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ATR-8000 (and other) CP/M System disks here


Kyle22

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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

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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

There is an older version of sysgen<?> that defaults to 128 byte FM mode for the entire disk. As usual I have lost everything once again to "female friend desk space grab" but I think I could find it. DDsysgen works as you describe of course. What ever the one that they came out with DDsysgen to replace anyway. I've never used it but I read the literature describing it in both the original ATR distribution and referenced when DDsysgen came out.

 

*BUT* it would be nice to have a sane format that could be reproduced w/o all the jumping through hoops. I was thinking ideal would be a format that could be created on an Atari with an 810. Something like make the format 18 sectors/track with 128 bytes/sector and hope the data inversion or track markers or whatever turn out usable. Maybe instead of 77 tracks make the first 40 tracks look like an 8" disk with the last 37 tracks marked as in use. Just tossing stuff up against the wall, haven't really thought it out.

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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

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Thinking about it, it wouldn't make sense to design a CP/M computer that wouldn't do SSSD. Of course I see no sense in mixing sector lengths on a track unless you are doing some form of copy protection either and for some strange reason the designers of the ATR8000 got up one morning and thought exactly that. I'm distracted with several other projects right now but I will try to get my system up again for some experiments.

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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

Long ago Hias Reichl patched his writeatr utility at my request. I asked for support for 1.2MB floppies which would be written on the PC and then used on the ATR8000. He put in 2 options and told me to try them both. After my results I believe he mentioned the ATR8000 does disks differently than the XF551 does but after 11 years I couldn't say how.

 

You can hear the stepper motor click only 40 times formatting a 40 track disk whether it's single sided or double sided. It formats in half the time for single sided. I don't know if this in itself tells you what you need to know.

 

-SteveS

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  • 1 month later...

Did some further testing and after the format I see that the 1st sector of the first 9 tracks is readable. I'm thinking that the 7406's might be at fault?

I'll desolder those two and pop in a socket, then use some new 7416's and see what goes...

Status update: finally made some time to remove the 7406's and install some IC Sockets in their place, bought some 7416's on ebay 2 weeks ago and today I installed them.

 

Hooked up the ATR-8000 to a Teac FD-55BR, booted up the 800 and nothing, so I tried the XF-551 mech with the same sesults, but noticed that when I turned on the ATR, the disk drive didn't initialize / get recognized. Then thought that maybe when reassembling I forgot to connect the Transformer plug to the main board, took the case back off and sure enough that's what I forgot :)

 

Reconnected the XF-551 mech back up, turned on the ATR's power switch and the drive came alive. Put in a MyDOS disk and turned on the 800, it booted up just like it should, then tried to format a new disk and NO ERRORS this tine, wrote DOS to this new disk and re-booted, Dos booted just fine :)

 

CP/M is now fully functional too...

 

Replacing the FDC and the 7406's with 7516's repaired mine, it might just fix yours too :)

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  • 6 months later...

I have two ATR 8000 boxes with 64KB handed down from my mentor in the 1980s. They ran the disk drives , modem and printer for the Action Annex BBS in Vancouver, WA. They were trick devices considering the alternative of hanging a daisy chain of SIO devices to do the same thing. There is a web site that has schematics and the ATR manual can be found online. The guy is in Bratislavia and documented more about all the disk drives in one blog than ever seen before.
http://blog.3b2.sk/igi/post/ATR-8000.aspx All sorts of goodies on this site.

My current problem resurrecting them is the power supply design was not the best.
The 22 VAC transformer and it's so called bridge filtercap/regulation worked, albeit it was not designed for 20 years of operation. It did last 8 years for the BBS. I remember one of the ATRs blew a pair of voltage regulators out once, and was replaced.

One of the ATR machines worked and the other has logic gates going from a probe ,but is not communicating on the sio port anymore. I patched in +12V and +5 from a PC supply and got one working for about an hour.
Why would I want to wake up this bit of coolness from the BBS world?
I was gifted 400 floppies of double sided, double density format disks with probably 1000-2000 MIDI files typed in by my mentor's wife. They are unique and copies of public domain songs in MIDI format that can still be played on todays synthesizers or your emulated ones on the PC. Two of the MIDI files ended up as demo files on the Windows 95 CDROM release my Microsoft. Bill Gates used to visit the BBS and download them.
I have the actual drives used to write the disks, about 5-6 5.5.25" drives, so I know alignment issues won't be a problem.
I'm leery of trying to just buy a XF551 drive and take my chances losing data.
So, anyone an expert on finding glitches on a truly neat board? All the chips are labeled on the board. It needs sockets.
I have a spare board with eproms that read, one spare z-80 and likely just need to xray the board and find the short in it. The ram was recycled from some other project and was installed. I can see where someone has used the 4264s with wire wrap on another Atari 800. The ram bank and the z-80 went thermal and quit.

I even tried putting back in the stock 16KB ram and set the jumpers to see if that would get it working to no avail.
Both boards are REV C. Which was the latest I think. The eproms have code version 3.02 written on the labels.

I never really got into using CP/M for an OS, as I was chasing IBM PC sales and programming after 1986 or so.

Anyone spare a true DSDD drive for a loan or know where I can get the controller parts cheap if I can't bless this mess of two boards?
I have an several 800s, and some spare parts to trade for a controller for the drives. ?

I am also looking into an ISA IBM pc floppy controller of the vintage with the use of the atarisd.exe app. which might not read dsdd anyway.


Meanwhile, the other Atari 800s were sold at auction to fund some of this recovery project and a few Kindle Fire tablets for the homeless shelter in Vancouver, WA.

ideas?

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it's an Argonator!

 

seriously though any 5.25 inch ds dd drive should work with the ATR 8000 and can usually be found near any place on the planet for cheap to nothing, in fact it usually cost more to ship em than to snatch from a thrift, yard sale... curb, basement etc etc.... while I hate ebay finding one for not much and nearby or with fast and free might be the best route for this sort of thing...

 

as far as an XF goes.... you can use one to read disks with no fear of destroying a disk and if you use APE with Prosystem, you can easily back them up to your hard drive and upload to the world.... just use your favorite sio2pc or 1050 to pc capable cable

Edited by _The Doctor__
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the link also has the gtia fix with a fix for the fix in the atari files section :) lots of duplicate stuff but some bits here and there can be very useful

 

some one needs to translate stuff back to English these days.... when it gets translated they ditch the original language and stuff etc etc.. it a trend... for years

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  • 2 years later...
On 6/9/2014 at 1:43 AM, BillC said:

If I understand it correctly CP/M uses only the Z80 processor on the ATR8000 mainboard, while the Co-Power88 daughterboard is for running DOS

There's also a utility which will use the Copower 88's memory as a Ramdisk drive under CP/M 2.2.  This ships with the Copower 88.

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The COPOWER-88 was a nifty little add-on-board, it really would work with just about any Z80 system (and in fact SWP sold it for Xerox 820 and the Kaypro II), but its usefulness was cut dreadfully short, because of programs that just bypassed BIOS traps (understandable, because BIOS traps on an 8086 were exceedingly expensive calls, and the brain dead idiots who designed the BIOS interface in the first place (looking at you Microsoft) didn't bother to think "gee, maybe we should try to minimize setup costs by e.g. doing more than one pixel or character at a time.?!..sigh... The Mindset did it right...), e.g. while you could run WordStar and MultiPlan, you couldn't run Lotus 1-2-3...

 

-Thom

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8 hours ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

I had an epiphany the other day, a little one.  The ATR8500 was aimed right at the Ampro Littleboard market.

 

Jeff

not a bad supposition. 

 

I wish I remembered enough of the specifics of the Ferguson Big Board to remember if the ATR8000 was an outright clone of it, or not... (Xerox licensed it, Kaypro outright copied it.)

 

-Thom

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14 hours ago, tschak909 said:

not a bad supposition. 

 

I wish I remembered enough of the specifics of the Ferguson Big Board to remember if the ATR8000 was an outright clone of it, or not... (Xerox licensed it, Kaypro outright copied it.)

 

-Thom

To look at it my guess would be no.  The ATR has no keyboard or video interfaces, lacks the additional rom sockets, and has no UARTS, uses a software routine to bitbang serial data for both use as an atari peripheral and to interface a terminal via the sio or the RS232 jacks.  Now, the 8500 is strikingly similar to the Littleboard.  It is a 51/4 inch form factor for attachment to the top of a disk drive, it has a uart (not two like the littleboard), a floppyface, and 4k rom.  So I think that SWP was targeting the same market as littleboard.

 

Best,

Jeff

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On 5/25/2014 at 5:26 AM, sup8pdct said:

Here is a ZIP archive of files etc that i have created that may interest people and includes files and instructions on how to create a bootable CPM disk on/for the ATR8000. I have included quite a bit. except for the ATR8000 manual. I would like the CPM manual for the ATR8000 but noone has scanned it yet.

 

James

ATR8000 boot.zip20200722_210216.thumb.jpg.3f9cacf165e1393227dd9d4d2bed4f41.jpg20200722_210317.thumb.jpg.a16b7f34f4ff3ff4ddce18cc6a117866.jpg20200722_211726.thumb.jpg.4fa581bd9e5a48f1af8375e400a04793.jpg20200722_211739.thumb.jpg.4a60095db965efacc88f77c20170ffbd.jpg 6.24 MB · 111 downloads

Know all ye present!

 

This WORKS!

 

I had some trouble initially and finally intuited why:

 

I have double-sided drives on my ATR and the disk I was using to make the CP/M boot was once formatted double-sided.  Formatting it single-sided in Ataridos mode, double-density, single-sided allowed the cpmfiles.atr to transfer perfectly and the CPMboot.exe file to execute properly and for the ATR8000 to then boot those tracks.  My problem was that none of the executables, of which I could do DIRS of all day long, would execute.  Most would 'run' and then drop me back to an A> prompt, but some, like DDSYSGEM, or Modem, would cause the machine to hang.  I eventually guessed the problem and could have replaced the disk with one never formatted, or formatted the other side of the disk as a flippy, but I took a powerful magnet to the disk and wiped it clean, THEN went through the creation process once again.  This time I have a perfect CP/M 2.2 boot with all the utilities and was able to config and write a new custom cp/m image.

 

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart.  You have done a great service and it is a true work of genius, how you made this work.  SWP would be proud to ship this with the machine way back when.  WOW man.

 

Best,

 

Jeff 

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43 minutes ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

Know all ye present!

 

This WORKS!

 

I had some trouble initially and finally intuited why:

 

I have double-sided drives on my ATR and the disk I was using to make the CP/M boot was once formatted double-sided.  Formatting it single-sided in Ataridos mode, double-density, single-sided allowed the cpmfiles.atr to transfer perfectly and the CPMboot.exe file to execute properly and for the ATR8000 to then boot those tracks.  My problem was that none of the executables, of which I could do DIRS of all day long, would execute.  Most would 'run' and then drop me back to an A> prompt, but some, like DDSYSGEM, or Modem, would cause the machine to hang.  I eventually guessed the problem and could have replaced the disk with one never formatted, or formatted the other side of the disk as a flippy, but I took a powerful magnet to the disk and wiped it clean, THEN went through the creation process once again.  This time I have a perfect CP/M 2.2 boot with all the utilities and was able to config and write a new custom cp/m image.

 

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart.  You have done a great service and it is a true work of genius, how you made this work.  SWP would be proud to ship this with the machine way back when.  WOW man.

 

Best,

 

Jeff 

hmm.  Thought I had tried this but I don't clearly remember.  I might have tried harder if I hadn't had the single side drives to fall back on. 

 

I always use a magnet to wipe disks that will be used on the ATR8000.  Avoids odd occurences.

 

I'll try this again soon.

 

-SteveS

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6 hours ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

Know all ye present!

 

This WORKS!

 

I had some trouble initially and finally intuited why:

 

I have double-sided drives on my ATR and the disk I was using to make the CP/M boot was once formatted double-sided.  Formatting it single-sided in Ataridos mode, double-density, single-sided allowed the cpmfiles.atr to transfer perfectly and the CPMboot.exe file to execute properly and for the ATR8000 to then boot those tracks.  My problem was that none of the executables, of which I could do DIRS of all day long, would execute.  Most would 'run' and then drop me back to an A> prompt, but some, like DDSYSGEM, or Modem, would cause the machine to hang.  I eventually guessed the problem and could have replaced the disk with one never formatted, or formatted the other side of the disk as a flippy, but I took a powerful magnet to the disk and wiped it clean, THEN went through the creation process once again.  This time I have a perfect CP/M 2.2 boot with all the utilities and was able to config and write a new custom cp/m image.

 

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart.  You have done a great service and it is a true work of genius, how you made this work.  SWP would be proud to ship this with the machine way back when.  WOW man.

 

Best,

 

Jeff 

excellent.

Can you do something for me? Please format a disk in cp/m for the atr8000, 256 byte sectors, double sided and copy all cp/m files to it, DON'T make it a system disk.  Then copy to an ATR image from that disk. Please use the ATR8000 as atari drive interface and if you can, make an ATR image using an XF551 of same disk.

Reason I ask is because the ATR8000 and XF551 treat the 2nd side differently. Percom double sided is different again.

 

post both versions here please.

 

James

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4 hours ago, sup8pdct said:

excellent.

Can you do something for me? Please format a disk in cp/m for the atr8000, 256 byte sectors, double sided and copy all cp/m files to it, DON'T make it a system disk.  Then copy to an ATR image from that disk. Please use the ATR8000 as atari drive interface and if you can, make an ATR image using an XF551 of same disk.

Reason I ask is because the ATR8000 and XF551 treat the 2nd side differently. Percom double sided is different again.

 

post both versions here please.

 

James

What program should I use to make the .atr file?  Scopy doesn't know double-sided.  HDSC?  That works well for me.  It is what I used to move the data from the .atr file already posted.  I have an XF551 and will re-install the mechanism just for you.  Right now it is hosting its very own Gotek. ?  Oh!  My xf551 has the HyperXF rom.  I suppose you would like the stock rom to be used as well?  Sounds like I have a nice Saturday afternoon project coming.

 

P.S.  I can do Percom ds/dd, ATR8k ds/dd, Xf551 ds/dd, and, soon, Trak ds/dd.

 

P.P.S.  I have a Gotek on the ATR8000, which works peachy for Atari disks, but would like to start using it in CP/M.  What format would be best to use for disk interchange?  The easiest way for me to move and keep a CP/M software library would be to use the Gotek's USB stick, copy the data to it from my Pea Sea running Linux and use it on the ATR.  I've been looking into various disk formats.  Diskdef supports 42 different ones, so if I need to use a go-between format, I can do so.  Suggestions and advice are welcome!

 

 

 

Best,

 

Jeff

Edited by Jeffrey Worley
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I guess you could use MYdos to duplicate a DSDD disk, set to correct parameters of course. Am sure others have other idea's on what to use. maybe an XF and ATR8K image marked as appropriate. Not many people would have a percom or a trak :) Just about everyone would have an XF and those who want to get an ATR8K going would have a mech hanging around. Don't know anything about gotek.

 

James

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The canonical formats for 5 1/4" CP/M disk interchange BITD were Xerox 820 (SS/SD), and Kaypro II (SS/DD, 256 bytes/sector 18 sectors).

 

(8 inch was infinitely easier, IBM 3740 format, 26 sectors, 128 bytes/sector, 77 tracks, 241KB. Everything could read that.)

 

-Thom

Edited by tschak909
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ICE T works well as a terminal to the ATR8000.  First run Spartados (or whatever), run the AT_RS232 handler, enter term mode in ASCII 9600bps, no echo, reset the ATR8000 with it's RESET button, and go to town.  I sometimes have had to reset the emulation (there's a box for that in ICE T), when the term gets confused by some control code or other, but it works pretty well!  Saves me from having to pull my SIde2 (and disable SDX) to run the DT80 cart for 80-column mode in CP/M.  I haven't gotten software onto the ATR's floppys yet, am waiting for a solution to move data back and forth that doesn't involve Xmodem (once called Christianson Protocol, after the fellow who came up with it).

 

Best,

 

Jeff

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