Quantity of USB drive icons

Right now there is a limit of 4 USB mass storage devices and 4 USB hard drives able to be displayed on the iconbar.

Why can’t this be increased?

If you connect more in you’ll see in !USBinfo and *devices that they are actually picked up.

Presumably this is from the historic way drives 0-3 were floppy discs and 4-7 were hard discs.

Another issue is that I only seem to be able to have one FAT formatted device active at once. Plug in a second one and it doesn’t appear on the icon bar.

Bryan has it exactly right, the limitation is a historical one from FileCore. In RISC OS 5 the API was extended (FileCore_DiscOp64) to support up to 256 drives but internally this is mapped back to 0-7 because it’s passed round in the top 3 bits of internal disc addresses.

Unrelated to that, there are also a great many places where paths are constructed from a template “MyFS::0.” where the ‘0’ is overwritten with drivenumber+’0’ which obviously only works up to 9.

It’s slated to be changed in Filing System Bounty 3 so the best immediate action is to deposit some monarch bearing paper bills into the bounty scheme…