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The mkromdisk Manual

Introduction

The mkromdisk is the host-based tool of the romdisk project that allows you to create disk images that are suitable to be placed into a ROM and used as a romdisk with the romdisk.device of this project.

You can either create a romdisk image directly from a directory tree (in this case amitool's xdftool is used to create a Amiga OFS/FFS image first) or you supply a pre-mastered disk image in a .adf or .hdf file.

Both floppy disk images (usually stored in .adf files) and hard disk files of arbitrary disk geometry (stored in .hdf files) are supported. Since ROMs have a size of 512 KiB floppy disk images can only be stored in a compressed format. Hard disk images with a very small geometry (e.g. 40 cylinders, 2 heads, 11 sectors = half a disk = 440 KiB) also fit in a ROM uncompressed.

The mkromdisk tool lets you decide if and what type of compression you want to apply. Furthermore, you can select parameters of your drive, like boot priority or number of file system buffers used.

Depending on the type of compression you selected, you will need to install an external compression tool on your command line first.

The tool is written in Python 2.7 (not 3.x!), so make sure you have it installed on your machine.

Typical Usages

From Directory

  • Create a romdisk directly from a directory tree (Assuming ROMDISK is a directory that contains all the files and directories for your romdisk):
mkromdisk -d ROMDISK disk.rodi
  • Note: The romdisk disks use a .rodi suffix and the tool always requires the name of a output disk image as argument.

From Disk Image

  • Create a romdisk from a pre-mastered disk image:
mkromdisk -i wb31.adf -f dflt disk.rodi
  • Note: since a floppy disk image does not fit uncompressed, we enable compression with the -f option

Options

The tool allows you to specify lots of additional options to alter its behavior.

  • -h shows you detailed help on all switches
  • -d <directory> create a romdisk image from a given directory. Make sure to install xdftool command from amitools, first.
  • -i <file.xdf> create a romdisk image from a given disk image.
  • -t <prefix> during image creation some temporary files are created. This option sets the name prefix used for all files. Default is temp.
  • -g <cyls>,<heads>,<secs> specify a disk image geometry. Specify cylinders, heads, and sectors as numbers, e.g. -g 80,2,11 specifies a floppy disk geometry. Use -g adf as a short cut for floppies.
  • -D <dostype> when creating an image from a directory (-i), you can specify the created file system with this option: Use ofs for old and ffs for fast file system images. Default is ffs.
  • -p <prio> set the boot priority of the romdisk. Default is 5.
  • -b <num_buffers> set the number of buffers that the filesys uses. Default is 5.
  • -f <format> sets the compression format (Default is raw):
    • raw: no compression applied at all. disk is stored unmodified. even empty tracks are kept.
    • nop: no compression, but omit empty (zero) tracks.
    • dflt: compress with zlib's deflate compressor (level 9). no external tool is required.
    • rnc: compress with Rob Northern Computing's ProPack. You need to install vamos from amitools first and supply the packer binary ppami.exe in current dir.
    • lz4: compress with lz4 algorithm. You need to install the lz4 tool first.
  • -v be more verbose
  • -e <entity> select the compression granularity: either pack whole tracks or cyls (= track * heads). Cylinder packing needs to decompress more for a single block but allows you to usually get a better compression ratio. Default is tracks.