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Just happen to have an opened 600xl handy: 14 1/4" X 5 31/32" Thats the board itself, excluding ports and PBI which extend out further.

That's very interesting. I have several different archives that contain INDUS Rom dumps and every one of them identifies that as 1.4. It must have been misidentified originally and then propogated over the years. I'm glad I never "upgraded" all mine to 1.4 as I had once planned. I believe the 'unk' version is a dump of an upgrade ROM I bought from Best Electronics back in the day. It was supposed to have some sort of improvements, but I don't recall exactly what. I have the documentation for it here somewhere, but I can't seem to locate it right now.

Here are the 3 versions that I have. INDUS.zip

Great work! Could you post an image of the repaired CP/M disk? Teledisk or Anadisk should be able to make usable images.

Despite the oddball media, it still used standard disk formats so it would work with any dos that supported the particular format. The 3" media were Single Sided Double density 80 track just like 3.5's. The manual states that it included a copy of DOSXL on one 3" disk and a second 3" disk with some utilities for configuring the drive, but I didn't get these and have never seen the utilities archived anywhere. I have never seen one of the original 3" disks, since mine had already been converted to 3.5 and did not come with any. I have since seen a couple of the drives for sale that included a few of the disks, but that is the only place I have ever seen them available. It looks like I payed $25 shipped back in 2000.

Yes, it has 2 standard SIO ports in back.

I just pulled out one of my TT030's for the first time in several years and finally got around to installing the Crazy Dots video card in it.

I picked up one of these several years ago, but it had previously been converted to dual SS 3.5" drives. The controller board in these is actually quite nice. It can control up to 4 floppy drives in just about any combination of single or double density, single or double sided and 40 or 80 track. It also supports enhanced density. There is a switch that will swap the ID's of the first 2 drives with the second 2. This was so you could connect one or two 5.25 drives externally and then be able to easily boot from either the 3" drive or a normal 5.25" drive. The drives are addressed sequentially and can start at any address from D1-D4 so standard Atari drives can be used in combination with the Amdek drives. The contoller also contains a printer port.

Thanks, not sure how I missed that. Must have used the wrong words in my search.

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this? The ICD site has the regular version but not the PRO and my Link 2 seems to have died so the regular version is not fully functional without it.

SpartaDOS X can use extended ram instead of the ram under the OS.

I know MetalGuy66 was making a new run of those boards, but I don't know if there are any more available, otherwise they're pretty hard to find. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...o+130xa+adaptor

Any 9 VAC Atari supply will work, like those from a 1050 or 800. Theres an HTML'ized version of the manual here: http://www.dropmail.com/MIO/Index.shtml

Hook up both the 1050 and the SIO2PC to your Atari computer. Mount a blank ATR file in APE and copy from the disk in the 1050 to the ATR file. Once you have the ATR file you can just use that via SIO2PC or in an emulator, or there are utilities you could use to extract files from the ATR file if you want to have individual files on the PC side.

I told ya it was a bizzare format. I tried everything to get those images to work. I must have tried 6-7 different Floppy controllers, several 360K drives as well as about 5 different versions of Teledisk in various combinations and nothing worked. After I finally got ahold of some working copies made on an ATR8000, I tried making my own teledisk images from known good disks and they still wouldn't boot.

Cool, thanks! That has a lot of information I didn't know.

This zip file contains images of the CP/M disks for the ATR8000. There is also another zip file in there that has the actual CP/M files that were extracted from one of the disks. These images were created with a program called TELEDISK. You should have no problem finding a copy of it online if you want to try to make physical disks from the images. I believe these are all Double Density. If you create physical disks, there is a porgram called 22Disk that you can use to read many flavors of CP/M disk formats, including the ones used by the ATR8000, on a PC with a 5.25 Drive. atr8000disks.zip

I got a response from Dan Vernon of the Retrobits Site. He never had the original disks himself, but said that he got the images from Bob Woolley and suggested I contact him. I've sent him a PM so we'll see if he has access to them. I also did a newsgroup search and found some old messages from a couple of people on c.s.a.8bit that said they had the disks. I recognized a couple of the handles....'Roy G Biv' and 'Sage' , but I haven't seen any activity from them in a while. If anyone knows how to contact either of them, they might still have the disks. The search continues........

Yes, I'd like to see that, do you have it in an electronic format?

Are you asking to have physical disks mailed to you? I'd be happy to do that, but postage might not be cheap to Australia. I'm not sure if they would be of much value to you if you don't have an ATR8000. There are images available that you could use to make your own copies. The only problem is they would not be bootable on an ATR8000. All of the files on the copy would be readable, but the boot tracks probably would not. They did something really weird with their disk format on the boot tracks and I've never been able to copy that part of the disk, only write new tracks usnig the ATR8000 CP/M itself. I'm not sure if it was intended to be a form of copy protection, but it certainly works that way. It's some kind of weird combination of single density and double density tracks that is almost impossible to read or write even with very old Single Density capable Floppy controller cards in a PC. I suppose a catweasel could do it, and I've always meant to see if the Happy Discovery Cart could handle it, but I don't have an ST 5.25 drive. Anyway, if you would like me to mail the floppies to you and don't mind paying the postage, I'll do that, or I can send you the images and you can see what you can get from those first if you like.

Ah, you probably have more experience with it than I do then. I just know that the same site that has the CP/M images also has 2 version of DOSXL images, one with Syncromesh and the other with "Super" Syncromesh, but I really don't know what makes it super . Yes, CP/M mostly ran on 8080 and Z80 CPU's, but the BIOS for most systems resided on the boot disk instead of in ROM and was customized for each hardware platform. Even changes in the configuration of a system required changing the boot code on each disk that you wanted to boot from. The ROM in most CP/M system is just a very simple file loader that first laods the BIOS into memory and passes control to it, which then loads and executes the rest of the CP/M code which was fairly standardized between systems.

Yeah, that's what I was alluding to when I refered to missing CP/M info. I'm not sure we will ever find another source for those disks. I sent an email the the Retrobits webmaster to see if he has the original disk that the images were made from. I do have an ATR8000 with CP/M disks, but I don't think there is any chance of that working. The boot sectors for all CP/M disks are completely machine dependant. [EDIT] Oh you were suggesting using the ATR8000 to copy the disks, not use the ATR8000 disks in the INDUS, yes that might work.[/EDIT] Yes Carsten is correct. As I understand it, the Indus drives had HiSpeed code that they named "Syncromesh" in the BIOS, but it is buggy and does not work. They then released a version of DOSXL that included working syncromesh code that can be loaded into the RAM in the drive to regain the high speed funcionality. I think Super Syncromesh is an even later version that is supposed to be even faster than the original. The only problem is that it's a major PITA. It takes about 3 floppy disks and a bunch of copying and configuring to make a working syncro disk from the master. Then once you have that, it takes forever to load the code into the drive and it sits there and polls all eight drives until they timeout, which takes even more time. Once you finally get it loaded, it stays there until you turn off the drive though. I understand there is also a driver in SpartaDos X that loads Hispeed code into the INDUS, but I've never tried it. That might be a faster solution. Once loaded though, the drive really is fast. I think I read somewhere that it is even faster than a Happy. I think I also read somewhere that it pushes the limits of SIO so far that there are often SIO transmission errors that can cause so many retries that the speed improvements are lost, although I've never experienced that. What I'd really like to see is a new BIOS for the INDUS that replaces the buggy code with a working version of syncromesh. Anybody feel ambitious?

I almost forgot to post the pictures. I also noticed there was an extra Serial number label on the bottom of the drive that the board was in.

sup8pdct and drac030....thanks for the suggestions, keep 'em coming. Yes I have tried booting from all 3 of the CP/M disks and from various OS's including an 800 OS. The results were all the same.....displays the CP/M messages and then the drive just freezes. I also tested all the RAM and it all tested good. I went ahead and replaced the RAM anyway and the results were again the same. I'm beginning to wonder if there might have been some copy protection or other CP/M data that was not preserved by the ATR images.

Actually the later versions of MyDos allow up to 10 autorun files. The file can have any name but must have a .ARx extention with the files executed in order from .AR0 thru .AR9.