MiSTer FPGA Forum

Posted: **Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:10 pm**

akeley wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 6:21 pm Regarding PC VGA CRT display, I've tried it again and it does work, but the scaling is off - on both old cores, as well as the latest scandoubled one. At least on my generic VGA config (which works with most other cores).

I use a VGA CRT and used a ruler to measure the aspect ratio of the output of the latest test build (with fixed keyboard input) and it matches the aspect ratio given for the specific display used in the mac plus: (almost) 3:2. Any variance could be very well caused by my CRT settings.

Why do you think the scaling is off?

Posted: **Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:32 pm**

mapf wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:10 pm Why do you think the scaling is off?

The text is garbled and there is overscan. It's probably something with my config then. I tried with
forced_scandoubler=1
vga_scaler=0 & 1
vscale_mode=0 & 1
direct_video=0
video_mode=5 & 6

Could you post your settings?

Posted: **Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:29 pm**

akeley wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 6:21 pm I have done some hdf-ing before, both for my real Amiga and Minimig, but all on a noob-level. As an experiment I did manage to create a 6.5GB hdf today. It has 500GB WB 3.1 partition and 2x empty ~3GB ones. It seems to work in MiSTer. If you're still after it, I can try to help if you have any questions (or upload this hdf somewhere). Though, it's pretty much as the guide you linked to says.

Regarding PC VGA CRT display, I've tried it again and it does work, but the scaling is off - on both old cores, as well as the latest scandoubled one. At least on my generic VGA config (which works with most other cores).

Sure, I'd be willing to give it a try. I have no idea how to get HDToolbox to acknowledge more than 4GB of a file, thus far...

Edit: well, I may have just figured it out. Using 3.1.4 and a different ROM file, along with the Partition tool, seems to be allowing things to work now.

Posted: **Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:59 pm**

akeley wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 8:32 pm Could you post your settings?

I use

Code: Select all

forced_scandoubler=1 
vscale_mode=1
vga_scaler=0 
vsync_adjust=2

As no scaler is used, video_mode should not be relevant. Mine is a custom 1152x864 resolution.

Looks like in this foto. Both with the latest core from the mister github and the "keys" fixed build from discord.

Posted: **Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:46 am**

This Amiga stuff is a true headache. I made a lot of (hypothetical) progress, but disk operations under whatever Amiga formats disks as by default are terrible beyond measure and I haven't yet learned how to get PFS3 working. Formatting large partitions on the Mac side while running from this filesystem is similarly abhorrent, so despite learning a lot, no practical ground has been gained in terms of creating a bespoke .hdf.

HDToolbox with large partitions went well at least (...eventually), but every action requires a handful of unforeseen supporting actions, and every step forward somehow contains another catch-22. I'm sure there will be another ShapeShifter image version... one day? But the end is not yet in sight.

Posted: **Fri Apr 23, 2021 1:23 pm**

mapf wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 9:59 pm I use
Code: Select all
forced_scandoubler=1 
vscale_mode=1
vga_scaler=0 
vsync_adjust=2
As no scaler is used, video_mode should not be relevant. Mine is a custom 1152x864 resolution.

I have applied this to a fresh mister.ini, with mixed results. Without any tweaks the image is narrow, with OSD's Full Screen it fills the screen but scaling is flawed (can see it on text in games, otehrwise it can look deceptively good). I can actually get a proper scaling using Wider HV-integer and then stretching image horizontally on my monitor. But even with the latter at 100 there are still substantial black bars on both sides.

Would you mind taking a look at my attached mister.ini? I'd love to get this sorted, it's my last CRT frontier. Got all the other CRT-friendly cores working.
EDIT: forgot to add that I'm using Direct Video. I don't think it matters though because the other cores aren't affected.

@meauxdal: the file system stuff is above my pay grade. I did kinda follow this guide when I was making my hdf, but I'm not sure I was entirely succesful, seeing as I didn't really install anything but WB on it.

Perhaps making a thread about it in Amiga section would be a good idea, or I could try and ask on EAB (Amiga's biggest forum).

Posted: **Fri Apr 23, 2021 2:16 pm**

I'd love to take a look at the Mac Plus hd image if possible. Thank you in advance!

Posted: **Fri Apr 23, 2021 2:35 pm**

I'd like to test Mac Plus Hd image as well, please. Thank you for your work.

Posted: **Fri Apr 23, 2021 7:58 pm**

akeley wrote: ↑Fri Apr 23, 2021 1:23 pm
I have applied this to a fresh mister.ini, with mixed results. Without any tweaks the image is narrow, with OSD's Full Screen it fills the screen but scaling is flawed (can see it on text in games, otehrwise it can look deceptively good). I can actually get a proper scaling using Wider HV-integer and then stretching image horizontally on my monitor. But even with the latter at 100 there are still substantial black bars on both sides.

Would you mind taking a look at my attached mister.ini? I'd love to get this sorted, it's my last CRT frontier. Got all the other CRT-friendly cores working.
EDIT: forgot to add that I'm using Direct Video. I don't think it matters though because the other cores aren't affected.

Something is wrong here. The scaler should not be active, thus the scaling options for integer v/h should not have any effect. As I wrote before and you can see in my photo, the correct aspect ratio is very close to 3:2 and should not fill the full screen height.

I am not near my MiSTer this weekend, I can check again on Monday. I can test direct video as well, I have the adapter.

Posted: **Mon Apr 26, 2021 2:01 pm**

jca wrote: ↑Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:02 pm hope your guide will cover the updating of the ShapeShifter disk

This part is so non-trivial

I made a quick little writeup in the ShapeShifter thread for you, see link below

Quick and dirty guide ShapeShifter image editing guide (for Windows users)

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2021 3:33 am**

Greetings!

I set up the Mac Plus core and it is very hard to deal with as I guess you all know. I decided the way to go would be using the Basilisk core as that seems more future full. Unfortunately I am having even more problems with that. I ran the Install_basiliskII script and I can run things to get the no operating system disk on the screen but that is about it. I don't see Install_BasiliskII.ini anywhere to be found and if I am correct that would be the only way to get an image loaded. I am not sure what I am doing wrong here. Does anybody have any advice here in where I am going wrong? I appreciate any help.

thanks,
Christopher Wentling

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2021 12:54 pm**

cwentling, you need to edit /media/fat/BasiliskII/.basilisk_ii_prefs to specify your hardfile and ROM paths before running the script to launch Basilisk II.

More details at https://github.com/bbond007/MiSTer_BasiliskII

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2021 5:55 pm**

New version of the image is out. I've been having some medical issues which restrict my use of the computer lately, so work has slowed down. I will try to get this version uploaded to archive.org eventually, as it is pretty stable now.

Posted: **Sun May 16, 2021 3:53 pm**

An even newer version has been uploaded to archive.org now. I'm not sure if it has been indexed yet but the item name is "MacPack-20210515 for MiSTer FPGA"

Posted: **Mon May 17, 2021 12:16 am**

I can confirm that a search brings it up so it's indexed now. Many thanks.

Posted: **Sat May 22, 2021 9:05 am**

I've seen that core is missing lot of sounds from Macintosh Classic 128k.

Lode runner misses all sound effects from 'laser', or 'take money'. I tried same DSK image on Mini VMAC and it works correclty.

Posted: **Sun May 23, 2021 4:21 pm**

Do you gain any speed in signing up for archive.org ?
I am trying to download meauxdal's mac file, and it's coming down in kilobytes, 150k to be precise, and it's already taken nearly 2 hours to get half-way, and another 2 hours to finish - that is 4 hours just for 700mb, I can normally download 1Gb in 10 seconds.

Posted: **Sun May 23, 2021 5:15 pm**

Archive.org is always slow. The best bet is to get leave it and wait. Check back on occasions though as it does like to drop connections and need to be restarted.

Posted: **Sun May 23, 2021 5:34 pm**

Yeah, it's just finished. Just over 4 hours, for 700mb. Oh well, glad it's down. I just worry about, like you said, drop connections and I have to start again. Now for a bit of Mac Plus love, haven't used a real one since the 90s when my print department had one, before moving to a Quadra 630 in 1995.

Posted: **Mon Jun 07, 2021 3:12 pm**

Anyone else having an issue where the time on the Macintosh Plus is an hour behind actual time?

Posted: **Mon Jun 07, 2021 5:49 pm**

rhester72 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 3:12 pm Anyone else having an issue where the time on the Macintosh Plus is an hour behind actual time?

Yep, I've been having the same issue. I think it might have something to do with PRAM not being (properly?) implemented yet? Last I heard gyurco/slingshot was working on implementing that as well as some SE/Mac II features, but it's been a minute.

Could also be something totally different, maybe just a bug in the date/time handoff to the core. I'm not using an RTC unit, just have my MiSTer on ethernet.

Posted: **Mon Jun 07, 2021 10:00 pm**

Ditto, no RTC here either.

One other quick question...is it possible to have both a floppy and SCSI HD mounted, but boot from the floppy? There's copy-protected software (more specifically, Macintosh Pascal 2.0) that must be booted from the original floppy image in order to install to the hard drive volume (yes, I know, it's as hokey as it sounds).

Posted: **Mon Jun 07, 2021 11:51 pm**

rhester72 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 10:00 pm Ditto, no RTC here either.

One other quick question...is it possible to have both a floppy and SCSI HD mounted, but boot from the floppy? There's copy-protected software (more specifically, Macintosh Pascal 2.0) that must be booted from the original floppy image in order to install to the hard drive volume (yes, I know, it's as hokey as it sounds).

ETA: Looks like you just need to have the bootable disk present in the floppy drive and it should prioritize that over SCSI: https://lowendmac.com/trouble/setboot.shtml

First thing to check is a General Control/Control Panel called Startup Device, but it might not be present depending on your OS version.

This may also help: https://poynton.ca/notes/mac/Mac_startu ... olete.html - try Command-Option-Shift-Delete and see if that does it.

Failing that you can always just install it using an emulator (Basilisk II would likely work for this).

Posted: **Tue Jun 08, 2021 1:59 am**

The trouble is that upon restarting the core, MiSTer helpfully unmounts all the floppies :/

EDIT: Never mind, MacOS was doing it upon restart. Force-restarting via the MiSTer menu allowed floppy boot. Thanks!

Posted: **Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:56 am**

@meauxdal

How are you creating your VHDs?

I started here:

http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index. ... romScratch

but anything larger than 20MB would not be recognized. I then broke down how yours is structured (and pulled the SCSI drivers out) from examining boot.vhd and Supplement.vhd (which interestingly use _different_ drivers, and neither matches lido - why is that?), and despite painstakingly reproducing your setup *exactly* (including the 16K of empty space at the end and the resequencing of the partition table), it *still* isn't recognized in MacPlus. I've even done side-by-side binary compares and I just can't see what I'm doing differently/wrong. (The whole point of the exercise is that I've painted myself into a corner with a 20MB VHD and need to grow it - that's easily done with Mini vMac, and repackaging that into a VHD *should* have been a slam dunk...but not so much.)

On a related note, has anyone successfully mounted two VHDs at once (one at SCSI-6 and the other at SCSI-2)?

Posted: **Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:41 am**

I figured both out.

The first problem is that hfdisk has no way of knowing the length of the SCSI driver you're later going to add (following the 'from scratch' directions linked above). It's at offset 0x17 at the start of the VHD (in block 0 of the partition map) and defaults to the driver partition size (32 or 0x20) in blocks, which is wrong and will cause the Mac ROM to try to read more driver than is actually there (and subsequently lock up/crash spectacularly). The fix requires knowing the proper length of whatever SCSI driver you're using in 512-byte blocks (if it's lido, it's 18, or 0x12) in hex. Place that value at offset 0x17 of your file just after step 3 in the 'from scratch' instructions and then continue and you'll be golden. If you're using a driver other than lido, you're on your own, but presumably if you're that far off the reservation you're either also knowledgeable enough about low-level partition map constructs that you knew all this already or you're using a proper set of tools on a real Mac.

tl;dr If you're creating a VHD from scratch following the instructions here:

http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index. ... romScratch

between steps 3 and 4, do this:

Code: Select all

echo -n -e \\x12 | dd of=disk.img bs=1 seek=23 conv=notrunc

and it will fix things right up for you.

The one nice thing about following this method is that if you chop the first 49152 bytes off the front of the file (after you've formatted it on the Mac and actually done something useful with it, of course!):

Code: Select all

dd bs=512 count=96 if=disk.img of=partition_map

and pull out the rest of the file:

Code: Select all

dd bs=512 skip=96 if=disk.img of=disk1.dsk

the resulting disk1.dsk can be used directly in Mini vMac, and can be reassembled later for use with the MiSTer MacPlus core like so:

Code: Select all

cat partition_map disk1.dsk > disk.img

Naturally, all of this assumes availability (and some knowledge of) Linux...but with WSL2 for Windows, installing Linux is really quite straightforward (I recommend Ubuntu for simplicity, but that's just me) and is an excellent excuse for finally learning a bit of Linux command line.

The "related note" (two VHDs at once) was made obvious by reading the github commits, namely this one:

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/MacPlus ... 312702477e

which removed the functionality but not the menu item. D'oh!

Posted: **Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:22 am**

I use SoftMac for .vhd creation, using Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5 on the emulated Mac. BasiliskII GUI to create the initial file. Format, then install the driver via SoftMac.

Don't have this down to a science, though. Sometimes it is picky about the .vhd...

Mounting two .vhd's works OK with the file in my pack labeled MacPlus_KBFix2_20210330.rbf, not sure about the official core

For anyone in need of more room, don't forget you can use the files from https://www.savagetaylor.com/downloads/ ... macintosh/ (2GB) or my pack (1.5GB) and just format/delete everything

Posted: **Wed Jun 09, 2021 8:20 pm**

New MacPack in the wild. Can be had from the usual Google Doc or at archive.org. Name of item on archive.org is 'MacPack-20210609 for MiSTer FPGA' - should be indexed shortly. Over 900 games on the main drive alone now, over 1,000 including the supplement and disks.

Posted: **Mon Jun 21, 2021 5:24 pm**

Mist seem to have been upgrade to Mac se compatibility...

Posted: **Sat Jun 26, 2021 4:55 pm**

Macintosh SE support has been further polished on MiST now: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.p ... 04#p418904

Here's hoping we can get these amazing updates on MiSTer soon...

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