Happy Drive "MOTOROFF.BAS"

[+Larry]

Older versions of the Happy Backup suite contained a small Basic program to shut down the floppy drive immediately after completing an operation. The "new" version of Happy (7.0 & 7.1) had this built into its drive options menu. Unfortunately, I discarded my old Happy versions since they would no longer work with my 810 Happy with the update rom. This is hopefully a means to an end -- that is to be able to manipulate the settings on my Happy 1050 without having to load the Happy menu program. Perhaps something was written for a Lazer drive which might work?

 

Does anyone have a copy of this program or a similar Basic program that works properly? I've seen some, but those that I've tried don't work; hence I'm seeking the "original."

Ones in Basic that I have seen try to use the $E459 vector to communicate with the Happy drive. Based on what I have read from the Happy disk, that probably won't work. Instead, Happy uses a different data table to communicate with the drive. (?)

 

Thers is a file "HPYSIO.UND" found on front side of the V7.1 Happy disk. This is an undocumented assembly file proposes to allow users to communicate with the drive via the "HPYTBL." I'm going to dig into this, but I wondered if anyone else has used this file?

 

Any help, suggestions, or leads would be greatly appreciated.

 

-Larry

[Shawn Jefferson]

Ones in Basic that I have seen try to use the $E459 vector to communicate with the Happy drive. Based on what I have read from the Happy disk, that probably won't work. Instead, Happy uses a different data table to communicate with the drive. (?)

 

$E459 is SIOV, which is the basic way to communicate with serial i/o devices using the OS interrupt drive routines. Unless the happy drive uses some very strange serial i/o communications protocol (which I doubt), you should be able to send commands to the drive that way.

 

Check out this page:

http://jindroush.atari8.info/asio.htm

 

According to that you can use SIOV to send the $48 command to the drive, set the appropriate AUX1 and AUX2 to get the desired drive function.

[+Larry]

Ones in Basic that I have seen try to use the $E459 vector to communicate with the Happy drive. Based on what I have read from the Happy disk, that probably won't work. Instead, Happy uses a different data table to communicate with the drive. (?)

 

$E459 is SIOV, which is the basic way to communicate with serial i/o devices using the OS interrupt drive routines. Unless the happy drive uses some very strange serial i/o communications protocol (which I doubt), you should be able to send commands to the drive that way.

 

Check out this page:

http://jindroush.atari8.info/asio.htm

 

According to that you can use SIOV to send the $48 command to the drive, set the appropriate AUX1 and AUX2 to get the desired drive function.

 

Hi Shawn-

 

Thanks for the link. Yes, that's the way I've seen it written up and in programs, however, it does nothing for my Happy 1050, while the actual Happy menu works perfectly. Have you tried this? My take -- something is missing in the documented procedures. I also can't imagine that the Happy would have been that easy to manipulate, else software publishers could have messed around with the Happy to no end. Of course that's speculation, but seems logical to me.

 

-Larry

[Shawn Jefferson]

Well, I have a happy, I'll try to dig it out in the next couple of days and try to send the commands to the drive to see what happens.

 

If you have APE hooked up to your system when you run the happy software, what gets captured in the SIO command trace window when you run the drive motor off command ?

[+Larry]

Well, I have a happy, I'll try to dig it out in the next couple of days and try to send the commands to the drive to see what happens.

 

If you have APE hooked up to your system when you run the happy software, what gets captured in the SIO command trace window when you run the drive motor off command ?

 

I have found the issues with the Happy menu program that I was trying to use. $E459 *does* work when it is properly set up. Not every command seems to respond properly, but most do, so I can proceed.

-Larry

[Shawn Jefferson]

Great! The Happy menu program you are talking about, is that the BASIC program you sent me via PM ? I hadn't had a chance to run it on my real system yet...

[+Larry]

Great! The Happy menu program you are talking about, is that the BASIC program you sent me via PM ? I hadn't had a chance to run it on my real system yet...

 

Hi Shawn-

 

Yes, that's the original, partially-working program that I had in my Happy stuff.

 

-Larry