Using USB memory sticks within the Emulator

I have the RISC OS emulator running very nicely on my Dell Studio 1558 laptop (Windows 7, 64 bit) but when I insert a (FAT32) USB memory stick into the my host computer the emulator does not recognise it and bring up a new disc icon on the icon bar.

Just for clarity works perfectly on my RISC OS booted Raspberry Pi and I need a way to copy some software and other resources from the Pi to the emulated version.

Can anyone offer any advice.

Thank you

Nick

Basically, RPCemu is completely different wrt disc handling compared to “native” RISC OS.

RISC OS 5 on your Raspberry Pi directly drives the USB stuff. When you insert a memory stick, RISC OS gets notified and tries to mount the inserted medium, and if it finds something it understands (filecore or FAT formatted), it presents you an additional disc icon.

RISC OS 5 on your RPCemu works on “virtual” hardware. This hardware does not not anything about USB and stuff. The way RPCemu presents disc content to RISC OS 5 is via HostFS, which works directly with the host OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS) to access files. Yes, files – not discs, a very important difference.

Unfortunately, HostFS in RPCemu is a bit limited – it only presents exactly one directory on the host OS’s filing system(s) to RISC OS. VirtualRPC, the commercial emulation solution (which, IIRC, does not support RISC OS 5), has a much more flexible HostFS which can mount multiple directories and can detect newly inserted discs and present them in RISC OS as a new “disc” automatically.

With RPCemu, you could try to manually create a link inside HostFS to the USB stick’s content to access it from RISC OS.

Thank you Steffen for your prompt reply. I understand what you say here but you say ‘works directly with the host OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS) to access files’ that suggests that I ought to be able to copy ‘files’ into the HostFS system so that I can access them from within RPCemu? If I interpret you correctly, how do I go about copying the files to the correct place?

Thanks again

Nick

Hi Nick, inside your installed RPCemu, you will find a directory called “hostfs”. This is the root of the FS represented by the “HostFS” disc item on the iconbar. So whatever you copy to the host filing system structure inside “hostfs” will automatically appear on the RISC OS side.

Hi.
I’ve been using memory sticks and hostfs to transfer files between my laptop and Pi quite successfully – apart from the unfortunate circumstance that all files FROM the laptop are copied into the Pi as text files and have to be re-typed before they are useable (transfers in the opposite direction seem to be o.k.) Any cure available?

I’ve been using memory sticks and hostfs to transfer files between my laptop and Pi quite successfully – apart from the unfortunate circumstance that all files FROM the laptop are copied into the Pi as text files and have to be re-typed before they are useable (transfers in the opposite direction seem to be o.k.) Any cure available?

Zip the files in the emu or Pi(Full version of SparkFS, or ZipInfo) transfer the zip file, at the other end drag the zip archive (which is showing as a text file) to SparkFS and extract the files. The filetype info is retained inside the archive.