Atarimax 1Mbit Flash card dis/enabler

[Marius]

Hi all,

 

In my search for a cartswitch (which works thanks to a few nice people here on Atariage) I thought: why not write a tool to enable/disable an AtariMax 1Mbit Flash card.

 

Well here they are.

 

Switching off cart does not need a reboot (unless it is SpartaDOS X, or other OS containing flash card)

 

Switching ON cart needs reboot.

 

There is one thing that does not work... with file version of SpartaDos 3.3a (not tested other versions). When you switch off the cart, the cart is off, so that works great. But when you reboot... the cart is still off, but spartados 3.3a goes nuts on the screen...

That is only on the screen... the rest of SpartaDOS 3.3a works great... but when you press reset it reboots (GRRR) and the cart appears to be on again. I checked this with other dosses and this issue appears only to happen on SpartaDos file version, on other Dosses it works great even after rebooting. It worked also great with SDX on an AtariMax 1Mbit flash card. Works even great with several demo's. I could run all kind of demo's WITH the maxflash card inserted) , after I ran my CARTOF tool.

 

I think SpartaDos Fileversions are messing/checking on D500, and that's why it goes nuts. Perhaps it has something to do with the RT8 driver...

 

Anyway: I created this cool for this purpouse:

 

I use an Assembler in my cart. That works great. But when I need another tool (like Superpacker) I could not start this tool, unless I pulled the cartridge out of the Atari.

I had several times that my Ramdisk got corrupted by inserting/removing cartridges.

 

So now I do this:

I use my assembler

When I need another tool, I go to DOS (by typing DOS hehe)

I run my CartOf tool

I start the application I need (superpacker in my case)

When I'm ready with superpacker I run the CartOn tool

My Atari reboots

I start my assembler on the cart again.

 

So no cartridge removing and inserting has happened here. My Ramdisk (in Qmeg) is still valid, and I'm happy

 

Perhaps you have a use for these tools too.

 

Let me know

Greetz

M

 

p.s. the attached atr is in SpartaDos Disk Format!!

[analmux]

Interesting tool. Thanks for that. I didn't test it yet, but is it also supposed to work after inserting an 8Mbit cart instead of a 1Mbit cart?

[Marius]

Interesting tool. Thanks for that. I didn't test it yet, but is it also supposed to work after inserting an 8Mbit cart instead of a 1Mbit cart?

 

Hi!

 

I don't have any of those... I hope you can test that out.

 

With the 1Mbit flashcards it works rather great. It is alwas 'tricky' since these carts do "think" on their own...

 

I ran Numen demo while the cart was 'off' but suddenly the cart awoke (probably because numen used a certain memory location that "wakes" the cart) so there was the cart again, and numen crashed. But as long there is regular use, for programming and all that, this is really a nice workaround.

 

Greetz

M.