Floppy disk drives D3: and higher

[atarifan_1982]

I have an Atari 130XE and 2 disk drives that work fine.

I added and 3rd and 4th, however, even with the switches set as 3 & 4 on the new drives I can access them.

They work fine if I switch them to 1&2.

Is there some limit on the 130XE or version of DOS.

I have Atari DOS 2.0 and 2.5.

Also when using a SIO2SD card reader (from Lotharek- which emulates up to 15 drives) it still won't see but drives 1 & 2.

 

Any help?

thanks

DevDude

[Guest]

well, dos 2.5 is supposed to handle 4 drives.

now here's the thing:

i've just tested my setup - all three are upgraded happy drives:

 

■ Dos 2.5 Directory Search for drive 3 reports error #160.

■ Sdx reads drive 3 directory

■ happy 7 s'ware reads drive 3

 

something definitely amiss with Atari dos.

 

you may want to ask Albert to move this to Atari 8-bit subsection - it'll get more views there.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Guest

[Guest]

Although Dos will work with 4 drives you need to tell it that you have more than 2 drives.

I think Flag 1802 needs to be set correctly - but don't know much more about it than that.

[+Nezgar]

Atari DOS 2 by default is only configured with buffers for D1: and D2: to save RAM. For 4 drives, go to BASIC and enter:

POKE 1802,15

 

Then go back to DOS, and choose to 'Write DOS files' to make it the default. Then reboot for the change to take effect.

 

See page 82 of the Atari DOS II Reference Manual: https://archive.org/details/atari-dos-2-ref