Altirra 2.60 released

[fujidude]

I think drac030 is (one of) the chaps at SDX. SDX these days is handled by DLT. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but drac030 is part of DLT.

[morelenmir]

Ahh... Excellent!!! Its nice to know we have a 'direct line' as it were to those dudes. Alongside old FJC they have done consistently excellent work and learning how to use all their various flashes and ROM's with Altirra are what started me getting back in to the A8 in the first place.

 

I'll note also that when I said:

 

...drac030's hash-calculation bug

 

I didn't mean a bug he'd caused, but one he'd found!

[drac030]

No worries, it looks like it was there from the beginning, i.e. from ICD Times (v.4.20 at least), so "ICD bug".

 

It only affects machines with 1 MB RAMBO and 576k Compy Shop, and the issue is limited to internal BASIC - external carts work fine and SAV files for them should be saved/restored correctly. So it is in fact a minor issue, unless one uses BASIC very often: the BASIC.SAV file may then sometimes refuse to load without a visible reason (the real reason being that the badly calculated checksums do not match).

 

SDX v.4.2 IIRC generally did not handle well any "non standard" RAM extension besides what was in 130XE and 192k and 320k RAMBO. SDX 4.4 is much improved in this respect (and not only in this one, I believe). Let us hope that this is one of the last quirks in the ext RAM support.

 

Also, subjectively, it seems to me that SDX 4.4 is much more popular/used now than SDX 4.2 ever was. Thanks to that the code since 2005 (when the "new" revisions first appeared) is more heavily tested on daily basis than (again) SDX 4.2 ever was. In turn, thanks to the expanded user base (and especially those who report quirks they noticed), SDX 4.4 is most probably much more stable and usable now than SDX 4.2 ever was

[morelenmir]

In regards usability and stability - I really think SD has got to the point where there is no reason to use any other DOS, unless you are specifically testing the features of DOS XE say or the criminally undervalued DOS 4.0. Certainly if you want to utilize the new features that U1MB or any of the other hardware mods bring then... Its no contest. I was a bit of a fan of MyDOS for a while as it had some very granular settings for floppy drive formatting. Now though I am SDX all the way.

[gozar]

The biggest obstacle to wider adoption of SD is the lack of a pass through cart option. It would be nice to see a new pass through cart with built in RTC. But maybe that isn't a big issue anymore?

[morelenmir]

The biggest obstacle to wider adoption of SD is the lack of a pass through cart option. It would be nice to see a new pass through cart with built in RTC. But maybe that isn't a big issue anymore?

No, I agree with you. That is the compromise I resigned myself to with "Ultimate1MB" and "SIDE2".

[Kyle22]

The pass through and lack of RTC is not a big issue anymore, at least with the Incognito. The U1M has RTC, but with SIDE2, no pass through. My 800has a "pass through" cart slot which is (virtually) on top of SDX. With built in RTC as well.

 

If I knew then (20 years ago) what I know now, I would have fixed the bug with V. 4.22, but the U1M and Incognito had not even been thought of then. We were working on the MARS8 board at the time, which was planned to be sort of like an Incognito for the 800XL, with an 816 on it, 1M RAM, clock, all the OSS carts, and SDX. Sadly, we didn't think about flashable BASICs and OSs at the time, and we never got far enough with the project to find the bug.

 

Thanks Konrad for responding to this bug report so quickly! I'd like to see M$ come up with a Windows bug fix that fast

 

By the way, I DO NOT have the SDX 4.22 source code anymore... I wish I did... It was lost long ago

 

[fujidude]

In regards usability and stability - I really think SD has got to the point where there is no reason to use any other DOS

 

Go SDX or go home!

Edited May 11, 2015 by fujidude

[fujidude]

Hmm. Discovered an issue: Copying files to PCL device results in many (usually all) files copied to be zero length.

 

Setup:

Altirra 2.70 test 12

U1MB

SDX 4.47

PCLINK.SYS dated 11-07-2014, 1393 bytes.

 

After troubleshooting I think I have narrowed the issue down some. If I copy anywhere except the PCL: the files are good. This is using the COPY command BTW. I turned off all acceleration options and there was no difference. What did make a difference, is what CPU option was set. I originally was set at 65C816 21.48MHz. Standard 6502 1.79MHz worked fine. In fact, all CPU types and speeds worked up through 65C816 14.28MHz.

 

I can live with this, especially since I can just engage warp speed on the emulator if I need to get through something quick, but I thought you might like to know.

 

PS: BTW, the VERIFY ON feature did not even notice an issue. Presumably that's because it doesn't work with the special nature of the PCL: device.

Edited May 11, 2015 by fujidude

[fujidude]

The biggest obstacle to wider adoption of SD is the lack of a pass through cart option. It would be nice to see a new pass through cart with built in RTC. But maybe that isn't a big issue anymore?

 

I thought SDX carts were pass through?

[Kyle22]

An original ICD or FTe SDX cart is a true pass through, but the newer implementations such as Incognito, U1M, SIDE, AtariMax are not.

 

The Incognito makes the 800 cart slot the same as a pass through, so does the U1M, but if you want a hard drive, your slot is used by the interface cart.

 

If you only have SIDE or AtariMax, you have SDX, but no possibility of a cart on top.

 

I hope that makes sense.

[gozar]

The pass through and lack of RTC is not a big issue anymore, at least with the Incognito. The U1M has RTC, but with SIDE2, no pass through. My 800has a "pass through" cart slot which is (virtually) on top of SDX. With built in RTC as well.

 

 

But the Incognito is in pretty short supply, I've been waiting 16 months for mine. And it still requires installation.

 

A true pass through, flash updateable, SDX cart with RTC would be a pretty nice thing to have. Kind of like the SIDE2 except with a cart connector instead of compact flash. Although I don't know how well SDX works with only 64K (but there are plug and play memory upgrades too).

[drac030]

@gozar: you are probably looking for the IDE+2.0 interface. It is pass-through, it contains SDX, it has a battery-backed RTC on-board, it is an IDE/ATA-3 HDD interface, it is flashable (separate ROMs for SDX and the hard disk firmware).

 

http://atariki.krap.pl/index.php/IDE_Plus#Opis_prze.C5.82.C4.85cznik.C3.B3w

 

(the photo with the English description was made by Larry, thanks a lot).

 

SDX works on 64k, but needs careful configuration and some application programs (like Turbo BASIC XL 1.5) would not work because the RAM under the OS is occupied (like on SD 3.2). Also, many nifty SDX extensions (like DOSKEY: command history buffer + aliases + filename completion) just want the extended memory.

Edited May 11, 2015 by drac030

[phaeron]

Mind keeping the side stuff to a minimum, folks? This is the Altirra thread.

 

Hmm. Discovered an issue: Copying files to PCL device results in many (usually all) files copied to be zero length.

 

Setup:

Altirra 2.70 test 12

U1MB

SDX 4.47

PCLINK.SYS dated 11-07-2014, 1393 bytes.

 

After troubleshooting I think I have narrowed the issue down some. If I copy anywhere except the PCL: the files are good. This is using the COPY command BTW. I turned off all acceleration options and there was no difference. What did make a difference, is what CPU option was set. I originally was set at 65C816 21.48MHz. Standard 6502 1.79MHz worked fine. In fact, all CPU types and speeds worked up through 65C816 14.28MHz.

 

Found the problem... it's a regression that's causing double ACKs to be issued. The faster CPU has a better chance of aborting the previous command before it finishes. (This is arguably incorrect, as devices normally don't monitor the command line during a command and would ignore the new command instead, but the dispatcher would have to work differently to support multiple simultaneous commands.) A workaround should be to run PCLink in accelerated mode -- pclink.sys /s and Other acceleration option enabled -- which would be faster anyway.

 

However, I've run into a new problem while testing. Fixing the double ACK lets the writes go through, but data corruption is now happening after the first write. It looks like the COPY command in 4.47 is buffering data in extended memory, but when the PCLink driver does the write from $4000-7FFF, the extended memory window is disabled. The copy is fine when copying disk to disk or without extended memory available for buffering.

 

[drac030]

However, I've run into a new problem while testing. Fixing the double ACK lets the writes go through, but data corruption is now happening after the first write. It looks like the COPY command in 4.47 is buffering data in extended memory, but when the PCLink driver does the write from $4000-7FFF, the extended memory window is disabled. The copy is fine when copying disk to disk or without extended memory available for buffering.

 

 

Are you sure you have the correct version of pclink.sys? It should say v.0.7, 1393 bytes, dated 11-07-2014. The problem you describe was in older versions and I remember fixing it. It (the bug showing up) was one of the side effects of the new ext memory management in SDX 4.47. This is why SDX 4.47 release notes say:

 

 

IMPORTANT:

 

When switching to this version, please replace the following drivers:

 

CON.SYS, RC_GR8.SYS, FAT*.SYS, PCLINK.SYS, S_VBXE.SYS

 

with the new versions available on the Toolkit disk.

 

Here the problem does not occur, I am copying tons of stuff this way (including like ROM files to flash SDX ROMs, long ZIP/TAR/TGZ archies, 2 MB ATR files etc.) and I saw no signs of data corruption.

Edited May 12, 2015 by drac030

[fujidude]

 

Are you sure you have the correct version of pclink.sys? It should say v.0.7, 1393 bytes, dated 11-07-2014. The problem you describe was in older versions and I remember fixing it. It (the bug showing up) was one of the side effects of the new ext memory management in SDX 4.47. This is why SDX 4.47 release notes say:

 

 

 

Here the problem does not occur, I am copying tons of stuff this way (including like ROM files to flash SDX ROMs, long ZIP/TAR/TGZ archies, 2 MB ATR files etc.) and I saw no signs of data corruption.

 

I had read the release notes when I upgraded from SDX 4.46 to 4.47 and did make sure to update all the support files as well. I have verified that the version of PCLINK that I am using is 0.7, dated the same and correct size. Any thoughts why it would be behaving this way knowing that?

 

Things seem alright with the 14MHz CPU speed, but I will try the /S switch anyway, and see how that goes.

[fujidude]

And now for something completely different...

 

Can anyone tell me if there is really any performance advantage to loading INDUS.SYS if all the SIO acceleration is turned on in Altirra?

 

Uhhg. I just remembered.... INDUS.SYS doesn't eat up any memory anyway, so there's no harm in leaving it in.

[fujidude]

And now, back to the PCL device.

 

I just added the /S switch onto PCLINK.SYS and bumped the CPU up to 21MHz. I copied a bunch of files over to PCL: and again, got plenty of zero length files. Thought that might be helpful to know.

[morelenmir]

Mind keeping the side stuff to a minimum, folks? This is the Altirra thread.

Nicely put Avery - and point made. My apologies for the other day.

[fujidude]

If you're referring to what I just posted: I do try to respect the thread topic and felt I was on topic. I would have posted in the SDX thread otherwise.

 

The PCL issue seems to be Altirra related so I posted an additional bit of info, in the hopes that it is useful to the troubleshooting process. As I said before, I have found a work around, so my posting about it is only motivated to try and help out with the troubleshooting efforts.

 

The question about INDUS.SYS was specifically in regards to how Altirra works with SIO acceleration turned on. It seemed to me to be a good place to ask about how Altirra functions with acceleration turned on. True, there is no cost to using INDUS.SYS, but even after remembering that I was still curious. That's why I didn't edit my post to remove the question even after I remembered there was no cost.

 

I'm sorry if, despite my best judgment to the contrary, I was off topic.

[morelenmir]

If you're referring to what I just posted: I do try to respect the thread topic and felt I was on topic. I would have posted in the SDX thread otherwise.

 

The PCL issue seems to be Altirra related so I posted an additional bit of info, in the hopes that it is useful to the troubleshooting process. As I said before, I have found a work around, so my posting about it is only motivated to try and help out with the troubleshooting efforts.

 

The question about INDUS.SYS was specifically in regards to how Altirra works with SIO acceleration turned on. It seemed to me to be a good place to ask about how Altirra functions with acceleration turned on. True, there is no cost to using INDUS.SYS, but even after remembering that I was still curious. That's why I didn't edit my post to remove the question even after I remembered there was no cost.

 

I'm sorry if, despite my best judgment to the contrary, I was off topic.

I don't think you were off-topic fujidude!!! I think I was while debating with FJC the pros/cons of programmer-lead as opposed to user-lead development!!!

 

This is absolutely the place for questions like yours. Sincere apologies if it seemed I was having a dig - completely not my intention.

[fujidude]

I don't think you were off-topic fujidude!!! I think I was while debating with FJC the pros/cons of programmer-lead as opposed to user-lead development!!!

 

This is absolutely the place for questions like yours. Sincere apologies if it seemed I was having a dig - completely not my intention.

No worries and no apologies required. I was really directing that to Avery anyway. I wanted to make clear that I was intending to stay on topic, even if somehow I wasn't. I want to make sure not to annoy Avery as I am very appreciative of his efforts on Altirra.

[fujidude]

I have another issue that has cropped up regarding VBXE and CON 80 mode under Altirra, but to give Avery a break, I will post it in the SDX thread. It has just as much chance of being an issue with SDX as it does Altirra (or the dreaded PEBCAK). So that's all I'll say here. If interested, look for the posting in the SDX area. I shall be making that soon.

Edited May 12, 2015 by fujidude

[morelenmir]

 

I want to make sure not to annoy Avery as I am very appreciative of his efforts on Altirra.

 

Absolutely!!! I think every day is buy Avery a tin of 'Carlsberg Export' day... Maybe even 'Stella Gold' if he happens to have been working on the floppy emulation!!!

[Mclaneinc]

You may be out of luck, he does not drink

 

(true)