U1MB, Incognito, SIDE2, SIDE3, 1088XEL/XLD Firmware 4.0 Released

[sup8pdct]

I am having a problem getting MYDoS on to an APT partition. Every time I try , I get an error 139.  Same if i try dos 2.x etc.

Why would that happen?

 

I managed to get it on in a round about way. I created an ATR on ASPECT that was the same sector size. formatted and build directory, wrote out dos. then copied over the occupied sectors.

 

Booting is almost instant..

 

James

[_The Doctor__]

is the booted hard disk directory the correct size and does it show as a high capacity drive, perhaps a capacity check of filling the disk is in order...

[flashjazzcat]

3 hours ago, sup8pdct said:

I am having a problem getting MYDoS on to an APT partition. Every time I try , I get an error 139.  Same if i try dos 2.x etc.

Why would that happen?

Make sure the partition has the correct density (nothing but SDX can cope with 512 byte sectors). Recent versions of the firmware - instead of simply overflowing the caller's sector buffer if the requested sector size does not match the density of the logical drive - return an error if the byte count in the DCB does not match said partition density. That might well explain it.

 

Other than that, watch out for drive number conflicts. You'll need to boot DOS 2.x/MYDOS on D1:, probably (from a FAT-hosted ATR if you want), install DOS on the target partition (on some higher drive number), then either set the system to boot from something other than D1:, or adjust things so that the partition on which you installed DOS becomes D1: (which is generally a bad idea if you ever subsequently want to boot a floppy or ATR again; better to keep your HDD partitions on - say - D3: and above, and use 'D1: Swap' or the 'Boot drive' settings to coax DOS 2.x/MYDOS into booting from hard disk).

 

Edited January 13, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

On 1/12/2022 at 2:34 AM, TheNameOfTheGame said:

There's never enough hours in the day it seems.

On 1/12/2022 at 9:30 AM, Beeblebrox said:

Been there in many respects at some point myself in recent years and it's tough - especially when these things seem to hit simultaneously.

Thanks both, and to the other supportive commentators (and to those who left comments under the video; to those who very kindly sent donations; I promise I will thank you all individually as soon as I have time).

 

Not wanting to get too far off topic: I got roped into some long phone calls yesterday morning with the care home manager (clearing the air about a few matters which she hadn't been properly kept up to date on by her staff), went up to the house, found mother's birth certificate and marriage license (required by the provider of my dad's company pension), and slashed my finger open on a broken sheet of melamine next to the filing cabinet in the devastated spare room. Actually it was Deborah who found the mentioned documents when she did a second pass on the filing cabinet after I'd pronounced it a dead loss (that's women for you - good at finding things). She also found this book:

 

 

I think the irony speaks for itself. We then bussed back into town so I could go to the care home to sign a consent form (in the garden, of course, since I am denied entry for a laundry list of based reasons).

 

This morning, Sainsbury's issued Deborah with a date for her disciplinary hearing (tomorrow at 3pm), which leaves me twenty-four hours to get the grievance and PID prepared if they are to have any hope at all of at least being looked at before the disciplinary happens (and she potentially gets dismissed). And if she gets dismissed, I'll immediately have to start work on an appeal, or simply put in an ET1, taking things to a tribunal phase and requiring legal representation.

 

Fun times!

Edited January 13, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[+Stephen]

Piss poor start to 2022 - sure hope it gets better ASAP.

[sup8pdct]

10 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Make sure the partition has the correct density (nothing but SDX can cope with 512 byte sectors). Recent versions of the firmware - instead of simply overflowing the caller's sector buffer if the requested sector size does not match the density of the logical drive - return an error if the byte count in the DCB does not match said partition density. That might well explain it.

 

Other than that, watch out for drive number conflicts. You'll need to boot DOS 2.x/MYDOS on D1:, probably (from a FAT-hosted ATR if you want), install DOS on the target partition (on some higher drive number), then either set the system to boot from something other than D1:, or adjust things so that the partition on which you installed DOS becomes D1: (which is generally a bad idea if you ever subsequently want to boot a floppy or ATR again; better to keep your HDD partitions on - say - D3: and above, and use 'D1: Swap' or the 'Boot drive' settings to coax DOS 2.x/MYDOS into booting from hard disk).

 

Sparta format reports APT partition as 256 byte sectors @ 20000 sectors which is what I told Mydos. Also used another dos to read config and it also reports 20000 sectors. Mydos and dos 2 report error 139 so am wondering if Side3 APT returns Nak at format command which mydos issues 1st before building directory. That would definitely stop it.

Everything works fine once i copied over the boot, vtoc and directory sectors.

 

James

[flashjazzcat]

50 minutes ago, sup8pdct said:

Sparta format reports APT partition as 256 byte sectors @ 20000 sectors which is what I told Mydos. Also used another dos to read config and it also reports 20000 sectors. Mydos and dos 2 report error 139 so am wondering if Side3 APT returns Nak at format command which mydos issues 1st before building directory. That would definitely stop it.

Everything works fine once i copied over the boot, vtoc and directory sectors.

Ah: I overlooked the obvious. You can't physically format a HDD partition since there is no conceivable way to lay down tracks. Just skip formatting and 'Build file system'. MYDOS's format command has a switch to bypass physical formatting, meanwhile (see manual). Not sure about DOS 2.x, but I can't imagine a situation in which putting DOS 2.x on a HDD partition is of much practical use.

 

With ATRs, the firmware implements a 'dummy' format command which simply returns an empty bad sector list; formatting thereby gives the illusion of having worked. I did this because ATRs emulate floppy disks, which may be physically formatted.

[flashjazzcat]

For those following the saga, Deborah received a renewal of the 'Final Written Warning' which technically should not have been active in the first place, after they elected to hear the grievance submitted only hours earlier at the meeting which was supposed to be a disciplinary hearing, and then skipped the disciplinary hearing entirely since they felt it covered exactly the same issues. So she's essentially received a final written warning as a result of a disciplinary which was never carried out. Obviously this is preposterous, but we'll see what the other irons in the fire (of which there are several) bring next week, and the primary objective (not being sacked) was achieved, so I guess the entire week spent working on this was not a complete waste.

 

Thanks again to everyone for their concern. I will have some time (and a suitable frame of mind) to do some coding over the weekend, then.

 

Edited January 14, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[_The Doctor__]

and your mailbox is full!   don't that beat all

[flashjazzcat]

20 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

and your mailbox is full!   don't that beat all

My DM inbox? Says 98 per cent full here. Anyway: thanks for the email!

 

[bfollowell]

I just installed an U1MB into a fellow AA user's 600XL for him, but I haven't used it a whole lot myself. I know my way around the basics of the BIOS setup menu and I'm learning SDX. One thing I haven't seen is, is there a command or some other way to enter the BIOS setup menu from from the SDX prompt, or do I have to reboot? I started looking through the U1MB manual, but there is just so much information in there! I could've easily missed it, or quit just before I got there. Anyway, if someone could help with this, I'd really appreciate it.

 

Thanks.

 

[flashjazzcat]

You need to warm reset the machine to enter the setup menu, since the reset key unlocks the configuration. This isn't the same as a reboot, however. DOS and any reset-proof application will still be right there if you exit the setup menu with the Escape key 

[bfollowell]

55 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

You need to warm reset the machine to enter the setup menu, since the reset key unlocks the configuration. This isn't the same as a reboot, however. DOS and any reset-proof application will still be right there if you exit the setup menu with the Escape key 

 

Gotcha. Thanks FJC!

[Frankie]

This sounds like an old bug, but when I boot my 800 with Incognito using the 4.06 BIOS it doesn't load the #1 profile. It says it does, but I can tell by the screen color in the BIOS menu it doesn't. If I press 2, to load profile #2, then 1 to load profile #1 again all my settings (and color) are loaded. 

 

Has this been reported before?

Version: 4.06

Plugin: SOP2

Version: 2.06

JED Version 2.0

[flashjazzcat]

20 minutes ago, Frankie said:

This sounds like an old bug, but when I boot my 800 with Incognito using the 4.06 BIOS it doesn't load the #1 profile. It says it does, but I can tell by the screen color in the BIOS menu it doesn't. If I press 2, to load profile #2, then 1 to load profile #1 again all my settings (and color) are loaded. 

 

Has this been reported before?

Version: 4.06

Plugin: SOP2

Version: 2.06

JED Version 2.0

The reason this may not have been reported is that it may not be a bug in the firmware. The symptoms sound more like the problems I was experiencing when testing the 2.0 JED, which causes failure to read the RTC NVRAM properly immediately following a cold powerup on some machines for reasons currently unknown. I invested a large number of hours running various tests for Candle but no correction was ever made to the JED and I had to work around the problem here by lengthening the start-up hardware stabilisation delay, although downgrading the JED also fixes the issue (but that has the unfortunate effect of removing other enhancements).

 

Faicuai tested the 2.0 JED last year when we were discussing the matter and observed similar problems, and found that they went away when he downgraded to the older JED. I believe I posted various test versions of the BIOS in the thread with extended delays, but I never got around to formally releasing the updates yet, partly because I was so browned off by the fact I had to kludge the software to make it work reliably with the new JED.

 

I have the 800 sitting on the desk here, anyway, and I assume I have the 'standard delay' firmware flashed to it, since it jumps into the setup menu without fail every time it's turned on (and it has the 2.0 JED). No relevant bug was ever found in the firmware, meanwhile, and since the problem under discussion vanishes 100 per cent of the time when the JED is downgraded, spending yet more time searching for an issue in the 6502 code would seem a pointless exercise.

Edited January 31, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

Here's the thread:

The issue is basically left 'hanging'.

[flashjazzcat]

Progress update on the SIDE3 loader. One existing user (who is very conscientious regarding support donations) suggested being able to order the file lists on different sort criteria, which is something I'd already been considering. So it's now done:

 

Descending sort by size 1:

Descending sort by size 2:

Ascending sort by file type (extension):

 

The directory currently has to be re-read to reflect a change in settings, but I might implement in-RAM sorting if it's not too time-consuming to do.

 

I had two pretty bad days (Sunday and Monday) of running into extremely nasty filesystem bugs, both of which are fixed now (I find them now so you don't have to later!). The first was a simple encapsulation issue (a file system variable being modified outside of its file control block context) and took about an hour to find, but the second one required an excruciating three hour bug-hunt, single-stepping IO operations in Altirra as the code did long JSRs from one ROM bank to another (breakpoints thereby helpfully triggering in different areas of code sharing the same address space). Turned out that the cluster pre-allocator (used to pre-allocated large files without actually writing anything to the data clusters) in the file pointer seek function was triggering when it shouldn't, causing file reads on long directories to eventually go off into the weeds. Hard to find, easy to fix.

 

It's been smooth sailing since then, although I did have to re-write the long filename parsing function in order to efficiently establish the file extension offset without expensive linear searching ('sort by type' being able to sort on extensions of arbitrary size, not just three characters). The thing is actually faster now, anyway.

 

Hope to have something fit for beta testing by the end of the week.

[Beeblebrox]

@flashjazzcat

 

 

.... well phase 1 of beta anyhoo! 

[_The Doctor__]

um no not really but a funny post none the less

[flashjazzcat]

If only the sort menu could simultaneously arrange my priorities.

 

[flashjazzcat]

Pleasantly surprised by the speed of in-RAM file list sorting:

 

 

[800_Rocks]

I am thinking of both an Incognito for my 800 and Ultimate 1M for my 800xl.  Can I use a single Side3 cart and use it on both without having to change settings or autoboot items (if any) on the Side3?

[Beeblebrox]

@800_Rocks  SIDE3 is great but for an 800 there are two issues. The SIDE3's plastic casing won't allow it to fit in the 800's bay and also even if it did the bay door doesn't shut given the SIDE3's height.

 

I've read you can remove the pcb from the casing to fit it but I personally don't see that as an option. There, if you did also you would have to bypass the bay door switch, which is fairly easy. (Either internally done or you can rig something externally that engages it. Then the 800 would power up.)

 

May have read this wrong but I've taken it that you are either thinking of getting Incognito for the 800 and U1MB for the XL, or just getting U1MB for the XL, therefore not upgrading the 800 with Incognito, and using a SIDE3 between the two.

 

If not upgrading the 800 with Incognito then I'm not entirely sure the benefit of using the SIDE3 cart on the 800 where the latter is stock, (ie if you indend to just get a SIDE3 to use for both). Some of the SIDE3's functionality and a lot of games won't be able to work on the 800. I am sure someone else with more insight will be able to comment.

 

I have Incognito in my 800 and use my SIDE3 cart between the rest of my XL/XEs but obviously I appreciate why you would ideally want to have the 1 x cart between all.

 

Worth checking out AVG cart too - I don't know too much not owing one.

 

 

Edited March 7, 2022 by Beeblebrox
incorrect info corrected

[flashjazzcat]

6 hours ago, 800_Rocks said:

I am thinking of both an Incognito for my 800 and Ultimate 1M for my 800xl.  Can I use a single Side3 cart and use it on both without having to change settings or autoboot items (if any) on the Side3?

SIDE3 wasn't envisaged for use with Atari 800s at all (Incognito-equipped or otherwise), and it can be a bit of a toss-up whether it will work on that machine at all. I didn't have any luck, but others have. Since Incognito provides a built-in Compact Flash hard disk, the HDD functionality provided by SIDE3 is redundant anyway, although Incognito of course lacks any cartridge emulation facilities (a future Incognito version will include it, and will work with SD cards). No integration exists between the Incognito firmware and SIDE3 either, precisely because using the two devices together is outside the remit of the original design and results may be unpredictable.

 

So: you could wait for Incognito 3, or pull the trigger on Incognito now if cartridge emulation on the 800 isn't important to you, or if you're prepared to accept that SIDE3 is not guaranteed to work on the 800.

 

If SIDE3 does happen to work on your 800, then it would be working in 'stand-alone' mode (i.e. without any Incognito firmware support), so there would be no particular reason for settings to be adjusted. Even on your U1MB machine (which would fully integrate with SIDE3 once the correct firmware and plugins were installed), the loader's configuration is pretty much self-contained, so you won't need to make adjustments simply in order to move the cartridge from one machine to another.

 

Autorun settings are coming in the WIP version of the SIDE3 loader, and this will require U1MB firmware support since the U1MB disables the cartridge entirely in normal circumstances. Conversely, on a 'stand-alone' SIDE3 setup (no U1MB), autorun simply kicks in as soon as you type 'CAR' at the command prompt of the built-in SpartaDOS X (again, this will be present in the version of the loader which is yet to be released).

Edited March 7, 2022 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

Just fixed the bug in the Sophia 2 plugin which would periodically result in several seconds of black screen inactivity when entering the U1MB setup menu. Went ahead and fixed a few other bugs as well, so I'll be releasing update 4.07 fairly soon.