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sup8pdct

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Posts posted by sup8pdct

  2. Posted

    Back in the day, I had a game that played like centipede except it was better. I thought it was called myraped but only versions i can find are not the one. Also not millipede.

    From what i remember, (memory is scratchy) it loaded in basic, and when ran, created machine code and ran it. I thought i read about it somewhere that the guy who wrote sent to atari but they rejected it because it was better then their own.

     

    Can someone point me in the right direction?

     

    James

  5. Posted

    According to the BlackBox firmware, hardware is used at the following locations with floppy board option and 64K ram.

    $D130-4 6551acia
    $D16x VIA on Floppy board. used for communications with and control of floppy board
    $D17X Via used for scsi/parallel printer data bus and control
    $D1BC-F 6521 PIA Ram bank select and read dip switches
    $D1Cx rom sel, interrupt, enable BB

     

    James

  8. Posted

    Just spotted an error in section B.1 in track sector number conversion. Xf551 DSDD has 720 sectors per side, not 1440 which is enhanced density.

    Percom and ATR8000 treat double sided differently. Need to look it up.The BB floppy board can handle all 3. Just need to change a setting.

     

    James

  9. Posted

    I did this way back in 1998. Back then,i used ape trial, BlackBox floppy board and its disk edit software (task master?), Scopy from SDCS, 1050 enhanced with supermax, xf551 enhanced with a css upgrade, couple of floppy mechs on the floppy board, homemade SIO2PC cable and a dos based PC. I liked Scopy as it reads a disk sector order and chooses the best sector read order to get all sectors quickly using a USD drive regardless of how it was formatted. Disks i had problems with, i used the BB disk edit tool and noted the sectors that wouldn't read then manually tried them in all drives till i got that sector read properly and copied it over. Some times it took many attempts, going forwards then back etc. Copying my harddrive partitions however was a different story. I found the diskcopy option in the BB disk edit software has a problem somewhere, so i wrote my own simple sector copy program to do the job.

     

    Ape trail only uses std speed,(19200) not any ultra speed etc so backing up all my disks took quite some time. Hard drive partitions took forever.......

     

    James

  10. Posted

    status and write are the only commands that printers/interfaces use. Interfaces like 850 convert EOL to LF.That is why std centronics printers connected to 850 and like must have CR after LF dip switch/option set. Each data packet is 40 bytes long. A problem occurs when printing graphic data through 850 and the like interfaces, any EOL (155) is converted to LF (13) regardless. Lines longer then 40 bytes will have just plain text in 1st block and as many blocks as required, then an EOL is sent. what is padded after that,i am not sure.

     

    James

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    There are 2 versions of the cpm atr bios. mar-82 and apr-84. The latter version is the only one i have worked with. A quick look at the early version in the archive shows it too uses 512 byte sectors to load the system. so no luck there.

     

    I need to know how the ATR treats the 2nd side when used as an atari drive. It may not be the same as the XF551.

     

    James

  14. Posted

     

    Is it *ONLY* that one sector that is the problem?

     

    Can't you just write some easy BASIC code that sets up the DCB at $300, points destination to sector one, points source to your buffer in a string ADR(SECTORDATA$) and calls SIO?

    Done it with a monitor program (supermon). and it does work. Getting original sector 1 data was the major stumbling block. had to convert the anadisk files to another format just to see the data which took ages to locate. then find corrupted images etc.

     

    The reason for disk archive i did was so anyone with a 64K ATR8000 without any system disks could recreate them using only the atr8000 and atari in a relatively easy manner. Still a little way to go yet it seams.

     

    James

    • Like 1

  15. Posted · Edited by sup8pdct

    hmmmm.looks like it is trying to read second side.

     

    Have to be very careful setting up double sided disks with atari. Xf551 reads side 0 from track 1 to 40 then side 1 from track 40 to track 1. Not sure what atr does for atari disks. A percom? would do the 2nd side from track 1 to track 40. std double sided on atr cpm does side 0 then 1, step then side 0,1 etc. will need to setup a disk that is double sided. Need to do some major figuring out.

     

    James

  16. Posted

    We probably should just give up the ghost and start working in 128 byte, FM, 90k disks. I never got around to doing it, but I should look at using the original format disk program for the ATR that produced 128 byte sector boot disks. I'm not sure if it was 8" only but at least we could stand a chance of making a boot disk that could be archived and transferred with a stock Atari drive like an 810 or 1050. Should'a, could'a would'a, made a CPM disk that could be copied with ~ANADISK instead of erroring out. I have a slightly busted 8" drive that I could get started on seeing if it is within my limits for repairing to work with. No power supply for it but the only thing I am missing is the 24V head load supply.

    Doesn't matter what the disk is formatted at. DDsysgen will reformat the 1st 2 tracks on side 0 to what is said above.

    I have messed around with anadisk a lot. I found i could recreate a disk except for the 1st 128 byte boot sector. for some reason, either anadisk or the disk controller in the pc couldn't handle it properly. Only way i could get it to work was to recreate the disk with anadisk, then go to atr8000 with disk and manually write sector 1 only despite it being MFM. Also be careful with some anadisk images that are around. some are corrupted.

    I will have to think about creating a disk with the atr8000 formatted with 1024 byte sectors and write them out.....

     

     

    Just reading the cpm manual and found something interesting. Do you have 2 drive mechs to hook up to your ATR? If so try the disk created above in the 2nd mech,

     

    James

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    sounds like the version of cpm booted doesn't properly see the 256 byte sectors or expects 1024 bytes of sector data. sounds like a drive parameter isn't set up. i haven't looked at or decoded the drive paramater table so it will take some work.

    I assumed the deblocking code could read the 256 byte sectors without a problem as it is one option within the format program.

    Digging through the source shows a setting for 256 byte sectors!??!

     

    Maybe more code needs to be downloaded to the atr to format the diisk or somehow get a cpm version that has the 256 byte sector tables built in.

     

    Does it throw up an error number? or just error??

     

    James

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    The native atr8000 disk format is 2048 byte sectors (memory is a little fuzzy here). a system disk has the 1st 2 tracks of side 0 at 512 byte sectors except for the 1st sector of 1st track and last sector of 2nd track which are 128 bytes regardless of what rest of disk is formatted at.

    Once you have system booted and a working data disk, simply create a disk at default settings, copy data to it and create a system dsik on it.

     

    James

    • Like 2

  19. Posted

    I have to revisit this as it was some time ago.

     

     

    Am unable to explain what is happening in your 3rd option.

    Maybe atr is picking up something on 2nd side and creating an error??

     

    I assume you have created a working system disk from what is in the archive and a files disk to create more CPM disks with its default format?

    I do remember an error i created on a disk on a large text or source file. It spans 2 directory entries and i messed up the linking or something.

     

    My ATR isn't working properly so unable to test. Need to find the correct FDC.

     

    James

  22. Posted

    The double density drive should be able to be configured to single or double by dos (ie via software) so rebooting it shouldn't be necessary.

    Get a density smart dos like Superdos. If you are unable to get and write another dos to disk, ask someone here to send you a disk.

     

    Some early DOSes are not density smart and are are stuck in what ever density that was booted. They sometimes come with a utility to copy between density's.

     

    If density smart dos doesn't work for you, you may need to daisy chain both drives, set drive id's as required and copy from one drive to another.

     

    James

    • Like 1

  24. Posted · Edited by sup8pdct

    Way to tell rom version is to look at the last 4 bytes right after 'KSB.' of the rom image. (note period = 2E)

    In lowbyte high byte format is version number eg 20 01 = 1.2 10 01 = 1.1.

    The last 2 bytes is supposed to be checksum excluding those 2 bytes (at least i believe that is the case).

    There is another location where version number is kept. In V 1.2 rom, it is at CF5 again in low/high format. V1.1 will be in a different location.

     

     

     

    Edit. Just checked V1.1 rom. 2nd Ver num location is in same place at CF5.....

     

    James

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