Atari 800- Disk directory listing from Atari BASIC... How?

[Brian D. Deuel]

I know I'm going to feel REALLY silly for asking this, but no one has scanned in *any* of the original Atari manuals, and the books that are scanned in don't have this answer for me....

 

I know there's a way to check the file listing on a floppy from Atari BASIC (NOT DOS; I know how to do that). My question is, how? What is the command? It's been *so* long that I've totally forgotten, and my searches have turned up nothing.

 

Any help offered would be appreciated.

 

Brian

[Nukey Shay]

By use of the XIO command...I'll see if I can track down the list of super-handy little one-liners that can be executed from a disk via the ENTER statement (not erasing the memory).

[Brian D. Deuel]

That's right! There isn't really a "simple" command like Apple has ("catalog"). I found more info about Atari's disk I/O here:

 

http://www.atariarchives.org/c1ba/page054.php

 

Thanks for jogging my memory!

 

Brian

[Nukey Shay]

Found it...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v8n1/atariba...hancements.html

 

Those files can be viewed in Notepad (since they are in LISTed format).

Save them to a disk or the Ramdisk by using that command to create them, and use them by simply ENTER"D:COMMAND.NAM"

 

Like ENTER"D:DIR" to read a directory

[Nukey Shay]

Oh...I believe that those short programs can be written to a disk by using DOS itself to "copy" the editor channel (E:)...the way that works is to select the copy option, and enter this on the from,to? prompt:

E:,D:{filename}

Everything you type will be written directly to the file (including the enter key). Press the Break key to close the file

[Brian D. Deuel]

Thanks! It appears that enhance.bas is missing from that page, though

 

Not a big deal, though. I can use the info there to write my own routine now

 

Brian

[Nukey Shay]

No, the program is there. These pages are just the articles, the programs are found in the archives. But they are small enough to type in quickly anyway. The individual command one-liners can be found at the bottom of that page.

(be sure to use the enter key in place of the "boxes" that show up in Notepad)

 

The entire tokenized program that creates those files...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/software/89-...05a/ENHANCE.BAS

(for use with emulators or SIO2PC)

 

But I find it easier just to use the DOS copy method to create them.

[Goochman]

I wrote that same program a looooooong time ago

 

PRoblem is you lose your Basic program to run it just like going to DOS, buts its a few sectors less to load

[Nukey Shay]

Ummm....

 

You don't run the Basic program when you need to use one of the routines...you use the ENTER command with one of the routines it creates (which uses no memory and will not erase any program in memory). The routines are written to the disk without line numbers, so they are executed in "immediate" mode (going directly into the keyboard buffer, just as if you'd typed them yourself). Much quicker than using the MEM.SAV method if all you want to do is pull up a directory or something. And the Hex conversion routine came in handy for POKE/PEEK arguments, since memory maps generally used Hex notation.