Native Floppy Imaging?

[+DrVenkman]

Thanks - and I have a qq for U1M BIOS - if I have my 1088 connected to a 1050 (as drive one) and then I'm mounting a blank ATR on D2: via SIO2PC/USB - can i have U1M boot an ATR image as D3: ? Or can the Atari only boot from D1, and I just forgot that. And then I just have to move my 1050 to D3.

 

I see how you can change the drive on Launch menu- but again, can I boot this? It seem to boot but becomes D1.

The Atari boots from D1:, period. However, there are options in Jon’s BIOS (and carried over to the 1088XEL BIOS) that allow you to “redirect” the system calls to D1: to another drive. Having said that, I’ve never actually experimented with that setting, let alone used it enough to know any nuances or limitations.

 

I do know his SIDEloader is versatile and resilient enough that I can hit F11 on my 1088XEL to access the Loader, assign a couple drives to ATRs on my CF card, then hit F12 and set whatever options I want in the rest of the BIOS, reboot the computer and use the CF card ATR drives as assigned, alongside both physical floppy drivers as well as the drive slots I may be using on my SDrive-MAX device. Last night, for instance, I had a CF card ATR file mounted as D4:, both my floppy drives in use as D1: and D2:, and the D3: slot on my SDrive-MAX, and I was able to copy files to and from all of the drives from each of the others seamlessly.

[massiverobot]

The Atari boots from D1:, period. However, there are options in Jon’s BIOS (and carried over to the 1088XEL BIOS) that allow you to “redirect” the system calls to D1: to another drive. Having said that, I’ve never actually experimented with that setting, let alone used it enough to know any nuances or limitations.

 

I do know his SIDEloader is versatile and resilient enough that I can hit F11 on my 1088XEL to access the Loader, assign a couple drives to ATRs on my CF card, then hit F12 and set whatever options I want in the rest of the BIOS, reboot the computer and use the CF card ATR drives as assigned, alongside both physical floppy drivers as well as the drive slots I may be using on my SDrive-MAX device. Last night, for instance, I had a CF card ATR file mounted as D4:, both my floppy drives in use as D1: and D2:, and the D3: slot on my SDrive-MAX, and I was able to copy files to and from all of the drives from each of the others seamlessly.

 

ok mindblown. i must work this out for myself then. thanks for the suggestions!

[+Nezgar]

With your 1088XEL, means you should have 1MB of extended RAM... You can type RAMDISK.SYS 9,63 for a nice almost 1MB D9: RAMdisk to temporarily drop your SCOPY files to.. IE SCOPY D1: D9:DISK.SCP ... Or make a folder on your CF to backup disks you might want to be able to write out again without external attachments...

 

also minor trivia... SCOPY can complete in less passes if you use SDX "X SCOPY" - since BASIC ROM gets turned off and some other MEMLO impacting aspects of the DOS. And since it outputs text using E:, you can get a minor increase of its text output by using QUICKED.SYS....

[flashjazzcat]

Thanks - and I have a qq for U1M BIOS - if I have my 1088 connected to a 1050 (as drive one) and then I'm mounting a blank ATR on D2: via SIO2PC/USB - can i have U1M boot an ATR image as D3: ?

You can. Use the 1088's XEL loader to mount the desired ATR on D3: (press Tab then down arrow to scroll through the drive numbers, then press Return). Go back to the BIOS with F12 and on the 'PBI BIOS and Hard Disk' menu, change the 'Boot drive' option to 'D3:'. Disable SDX (either in the BIOS menu or by typing 'COLD /N' at the SDX prompt) and the system will boot from the ATR on drive 3.

 

The Atari boots from D1:, period. However, there are options in Jon’s BIOS (and carried over to the 1088XEL BIOS) that allow you to “redirect” the system calls to D1: to another drive. Having said that, I’ve never actually experimented with that setting, let alone used it enough to know any nuances or limitations.

I attempt to explain all the nuances in the manual, but there's so much flexibility that it's difficult to do so clearly. I have a firmware update coming up shortly which I aim to demonstrate in a series of videos.

 

Basically, the stock Atari OS likes to boot from D1:, and to that effect it aims to read the boot sectors from drive 1 by setting DUNIT to $01. The way we overcome this in the PBI BIOS is to forcibly redirect SIO transfers intended for drive 1 to whatever drive the user specified as the boot drive while the OS BOOT flag = 0. This method generally works well, but is still hampered by any DOS which - in turn - insists on looking for its system files on drive one after the BOOT flag has been set. A well written DOS will observe the initial value of DUNIT, whatever it happened to be.

 

This kind of boot redirection is only attempted with HDD partitions and ATRs; never with SIO devices. Since the XEX loader only ever sets the boot override flag on drive 1 when the user wants to auto-boot an ATR (by selecting the image and hitting Return), the method I described above is required to boot an ATR from a drive other than D1:. In point of fact, the API allows for the one-shot ATR boot override to applied to any drive number, but for the sake of convenience the loader only ever forces an ATR boot from D1: when an ATR is mounted on that drive number.

 

The second method of boot redirection is restricted to HDD partitions, and is the 'D1: Redirect' setting. Enabling this will direct ALL SIO transfers intended for D1: to whatever volume is on 'Boot drive', and all references to 'Boot drive' to D1:. Both D1: and the boot drive must point to hard disk partitions, otherwise no redirection will occur. I felt it best to keep disk images entirely out of this arrangement, since ATR rotation, etc, could cause all kinds of unwelcome results. Think of the D1: redirect option as a useful means of switching between two bootable hard disk partitions, especially if the DOS in use expects to see everything on drive 1.

 

I do know his SIDEloader is versatile and resilient enough that I can hit F11 on my 1088XEL to access the Loader, assign a couple drives to ATRs on my CF card, then hit F12 and set whatever options I want in the rest of the BIOS, reboot the computer and use the CF card ATR drives as assigned, alongside both physical floppy drivers as well as the drive slots I may be using on my SDrive-MAX device. Last night, for instance, I had a CF card ATR file mounted as D4:, both my floppy drives in use as D1: and D2:, and the D3: slot on my SDrive-MAX, and I was able to copy files to and from all of the drives from each of the others seamlessly.

The ability to use mounted ATRs (hosted on the CF card) alongside regular HDD partitions is not a facility necessarily present on other similar devices, but I considered it an important feature. One can go a stage further on the 1088XEL and use a mixture of HDD partitions and ATRs mounted from two separate physical disks (assuming the presence of a dual-slot XEL-CF adapter), or copy between an IDE Plus 2.0 hard disk partition and an U1MB/SIDE ATR or HDD partition if you feel like hooking a lot of hardware up all at once.

 

With your 1088XEL, means you should have 1MB of extended RAM... You can type RAMDISK.SYS 9,63 for a nice almost 1MB D9: RAMdisk to temporarily drop your SCOPY files to.. IE SCOPY D1: D9:DISK.SCP ... Or make a folder on your CF to backup disks you might want to be able to write out again without external attachments...

With a 1088XEL or other U1MB/SIDE equipped machine, one could make backups of real floppies rather quickly by using the XEX loader to mount empty ATRs (first created with the appropriate geometry on the PC and copied into a FAT partition) and then using a raw sector copying tool (such as HDSC) to copy the sectors. You will end up with ATR copies of the real floppies sitting in a FAT partition on the CF card. Writes to the CF-hosted ATRs should handily outperform any available SIO solution. I use this method for backing up APT hard disk partitions on the CF card to 32MB ATRs.

[sanny]

Are there programs which together with a Happy drive (I've got a Mega-Speedy which is compatible) can create ATX-Images from copy-protected disks?

[+Nezgar]

Are there programs which together with a Happy drive (I've got a Mega-Speedy which is compatible) can create ATX-Images from copy-protected disks?

I asked this exact question a while back. ijor wrote such a tool for Happy drives, but it was unfinished, and was superseded by the capabilities of a kryoflux or SCP with phaeron's A8RAWCONV

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/234684-atari-8-bit-software-preservation-initiative/?p=3957235

[Kyle22]

 

I asked this exact question a while back. ijor wrote such a tool for Happy drives, but it was unfinished, and was superseded by the capabilities of a kryoflux or SCP with phaeron's A8RAWCONV

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/234684-atari-8-bit-software-preservation-initiative/?p=3957235

 

Maybe he will finish it, now that it has been mentioned.

[sanny]

I would volunteer to help, but I've got only 5 or 6 copy-protected disks to test with...