I am currently planning a MorphOS boot CD Projekt
and I need to know what are the minimum requirements to boot such a CD? I want to leave all unneccessary stuff out, only support for usb should be available.

As far as I understood it should also be possible then, to move all mossys: stuff direct to sys, right?
And how could I boot from a diferent partition (not cd) without changing the boot priority? is it possible like with the linux boot image for exampale dev=hdax ? Or have i really to change the bootpri every time?

Now this is a good productive new thread. Nice iniative/concept..

magnetic


UPDATE

Quote from MOS dev;

Tell him to RTFM

MorphOSCD:Docs/SmartFirmware.pdf

A short extract from MorphOSCD:Docs/SmartFirmware.pdf

"Booting from dh1: instead of the device with highest BootPri
boot boot.img bootdevice dh1"

So, simply RTFM :)

Magnetic: Thank you

henes:
Ah right, shame on me I was not sure if this was mentioned there But thank you for the hint.

Anyway the main question still is about the requirements boot from different device is just for testing the cd contens before booting (what i could anyway test just tomorow)

BTW the reason to do this is very simple, I have a few mame games which won` t work proberly when Ambient is bootet, the Problem is ( i guess) 256 MB Ram are not enough for them
And I like the Idea to do it just like in the good old days: Insert a medium, boot it and play.
BTW, currently the whole thing is just shell based (means it is not very comfortabel and looks ugly)
If someone can make a new Frontend ( I know that mame allready has a built in one) this would be very welcome

Here the reuirements for the "frontend"
It should be abel to execute shell skripts via buttons, the buttons should be picturebased, in this case it should be able to read the screenshots provided through mame.
Nice would be support for the different mame .dat
files.
It should be small.. very small

Cool

Keep us updated on your progress..

have fun

magnetic

sounds simular to the way I have my movie-cd's done here.

I simply set up a directory with MPlayer, and in there I have a "movies" directory. I set the default path to "movies/" (relative pathname). Then, I just copy some avi's into the movies directory, and burn it as a cd. Then, I delete the videos.

Pop in a cd, start mplayer, play shows

For an alternative on the MAME concept, how about simply having the roms on a CD. Then, just write an alternate User-Startup. Still boot from the normal drive, just use a variable to determine if you should start as a game-system.

Targhan:
Well, I am afraid thats not enough for me
The whole Idea behind this is that at leats my Peg 1 everytime tries to boot first from a bootable cd rom and then try on other devices.
So thats the whole thing. I am very lazy and don`t want to play with any variables around or hack any commands in a shell (well ok for the moment i have to, but hopefully i find a coder who wants to help with the frontend) and btw, if i could buy me one day a peg two, my peg one could be a simple game console complete without a harddrive.
But for the moment i just want to have a cd boot effort

Oh, well, that's easy!

in the user-startup of your test device for making a cd, try doing the following (making the assumption that mame.elf is in an assignment "mame:". (This may not be exactly right, but it should get you closer.)

;$VER Game-Startup 1.0 DJC
.KEY MyGame
.BRA {
.KET }

if "{MyGame}" EQ ""
set MyGame `requestfile title="ROM" initialvolumes`

mame:mame.elf *"$MyGame*" joypad overlay
else
echo "ERROR! Variable already set?!"
endif

; the *" bits puts the quotes around the filename
; just in case there is a space in a filename.
;
; also, initialpath can be set on requestfile


;well, it's a start, no?

the trick with this is to also remove the line that calls "loadwb" in the startup-sequence. You could even put this in there instead of the user-startup.

What should happen is, while booting, you should get presented a file requester. Select a rom, and it'll launch mame.elf with the game you chose. (in this case with joypad support and in overlay mode).

Targhan:
Hey that is a good idea, currently i thought about just define aliases in shell startup, but this is less keyboardwork
(I wonder why i don`t thought about this earlier, because i did allready a shell script for snes before this got its gui)

Anyway, a nice frontend is still welcome
(or i might do a search on aminet but i am afraid there is nothing which fit my needs)

BTW, the first boot tests work fine, i have allready removed mossys and placed everything in sys (please little children, don`t do this, you might harm yor computer very badly ) and going now to strip this down step by step.
And it is also funny to see, that MorphOS creates locale if there is no drawer with this name
Amazing to explore how it works..

So stay tuned

edit:
Loadwb is allready disabled just a shell pops up

Hrm... It looks as if the fuzzy compare from mame want's to use the quotes. Not good. Worse still, fuzzy compare messes it up when leaving the .zip on the filename.

I'm not thinking a quick arexx script is in order... I'll post what I come up with.

ok, new Game-Start shell script, preferably from user-startup but can be anywhere:


;$VER Game-Startup 1.0 DJC
.KEY MyGame
.BRA {
.KET }

cd mame:roms
if "{MyGame}" EQ ""
set MyGame `requestfile title="ROM"`
echo "-----------------------------"
echo $MyGame
echo "-----------------------------"
cd mame:
rx GameStart.rexx $MyGame

else
echo "ERROR! Variable already set?!"
endif
;-------------------


and GameStart.rexx, must be in Mame: with mame.elf...:

/*
** $VER GameStart.rexx 1.0 DJC
**
** Must be in Mame:
*/

parse ARG MyGame

parse var MyGame GName '.' Trash
say 'Running: 'GName

MyCommand = "mame.elf " || GName || " overlay joypad"

address command
MyCommand

return 0


/* never reached */

Watch the spaces around some of the quotes, as xoops strips them. Otherwise, this should do the trick. At least it works from here.

Quote:
Metal Slug 3, I guess?

One possible solution is to use neomame for BIG neogeo games (such as mslug3) as it's more than 15 megs smaller than full mame...

EDIT

One likely thing that eats memory are buffers for your partitions, check how much they use...

Targhan:
Hmm seems as i have to put arexx back then... but i really wantend just as much as neccessary
Btw i also did find a prog which comes very close to that what i need, unfortunatelly, it is from 96, it is crippled shareware and there is no mailadress provided (I doubt anyway that the author is still active)

Jupp3
Your are right it is MSlug 3 But also King of Fighters 2000
Good Idea with NeoMame, but it is not in the MOS Mame archive is it? Or do you mean one of the older WOS Ports ? Never tried them..
Anyway I like the Idea of having plain game CDs for my Peg more and more

Well, it would be nice if we could get Hollywood stuff running fairly early in the boot sequence. How neat would it be to boot directly to the Maguilla Mame gui? Maybe Anarka could shed some light onto this idea?

@Bladerunner

you can find NeoMame here
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/fabien.coeurjoly/neomame.zip

Uhm...

Hey! Let us know how the whole thing is going... It seems a really interesting use for a Pegasos machine...