OSX, QEMU, USB and Garmin
Jun 6, 2006I want to use my G4 Powerbook with my Garmin Streetpilot III GPS. I’ve done this on Linux. I know what is coming. It is trial by ordeal.
First, I need Windows on my Mac. That’s okay as I have the 98SE cdrom.
Now an emulator. I’ve used Bellard’s
[QEMU](http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) for games and hope the
current version has working USB. I won’t know
for sure until I get it set up but the changelog indicates that there is
support.
Next I need a boot disk but I only have FreeBSD and OSX which rules out
places like
[bootdisk.com](http://bootdisk.com) which use a self-extractor for its
images, so I snag a minimal disk image
from [Oldfiles](http://oldfiles.org.uk/), boot the emulator with it
and fdisk and format a hard disk image.
Now I need to read from the CDROM. Dig up copies of
[xcdrom](http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/),
[shucdex](http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/shsucdx/index.html), and the
tiny editor [ae](http://www.nyangau.fsnet.co.uk/). Write a minimal
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Create a disk image file with dd
if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/disk.img bs=512 count=2880
, assign it in
.mtoolsrc as drive a: and format it with mformat from the [mtools
project](http://mtools.linux.lu/) and use mcopy to copy everything in
place. Copy it to the Mac, mount it with the emulator and copy the
files.
Reboot the emulator, twiddle the drivers, reboot again and it’s off installing Windows for the next forty minutes.