flashjazzcat Posted December 10, 2013 Author Share Posted December 10, 2013 What's an APT BIOS? A PBI ROM which observes the APT (Atari Partition Table) specification, described here. TXG/MNX was obviously interested in using FDISK 4 (the partition editor for APT) with his BB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 10, 2013 Author Share Posted December 10, 2013 MATR nearly finished: 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 11, 2013 Author Share Posted December 11, 2013 (edited) Found a bug in the PBI ROM which would prevent a mounted ATR from working if there's more than one FAT on the card and the ATR is in the first FAT. I doubt this affected anyone, however, and it still doesn't account for the reported XEGS issue. Fixed in upcoming upgrade. Edited December 11, 2013 by flashjazzcat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
w1k Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 hm, exist any small chance to run ATR file with SIDE II or from SDX without u1mb? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 11, 2013 Author Share Posted December 11, 2013 hm, exist any small chance to run ATR file with SIDE II or from SDX without u1mb? Certainly, using an existing SDX driver which I'll release. No booting, though, and SDX is required. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bandit Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 MATR nearly finished: Really looking forward to MATR You have done alot for atari. Thank You! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 13, 2013 Author Share Posted December 13, 2013 Drac030 has told me he will update the IDE Plus 2.0 PBI BIOS to remove the compatibility issue with the FDISK's newly introduced "global metadata flag". This is excellent news, and means that a final release of all the APT tools is but a short time away. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 18, 2013 Author Share Posted December 18, 2013 (edited) You can now select a different FAT partition at any time in MATR: Just need to add code to register the additional FATs and then it's DONE. I was thinking of making it handle APT partition mounting as well, but I might leave that till a later version. Note: Youtube's encoding has completely mangled this Altirra recording. Edited December 18, 2013 by flashjazzcat 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atari8warez Posted December 19, 2013 Share Posted December 19, 2013 Note: Youtube's encoding has completely mangled this Altirra recording. Why is everybody using Numen for demos, I am just wondering out loud here, anything particular with Numen which makes it popular for demoing purposes? MATR looks very nice by the way.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 19, 2013 Author Share Posted December 19, 2013 Why is everybody using Numen for demos, I am just wondering out loud here, anything particular with Numen which makes it popular for demoing purposes? MATR looks very nice by the way.... Ta. I like Numen because it's a) excellent, and b) big, and therefore a good benchmark of transfer speed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted December 19, 2013 Share Posted December 19, 2013 (edited) It also requires a PAL ANTIC chip to even run, which a large percentage of the user base does not have in all of their machines.. Edited December 19, 2013 by MEtalGuy66 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 19, 2013 Author Share Posted December 19, 2013 (edited) It also requires a PAL ANTIC chip to even run, which a large percentage of the user base does not have in all of their machines.. Well, the question was why is it popular. That would be a reason for it not to be a popular choice, although the fact the question was posed in the first place would suggest it obviously is a popular choice - although perhaps we can assume only in Europe. It's a non-issue anyway: NTSC users may feel free to substitute an NTSC-compatible demo of their choice. Edited December 19, 2013 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atari8warez Posted December 20, 2013 Share Posted December 20, 2013 Well, the question was why is it popular. That would be a reason for it not to be a popular choice, although the fact the question was posed in the first place would suggest it obviously is a popular choice - although perhaps we can assume only in Europe. It's a non-issue anyway: NTSC users may feel free to substitute an NTSC-compatible demo of their choice. Well yeah, i noticed it is popular with Europeans although most demos seem to show it loading and not much else, that's why I was wondering, I myself like to use flimbo's quest it has a cool chiptune. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 20, 2013 Author Share Posted December 20, 2013 What the hell - I've added APT support as well, so you can mount ATRs and conventional partitions all from within the same application: The APT partitions (which must have names) just appear as an alphabetised list, same as the FAT-based disk images. You can have as many FATs as you want and as many APT controllers as you want (imagining for a moment that it were possible to connect more than one at a time which is capable of mounting ATRs in FAT partitions). I'm yearning to get this done and dusted now. It'll definitely be finished for Christmas. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 22, 2013 Author Share Posted December 22, 2013 Nearly there: This is just a tool which displays the drive assignments on any APT device on any controller ID. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 25, 2013 Author Share Posted December 25, 2013 (edited) Busy working on a very intriguing bug which causes MATR to go loopy after mounting an ATR on D2:... only drive 2 is affected. If I hard-code the drive number to 1 (so MATR thinks it mounted D2:, but actually mounted D1:), the problem goes away, so I suspect a BIOS issue. Either way, it's going to be a swine to track down... Edited December 25, 2013 by flashjazzcat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 25, 2013 Author Share Posted December 25, 2013 (edited) Fixed. NASTY bug in the PBI ROM. Physical disk reads were sometimes redirected to mounted ATRs. Ouch. Edited December 25, 2013 by flashjazzcat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 27, 2013 Author Share Posted December 27, 2013 (edited) Has anyone suffered any kind of crashing issue when using FDISK with IDE Plus 2.0? Specifically when invoking Disk->Properties from the editor? Konrad is suffering a consistent crashing problem when using this kind of combo, but unfortunately I can't duplicate any issues on real hardware or in emulation. Steve Carden also reported success using four different IDE Plus units with various betas of FDISK, but of course I can't be sure he used Disk->Properties. There's no explicable reason for Konrad's issue (which appears to manifest itself as scrambled code inside FDISK, creating garbage output when Disk Properties is called), and as I say, I can't duplicate any problems here, despite slavishly testing every conceivable set up (this is ongoing) on four different machines. If someone else had experienced troubles, it would at least eliminate some hardware quirk, although I realize chances are probably slim (especially at this time of year). It's a very strange problem, and worse still because the developer (i.e. me) can't even trigger the issue, let alone set about debugging it. The only possible clue is that Konrad is able to avoid the problem when his IDE Plus is on PBI #0. Edited December 27, 2013 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roydea6 Posted December 27, 2013 Share Posted December 27, 2013 I get a good response Using Properties, but when I try to open the CF card I get a Dialogue saying metadata read/writer error then pressing ENTER KEY I am back to the main screen with just the DISK title at the top of screen AND the about Dialogue message.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 27, 2013 Author Share Posted December 27, 2013 (edited) I get a good response Using Properties, but when I try to open the CF card I get a Dialogue saying metadata read/writer error then pressing ENTER KEY I am back to the main screen with just the DISK title at the top of screen AND the about Dialogue message.. It seems you have a mangled (or more likely outdated) partition table on the disk; possibly external partitions with bad metadata pointers? In any case, you're using Disk->Properties at the top level. The one Konrad's having trouble with is Disk->Properties from inside the APT partition editor screen. The "About" dialogue is supposed to remain open on the main display before the editor is opened, by the way, so that's normal behaviour. As I say: regarding transfer errors, perhaps your APT got damaged or you may be experiencing some IO troubles. If you're able to send an image of the media across, I will of course take a look at it. It looks as if I'm going to have to hard-modify the PBI ID of my Rev. A IDE+, meanwhile, in an attempt to reproduce problems. EDIT: Just moved the jumper on the IDE Plus (to position 4), and thankfully was able to reproduce crash at last. Can't be far from a solution now, hopefully. Edited December 27, 2013 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 27, 2013 Author Share Posted December 27, 2013 Yes - found it. Five minutes of soldering was time well spent... Because IDE Plus does not currently return a hardware ID string, FDISK proceeds to manually select the PBI ROM, and look for the IDE Plus 2.0 magic bytes. At this point, FDISK banked out the PBI, then bewilderingly wrote $FF to PDVMSK. I have no explanation for that. Removing the superfluous write to PDVMSK appears to have cured the issue, pending further tests. Heartfelt thanks to Konrad for the time he's spent testing FDISK these past couple of days, and for spotting those few things I had somehow missed. Always a pleasure trading bug reports and suggestions. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 30, 2013 Author Share Posted December 30, 2013 Should get most stuff released tomorrow. "Man-flu" has hampered tonight's progress. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Allan Posted December 30, 2013 Share Posted December 30, 2013 Should get most stuff released tomorrow. "Man-flu" has hampered tonight's progress. I liked it but not the flu-stuff obviously. Allan 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted December 30, 2013 Author Share Posted December 30, 2013 Understood. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frankie Posted December 31, 2013 Share Posted December 31, 2013 What's MATR stand for? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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