jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 Has anyone had any success using the real time clock function of the R-Time 8 cartridge (or any of the new modern replacement designs) with a DOS other than SpartaDOS? What I'm looking for is to get that nice extra line at the top of the screen with the date and time using any DOS besides SpartaDOS. Currently I use XDOS as my go-to DOS. Please don't try to sell me on SpartaDOS since I am very familiar with it's capabilities. I do not want the SpartaX cart and don't care to use the disk version of it unless I'm copying files off of Sparta formatted disks. XDOS is fantastic and does everything I want using only three character commands. And it is designed to work with my Omniview BIOS upgrade. So has anyone written any custom software to read the R-Time 8 clock information so that it can be presented on the screen? Or even a program that fetches the clock information so that it can be used in other screen presentations. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marius Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 Very offtopic response here, but I found the need to write about it. I once bought two remakes of the RT8 carts from MacRorie The Brewing company, and although he did an amazing job in creating a 100% copy of the original, this also lead to copying the flaws of the original. The legs of the cart are too short, which results in many Atari 8bit computers where you have to pull the cart slightly back after inserting. That is a practice I dislike a lot. The legs should have been longer and in gold. So these RT8's are eating dust now here, since they fail all the time. I remember there was some technical know how somewhere about Z: device, which could/should work under Dos 2.5 ... probably also compatible with XDOS. I love XDOS as well, so I am also interested in this. One thing though: XDOS itself does not do any time/date stamp (which is in my opinion THE best feature where you could use an RT8 for). Since I am not so satisfied by those RT8 remakes, I know rely again on a APETIME kind of program, but then S2UTIME which downloads the time from my ABBUC-> Sio2USB device (not a sio2pc device!) which has a RTC built in. Also the amazing IDE+ has this facility. It is even possible to have an APETIME kind of tool for U1MB, which I wrote years ago. But I am not sure whether these tools do work with something different than SpartaDos. I am not sure where I saw it, but you might be able to find more info when you search for Z: device and RT8 ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 Page 155 of the Altirra Hardware Reference Manual describes software interfacing with RTime-8, so it should not be very difficult to write a TD display. The source for the ICD "Z:" driver is indeed available (I used it as a reference when implementing a PBI CIO "Z:" driver in the U1MB PBI BIOS), but I can't remember where to find the ICD manual which contains it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Author Share Posted June 28, 2020 Thank you both for the responses. Interesting re the MacRorie carts. I too had an issue with the case on mine in which the circuit board moved too much and the plastic pins were too wide for insertion into carts with protective covers. He did accept my return and now has recently re-designed the case, fixing the flaws. He has sent me a new version of the product which does now work properly and can accept carts with protective covers. Yes I can get the time from my PC link as well but that, as well as Apetime, S2Utime, etc is not what I want. I simply want code to access the date and time that the cart provides. Thanks flashjazzcat for the pointer to the Altirra manual. I will start there. I was just hoping someone had already written standalone code, either BASIC or Assembly language that already does this. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Robot Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 6 hours ago, jgrass said: XDOS is fantastic and does everything I want using only three character commands. I can think of one thing you want that it doesn't currently do... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Author Share Posted June 28, 2020 Yeah, yeah... I just can't believe that of the the tons of users out there, not one person has tried to use either the original ICD cart or the re-makes with another DOS. BTW, that page in the Altirra manual doesn't help. I am not a professional programmer so I can't go beyond peeking addresses that might contain the time and date info and writing BASIC pgms which would manipulate the data. I did find the time and date data in the addresses pointed to in DOSVEC locations 10 and 11 IAW with ICD docs. But the data is only there (wouldn't you know it) when SpartaDOS is loaded! Oh well... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marius Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 Well, I am a huge fan of XDOS myself. For some reason it comes closer to my 'native' atari 8bit experience, which I had in the past, when I only had a 1050 and an atari 800xl. I did not grew up with SpartaDOS nor Spartados X. Later, when I got the amazing Black Box, I started to use Disk versions of Spartados (like 3.2d, 3.2g and the 3.3a and 3.3b versions). Of course that was a huge improvement to the way I had been using my a8 before. Even much later I discovered SDX and again, it is not difficult to admit that SDX was amazing, powerful and extremely versatile. There is no doubt at all that SDX is the most powerful DOS ever written for Atari 8bit, and I even can't imagine there will be any 8bit computer DOS more powerful than SDX. That said though, I love DOS'es that can be booted from a disk, and are small and fast and compatible. XDOS is all those things. I run The Last Word now from floppy disk. One ATR with XDOS and The Last Word, and it works more than excellent. I also have some XDOS formatted and initialized disks full of sources and other stuff. It fits the way I use and love to use my a8. Just like the old days. And don't worry, I keep using SDX with SIDE2, MyIDE2 and IDE+ ... it's way too cool to leave SDX. But I can imagine @jgrass wants to use his XDOS, and he would like to use his RT8 with it. I might contact MacRorie about my RT8's... thanks for the suggestion. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Author Share Posted June 28, 2020 Marius, you may find this hard to believe, but my story is almost the same as yours. And I DO agree that SpartaDOS is the most powerful for the Atari 8 bit world, but I am at the stage where 99% of the time, I don't require that awesome power. Almost all my ATR's are XDOS based that boot just the program I want. That's also how I run The Last Word and every other "large" stand-alone program. And once I discovered PicoDOS, I now mostly use multi program / game boot disks (XDOS based) that boot instantly and allow me to select any number of games or programs from any size ATR with my SDrive-Max. So I am content with this operational scenario and was only looking for one more bonus feature added to XDOS. I did appreciate hearing your back story, even with the touch of sarcasm! ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Author Share Posted June 28, 2020 Oh one last thing Marius. In re-reading your post, I forgot to let you know that when I sent my original RT8 back, it was still brand new still in original packaging, covered under return policy. That was quite a while ago. recently, when I heard the case was improved, I just simply decided to re-purchase one. Wanted to make sure you didn't mis-interpret my saga... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nezgar Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 There's instructions in the R-Time 8 manual how to use the cart with DOS 2, 2.5 DOS XL, and even DOS 3 and such with RTIME8.COM renamed to AUTORUN.SYS, and will automatically add the TDLINE too. (But get turned off when entering DUP) The manual describes how to use the Z: handler easily to turn the TD line on/off, read, and set the time. BASIC listings are provided. Here's one source of it: https://atariwiki.org/wiki/attach/RTime8 Manual/RTime8.pdf Of course, the original handler will only support a genuine R-Time 8 cart, and wouldn't support the RTC present in modern carts such as Super SDX, SIDE1/2/3, MyIDE, U1MB. @flashjazzcat made a custom handler that allows the U1MB/SIDE clock to be used with disk-based SpartaDOS/RealDOS, so maybe it wouldn't be too hard to adapt to work with other DOSes with the RTIME8.COM... https://atariage.com/forums/topic/295702-side2-with-u1mb/?do=findComment&comment=4347220 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgrass Posted June 28, 2020 Author Share Posted June 28, 2020 Thanks so much for pointing me to that manual! I have seen the SpartaDOS manuals but not this one. I will give it a try and see how it works. Thanks again. Case now closed as far as I'm concerned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 28, 2020 Share Posted June 28, 2020 (edited) 25 minutes ago, Nezgar said: @flashjazzcat made a custom handler that allows the U1MB/SIDE clock to be used with disk-based SpartaDOS/RealDOS, so maybe it wouldn't be too hard to adapt to work with other DOSes with the RTIME8.COM... The method used for relocation may be illustrative, but most of the code concerns specific interactions with the DS1305 RTC (which is quite different to the chip on the RTime-8), and interaction with the date/time registers of SpartaDOS and derivatives. Unless the other DOS supports date/time stamping of files and/or a TDLINE, there may not be much of use there. The OP's objective appears to be to pull the RTC info out of the RTime-8 and throw it up onto the screen. This shouldn't be too difficult given half an hour and access to the Altirra emulator. Note: the driver I posted has a couple of glaring bugs which are corrected in the version supplied on my APT toolkit disk. I can upload the corrected sources if needed. Edited June 28, 2020 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 29, 2020 Share Posted June 29, 2020 I'd like the driver that worked with DOS XE... stamping files always a good thing. It was from ICD, so it's not Y2K compliant... who knows maybe that's another one that's best redone or rather done from scratch anyway. Stuff lost to time... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marius Posted June 29, 2020 Share Posted June 29, 2020 8 hours ago, jgrass said: even with the touch of sarcasm! ? There was no sarcasm in my post. I love XDOS and use it a lot. I am honestly happy that there still do exist people in a8 land who use and develop non-SDX stuff. I also have experienced that large partitions on an atari 8bit computer is not always a benefit. Especially when you are into coding and not the best coder (like me). I have corrupted so many important partitions in the past, that I decided eventually to do coding only on disk based atari. Well the XDOS appears to be a great dos for that. So seriously no sarcasm here. And really good to read that your and my a8 history do have some similarities. I am not going to return those rt8 clones. I also purchased them to support the creator. My solution with the apetime clone works for me. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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