Emax

> I am running win 3.11 with DOS ver 6.2.
No version of Windows will work

> I am running from the command line or DOS prompt.
You must only run it from DOS - don't even attempt to load any of the
drivers for Windows.  DOS only!

> I am using high quality DSDD floppy discs.
Always a good plan - there's a regular cycle of heat and light on
Mirage-Net about using HD floppies.  They work, but not for long.  Can
you format the floppies as 720k DOS floppies?

> I have made sure the Emaxos.emx file is in the EMX dir.
Handy, but not always necessary

> I have replaced the OS emx file (thinking it was bad).
Good idea, just to make sure.  Do the OS files have checksums?

> I have tried other Emax OS versions.
Fairynuff.  If you think it will help

> I have tried to format from the Emax then go to EMX for banks.
This works best for me


> If anyone has any suggestions that I am missing here please email me,
> but I think this software is crap and full of bugs so I have sent it
> out to a C+ geek friend to rewrite it. If we are able to rewrite the
> software it will run under win 95, 98, NT and 2000.

You're almost certainly wasting your time trying to rewrite it under
Windows.  Windows specifically does *not* allow you low-level access to
the floppy controller, which you will need to do this.  The rather
inflexible Windows API is designed for writing high-level applications,
and you're not expected to tamper with the hardware yourself.  You will
need to work on bare metal for this, and to do that you'll need to base
the system on either DOS or Unix.

A far better bet would be to look at using fdrawcmd and dd on one of the
many Unix-based operating systems out there.  These are two very handy
tools - fdrawcmd sends raw commands to the floppy drive controller (as
the name implies), and dd copies data between devices and files (recall
that Unix treats nearly *everything* as a file, including block
devices).  I haven't quite cracked what the Emax format is, but it
should be possible to extract at least an Emax II image saved as a
16-bit bank to a .wav file *fairly* easily.

Does anybody know what the .emx format is?  Is it compressed in some
way?  Can the original author be contacted?

Cheers,
  Gordon