyzing the boot sector for its own purposes, it doesn't.
It needs to do the same thing for both.  An extra option not to byteswap might
be nice, but it would have to apply to both situations (and it runs the risk of
being confusing to users).

To whichever Hatari developer is going to fix this:

When I looked at the code, I did it with Atari-style images in mind.  But I
think there might also be the same issue with DOS-style images.  Of course,
this would not apply to plain Atari TOS, which doesn't understand such things,
but only to EmuTOS (or Atari TOS + BigDOS?).  So this could in fact be even
worse, because to assign the GEMDOS letter properly, Hatari needs to know how a
DOS-style image will be interpreted by the OS/hard disk driver.

Thinking about this from a different direction: when the 'assign GEMDOS drive
after image drives' option is selected, would it be possible for Hatari to only
hook in the GEMDOS drive after the hard disk driver has been run?  That way it
doesn't need to worry about analyzing the boot sector, it just looks at
_drivebits or whatever it's called.  I realize that this might not be easy (or
perhaps even possible).

Roger