Message when leaving BASIC or ASSEM ED

[TGB1718]

On my U1M occasionally I type BASIC (loads basic or Assem Ed depending whats set in U1M)

and use it to write "quick/dirty" programs to test things out, my question is, when leaving 

by typing DOS, I always get this message regardsless of whether I have saved my program or not:-

 

READY
DOS

Disk error while saving memory!
ESC to Abort - RETURN to enter DOS

 

Any ideas why, programs run from disk i.e. MAC/65 don't do this

 

 

[+Nezgar]

You have no ramdisk. SDX defaults to create a BASIC.SAV or CAR.SAV in whatever your default RAMDISK is....

You can add this to your config.sys or autoexec.bat to automatically use all extended RAM banks except the 4 XE banks as a RAMDISK on D9:

 

RAMDISK.SYS 9

 

Make it use ALL available banks: RAMDISK.SYS 9,99

Make it use only 5 banks: RAMDISK.SYS 9,5

 

you can also type that on the command prompt directly...

 

Or if you have no extended RAM, a ramdisk is not an option, so you can direct them elsewhere like your memory card disk partitions in config.sys, or autoexec.bat, or explicitly from the command prompt. This also has the advantage of your mem.sav's persisting power cycles:

 

SET CAR=D5:CAR.SAV

SET BASIC=D8:BASIC.SAV

[TGB1718]

many thanks, will put one of those configs in, was getting to annoy me a bit

 

 

Worked a treat, thanks again

Edited October 28, 2020 by TGB1718
Update

[Mclaneinc]

SDX confused me when I first saw it all those years ago and it still does to this day, takes me back to the days of setting sound blaster variables in DOS on the PC and running Quemm.

 

Hated all that, hence my Ult1MB never gets used for Sparta..

 

Was never a utils person back then nor now..

 

But good to know if help is needed you guys have the answers..

[+Nezgar]

Here is my "every day" sparta autoexec.bat if any of my settings help to start for reference:

 

SET SCRDEF=12,2,0,0     ; Set background to dark grey, with left column at 0, and always default to this when entering CMD
SET PATH=CAR:,D5:>x32F> ; look in CAR: and D5:>x32F> for commands typed without a path
SET PROMPT=$N$P>        ; Set prompt to display current drive & path
INDUS.SYS 1             ; If a happy drive is on D1:, enable fast writes (to workaround write corruption bug) - takes no RAM,
                        ; ... if an INDUS GT drive is on D1:, upload syncromesh code for ultraspeed-like operation
TD ON                   ; Display TDLINE
RAMDISK.SYS 9           ; Setup Ramdisk on D9: using all available free banks except for 4 XE banks
QUICKED.SYS             ; Faster E: / S: Handler included with SDX
CLS                     ; Clear screen
VER                     ; clean slate with version info printed at top of screen

Many of these could go into config.sys, but on a non-U1MB system, config.sys is not parsed from the boot drive and is a lot more work to modify on the CAR: ROM, but autoexec.bat so that's where I stuck them.

[Marius]

13 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

SDX confused me when I first saw it all those years ago and it still does to this day, takes me back to the days of setting sound blaster variables in DOS on the PC and running Quemm.

 

Hated all that, hence my Ult1MB never gets used for Sparta..

 

Was never a utils person back then nor now..

 

But good to know if help is needed you guys have the answers..

For a very long time I had the same opinion. But at a certain point I really "needed" SDX. I believe that was when I wanted to use The Last Word on a harddisk partition (and no, I won't start using mydos!).

First is was slightly more complicated than the average atari 8bit DOS, but once things are setup right, it works.... VERY WELL.

 

To be honest, I find it one of the most compatible DOS'es for little Atari, and it is extremely versatile. 

There are actually 3 Dos'es I use most:

 

1. SDX

2. SpartaDos 3.3a

3. XDOS 2.4 by Stefan Dorndorf.

 

The "fun" is that my main SDX partition (let's call that D1:) is a 16MB partition that boots SpartaDos 3.3a when SDX is not active. So SDX and SpartaDos 3.3a share the same partition. 

 

On a SIO only system, I prefer using XDOS. Really nice DOS with quite some cool adjustable settings. 

 

 

[TGB1718]

14 hours ago, Nezgar said:

Here is my "every day" sparta autoexec.bat if any of my settings help to start for reference:

Very helpful, thanks, I've had a look now at the SpartaDOS manual and made many changes to configure

my system (Note to self:- READ THE MANUAL ? )