HardDisc4 filename lengths

For personal curiosity I’ve been tinkering with using HardDisc4 Boot Sequence + ROOL !System under RO3.11, mainly because I like a snazzier looking game of !Patience plus you get an eye-watering module area of over 3Mbytes as it evicts everything from the ROM :)

Question is two fold, one query, one quirky:

1. Is using HardDisc4 Boot Sequence + ROOL !System under RO3.11 still supported (albeit probably not massively tested) as the download text implies it is with: “RISC OS 5.24 stable disc image, including boot sequence and applications. [SNIP] The ‘System resources’ (above) are also required for users with pre-RISC OS 5 machines.”

2. In the download of HardDisc4, there are 8 files out of 1753 that exceed 10 characters in length making them invalid on the file system I was copying to, ZIDEFS in this case:

InSituBootUpdate
HardDisc4.!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors.Philips.Philips-109E
HardDisc4.!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors.Philips.Philips-18P2
HardDisc4.!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors.Philips.Philips-180P
HardDisc4.!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors.Philips.Philips-170S
HardDisc4.!Boot.RO510Hook.Boot.PreDesk.SoftSCSI.SCSISoftUSB
HardDisc4.!Boot.RO500Hook.Boot.PreDesk.SoftSCSI.SCSISoftUSB
HardDisc4.PrintDefs.Printers.QMS.QMSMagi2350

None of these matter to RO310 as I understand it so it’s more of a question of should they, like their brethren still be 10 characters max to not cause errors when copying as having ‘truncate on’ set when copying system files should be considered risky?

1. Is using HardDisc4 Boot Sequence + ROOL !System under RO3.11 still supported

Yes. But it’s definitely not something I’d recommend, for the problem you mention of it eating 3MB of RAM :-)

should they, like their brethren still be 10 characters max

Yes. There’s also RISC OS 3.5-3.7 to consider, where the boot filesystem is likely to be restricted to 10 character filenames.

Just wondering, could Jeff Doggets’ Fat32FS have it’s SCSI DiscOps converted to ADFS or IDEFS DiscOPs, or perhaps at least it could mount a fat SCSI harddrive? I could get an ide cfard mounted with an old !DosMount program, but the old DOS looks even worse with uppercase /and/ short filenames.
One time I had long filenames on 3.7 was when Jeffrey Lee was doing USB CD drivers, and I mounted an ide CD drive through an IDE-SCSI interface card, using the Acorn SCSI card.
Edit: Sorry, realise this was off the topic (is harddisc4 download)

Yes. There’s also RISC OS 3.5-3.7 to consider, where the boot filesystem is likely to be restricted to 10 character filenames.

Cheers Jeffrey, popped in Bugs

It’s been a problem for years, although it was only one file back then!