Best Atari 800/XE DOS version?

[Draugr]

What is the best DOS for the Atari 8-Bit? I have a 130XE and would like to know which OS I should look to get. I hear Sparta DOS is good. Does anyone have any info on this and does anyone know where I can purchase a copy? That is assuming Sparta DOS is the best. There may be better perhaps by other companies. I know of Atari DOS and Microsoft DOS, but don't know anything about any of them. Anyone with info or at least with knowledge as to which is the best, I'd appreciate you dropping me a line.

 

Sincerely,

John

[svenski]

Hi,

 

You only need DOS if you have a disk drive, not sure from your post if you have one or not.

 

DOS=disk operating system. Your 130XE has a built in OS (operating system) with ATARI BASIC.

 

You can purchase various different programming languages for your Atari including Microsoft BASIC, Assembler, Logo, Pilot, Forth, Pascal and more.

 

As for DOS, there are several versions of Atari DOS. The most commonly used is DOS 2.5. The best Atari DOS is DOS XE, which was written with Atari's XF551 disk drive and the 130XE in mind.

 

There are several versions of Sparta DOS, some on disk, some on cart. It has been years since I've used Sparta DOS so I can't advise you on which one to get. Generally Sparta DOS was considered *the* DOS system to use.

 

Personally I think DOS XE is fantastic, it loads into RAM, supports the 130XE RAMdisk, supports subdirectories , can be configured for your Atari system and also will allow you to program your own binary files with set command instructions for common tasks so you can essentially automate it.

 

DOS XE is available on ebay. Sparta Dos is a bit thin on the ground but you can buy it from myatari.com.

 

If you haven't got a disk drive then that should be your next purchase, a disk drive really opens up the capabilities of the Atari .

 

Good luck.

[Gunstar]

Spartados was definately the most powerful dos for the Atari, and VERY similiar to MS-dos, so if you know MS-dos and like it, get spartados. If you want menu driven dos's then Mydos, Superdos, dosXE and dos 4.0 (never officially released, but downloadable and VERY cool and powerful!) are the ones to choose from depending on preferance. Avoid dos 3 like the plague, it's good for only one thing; it has the ability to salvage some bad disks if you format a bad disk with it and then reformat it with another dos. Dos 2.0 and 2.5 were the most commonly used dos's and are good too, but the others are more powerful.

[Goochman]

After messing around with DOS's I finalized on Dos 2.5 since it works with 99% of all disks out there.

 

I loved MyDOS but its 'enhanced' formatting isnt compat with Dos 2.5 and its disk copy doesnt seem to work always?????

 

SpartaDOS is just a whole different animal - If you start from scratch that may be fine but if you want to play games it can interfere with some due to where it locates itself in memory.

 

Never played with Dos 4 or XE - if they are compat with 70, 130 and 180K diskettes(ie, Dos 2, Dos 2.5 and above) then it should be the way to go.

[Tickled_Pink]

For what it's worth, I've just started work on a new 'all encompassing' DOS system which will, when finished, read all available Atari DOS systems and boot menus ... it will basically treat boot menus as just another DOS disk. The system is actually designed to work off a ROM cart and is being designed to make my life a little easier when writing a disk cataloguing program later.

 

SpartaDOS is definitely the most powerful DOS system out there ... or at least it seems to be. I think that its CLI gives it the impression of being very powerful. But what of MyDOS and its hard disk abilities?

 

I think it all depends on what hardware the user has. I find SpartaDOS a little too much when programming although theoretically it should be the best platform. Unfortunately Sparta is let down slightly by its size. As I recall from past attempts at using it with MAC/65 it reduces the amount of memory I have to play with, which is why I try to stick to DOS 2.5.

 

If you have the hardware to use SpartaDOS' extra power then use it by all means but I personally think that for a basic setup (single 1050, for example), you may as well stick to DOS 2.5

[Gunstar]

spartados 3.2 and spartados x (cartridge) are both compatible with hardrives. And, if you use the Spartados X cart, is obliterates those memory conflict problems your talking about, since it's all instantly accessible from the cart and uses none or extremely little of the internal memory, should take up less ram than even 2.5 at least, so you might look into it for your programming needs. Superdos and Topdos are also hardrive compatible...as well as compatible with single, enhanced, double and quad densities like mydos, dos xe and spartados 3.2&X.

[walter_J64bit]

Gunstar wrote:

Superdos and Topdos are also hardrive compatible...as well as compatible with single, enhanced, double and quad densities like mydos, dos xe and spartados 3.2&X.

 

What version of Superdos is hardrive compatible? Ive dont even know that and Ive love using Superdos!

[Nukey Shay]

Never played with Dos 4 or XE - if they are compat with 70, 130 and 180K diskettes(ie, Dos 2, Dos 2.5 and above) then it should be the way to go.

 

Dos 2.5 is single and enhanced density...IIRC it can't access "true" double-density disks. Does anybody know why Atari went with "enhanced" instead of "true"? Was that to preserve 810 legacy compatability?

[RJ]

Another strike against DOS 3- it saved data in 1024-byte "blocks", so if your program was a bit more than a "block" long, it'd waste an entire 2nd block as well!

 

www.atarimagazines.com/v4n3/AboutDOS.html (July 1985)

 

www.atarimagazines.com/v7n11/spartados.html (March 1989)

[Sikor]

DOS - is good as you can make this somethink. For games - I prefer MyDOS, for work - Sparta DOS X. If you will use Hard Disk in your Atari 130XE - this DOS are good too.