jgrass

Thanks so much for pointing me to that manual! I have seen the SpartaDOS manuals but not this one. I will give it a try and see how it works. Thanks again. Case now closed as far as I'm concerned.

Oh one last thing Marius. In re-reading your post, I forgot to let you know that when I sent my original RT8 back, it was still brand new still in original packaging, covered under return policy. That was quite a while ago. recently, when I heard the case was improved, I just simply decided to re-purchase one. Wanted to make sure you didn't mis-interpret my saga...

Marius, you may find this hard to believe, but my story is almost the same as yours. And I DO agree that SpartaDOS is the most powerful for the Atari 8 bit world, but I am at the stage where 99% of the time, I don't require that awesome power. Almost all my ATR's are XDOS based that boot just the program I want. That's also how I run The Last Word and every other "large" stand-alone program. And once I discovered PicoDOS, I now mostly use multi program / game boot disks (XDOS based) that boot instantly and allow me to select any number of games or programs from any size ATR with my SDrive-Max. So I am content with this operational scenario and was only looking for one more bonus feature added to XDOS. I did appreciate hearing your back story, even with the touch of sarcasm! ?

Yeah, yeah... I just can't believe that of the the tons of users out there, not one person has tried to use either the original ICD cart or the re-makes with another DOS. BTW, that page in the Altirra manual doesn't help. I am not a professional programmer so I can't go beyond peeking addresses that might contain the time and date info and writing BASIC pgms which would manipulate the data. I did find the time and date data in the addresses pointed to in DOSVEC locations 10 and 11 IAW with ICD docs. But the data is only there (wouldn't you know it) when SpartaDOS is loaded! Oh well...

Thank you both for the responses. Interesting re the MacRorie carts. I too had an issue with the case on mine in which the circuit board moved too much and the plastic pins were too wide for insertion into carts with protective covers. He did accept my return and now has recently re-designed the case, fixing the flaws. He has sent me a new version of the product which does now work properly and can accept carts with protective covers. Yes I can get the time from my PC link as well but that, as well as Apetime, S2Utime, etc is not what I want. I simply want code to access the date and time that the cart provides. Thanks flashjazzcat for the pointer to the Altirra manual. I will start there. I was just hoping someone had already written standalone code, either BASIC or Assembly language that already does this.

Has anyone had any success using the real time clock function of the R-Time 8 cartridge (or any of the new modern replacement designs) with a DOS other than SpartaDOS? What I'm looking for is to get that nice extra line at the top of the screen with the date and time using any DOS besides SpartaDOS. Currently I use XDOS as my go-to DOS. Please don't try to sell me on SpartaDOS since I am very familiar with it's capabilities. I do not want the SpartaX cart and don't care to use the disk version of it unless I'm copying files off of Sparta formatted disks. XDOS is fantastic and does everything I want using only three character commands. And it is designed to work with my Omniview BIOS upgrade. So has anyone written any custom software to read the R-Time 8 clock information so that it can be presented on the screen? Or even a program that fetches the clock information so that it can be used in other screen presentations. Thanks.

Thank you very much for the detailed information. OK, you have convinced me to remove the Newell upgrade and go with the U1MB.

Hi, this is my first post here. I recently pulled my 800XL from storage and got it going again. I have been reading this forum for weeks and can't find the answer I am looking for, so please help. This 800XL has the Newell 256K upgrade installed along with a switchable Omniview bios chip. I see there is a pretty cool upgrade out there (Ultimate 1MB) which I am interested in installing, but I would prefer not to remove the Newell upgrade and just add the Ultimate upgrade. Can I do this? Can they coexist peacefully without any memory conflict issues? To be clear, I would not activate the Newell memory with software, just want to leave it installed doing "nothing" and instead use the Ultimate 1MB for additional memory. I see that there are two possible switch installations for the Newell upgrade: 1)Newell says I can install a switch which provides PIA chip pin 15 with two different signal sources to make it look like "other" memory and 2) 3rd party mod says I can put a switch on the Halt line to determine whether Antic will follow either main or banked memory. Will installing either one of these switches help? Perhaps someone can explain to me exactly what they do since it is beyond me. I am good at soldering so I could install either of these or both of these switches or even a different one that could "deactivate" the Newell memory. Thanks!