Problems with RPCEmu on Win7

I’m running a copy of RPCEmu originally from one of ROOL’s London Show memory sticks on a Windows 7 machine (Dell XPS, 3.4GHz Core i7, 8MB RAM). It runs very well, averaging around 300 MIPS, but I find:
1. I can’t delete files from HostFS from within RISC OS, although this is possible using Windows Explorer;

2. NetSurf 2.8 (installed from a fresh download) will not run. I’ve updated !Boot and !System, but clicking on the icon produces an endlessly cycling hourglass. RPCEmu is not yet bridged to the web, but I assume this isn’t necessary in order to use NetSurf as (for example) an HTML viewer?

If anyone can tear themselves away from the festivities long enough to reply I should be most grateful!

Have you tried running RPCEmu as Admnistrator?
If you right click on the RPCEmu shortcut, you should see an option ‘Run as Administrator’

You may also need to disable user account control – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-vista/Turn-User-Account-Control-on-or-off

On Windows 7 HostFS exists in two locations. One in Program Files (x86), the other in user\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files(x86)\RPCEmu. Files in the first location are not deletable under emulation while in the second location they are. This maybe causing your other problems too.

I have on my laptop created a library named Acorn which points to the second location, to make it easy to copy files to my HostFS, since my RPCEmu only networks through the wired interface and not with the wifi.

Interesting. I’ve got two copies of RPCEmu, one booting into 4.02 and including a HardDisc4 1GB drive as well as HostFS, the other booting into 5.17 with just HostFS, both located in C:Program Files. HD4 under 4.02 seems to behave exactly like normal RO hardware. I’ll follow up the suggestions above. Meanwhile, a further question: the largest pre-formatted HardDisc4 option seems to be 1GB under RPCEmu; can it be enlarged, or is there a reason for the size limit?

Is HostFS similarly constrained?

PS: the NetSurf problem went away: I hadn’t been waiting long enough for it to parse all the fonts on launching…

Meanwhile, a further question: the largest pre-formatted HardDisc4 option seems to be 1GB under RPCEmu; can it be enlarged, or is there a reason for the size limit?

It can be re-formatted up to 32GB in size.

Is HostFS similarly constrained?

No.

“It can be re-formatted up to 32GB in size.”
Excellent! But I cannot find instructions for doing this in the online manual:
http://www.marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/manual/
so any advice would be welcome.

There is a guide here – http://www.riscos.info/index.php/RPCEmu_Linux_Guide#Enlarging_emulated_ADFS_drive

You can download the latest HForm (Hard disc formatting utility) from here – https://www.riscosopen.org/zipfiles/apps/hform.2.59.zip

I’ve not tried doing this with RISC OS 5.17, but I assume it will work.
You may want to back everything up to HostFS, as you will loose anything on the HardDisc4 image.

I have RPCEmu 0.8.8 / RO 5.17 working on Win7, except that I can’t get an ADFS harddisk to appear at all. I have a hd4.hdf file in the RPCEmu folder, but no drive icon appears, only HostFS. Anyone experienced this before? Does RO see the .hdf file drives as SCSI drives, or something else? TIA

I believe there is a problem with hard disc emulation with RPCEmu 0.8.8 and RO 5 still. So the ADFS hard disc is disabled.

So the ROOL RPCEmu sticks also have no ADFS hard disc option?

"This stick includes all of the disc-based software found on the “Boot stick”"

However, the following appears in the RPCEmu Windows folder on the Boot stick, in the How to Install text message:

Other information
-———————
The ‘boot drive’ of the Risc PC is inside the “hostfs” folder which you
copied in step (2). Note that the Risc PC RISC OS 5 ROM supplied in this release does not have ADFS support and networking is untested – you may find that HostFS is the only way to transfer data; for more information, please see the RPCEmu user guide at:
http://marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/manual/

The manual does not specifically refer to version 5 of the OS in the section on using hard disk images. In the absence of ADFS support I can’t see how it is possible to set up a hard disk under RO5….

There is mention of a data loss bug with IDE when using RPCEmu and RISC OS 5.
http://marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/ro5.html

Aha – I really ought to try out the stick I bought back in October!

If you REALLY REALLY want to play with ADFS on RPCEmu, this latest IOMD ROM build has ADFS built in. http://robheaton.co.uk/riscos/roms/5.17-iomd.zip

Don’t hold me responsible if you trash your harddisc4 image!
DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

Now that 5.19 is available, is ADFS support still missing from the ROM build?