litedos second edition same drive copy

[prysm1]

hi all

 

anyone else using the litedos se? I was wondering if same drive file copy works for anyone else.

 

regards

prysm1

[_The Doctor__]

http://www.mr-atari.com/Mr.Atari/LiteDOS/

@mr-atari

can help you explore the possibilities

Edited October 20, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[prysm1]

yup, mr atari already got in touch with me. thanks

[+hloberg]

I just got LiteDOS SE and have been playing with it. It is smaller than say MyDOS, which is my preference DOS. But, unless you are loading from an unmodified 1050 or 810 it's smaller size doesn't seem all that advantageous with load speed. Although it does give an additional 2k in some cases. I found it didn't give an added 2k in MS BASIC but yes in TBXL so it varies. 

[ivop]

24 minutes ago, hloberg said:

I found it didn't give an added 2k in MS BASIC but yes in TBXL so it varies. 

MS BASIC probably has its bottom memory location hard coded, and TBXL looks at MEMLO.

[drac030]

It is actually the exact reverse.

Edited October 21, 2021 by drac030

[ivop]

47 minutes ago, drac030 said:

It is actually the exact reverse.

Can you explain?

[drac030]

TBXL has its bottom memory location hardcoded (at $3629), and MS-BASIC *probably* looks at memlo ("probably" I am adding in afterthought, because it has been long time since I used MS-BASIC last time, and my memory may be failing me).

 

In any case, dropping memlo no matter how much does not gain any memory under the regular TBXL, ?FRE(0) will be 34021 even with no DOS at all.

 

[ivop]

That doesn't match with what hloberg said. 2kB extra with Turbo Basic. Mr. Atari claims this on his website:

Quote

EXTREMELY SMALL: uses only 2k RAM, leaving 4k more free memory
(XL/XE with 64k: even 8k more when using Turbo Basic or Ubasic)

How does that happen if it doesn't look at MEMLO?

[flashjazzcat]

IIRC, calling Run at Address at $2080 re-enters TBXL if you have MEM.SAV, so there's definitely code down there and even if MEMLO is $700, you won't get more space for your TBXL programs.

 

In other words, Mr. Atari is wrong.

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by flashjazzcat

[+CharlieChaplin]

Nope, Mr. Atari provides a patched/changed version of TB XL, created especially for LiteDOS by one of the AA members here. That's why it gives 8k more RAM with LiteDOS. Think if you are using the "standard" version of TB XL then you will not get 8k more RAM. (But "standard" is not easy to define nowadays, since there are already various TB XL versions e.g. 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 3.2q and maybe others.)

 

 

[mr-atari]

On 10/20/2021 at 4:39 PM, prysm1 said:

hi all

 

anyone else using the litedos se? I was wondering if same drive file copy works for anyone else.

 

regards

prysm1

Being fixed at the moment.

The colours flash for a reply, but I forgot to show the message source/target.

[drac030]

13 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Mr. Atari provides a patched/changed version of TB XL, created especially for LiteDOS by one of the AA members here. That's why it gives 8k more RAM with LiteDOS.

Maybe post it, then, because I am very curious about a version of TBXL which gains 8k of user memory having dropped the memlo by about 4k.

 

13 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

But "standard" is not easy to define nowadays, since there are already various TB XL versions e.g. 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 3.2q and maybe others.

"Standard" TBXL is 1.5, 34021 bytes free.

[+CharlieChaplin]

You can download the patched TB XL together with LiteDOS on the LiteDOS page (the patch was done by dmsc). You get two ATR images, simply boot LiteDOS, then insert/attach TBXL_uBasic(noDOS).ATR and load it with LiteDOS. But yeah, you are right only about 4k more RAM (not 8k) than with DOS 2.x. Screenshot:

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

2 hours ago, drac030 said:

"Standard" TBXL is 1.5, 34021 bytes free.

 

We also have several TB XL 1.5 patches a) to make it work fine with ST-mouse drivers (and other controller drivers, e.g. on the Multi-Mouse driver disk), b) we have a patch (e.g. with Turbo DOS XL/XE from Reitershan) to make the Turbo 1050 driver reset-proof under TB XL (normally, when someone hits Reset in TB XL, the turbo driver / turbospeed is gone, with the patch it is still available), c) we have patches to make TB XL work with XEP-80 and whatnot. All these patched versions still show 1.5 on the loading screen, some of them even still show 34021 bytes free.

 

[drac030]

40 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

All these patched versions still show 1.5 on the loading screen, some of them even still show 34021 bytes free.

Ah so, if you are so good at identifying the patched versions vs standard versions, please identify this one for me then:

 

TBXL 1.5, 18108 bytes, md5 38C6E6F99BA101341A41595C0FFBF03B. On my hard disk it is dated 24 June 1996, 20:52:00.

[+CharlieChaplin]

12 minutes ago, drac030 said:

Ah so, if you are so good at identifying the patched versions vs standard versions, please identify this one for me then:

 

TBXL 1.5, 18108 bytes, md5 38C6E6F99BA101341A41595C0FFBF03B. On my hard disk it is dated 24 June 1996, 20:52:00.

 

Errrm no, I wanted to say quite the contrary - it is not that easy anymore to find out if you have a standard TB XL 1.5 version or some patched/modified version of it.

 

The problem with many of these available TB XL patches is, that they do not change the loading screen of TB XL (with its version number) at all and some of them also do not alter the available free bytes, so for a lamer like me, it is impossible to find out if they are patched or not.

 

[ivop]

1 minute ago, CharlieChaplin said:

 so for a lamer like me, it is impossible to find out if they are patched or not.

You could make a list of file sizes and MD5 sums of all the TBXL variants you have, and then compare. Or post a zip here with all the TBXL AUTORUN.SYS files you have Preferably with a description of what they do and/or have modified that you know of.

[_The Doctor__]

59 minutes ago, ivop said:

You could make a list of file sizes and MD5 sums of all the TBXL variants you have, and then compare. Or post a zip here with all the TBXL AUTORUN.SYS files you have Preferably with a description of what they do and/or have modified that you know of.

and then edit the damn splash /loading/ loaded whatever screen so we know what's what without the gymnastics!

[drac030]

TBXL 1.5R, SpartaDOS X, Rapidus, fully loaded config:

 

 

So it is really relocatable and respects memlo.

 

However, it has a bug. Details on PM to @dmsc

[+Larry]

16 hours ago, ivop said:

You could make a list of file sizes and MD5 sums of all the TBXL variants you have, and then compare. Or post a zip here with all the TBXL AUTORUN.SYS files you have Preferably with a description of what they do and/or have modified that you know of.

That's a really good idea.  I had never considered  how many variants existed, and the potential issues that could arise.  Is there an A8 version of MD5 (or recommended alternative)?  A simple checksum program should catch these, shouldn't it?

[800XLNZ]

Frank has produced a Frankenstein, a beautiful metamorphic creation.

 

After 36 years Turbo-BASIC XL 1.5 and it's various incarnations deserve a special position in the Atari 8-bit community.

 

 

 

[flashjazzcat]

What is the run address now if one wishes to re-enter TBXL with MEM.SAV?

 

[GoodByteXL]

 

7 hours ago, Larry said:

Is there an A8 version of MD5?

Yes, see MD5 tool on SDX Toolkit.

 

Concerning the versions of Turbo-BASIC XL 1.5:
The original version on the 1985 disk from Happy Computer has
MD5 (TURBO.COM) = 8EA3BF2EA89405AC347B2DBFAB5DE047
and is 18104 bytes in size.

 

There is a need to change Turbo-BASIC XL 1.5 because of this:

15.1 Clean RESET Protection for Turbo-BASIC XL (File: RESET. TUR)

Of course, Frank Ostrowski has provided his Turbo-BASIC XL with RESET protection.
However, this was (exceptionally) not very cleanly programmed.

Result: If you use a floppy in which the Turbo 1050 module is installed, the associated transfer program is no longer initialized during a RESET.

Programs that use the same RESET protection do the same.

(The reason is the following: The initialization program of Turbo-BASIC XL writes a 1 in memory location 9. This deletes bit 1, which must be set in any case if a jump via CASINI is to be made during a RESET. After using this program, only bit 0 is set, while all other bits remain unchanged.)

 

Raw translation from the manual of Turbo-DOS 2.1.

 

Now MD5  (TURBO2.EXE) = 5B97DBCF82ED86F25F0E629E31EA445E.

 

The difference of those two files:
?dif at 0042C1:E1 & 0042C1:E5
?dif at 004408:FD & 004408:F9

[drac030]

4 hours ago, GoodByteXL said:

The original version on the 1985 disk from Happy Computer has
MD5 (TURBO.COM) = 8EA3BF2EA89405AC347B2DBFAB5DE047
and is 18104 bytes in size.

The size difference made me curious, because my copy does not have any visible bytes of garbage at the end (or anywhere), so I have downloaded the ATR from AtariWiki to find out the differences. Here is the file structure of the "original" (18104), with two interesting points indicated:

 

 

"Segment A", 2 bytes in size (or 6 including the header info) just sets the MEMLO to $3629.

 

And here is the structure of "my" TBXL binary (18108 bytes):

 

 

My copy is 4 bytes longer, because it has 10 bytes more code, but at the other hand the segment setting the MEMLO is missing. When you run the program however, the MEMLO still gets set to $3629, so it seems that the absence of the first segment does no harm.

 

Let us take a look at what makes the "segment B" longer. It gets loaded at $6000, extends to 1 page and a half and consists seemingly mostly of code. The additional code is located at offset 71 ($47) from the beginning and looks like this:

 

00:6047: A9 29     LDA #$29
00:6049: A0 36     LDY #$36
00:604B: 8D E7 02  STA MEMLO
00:604E: 8C E8 02  STY MEMLO+1

So this sets the MEMLO to $3629, compensating for the missing segment A. The rest of the differences in the segment B, as far as I can tell, are confined to the shift of addresses resulting from the insertion. So in the "original" we have JSR $6101 immediately before, and in my copy this is JSR $610B (+10 bytes shift) etc.

 

This does not look to me like a binary patch. Quite contrary, the differences in the section I am calling here "segment B" look as if these four instructions were inserted, then the entire program reassembled from source.

 

In other words, it looks like a later revision made by the author.

 

That binary I am quite sure that it is the same copy I got on cassette in the middle of 1988 (or maybe early 1989). The datestamp it bears now is most probably the day and hour when I copied TBXL from old floppies to a subdirectory on my first hard disk, then did CHTD on the contents of that subdirectory (and yes, the runtime and the compiler have the exact same datestamp).

 

In any case, the "segment A" in the 18104-version looks like a quick patch to setup the MEMLO, added last minute before release. Then, when the tape version was being prepared later, that patch has apparently been removed and that snippet of code was inserted instead.

 

4 hours ago, GoodByteXL said:

The difference of those two files:
?dif at 0042C1:E1 & 0042C1:E5
?dif at 004408:FD & 004408:F9

Mine, taking the 4-byte shift into account, matches the values on the left. Also, the differences definitely are not related to DOSINI/CASINI initialization, this is some FP code which differs here and it more looks like accidental damage than a patch. I would not trust the version on the right untill proved that the changes make sense.

Edited October 23, 2021 by drac030