Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store  

MrMartian

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    364

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by MrMartian

  1. Posted

    17 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

    I'm just benchmarking an SIO attached disk at divisor 0 using high speed SIO BIOS using an ATR at 512 bytes/sec and I get nowhere near the speeds Facuai is getting via RespeQt.

     

    zc5aQt8.jpg

     

    I don't know what I'm doing wrong here:

     

    Pil6bah.jpg

     

    vt57dfv.jpg

     

    5Dv2fm6.jpg

     

     

    I see in this, you have handshake method as 'NONE'. You will need to have the command signal hooked up to one of the serial signals, and select that in the settings to have proper full speed communicatons.

     

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    On 12/30/2020 at 12:41 AM, Nezgar said:

    Well - yes - "technically" a double density drive could read an enhanced density disk, but it requires firmware support... Good examples would be 3rd party double-density drives like Percom, Rana, Trak - they do not support enhanced density, but technically could if someone were to update their firmware. :)

     

    As for ED disk images with only 720 sectors... Yes it could be either the person used a suboptimal sector copier, or maybe used an SIO2PC type software with only 720 sector ATR blank disk templates or something... I've also seen the reverse - ED ATR's with less than 720 sectors in use...

     

    Since the 1050 does not use the "Percom" standard to query disk density, software must have extra logic to check the drive status command for the FM/MFM flag to tell the difference between an SD or ED disk...

     

    There was also an "early" US Doubler ROM that incorrectly reported the STATUS command for an ED disk, so there's a remote chance the archivist had this ROM in their 1050, albeit quite remote:

    https://atariage.com/forums/topic/298026-us-doubler-rom/?do=findComment&comment=4385410

    Any of my updated firmwares for the Trak or Rana support enhanced density in addition to ultrapseed. Percom I would like to do as well as the ATR8000. 

    • Thanks 1

  3. Posted

    4 minutes ago, tane said:

    That's right. Just thinking about using a USB Blaster is cumbersome.

     

    images.jpg.8091824a47e3506760b3524cbf170569.jpg

    Yes.. If I could ever dedicate time to my hobbies, I would get through this. My Ultimate lives with the blaster connected, and I hack on it occasionally. The ability to self-update the FPGA is what I've been working on the most. I already made an SPI master to talk to the SD card directly from the Atari but should now look at the way the SIDE3 does it to see if I can make it compatible to that?

  4. Posted

    6 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

    This needs to be added to the various collections out there for completeness, and analysis.

    I agree... I know there are other more Commodore specific forums out there, but I'm a member here and not there.. :) I'm sure it will get around.

     

    I do find it interesting that this is on an EPROM in this SX64. I guess it never made it far enough to make it worthwhile to be a mask rom? Then again, the actual ROM on the main board is also an EPROM and not a mask. Early production SX?

  6. Posted

    1 hour ago, carlsson said:

    Aha. Yes, it is listed as recalled by Commodore. Regarding the dumper, I've never tried it but I agree that it shouldn't take four hours to dump 8 kilobytes.

     

    Realled eh? I find it interesting that there seems to be no dumps of it anywhere.. It will be interesting to see what bugs there are in it that made it so bad?

  9. Posted

    On 7/23/2020 at 10:23 PM, Jeffrey Worley said:

    Oh, I just tested and one thing is does not do is pretty sad to lose.  It won't run slaves.  I tried.  It doesn't respond to any other id than the one on the drive's switch.  Can you fix this?  I know, I'm the only one in the world who cares, but a four drive controller with just one drive? And double-sided slaves at that.  Sigh.Oh, double-sigh.  I just tested double-sided with the original rom and it runs the slave, but only single-sided.  Sigh.  (My original rom is version 1.11.)

     

    Jeff

    I can look into putting the printer port and other drives back in. Double sided will never work without hardware modifications, as there is no IO pin hooked up to the side select pin....

     

    For the other drives, how would that work? Does it just respond on selected drive +? So if DIP switch is drive 1, it responds on 1,2,3,4, and if the switch is at 3 it does 3,4,5,6?

  12. Posted

    Sorry, real life intruded for a bit there...

     

    I'm not sure why people are having problems with this version of the ROM. It works perfectly fine for me... More details? Is it only formatting? Can you write fine to previously formatted disks?

  13. Posted · Edited by MrMartian
    More info

    Yes, the Percom would need a small hardware mod to go with the software changes. It depends on if people would be willing to do that...??

     

    I've written before about how the ATR8000 would be capable, and I've already started some preliminary work on the ATR8000, but again, not having one.. :)

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    5 hours ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

    Wow.  Thats a real hairball.  Hey, whats that sio device on top of the 800? Another Rana?

    Well, that's the real work side of my work bench... The Rana is torn apart, the wires behind it are my breadboarded Fujinet.. The drive on top of the 800 is a Super Archiver 1050, which I was using to read the disc after it was formatted double density by the Rana to see what was wrong. That fact that it couldn't read it either is what really made me look more into the Rana.  I do have another Rana, but it's the 6502 variant.

     

    I didn't take any more pictures or videos - but even once the drive was all sealed up I still don't have any issues with reading or writing, or RPM. None of the stuttering that you get...

  18. Posted

    8 minutes ago, Nezgar said:

    I found 450ns 2532's work fine in a 1050 which clocks them at 1Mhz. What does the Rana run at?

    The chip runs with a 12MHz clock and it divides that internally to 12 states, so 1MHz maximum instruction speed. But it can access the ROM multiple times in through that cycle. A quick read through the Intel manual doesn't show any information on requirements either...

     

    450ns might be too slow, but you could always try it!

  22. Posted

    So, I did find a bug in formatting which should make it not work properly doing normal formats in ED or DD. Custom (ulraspeed) format would work. But that doesn't explain my issues. I'm guessing my drive doesn't exactly like MFM recording. I will investigate hardware issues then.

  24. Posted · Edited by MrMartian
    Added clarification

    A) found the bug when the Atari is turned off.. yay!

     

    B) I can't format disks again with this thing... Has anyone else that has tried this ROM had problems formatting disks? What I mean is, the drive goes through the whole format sequence but then the disk is unreadable....

  25. Posted

    3 hours ago, Nezgar said:

    I think the 1050 US Doubler will do density detection on whatever sector happens to pass under the head on track 0 first as the drive latch is closed, not when the host actually requests a sector. I'm not sure if the rana has ability to detect latch open/closed? Normally, all 18 sectors on a double density disk are formatted as 256 bytes in MFM format, and the format of the whole disk is assumed from any sector on track 0. (128 bytes are just truncated by the drive OS from sectors 1-3 when sent to the Atari) Double Density disks formatted by the 1050 Duplicator upgrade diverges from this standard by physically formatting sectors 1-3 as MFM 128 bytes instead of 256, and 4-18 as 256 bytes. For example, this causes the 1050 US Doubler density detection to fail 3/18 (1/6) of the time by incorrectly detecting the disk as "Enhanced" density if it happens to see sectors 1, 2 or 3 first.

    Yes exactly, I do remember this. That's why it gets it right... And no, the Rana doesn't have any indication of disk present. I do something similar on my Trak rom, which still doesn't have a disk latch input but it does have the write protect input, so as long as the sensor still works I know if a disk has been changed.

     

    Which is funny - since I had another quick look at the Rana to verify it didn't have a way to check WP status - I do see that it has SIO ready. And then I look at my code and see that it does check for it and bails. So now I don't know why the LEDs don't work when the system is off.. Hooray! An actual bug...

    • Haha 1
AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...