Hello,

First of all, I am very grateful for this project. It was really great to get Venix running on my old Rainbow! I'd love to get it running under MAME so I can minimize the amount of time I need to fire up the old hardware. According to the MAME driver for Rainbow [1], this is possible. And the readme in this project [2] also makes the same claim. I have gone through the entire setup procedure without any issue. However I am unclear on how to actually boot my new Venix for Rainbow installation under MAME. There is a known bug in the Rainbow driver for MAME, preventing booting from the virtual hard disk. For CP/M and DOS, I can just use a boot floppy and then use the hard drive. I thought perhaps the vboot.flp would be useful for this, but it seems to behave just like the XFER disk and the shell that is executed only seems to give me access to the contents of the floppy. I had a look at the setting up and system managers documentation for Venix, but couldn't find anything about booting from a floppy asides from when a system restore is needed.

Can anyone give me some tips on how to get this booted using the Rainbow driver for MAME? I'll be happy to create a PR to update the instructions if I get this working.

Thanks!

Bones

[1] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/dec/rainbow.cpp
[2] https://github.com/bsdimp/venix/blob/master/doc/MESS-RB-INSTALL.md

Hope this is the right place to leave a note, I came across this archive of Venix stuff, and I've actually been working on writing a driver to allow Venix to use int 13h to talk to the HDD so it could run with an XT-IDE and/or in VirtualBox. I've actually gotten to the point that basic disk I/O works (and I just managed to get it to dynamically read disk geometry), and trying to figure out how to get XFER's partitioning tools to work properly.

I'm somewhat curious where most of this archive came from, most of what I've seen has been just the backup disks that popped up, but this seems to have a lot of the original media and more.

I'm hoping to be able to get the partition problems solved, and then just one or two left. I've had to do considerable patching in low.s to get this far, but well, at least its there on the reconf kit.