8-Bit Hard Drive

[Bill Lange]

Is it possible and if so, what is the best way to hook a standard hard drive to an Atari 8-bit. Has anyone done this? What DOS do you use? How do you power the Hard Drive?

 

Bill Lange

[atari70s]

i dont know if it can be done but the Dos that would be used is Dos 2.09.

[Gunstar]

You need the ICD MIO board or CSS Black box to hook up a hard drive. CSS is still in business, I'll give you the adress in a minute. DOS 2.09 is a hack job and you may have trouble finding it. I believe you will get a DOS with the MIO or Blackbox to use with Hard drives, but SpartDOS, Mydos, SuperDOS, and several others *DO* support hard drive partitions upto 16megs and you can have an unlimited amount of partitions.CSS catalog

[atari70s]

I got a disk of Dos 2.09 so thats how i know that but Dos 3 shoudl work

[Jetboot Jack]

I would recommend either MYDOS or Sparta DOS for handling a HD. They are both reliable and well featured.

 

Hacks of DOS 2.5 do support HD's but they are ugly and hard to use. If you want to use an ATARI DOS then I would suggest DOS 4 or DOS XE as its othewise known.

 

And be sure to avoid DOS 3 at all costs - I have no idea if it supports HD's, but it is awful and incompatible with 99% of software.

 

sTeVE

[Bill Lange]

I remember using MYDOS with my ATR8000 back in the day. It supports many drive configurations. I had a couple of double sided quad density drives and I thought I was king.

 

Does anyone use this CSS Black Box? The $199 seems a little steep for this little device. Of course the best part of re-living your childhood is that you can afford it the second time around.

 

WRL

[mos6507]

I had a 155MB drive hooked up to my 8-bit through a Black Box and it was wonderful. There was no way I would ever fill up that much space.

 

The problem with 8-bit DOSs is that they only support up to 16MB partitions. The only DOSs that will work effectively with hard drives are those that support subdirectories.

 

That pretty much means only MYDOS and SPARTADOS. Of those, MYDOS doesn't support true random access, it's a seek and find file system. SPARTA has a true file bitmap and therefore file operations tend to be faster with SPARTADOS than MYDOS.

 

The BB has a virtual floppy system which is pretty cool also. You can copy your floppies to the HD and then boot off them as if they were floppies. Great with games and other protected programs that will only run off of a floppy.

[atari70s]

think you can hook a 40 gig HD to an atari 8 bit ( and be able to use all 40 gig )

[King Asmo]

What the heck would you put on a 40GB hard drive for an Atari computer? Heck, I'd be surprised if you could fill 40MB, let alone 40GB.

[Ze_ro]

Anything like this available for the Atari 8-bit? I set it up on my Commodore 128 downstairs, and it works... though I have tons of problems with long file names

 

--Zero

[atari70s]

is it doable?a 40 gig thing. ( now all i woudl want else is a Pentium 4 hehe. ) take pong to the next level

[Gunstar]

With the black box, it states that upto 9 16meg partitions are accessable at one time, but it is possible to switch partitions in and out for virtually unlimited storage space, so if there was enough software for the Atari, you could fill up an 40gig drive and be able to access it all if not all at once. I think King Asmo is right about the entire library of 8-bit software being in the megabytes though, including commercial, pd&demo, of every type of program application-music-games, probably would only come to about a 100 megs or so...just a total guess...

[Gunstar]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ze_ro:

Anything like

this

available for the Atari 8-bit? I set it up on my Commodore 128 downstairs, and it works... though I have tons of problems with long file names

 

--Zero

---

 

Yes, there is; the SIO2PC or A.P.E cables and software allow you to use all of your PC's drives, printers, modems, etc. with the 8-bit atari, the SIO2PC has been around for over a decade although upgrades have come, and the A.P.E cable&software for close to the same I believe (early 90's?). It also is much faster than standard Atari drives, but even more importantly, it's about 150 times faster than regular Commodore 1571's....what a joke (I own two and a C64). just recently I was comparing the game 'Racing destruction Set' between the atari and c64 and decided to syncronize the music of both and compare&see how well they go together. It took literally 10 times as long for my 1571 drive to load the game than my 1050(both unmodified)!

By the way, the two games are virtually identical, the music on both is very good and very similiar, and excellent source to compare the basic powers of both sound processors. They're about the same as far as I'm concerned, I think they both sound good for their era.

 

[ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: Gunstar ]

[Albert]

Back when I was running an Atari 8-bit BBS, I used a 1MB ICD MIO board to attach two Seagate ST225 hard drives. I don't remember all the specifics, but there was some type of Adaptec controller between the MIO and the hard drives. I had the hard drives and controller in a big XT hard drive case, which worked pretty well. I used SpartaDOS X, which I highly recommend for someone wanting to use a hard drive on the 8-bit.

 

40MB of storage is a *huge* amount on an Atari 8-bit. I wish I never sold all my 8-bit gear before going off to college. It's probably all rotting in a dump somewhere. I'm still looking for an MIO board if anyone ever comes across one.

 

..Al

[Guy Ferrante]

The biggest Hard drive I formated with the Black box was 1 gig, the BB os rom had problems formating the last partition. A quick call to CCS and in no time a new rom was avalible. It took a LOOONG time to low level format the drive and then put all the partition information in and then format each partition!! Did it in 1992.

If I remember it was 96 partitions of 16 megs, a real wormhole.

 

Atari8Man

[Guy Ferrante]

Oh lets not forget that even MSDOS 3 had the same problem with 16 meg partition limits and that was for the 16 bit itel 80286 chip.

 

Atari is Power with out the price.

 

Atari8man

[AlanD]

Albert,

I believe tho it has been a while since I have looked at it that the board you are talking about is an Adaptec 4000A controller board. It allows you to use MFM/RLL drives in a SCSI system.

 

I am using one of them with my setup and two hard drives, a 40meg and an 80meg. After using an Atari with a M-I/O and a hard drive I could never go back to using the 1050 exclusively. My setup is especially diskless since I slaved a 486 to the system thru an SIO2PC cable. That system holds most of my work disks and data files.

 

AlanD

[Bill Lange]

You know, after reading all that, I just might continue using my SIO2PC cable and my PC hard drive.

 

I figure it is going to be over $300 for a new BB and hard drive. The SI02PC cable cost me about $10 and 2 hours to make.

 

WRL

[Gunstar]

I've got the SIO2PC and about a 4gig hard drive, with about 16 megs partitioned so far for use with the A.P.E software, I load Atari software through the PC/SIO2PC using the PC's hard drive, cd-rom and floppy, but I still have 3(!) 1050's hooked up (all US double ULtra speed except one) and I still use my floppies just as much if not more than the SIO2PC set up. I just find it more enjoyable, or nostalgic and easier to load my software up the old fashioned way. why? 1) put the floppy in, turn on the computer and your game is ready to play in a short while. 2)1050 really doesn't take that long (IMHO) to load Atari games. 3) it must be nostalga too...If I leave my PC on all the time, then I only have to play with it for a second to use it with my XE, but I don't leave it on wasting power, so my 1050 is still easier (I don't have any problem flipping through floppies over scrolling through directories-they're both just as easy/hard to me). Am I "out there" for still using my floppies? I actually bought my third 1050 AFTER I had the SIO2PC!!!

[Bill Lange]

I have two 1050 drivies. I can't format or write with either one. I can read with both of them, but one's read doesn't work much either. I tend to use my 800 XL for playing cartridge games. I used my emulator to fool around with 6502 assembly programming. I have a box of about 200 floppies that I would like to get on another media before they all byte the dust and end up in the bit bucket.

 

WRL

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gunstar:

I was comparing the game 'Racing destruction Set' between the atari and c64 and decided to syncronize the music of both and compare&see how well they go together. It took literally 10 times as long for my 1571 drive to load the game than my 1050(both unmodified)!

---

 

Well, here's the thing: Most people don't know this (other than us Commodore fans), but when Commodore designed the Vic-20, a bug crept into the I/O routines, and as a result they had to limit the speed of the disk drive to a 300 baud transfer rate (I'm not sure offhand what the maximum would have been otherwise, but I would geuss at least four times that). I would imagine that Commodore wasn't too concerned since at the time, tape drives were the thing, and VIC-1541 disk drives were $800 or so.

 

Flash forward ahead, and Commodore is designing the C-64. Since they want to keep as much compatibility as possible with the Vic-20 (Almost all the hardware is compatible except for cartridges), they had to compensate for this bug.... which meant they again limited the disk drive transfer rate to 300 baud! Of course, this is why the C-64 and 1541 are known for their painfully slow transfer rates.

 

Another flash forward, and Commodore is working on the C-128. Here, they finally decide to fix their mistake properly. They still want backwards compatibility, so they design a new disk drive, the 1571. This drive was sort of a dual-mode drive... if necessary, it could downgrade itself to a 1541, or it could work in it's native mode, which was a LOT faster (believe me, I've been using Commodore machines for the last 15 years or so). Of course, the only way to get this speed increase is to use it with a C-128, and then only in 128 mode I believe (There's probably a hack to use it in C-64 mode though).

 

Not a very good excuse for the slow disk drive... but at least it's an explanation I suppose.

 

--Zero

[mos6507]

If you want to talk about floppy drives, the Atari had a similar problem.

 

The 800 system wasn't originally designed to talk to floppy drives through the serial port but they wound up doing that for cost reasons, I guess.

 

By the time the XLs were coming out, Atari had designed a parallel disk system for the 1400, 1450XL(d) machines. These would have been really fast. Never came out.

 

But Atari could have also started offering disk drives that hooked up to the PBI port. They never did that.

 

Wonder how fast it might have been??

 

The datarate speed of floppy drives hooked up to the CSS Black Box Floppy Board is almost as fast as hard drive datarates! Of course the main bottleneck is CPU speed. Even ramdisks on the 8-bit are slower than hard drive datarates on modern PCs, but as far as the theoretical maximum datarates on the platform, PBI hard drives are a joy to use.

[Ze_ro]

Did someone say parallel cable for the 1541? I actually have one of these, and they're amazingly fast. Unfortunately, they require a hardware modification to the 1541 (which isn't too difficult, and it still works via serial afterwards), and you need special programs to be able to access the drive this way.

 

However, when doing a disk-to-disk copy, this thing beats everything hands down. I've seen full disk copies in about 12 seconds with this thing.

 

Of course, this is a homebrew modification, and not something Commodore came up with... too bad, since it would have helped them out a lot I think.

 

--Zero

[Jetboot Jack]

In the UK Datel and Evesham brought out ripper carts for the C64 that supported high speed I/O.

 

Action Replay was one of them, with that in the C64, a new BIOS for the DD and a parallel cable the C64 discs were fast, and very easy to copy!!

 

BUT comercial games/programs would not work unless hacked.

 

Overall a Happy/Archiver 810/1050 was an easier to use solution for me....

[Gunstar]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jet Boot Jack:

In the UK Datel and Evesham brought out ripper carts for the C64 that supported high speed I/O.

 

Action Replay was one of them, with that in the C64, a new BIOS for the DD and a parallel cable the C64 discs were fast, and very easy to copy!!

 

BUT comercial games/programs would not work unless hacked.

 

Overall a Happy/Archiver 810/1050 was an easier to use solution for me....

---

 

I got this cartridge with my C64 when I go it, called the 'fast load' by Epyx, but I have yet to find a single disk in my collection that actually works with it (I'd assume that at LEAST the Epyx software should, but I don't have any)!!! I have hundreds of disks for my c64 too (although I have only tried about 25% of my disks out before I gave up trying to use the cartridge).