Indus Ramcharger Help

[sup8pdct]

could you possiably copy the atr8000 disks with the pc and send them to me? I have compared cp/m version 2.2 from the indus atr file and some other computer and it appears that they are very much the same except for the missing data. Comparing the atr full with the indus part just may reval what is missing.

Rebuilding it would be a problem.......

 

James

 

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.

I thought electronic images of the single density disk would be sufficient. I assume the atr8000 cp/m disks are single density?

 

James

[JR>]

I thought electronic images of the single density disk would be sufficient. I assume the atr8000 cp/m disks are single density?

 

James

 

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

[trub]

I got a document which "explains the specifics of your Indus GT based CP/M 2.2 system".

It seems to be unknown, so you can read it here. Perhaps you will find it interesting

[JR>]

I got a document which "explains the specifics of your Indus GT based CP/M 2.2 system".

It seems to be unknown, so you can read it here. Perhaps you will find it interesting

 

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

[sup8pdct]

could you possiably copy the atr8000 disks with the pc and send them to me? I have compared cp/m version 2.2 from the indus atr file and some other computer and it appears that they are very much the same except for the missing data. Comparing the atr full with the indus part just may reval what is missing.

Rebuilding it would be a problem.......

 

James

 

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.

I thought electronic images of the single density disk would be sufficient. I assume the atr8000 cp/m disks are single density?

 

James

After a lot of mucking around with old stuff, I finally got teledisk and a 360K drive to work.

Bad part is, the CP/M boot files don't want to write properly. the modem source disk appeared to do so.

I do have an ATR8000 as well as a floppy board for the BB and several 360K and one 1.2M 5.1/4 mechs.

The ATR i don't have instructions for. A quick look on the net should turn up some.

re reading the failed to write disks, teledisk says the first track is 128 byte sectors and the reast are 1024 byte sectors.

Very unusual to do things this way, unless teledisk didn't get it right in the first place?

 

James

[JR>]

After a lot of mucking around with old stuff, I finally got teledisk and a 360K drive to work.

Bad part is, the CP/M boot files don't want to write properly. the modem source disk appeared to do so.

I do have an ATR8000 as well as a floppy board for the BB and several 360K and one 1.2M 5.1/4 mechs.

The ATR i don't have instructions for. A quick look on the net should turn up some.

re reading the failed to write disks, teledisk says the first track is 128 byte sectors and the reast are 1024 byte sectors.

Very unusual to do things this way, unless teledisk didn't get it right in the first place?

 

James

 

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.

[cas]

I found on Mathy v. Nisselroys page an Article on how to build fast loading Synchromesh disks. Because the text was hidden in an ARC File, I have unpacked it, reformatted it slightly without changing content and included it into the AtariWiki for easy access:

 

http://atariwiki.strotmann.de/xwiki/bin/vi...SuperSyncromesh

 

Carsten

[trub]

Hey, I have successfully booted the Indus CP/M !

Everything runs fine. I have executed some famous CP/M software (i.e. Turbo Pascal 3, DBase II and Wordstar) and it seems to work ok. However, it is convenient to have another drive set as D2:, because many CP/M programs require this (like copying files from Atari DOS disks). It can be any drive, not necessarily an Indus (I used SIO2PC/APE drive).

 

Actually, I did it with LDW Super 2000 It is an Indus GT clone (it uses a different mechanism and power supply). To fix the corrupted sectors of CP/M ATRs, I took data from another CP/M 2.2 distribution. And finally, instead of the original RamCharger, I used a self-made replacement board with SRAM memory (I will publish schematics soon).

[JR>]

Hey, I have successfully booted the Indus CP/M !

Everything runs fine. I have executed some famous CP/M software (i.e. Turbo Pascal 3, DBase II and Wordstar) and it seems to work ok. However, it is convenient to have another drive set as D2:, because many CP/M programs require this (like copying files from Atari DOS disks). It can be any drive, not necessarily an Indus (I used SIO2PC/APE drive).

 

Actually, I did it with LDW Super 2000 It is an Indus GT clone (it uses a different mechanism and power supply). To fix the corrupted sectors of CP/M ATRs, I took data from another CP/M 2.2 distribution. And finally, instead of the original RamCharger, I used a self-made replacement board with SRAM memory (I will publish schematics soon).

 

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

[a8maestro]

Does anybody know how to boot one of these into CP/M?

 

I picked up an Indus drive recently that has a Ramcharger board in it. I found the CP/M disks for it here:

 

http://retrobits.net/atari/indus.shtml

 

I made floppy copies of all the images and I can boot the 40-80 Column terminal disk from the INDUS, but I can't figure out what to do from there. I put the CP/M boot disk in at that point and I assume that there is some way to issue a boot command to the Indus from the terminal program but I cant figure out what it is. I've tried every keystroke and key combination I can think of but can't get the drive to respond to anything once I'm in the terminal program.

 

What do you get on the screen when you boot the terminal disk?

 

Rick D.

[sup8pdct]

Hey, I have successfully booted the Indus CP/M !

Everything runs fine. I have executed some famous CP/M software (i.e. Turbo Pascal 3, DBase II and Wordstar) and it seems to work ok. However, it is convenient to have another drive set as D2:, because many CP/M programs require this (like copying files from Atari DOS disks). It can be any drive, not necessarily an Indus (I used SIO2PC/APE drive).

 

Actually, I did it with LDW Super 2000 It is an Indus GT clone (it uses a different mechanism and power supply). To fix the corrupted sectors of CP/M ATRs, I took data from another CP/M 2.2 distribution. And finally, instead of the original RamCharger, I used a self-made replacement board with SRAM memory (I will publish schematics soon).

Well done a true hacker My hat off to you sir.

I would like both when you have done the schematics .

 

James

Edited October 26, 2007 by sup8pdct

[trub]

What do you get on the screen when you boot the terminal disk?

This is what I get:

Edited October 26, 2007 by trub

[a8maestro]

O.k. The terminal disk looks to have booted you into cp/m. You just need programs to run besides stat and pip.

 

Not too different from the ATR-8000 stuff I have played with. There is a lot of software for it, much should run.

 

Rick

[cas]

Hey, I have successfully booted the Indus CP/M !

Everything runs fine. I have executed some famous CP/M software (i.e. Turbo Pascal 3, DBase II and Wordstar) and it seems to work ok. However, it is convenient to have another drive set as D2:, because many CP/M programs require this (like copying files from Atari DOS disks). It can be any drive, not necessarily an Indus (I used SIO2PC/APE drive).

 

Actually, I did it with LDW Super 2000 It is an Indus GT clone (it uses a different mechanism and power supply). To fix the corrupted sectors of CP/M ATRs, I took data from another CP/M 2.2 distribution. And finally, instead of the original RamCharger, I used a self-made replacement board with SRAM memory (I will publish schematics soon).

 

Oh trub, your are the KING!!!

 

This would enable me to develop VolksFORTH CP/M also using my Atari (now I use a CP/M emulator on Mac or PC), also it would be possible to cross-compile from CP/M to Atari

 

Would you be interested in VolksFORTH CP/M for testing on the Indus CP/M?

[trub]

Would you be interested in VolksFORTH CP/M for testing on the Indus CP/M?

I know nothing about Forth, but if you equip me with step-by-step procedures, I can surely do

[cas]

Would you be interested in VolksFORTH CP/M for testing on the Indus CP/M?

I know nothing about Forth, but if you equip me with step-by-step procedures, I can surely do

 

Hi Trub,

 

VolksForth for CP/M is attached. Unfortunately all the comments in the sources are still in german language, I'm more working on translating the Atari and C-64 versions to english this time.

 

However, the main file is "volks4th.com", which is the complete development environment, including the editor.

 

a source file (ending with .FB for ForthBlock) can be selected with "use <filename>"

 

then open the editor with

 

1 l

 

(the digit "1" and a small "L")

 

the Keyboard codes might not work on the Indus GT CP/M and must be adjusted. That can be done with "Terminal.FB" and "install.fb"

 

you can try some programming on the Forth Interpreter

 

1 2 3 + + .

 

should print "6"

 

: square ( n -- n^2 )
 DUP *	
;

5 square . --> 25
3 square . --> 9

 

You can leave Forth with the command "BYE".

 

"META.COM" is the MetaCompiler to create a new Forth System out of KERNEL.FB

 

"KERNEL.COM" is the plain Forth Kernel.

 

For me it would be interesting to know if you can start it and can do some tests on the interpreter (like the ones above).

 

Carsten

vforth_cpm.zip

Edited October 29, 2007 by cas

[trub]

For me it would be interesting to know if you can start it and can do some tests on the interpreter (like the ones above).

Volks4th.com loads and correctly executes some commands (bye, dir).

However, it is hard for me to get further, probably due to terminal incompatibility (additional chars appear and mess the screen).

The Indus CP/M terminal program emulates two types of terminals: ADM3A and ADM31. Can you configure VolksForth to support one of them (say ADM3A) ?

[+remowilliams]

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

Yes, working images would be great! I could finally use this Ramcharger for something.

[trub]

Unfortunately, Teledisk doesn't work for me (at least ver 2.11)

Anadisk goes better, you can edit sectors and fix the CP/M images (I used ver. 2.06 ).

Procedure is as follows (until I find a better way):

1. Create a copy of the Indus CP/M Utility disk from .atr file (a regular Atari disk copier will do)

2. Use Anadisk and fill the missing bytes in sectors 2 and 3 according to this dump. Write the changed sectors.

3. Boot the terminal disk and CP/M.

4. Use INIT command to create a fresh CP/M disk, copy all necessary files using PIP.

[cas]

For me it would be interesting to know if you can start it and can do some tests on the interpreter (like the ones above).

Volks4th.com loads and correctly executes some commands (bye, dir).

However, it is hard for me to get further, probably due to terminal incompatibility (additional chars appear and mess the screen).

The Indus CP/M terminal program emulates two types of terminals: ADM3A and ADM31. Can you configure VolksForth to support one of them (say ADM3A) ?

 

I'll try to do that.

 

Carsten

[JR>]

Unfortunately, Teledisk doesn't work for me (at least ver 2.11)

Anadisk goes better, you can edit sectors and fix the CP/M images (I used ver. 2.06 ).

Procedure is as follows (until I find a better way):

1. Create a copy of the Indus CP/M Utility disk from .atr file (a regular Atari disk copier will do)

2. Use Anadisk and fill the missing bytes in sectors 2 and 3 according to this dump. Write the changed sectors.

3. Boot the terminal disk and CP/M.

4. Use INIT command to create a fresh CP/M disk, copy all necessary files using PIP.

 

Cool! thanks a lot, I now have a working CP/M disk. Unfortuantely the alignment on my PC drive doesn't agree with the alignment of my INDUS. I was able to use it to edit the 2 sectors, but I get a lot of error when trying to make a Teledisk image. When I get a chance I'll try swapping dirve mechanisms around to see if I can get a working image.

[trub]

I have prepared Indus CP/M page with the schematics of SRAMCharger (Ramcharger replacement). Following the information, you can run CP/M on Indus GT, LDW SUper 2000 and CA-2001 disk drives.

The page is here.

[cas]

I have prepared Indus CP/M page with the schematics of SRAMCharger (Ramcharger replacement). Following the information, you can run CP/M on Indus GT, LDW SUper 2000 and CA-2001 disk drives.

The page is here.

 

Hello trub,

 

thanks for the excellent documentation.

 

I haven't been able to patch volksForth CP/M so far, but I'll try to get an SRAMCharger myself and do the modifications. I'll post my findings here, once there is some news to report on that front.

 

Carsten

[trub]

Ok, let me know if you have any problems. I'll adjust the info or correct the page if necessary.

[cas]

Hi,

 

some pictures of my Indus GT, made by Beetle last weekend. Beetle, Mike and me will try to build a ramcharger for that in February - March timeframe.

 

 

Best regards

 

Carsten