On 2026-05-03 20:42, Paul Koning wrote:
On May 3, 2026, at 1:19 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote: On 2026-05-03 19:03, Andrew Ball wrote:ASB> I notice that ra0 and ra1 are reported as the wrong type of > drive (RF31 instead of RF35). JB> The names are basically just strings returned from the > simulator. They have no relevance beyond being just a string > that you can print out. > > Size/capacity similarly is reported as what the actual capacity > is, without any regards to names. > > So this is all just cosmetic, and it's a thing that you need to > fix in the simulator if you want it to say something else. Thanks Johnny (and thanks Michael for the correction). I'll try some other disk types to submit a more helpful report to the open-simh people. RF71 works:- ra3 at mscpbus0 drive 3: RF71 ra3: no disk label: size 781440 sectorsI wasn't even aware that simh could report "RF71". simh have been pretty stubborn on not accepting that it should be an arbitrary string, and have just a few fixed values hardcoded in the code. (Atleast when I last checked.)But honestly, I would just ignore this "problem". Like I said - it's very much just a cosmetic thing.I would have thought the "type" is chosen based on the disk image size, but judging by the examples given that isn't the case. I wonder why not.
simh could possibly do that for known sizes, yes. But even that isn't clear cut. The RF70-73 are the same as the RA70-73, for example. But simh just seem to have a very strange idea that identifiers somehow are very fixed. I was surprised they added some RF disks. It used to be that simh used RA81 for almost everything. Then a few more types of RA disks were added, and a few other odd bits. But it's always been rather hardcoded.
And yes, technically it's a string that should be configurable to anything the MSCP protocol can convey. But it would be nice if atleast it produced identifiers matching the media size.
When that exists, sure, it could provide some defaults. But it's also a question of why. Because the names have no actual meaning.
For MSCP, the only thing that actually matters is the size. Names can be completely ignored. They are only useful for printing something for humans.
Johnny
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