Softload changes

Having see a post mentioning that network drivers are available for some RPC/A7K cards, I decided to try RO 5 on an old SA RPC.

I used the Pi Distro as a starting point (removing the drivers and loader folder and copying it to a 20GB drive).

The machine actually appears to work OK (apart from lack of a floppy drive (though I’m surprised I noticed).

However I modified the way the softload is called.

I copied the contents of the sofload to a folder in boot named softload. (Though perhaps loader would have been more consistant.)

I then added these lines to the !run file in !boot dir

RMEnsure SharedCLibrary 5.17 RMLoad <Boot$Dir>.Resources.!System.500.Modules.CLib
RMEnsure UtilityModule 5.19 Run <Boot$Dir>.softload.Loader

Above this line

Run <Boot$Dir>.Resources.!System

This loads RO 5 without having to load stuff first and without asking. (It’s a pluggable hard drive, and a second Risc PC, so loading the ROM OS isn’t of interest to me.)

I’d like to request that the softload be modified to.

1. Load at this point.
2. Default to loading the new OS (rather than the ROM one)

and in the longer term have a proper menu with multiple option and configurable time out and default. (Hopefully the same menu being available on the Pi and BB to select completely different OSes)

(I also tried it on a 3.7 A7000+ and it worked, although there were issues with things with long names and too many files, I suspect it would have been better to start with the ordinary disk image rather than the Pi one. Although when we get partition support, the problem should be no more, just !boot RO 5 from a partition that 3.7 can’t see.)