The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

I'm trying to use QDOS Classic for Amiga with the UAE emulator. Since I have no time or interest to learn Amiga operation, I just used the QL Kick ROM for UAE and RAW QDOS Disk Images from here: https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/emu/index ... _for_Amiga
This nicely boots directly to a "QL". Unfortunately, the .ADF floppy images for UAE are in a raw MFM format which is incompatible to the usual QDOS floppy images.

Does anyone have an idea how to write files into those raw MFM .ADF floppy images? Or how to convert converntional QL floppy images to that format?

Thanks, Peter

Probably the HXCFE tool to convert back and forth!

Hi Peter,

RAW MFM disk images were necessary at the time of the first UAE QDOS Classic ROM (around 2002) as UAE wasn't able to read non-amiga disk formats.
Later versions of UAE can read and write foreign formats - so normal 720k disk images should be OK.

Mark

Thanks Mark, it does work. Is larger mass storage also supported under UAE?

Or at least larger floppy images than DD?

Hi Peter,

Peter wrote: Sun Aug 10, 2025 12:06 pm Thanks Mark, it does work. Is larger mass storage also supported under UAE?

QubIDE disk images are supported. Available to UAE via an IDE RDB config.

There is a build ( QC-3955-Android-RLS.zip ) from March 2024 in the QDOS on Google TV walkthrough.
There are UAE ROMs and QubIDE images in that zip file.

My current build is a little bit broken.

Mark Swift wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2025 8:32 pm There are UAE ROMs and QubIDE images in that zip file.

Does it require specific settings? Driver says "Not a QubIDE partition".
The images are byteswapped, starting with "LQ1W" instead of "QLW1". Is that intended? On a QL or Q40/Q60 it would be wrong.

Peter wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:50 am

Mark Swift wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2025 8:32 pm There are UAE ROMs and QubIDE images in that zip file.

Does it require specific settings? Driver says "Not a QubIDE partition".

There are 3 versions of the ROM in the zip file.
QC3955UAE.ROM - no qubide
QC3955UAE1.ROM - with qubide for A1200
QC3955UAE4.ROM - with qubide for A4000

You will need to set up UAE with the correct chipset for the machine you want to emulate. Perhaps this is why the partition is not being recognised.

Peter wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:50 am The images are byteswapped, starting with "LQ1W" instead of "QLW1". Is that intended? On a QL or Q40/Q60 it would be wrong.

Yes, this is expected. There are some endianess shenanigans going on somewhere - either in Amiga hardware, or in Amiga emulation.

The QubIDE code is pretty much as-original. Endianess is only considered just before sending a word to the IDE controller, and just after reading a word from the controller.

There is no special distinction between control words and data words in the QubIDE code. Since the IDE controller successfully reads and writes data, I came to the conclusion that the Amiga hardware might be byte-swapping data words when it writes to media.

It's on my to-do list to figure out what's happening - but the byte swap on the image is intentional - for the moment.

Just a note for people needing to quickly byteswap disk images

XorA wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 10:18 am Just a note for people needing to quickly byteswap disk images

Code: Select all

dd if=input.img of=output.img bs=4k conv=swab

This is works only for Linux.
On Windows dd does not do any conversion.