Ultimate 1MB default OS slots?

[Smokeless Joe]

Looking at the OS ROM slots on my recently installed Ultimate 1MB, I see Stock XL, Stock XE, Q-Meg and Hi-Speed OS.

 

What are these? I always thought the Stock XL and Stock XE OS were the same. What's the difference?

 

I might have heard of Q-Meg, but Hi-Speed OS sounds kind of generic. What are these and why might I want to use them?

 

Thanks for your patience with a noob,

 

-Joe

[Rybags]

Stock XL/XE - not sure, there were fairly subtle differences, later XE had Memory Test which would test extra 64K RAM of the 130XE. Unsure if that's which OS is included.

 

QMeg - a modded OS (Quarter Meg) designed to work best with 256K or more RAM. Has some extra features useful to programmer/hackers. Should be some documentation around somewhere, fairly sure it could take a snapshot of working RAM which helped with dumping programs from memory.

 

Hi-Speed - has high speed SIO built in, can be useful with some quicker drives or emulation devices like SIO2xx which support high speed I/O.

[voy]

Stock XL = XL OS BB000001 rev. 2

Stock XE = XL OS BB000001 rev. 3

Q-Meg = Q-Meg+4.04 by Stefan Dorndorf

Hi-Speed OS = XL OS BB000001 rev. 2 with Highspeed SIO patch by HiassofT

 

[ACML]

The stock XE OS removed the 1200XL keyboard functionality (L1 & L2 LED and F1-F4 keys) that the stock XL OS had. Atari was still planning on releasing the 1400XL and 1450XLD when the 600/800XL came out and decided to leave the expanded keyboard and LED functionality in it. So if your install the Ultimate on a 1200XL, the stock XE OS won't utilize your extra keyboard functions.

Edited August 16, 2014 by ACML