Atari 800 Production Differences

[Colleton]

I have two 800s, one dated 3-16-82 (hand written on a sticker on the case bottom) and the later machine is undated with a production week stamp of 193 (May 1983).

 

The earlier 800 has "ATARI / 132" stamped in silver into the plastic of the bottom cover instead of the inked production week stamp on the case label like the older machine.  It also has the twist levers for the expansion bay and from what I can tell shipped with only 16K RAM, as it came to me with the ROM card, 16K RAM card and an aftermarket 32K Mosaic RAM card.  Both the ROM and 16K RAM cards are cased.  The later production machine shipped with 48K (I have the original packaging (I hope), and all of the cards were uncased.

 

The oddest difference is that the earlier machine does not seem to have Memo Pad.  When you boot it without a disk or BASIC cart, instead of the Memo Pad display you get an "Error: no DOS" message displayed in the upper left corner instead.  Is this normal for earlier production machines or is my ROM board bad?  The machine functions perfectly, otherwise.

[+DrVenkman]

2 minutes ago, Colleton said:

The oddest difference is that the earlier machine does not seem to have Memo Pad.  When you boot it without a disk or BASIC cart, instead of the Memo Pad display you get an "Error: no DOS" message displayed in the upper left corner instead.  Is this normal for earlier production machines or is my ROM board bad?  The machine functions perfectly, otherwise.

Sounds like a bad ROM. Memo Pad was there from the get go, so far as I know.

[Colleton]

I thought so as well.  Thanks!

[adam242]

Could be an aftermarket or custom ROM. Check your OS cart.

[Colleton]

Swapped the suspect ROM card with a known good card - Memo Pad.  Re-inserted the suspect card - Memo Pad.  Cycled power several times and got Memo Pad every time.

 

There might be some corrosion on the card connection fingers (didn't see any) or maybe I didn't have it seated properly.  I'll keep an eye on it, but it seems to be fixed.  Yay!

[+Stephen]

The Error:NoDos sounds like a Sparta DOS thing.

[Gunstar]

48 minutes ago, Stephen said:

The Error:NoDos sounds like a Sparta DOS thing.

That's what I was going to say! But it didn't fit the circumstances so I thought maybe a custom OS that expected a custom or compatible DOS when boot-strapping. I get that every time I do my start-up routine to get an OSS programming language to work with my SDX cart and MyIDE II. I have to start with the SDX cart off, booting to the MyIDE start-up menu and selecting the OSS cartridge rom, then it trys to boot to DOS when the language starts and I get that error, I then turn on the SDX cart without power cycling and do a cold-boot reset with my custom OS and that way I have the OSS language available when I type CAR from SpartaDOS and full use of the APT and FAT16 partitions on the MyIDE II cart with an OSS cart in sram/flash ram.

 

None of which would be possible without @flashjazzcat 's SDX/APT driver for MyIDE II, which allows the use of the internal OS of your choice and SDX instead of MyBIOS which is incompatible with SDX...I should mention, cartridge SDX only, you can use SDX from sram/flash with MyBIOS, but then you can't use an OSS languange, it's either SDX or OSS cart, not both...the only other way is MyBIOS in internal OS, like on a 32-in-1 or lone eprom.

 

Sorry for straying off-topic.

Edited September 19, 2019 by Gunstar

[+Nezgar]

On 9/18/2019 at 5:56 PM, DrVenkman said:

"Error: no DOS"

This is the message presented when booting from a disk formatted by SpartaDOS when there is no bootable DOS on the disk. Did you by chance have a disk drive attached at the time?

 

Otherwise, you could try running JAC!'s Atari ROM Dumper (with a BASIC cartridge present), and we can see if it matches any known modified OS ROM's if you upload the resulting data here...

 

[Colleton]

No, I didn’t have a drive connected at all.  I’ll try the rom dumper this weekend and will upload it here, thanks.