Hard Drives

[Sean39]

HI Everyone

 

Thank you so much for the help on hard drives..... The Cartridge looks like the way to go....

 

MyIDE+FLASH IDE Interface Cartridge for XL/XE Computers

 

1 for $49.99 + $5 Shipping

($1 extra shipping each additional cartridge)

 

 

I guess what I need is a good IDE Hard drive, and the box with a power supply to run it. Now I do have a copy of Mydos

but not sure if it still good......... What operating system has worked the best with the IDE drives so far ???????? I guess that a good

cable going from the cartridge to the drive would not hurt also. Thank you everyone, and with this cartridge do I still need to have a chip

burned for the computer or not???? Or buy a new OS Chip. Let me know on that.....

 

 

Thanks Sean

[+Larry]

Is there a link (in english) where I could get a KMK/JZ? Preferable with Paypal?

Here are a couple of websites:

 

http://8bit.yarek.pl/interface/atari.kmk/

 

http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~machek/atari/ide8bit.html

 

I bought my KMK/JZ from Jerzy Dudek on eBay.He shipped it to me from Poland,with no problems!

 

A small addendum:

 

Most of these KMK interfaces normally ship *without* a cartridge jack. At least when I bought mine, they did not work with XL computers, only XE. There is more than one version, but those that I've seen all have some *provision* for a cartridge jack, so be sure to ask if that is important to you. You might also check the bios version supplied. From Drac030, the latest release version is 1.11. When I bought mine, the first thing I had to do was burn a new eprom for the bios -- but fortunately I have a burner.

 

KMK has excellent docs, and this device can control 16 partitions and two drives (master and slave), IIRC. And it is FAST, FAST, FAST! (OK, not like a PC, but for an Atari -- FAST!)

 

http://drac030.krap.pl/en-kmkjz-pliki.php

 

-Larry

[Forrest]

The MyIDE adapter works well with MYDOS most programs function fine with the MyIDE. You don't need the internal OS chip upgrade.

 

The cartridge port provides enough +5V DC power to run a IDE CF Adapter and a CF card. If you search ebay.com for 'IDE CF Adapter' you'll find many choices for about $7 shipped. I've used a 40 pin IDE CF adapter with a 256 MB CF card - works great. CF cards are inexpensive and large - I just pickedup a SanDisk Ultra II 1 GB card for $15 at my local office supply store.

 

The forums at http://www.atarimax.com/flashcart/forum/index.php are great - you'll find all the help you need.

[+bf2k+]

So where can you actually order the KMK/JZ. None of the links above mention anything about ordering the device. Any links or email addresses?

[+Larry]

So where can you actually order the KMK/JZ. None of the links above mention anything about ordering the device. Any links or email addresses?

 

You can try here:

http://atarifanstore.selfip.com/idea.htm

 

But first, you might want to PM Drac030.

 

-Larry

[+Larry]

Larry:

 

The Supra has one strenghth....you gave it to me !!

 

Since I have all the components ( I just found an Adaptec 4010 bridge controller that I didn't know I had!),I guess I will try to set up this puppy.

 

Then dinosaur can use a dinosaur hard drive!

 

BTW...I never have got my KMK/JZ to boot,either with MyDos or SpartaDos...

 

Both mine work fine -- I remember suggesting that you should update the bios and d/l the updated docs.

 

-Larry

[dinosaur]

Both mine work fine -- I remember suggesting that you should update the bios and d/l the updated docs.

 

-Larry

 

None of the websites that I have for this make the EPROM file nor the improved documentations available.

 

Can you give me a URL?

 

Thank you.

[dinosaur]

Disregard!!!

Edited May 26, 2008 by dinosaur

[dinosaur]

Larry:

 

Disregard my last post,I found them!

 

BTW...I have not opened my KMK/JZ. What size is the EPROM and does the file "hdb111.arc" have the header in there?

 

Thanks!

[drac030]

As far ast the KMK goes.. Thats a decent hardisk controller.. But it doesnt hold a candle to the black-box...

 

Probably, but the BB is not a hard disk interface - it is a multifunction interface, which can handle hard disk among other things. KMK/JŻ/IDEa is an ATA host adapter only. In turn, it costs a fraction of the BlackBox' price, and is also, as Larry said, very fast in comparison to other storage devices for Atari (although I have no clue about BB speed figures).

[+Larry]

Larry:

 

Disregard my last post,I found them!

 

BTW...I have not opened my KMK/JZ. What size is the EPROM and does the file "hdb111.arc" have the header in there?

 

Thanks!

 

I can't help you too much with that one -- when I installed the cartridge jack, I had to do some surgery to the case and it is now hot-melted together. However, peeking inside, and from memory, I'm pretty sure that it is a 2764. Definitely a 28-pin eprom. There are no headers -- straight .bin/.rom type file. Read the docs, as there are two versions in the archive.

-Larry

[Fres]

Just out of curiosity, what does a Black Box look like? Anyone care to share a pic?

Edited May 27, 2008 by ponderosa

[drac030]

http://atariki.krap.pl/index.php/BlackBox

 

EDIT: there are also the speed figures there I forgot about (section 3). Normally, the KMK/JŻ/IDEa is at least twice as fast as BB. And with 512-byte sectors (under SpartaDOS X >= 4.40) it is three times faster reading and seven times faster writing

Edited May 27, 2008 by drac030

[Mathy]

Hello Ponderosa

 

If you don't speak Polish very well or just wanna learn more about the BlackBox, you might try my BlackBox page.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

[MEtalGuy66]

Actually, one could argue that devices such as the Blackbox and MIO are much more of an "interface" than any IDE interface. If you look at the IDE standard, the drive (or other IDE device) contains about 99% of the "interface".. In fact, the standard was originally developed for the specific purpose of providing an interface standard that minimized the amount of logic necessary on the host end. It will just about "go straight on" to any 8/16 bit data bus with a bare minimum of necessary logic. (hence the simplicity of the MyIDE hardware spec.)

 

The speed figures you get with an IDE interface are going to vary widely based on the speed of the device, itself. Some earlier CF cards and older notebook IDE hardisks are painfully slow by comparisson to newer/faster CF cards, and hardisks. Speeds that the black box can achieve, even with newer SCSI devices, are going to be largely determined by how fast the interface and firmware can deal with the (somewhat complex by comparison) system of SCSI bus negotiation and data exchange.

 

There is another major influencing factor where the use/handling of 512 byte physical secotors is concerned. The black box's firmware contains code that the atari has to use to support 512 byte sectors. Depending on how this is handled, it can have a major influence on speed. For instance, on a sector read, the firmware must decide whether any given 256 byte "ATARI sector" is a "first half" or "second half" of it's corresponding 512 byte "physical sector" on the drive. If its a "first half" then it simply reads the first 256 bytes and stops. If it's a "second half" then it must either do 256 "dummy reads" and then read the "second half" of the physical sector, or if the drive's command set supports a byte offset sector read, then it could start at the "second half" and just read the 256 bytes it needs. Depending on how this is handled, you can obviously see a major difference in read speeds. And we are not even talking about other features and considerations of the black box's complex device/partition mapping system that may come into play during a read, depending on the exact nature of the code. Where writes are concerned, the potential for slowdown due to this factor is increased even more.. With a write (again depending on the features supported by the drive, as well as the interface's firmware) we could conciveably have to read into memory the entire 512 byte "physical sector," replace the specific data that we are writing, and rewrite the entire 512 byte sector to the drive. This is an extreme example, and Im not saying that this is even necessary in the case of most SCSI devices, but I have not seen the blackbox source and I dont know.

 

With an IDE device, as I said before, 99% of the interface resides in the device. As far as 512 byte sectors are concerned, this still needs to be handled either by the ATARI, or by a "smart" interface. Depending on how the KMK handles this, some major speed advantages could be gained over any interface that depends on the ATARI to manipulate all of the data in software.

 

As I said, I havent seen the firmware/handler code of either device. Some or all of this may be totally unapplicable to either or both devices. But its something to think about from an interface design standpoint. I know for sure that all of the SCSI code on both the MIO and BlackBox is done by the ATARI in firmware..

[MEtalGuy66]

Here is the board layout for the SUPRA controller if anyone's interested.

 

[drac030]

If you look at the IDE standard, the drive (or other IDE device) contains about 99% of the "interface".

 

This is why we call the Atari-side interface a host adapter. The part that resides on the disk itself is the controller.

 

It will just about "go straight on" to any 8/16 bit data bus with a bare minimum of necessary logic. (hence the simplicity of the MyIDE hardware spec.)

 

Except that interfacing the disks 16-bit bus to Atari's 8-bit bus is not so simple, because e.g. while reading the data there are two reads at the 6502 side (2 bytes), while the disk side should only see one read (1 word). Same for writes. The host adapter must also contain some memory, the controlling register etc. (the PBI logic, in short). MyIDE, obviously, doesn't contain any PBI logic, it also ignores the other half of the IDE bus - hence its simplicity.

 

The speed figures you get with an IDE interface are going to vary widely based on the speed of the device, itself.

 

True. Still the KMK/JŻ/IDEa is the fastest, with any device. During last 13 years (since the KMK/JŻ IDE has been built) I have never seen an IDE device that would have given so slow figures as the BB (I saw 7 KB/s writing speed on some Conner disk - but 20 KB/s reading is low speed, at least under a decent DOS). Some disks were very old, but still.

 

For instance, on a sector read, the firmware must decide whether any given 256 byte "ATARI sector" is a "first half" or "second half" of it's corresponding 512 byte "physical sector" on the drive. If its a "first half" then it simply reads the first 256 bytes and stops.

 

Not true. You always have to read the entire sector. Obviously, you can reset the disk after reading the first half of the 512-byte sector, but this is rather brutal method and despite that, it puts the disk in busy state, it resets the geometry to default (again, with some disks it is a disaster). How long this state lasts, this depends on the device (I saw max. around 30 seconds). Some devices strongly dislike receiving commands when DRQ is on, so even if you gain something this way (which I doubt), you loose on compatibility.

 

As I said, I havent seen the firmware/handler code of either device. Some or all of this may be totally unapplicable to either or both devices.

 

So, what's the point?

Edited May 29, 2008 by drac030

[MEtalGuy66]

.

 

As I said, I havent seen the firmware/handler code of either device. Some or all of this may be totally unapplicable to either or both devices.

 

So, what's the point?

 

The point is that depending on how "sector splitting" is implemented, and other characteristics of the code/device that actually does the drive negotiation/data exchange, you can have a huge difference in performance. The black box handles all of this in software on the "atari end" and depending on factors that may influence the nature of the code due to the black box's disk/partition/device management system (which is by far the best and most powerful/advanced on any atari hardisk setup,) there may be even more reasons for "performance hits" which personally, I don't notice, and consider a damn good tradeoff for the functionality it has. After having a black box on your main setup for any period of time, switching to any other setup seems quite "crippling".. I think most black box owners that use their system for serious power-user/development-oriented tasks would agree strongly with me on this.

[+Larry]

.

 

As I said, I havent seen the firmware/handler code of either device. Some or all of this may be totally unapplicable to either or both devices.

 

So, what's the point?

 

The point is that depending on how "sector splitting" is implemented, and other characteristics of the code/device that actually does the drive negotiation/data exchange, you can have a huge difference in performance. The black box handles all of this in software on the "atari end" and depending on factors that may influence the nature of the code due to the black box's disk/partition/device management system (which is by far the best and most powerful/advanced on any atari hardisk setup,) there may be even more reasons for "performance hits" which personally, I don't notice, and consider a damn good tradeoff for the functionality it has. After having a black box on your main setup for any period of time, switching to any other setup seems quite "crippling".. I think most black box owners that use their system for serious power-user/development-oriented tasks would agree strongly with me on this.

 

Perhaps an interesting question is what would it take to have the BB be able to use 512-byte sectors as from the newer versions of SDX? The BB already fetches 512 bytes, but as mentioned splits them for the Atari, because when the BB was developed no Atari dos could read/write more than 256 bytes. Such a shame that the BB firmware source code is lost, or is it?

 

-Larry

[drac030]

The point is that depending on how "sector splitting" is implemented, and other characteristics of the code/device that actually does the drive negotiation/data exchange, you can have a huge difference in performance.

 

You mean, basically, that better firmware = better I/O performance. That's what I am glad to agree (since KMK/JŻ is the fastest one and this is me who wrote the firmware ). I admit however, that the interface has some basic hardware support that, in conjunction with the software, speeds up reads in the 256-byte-per-sector mode (it is useless in the 512-byte-per-sector mode, though, and in this the I/O is very fast - in Atari terms - too)

 

The black box handles all of this in software on the "atari end" and depending on factors that may influence the nature of the code due to the black box's disk/partition/device management system (which is by far the best and most powerful/advanced on any atari hardisk setup,) there may be even more reasons for "performance hits" which personally, I don't notice, and consider a damn good tradeoff for the functionality it has.

 

The first thing that comes to mind is, that, at the stage of designing the software, you project the other factors, such as the partition table format or "sector splitting", in such a way that these would cause minimal tradeoffs, if any. At least, the partition table is internal to the interface, so you can design it as convenient for your code. The way the firmware does sector splitting is internal to the firmware too, so there are no impediments resulting from the necessity of implementing some established standard.

 

As for the partition table scheme in the BlackBox, what advantages it has over the partition management in KMK/JŻ/IDEa?

 

@Larry: yes, I am curious about it too. And, since Mathy mentioned that BlackBox can create partitions up to 64 MB (in KMK/JŻ/IDEa this limit is 8 GB, btw.), I wonder how such a partition is addressed? Specifically, is it a 65535 sectors 1024 bytes each, or 131072 sectors 512 bytes each, or 262144 sectors, 256 bytes each? In the latter two cases, the sector number is >= 16 bit, so I am curious, how a DOS can address this via DCB (where only 16 bits is reserved for the sector number).

Edited May 30, 2008 by drac030

[Mathy]

Hello Drac030

 

Check out this textfile on my Blackbox page. It'll tell you (just about) everything you want to know about the BB's configuration and partitionlist.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

 

PS the above link bring you to the end of my BlackBox page, since the paragraph it should jump to, is too much near the end. At the moment of this writing, the (link to the) textfile is the last link on the page.

[drac030]

Thanks, Mathy. I have read the file, and it seems to me that the BB partition scheme is superior to the KMK/JŻ/IDEa partition scheme in only one point: namely, in the latter, the logical drive numbers are automatically assigned to partitions in sequential order and you cannot change them other way than changing the order of entries in the partition list (i.e. the physical partition 0 is always mapped to D1:, 1 to D2: and so on). But the version 2.0 if the firmware has this feature implemented.

 

Also, I can't find any information about the maximum number of partitions in the BB. Judging from the partition table size (7 sectors) it is probably greater than in KMK/JŻ (where the limit is 16 partitions).

 

64 MB in BB is 262144 sectors, 256 bytes each. I can see no information, though, on how to address sectors no. >65535 at the SIO level.

Edited May 30, 2008 by drac030

[Mathy]

Hello Drac030

 

All I know is that the BB can handle 64MB partitions. Not how SIO should handle them.

 

The BB can have as many partitionlists as you want. You just have to change the starting sector of the partitionlist to be able to use a different partitionlist. Problem is, the BlackBox isn't smart enough, to have a list of all the partitionlists. And when "partitioning" a drive, you have to make sure yourself, that the partitionlist and the partitions themselves don't overlap. (If somebody would be willing to write some software for this (that doesn't need Sparta or BeWeDOS) please do so. I'ld really love to see that!!!)

 

IIRC the BlackBox addresses the sectors as 512 byte sectors. What I'm no sure about is, whether the BB can handle max. 4 GB or 8 GB. That depends on how something (not sure what exactly) is handled/programmed.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

 

PS have you seen my (AT)ASPI page?

[MEtalGuy66]

Thanks, Mathy. I have read the file, and it seems to me that the BB partition scheme is superior to the KMK/JŻ/IDEa partition scheme in only one point: namely, in the latter, the logical drive numbers are automatically assigned to partitions in sequential order and you cannot change them other way than changing the order of entries in the partition list (i.e. the physical partition 0 is always mapped to D1:, 1 to D2: and so on). But the version 2.0 if the firmware has this feature implemented.

 

Also, I can't find any information about the maximum number of partitions in the BB. Judging from the partition table size (7 sectors) it is probably greater than in KMK/JŻ (where the limit is 16 partitions).

 

64 MB in BB is 262144 sectors, 256 bytes each. I can see no information, though, on how to address sectors no. >65535 at the SIO level.

 

That may be. But the black box, as a device, is far superior in that you press a button (on the black box) at any time, and instantly, whatever application you are using is frozen (program space, zero page, and system registers are preserved by copying them to SRAM on the blacdk box), and you endter the firmware menu, where you can swap any of up to 96 partitions per physical drive, any SIO connected drive (with hard-coded support for US-DOUBLER/INDUS/XF-551 ultaspeed), any floppy-board connected floppy drive, or any ramdisk, onto any drive number (d1: - d9:)... You can also make changes to serial/printer/spooler configuration, or enter the BB's 6502 monitor/debugger, or use the BB sector editor/copier (which works on any partition size, on any device), and when you are done and exit the menu, you are dropped SEAMLESSLY back into the application you were running... whatever that may be.. DOS, BASIC, ALternate Realty, Numen DEmo, whatever... And the application continues just as it was when you pressed the "menu button"..

 

So if you combine the KMK niterface, a Turbo freezer, and create a fast paralell floppy interface, and add firmware support for integration of all 3 devices, along with support for instant 16-grayscale spooled screen-dumps from any graphics mode, including full ATASCII support in text modes (for EPSON and IBM compatible printers).... Then you could compare that system with the Black Box.. Other than that, you are comparing "apples to oranges"...

[+bf2k+]

Speaking of the BB... while searching for a missing CD today, I found my old BB. I thought I had sold it years ago. Now to get this thing back up and running... where is docs? What power supply does it need?