MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: DEC Rainbow 100

Hi,

i am one of the maintainers of the Rainbow driver. Let me answer some questions i saw previously.

A Rainbow-100-A is not emulated because nobody to date dumped the ROMs (and the ones online are fake).

TeleDisk needs 100 % real iron and a non-USB diskette controller As far as i know, it is useless in Dosbox.

The Rainbow diskette format is interleaved and has nothing in common with standard PCs, so you will need customized tools to manipulate them.
PowerISO and all modern PC utilites aren't capable (this includes PUTR which claims to handle RX50 disks, but destroys Rainbow-100 boot sectors).

Attached is a .NET executable to skew/unskew 400 K DEC-DOS image files (for use with DiskExplorer 1.69E...see linked PDF). A tested version of Cpmtools for Windows is also provided.

Existing 400 K image files (exactly 409.600 bytes; type *.IMG) - and *.TD0 files can be mounted directly in emulation (in MAME/MESS).

A few Rainbow-100 archives are still online (Latrobe, Goodnight, Decus, mirrors of ftp.update.uu.se).

Current Rainbow-100 B emulation in MESS has support for

- two RX-50 disk drives (A and B)
- one PC compatible 5.25 inch 360 K drive (Slot 3) ...with special drivers
- one PC compatible 3.5 inch 720 K drive (Slot 4) ...with special driver (the way to go for seamless data exchange with PC)
- one single DEC RDX hard disk (up to 8 heads and 1024 cylinders and multiple partition types).
- up to four independent Corvus hard drives (CP/M 1 only, no drivers for DOS or other OS seem to have survived)
- all known variants of the ClikClok (a real time clock sold by Suitable Solutions)
- 7220 Color Graphics (marked as imperfect; many games run but colors are too dark; AutoCad 2 omits lines / patterns)
- different types of monitors (including homebrew dual monitor)

Read more in my introductory PDF (with instructions on how to create suitable hard disks with Chdman)
First steps with the Rainbow-100

Serial and printer were fixed around 0.196 (not reflected in document above).

Another source for info are notes in the Rainbow driver

Edited by Bavarese (04/08/18 08:28 PM)