Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!

[_The Doctor__]

Not to mention all the folks that are retiring and getting their world set up, uncovering their old friend the Atari and setting it up exactly as it was and having good fun now that they have the time to do it as they always wanted to. Many folks are on a fixed income by the time they reach that stage and won't use their funds for hand full after hand full of whatever the latest 60 to 100 whatever stuff is popping up. Inflation is currently out of control and many folks are tightening their belts. It shows no signs of stopping either as bad decisions and other silly stuff happens in the halls of power. If I could buy everyone an AVG, Fujinet, and u1m or incognito I would... sadly we just don't have the cabbage...(green stuff that buys things, your color paper etc varies by country)

[Mazzspeed]

1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Not to mention all the folks that are retiring and getting their world set up, uncovering their old friend the Atari and setting it up exactly as it was and having good fun now that they have the time to do it as they always wanted to. Many folks are on a fixed income by the time they reach that stage and won't use their funds for hand full after hand full of whatever the latest 60 to 100 whatever stuff is popping up. Inflation is currently out of control and many folks are tightening their belts. It shows no signs of stopping either as bad decisions and other silly stuff happens in the halls of power. If I could buy everyone an AVG, Fujinet, and u1m or incognito I would... sadly we just don't have the cabbage...(green stuff that buys things, your color paper etc varies by country)

Once again. Most of the time multi carts are cheaper than floppy drives and a magnitude more reliable. I got RespeQt and FujiNet-PC up and running for $20.00, I won't find a 1050 or especially an IndusGT for $20.00.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[_The Doctor__]

2 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

Once again. Most of the time multi carts are cheaper than floppy drives and a magnitude more reliable. I got RespeQt and FujiNet-PC up and running for $20.00, I won't find a 1050 or especially an IndusGT for $20.00.

what part of they already own the stuff don't we get?

taking your Atari out of storage be it off site, your old office, your attic, your garage, your closet, your basement etc etc etc costs nothing. Most just clean it up and do maintenance and hook it all up... it still works and they happy as a clam...

Edited July 19, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[Mazzspeed]

1 minute ago, _The Doctor__ said:

what part of they already own the stuff don't we get?

I'm not commenting on that part.

 

1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said:

If I could buy everyone an AVG, Fujinet, and u1m or incognito I would... sadly we just don't have the cabbage...(green stuff that buys things, your color paper etc varies by country)

I'm commenting on this part. What part of that don't you get? If you want to buy everyone a 1050 or IndusGT, my hand's up.

[_The Doctor__]

actually mazzspeed I've given people surplus computers and drives, I also have supplied a number of 850's to folks just so they could call my old BBS... (which sadly had in issue in the not so distant past... lost an SD card and a stupid Hard drive issue)

If it goes to a good and somewhat permanent home and they won't p*ss and moan about this or that, historically it's been free or for shipping.

Of course if a person makes my sh*t list, you can guess what they get an how that'll work out. If I spy anything I give a person on epay/etc instead of being passed on, returned or on the cheap... they never get a single response again. Yes, I'm THAT peculiar old guy.

1050's, Happy, indus, rana, trak, 810, 850, etc etc ... the entire line of computer and peripherals have come and gone over the years... always at cost or free and to persons whom still love every bit of them to this day. only 2 people ever did a 'bad' in over 40 years give or take. That speaks pretty well about folks I think.

Edited July 19, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[+x=usr(1536)]

Deleted. Funny because it's true, but not worth it.

Edited July 19, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[Mazzspeed]

6 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

actually mazzspeed I've given people surplus computers and drives, I also have supplied a number of 850's to folks just so they could call my old BBS... (which sadly had in issue in the not so distant past... lost an SD card and a stupid Hard drive issue)

If it goes to a good and somewhat permanent home and they won't p*ss and moan about this or that, historically it's been free or for shipping.

Of course if a person makes my sh*t list, you can guess what they get an how that'll work out. If I spy anything I give a person on epay/etc instead of being passed on, returned or on the cheap... they never get a single response again. Yes, I'm THAT peculiar old guy.

1050's, Happy, indus, rana, trak, 810, 850, etc etc ... the entire line of computer and peripherals have come and gone over the years... always at cost or free and to persons whom still love every bit of them to this day. only 2 people ever did a 'bad' in over 40 years give or take. That speaks pretty well about folks I think.

And likewise I've supported modern hardware developers/vendors by buying their products. Point being, no one here is better than another by virtue of being a purist.

 

For anyone having issues running all CAR images via SIDE3 with U1MB fitted, turn off PBI BIOS. Confirmed by two users now that it works.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[+DrVenkman]

Let's all just stop telling each other how to have fun, okay?

 

I have a pair of 1050's. I have them because I want to, and about every 4-6 months I'll boot up some games to play from disk, or even write out one of @DjayBee's "clean cracks" to physical disk just for fun and play that - reminds me of being a teenager lo those several decades ago. Then I'll go back to FujiNet or the CF card drives on my daily driver machines or SIDE3. Before I got my FujiNets, I would use my SDrive-MAX or RespeQt. But even so, I'd still pull out a drive if for no other reason than that it pleases me to do so. I own 3 or 4 non-working 410's and one of my summer projects (which I still haven't gotten to) is to buy a couple sets of belts and get at least one or two of them working again just for giggles. Painful as it was to sit through multi-minute load times as a kid, today it's part of the nostalgia to do it once in awhile (either through FujiNet, RespeQt or SDrive-MAX). No one is required to like the same stuff as me, or use the same methods to get their nostalgia fix.

 

But neither are they allowed to tell me how to have fun. 

[Level42]

4 hours ago, tjlazer said:

Never understood this mentality.  Yes it is 2021 and we all use our modern machines to do stuff that is for modern times.  But we also like to play with our old vintage Atari computers like it is 1986 too.  Using it as it was back then.  Using floppy disks or Cartridges and some even tapes!  A lot of us are perfectly fine with this.  If you aren't, go back to your PC or Mac.  Not sure why you are on here.

I am here because I want to, I don’t owe any explanation to anyone why I am here (and no I’m not going to), who the fuck do you think you are to suggest I shouldn’t be here ?

 

I never wrote I was against using the old hardware.
 

I’m sure there are loads of members who use emulators only ! They have every right to be here too so don’t you tell who should or should not be here.

 

As I have stated before, I have two 1050’s, one that I will keep original for originality’s sake, and the other I equipped with the best 1050 upgrade ever, the MegaSpeedy.

Sure its fun to play with them, but in the end, why should I use them when there are better things now ? 
i have a 400,800, several tape drives. They are fun to run once in a while but not as my daily driver.

 

My remark was about that there are way better, cheaper and faster ways to load stuff and that this is a great ADDITION to this hobby, not a replacement. 
 

Edited July 20, 2021 by Level42

[+x=usr(1536)]

Must...  Restrain...  Self...

Edited July 20, 2021 by x=usr(1536)
Trying to not do it. Trying *very* hard.

[rensoup]

Thanks to everyone who run that test,

 

The consensus seems to be that reaching copyright takes usually about 1min and sometimes 1m30 depending on the hardware (some of which I've never heard of!)

 

I still don't understand the technical details behind burst mode (I guess it's not in the drives' firmware since it was introduced by Dos2, so it's purely software?) but if 1KB/s is the expected speed then it looks like it's all good for PoP.

 

I may remove some seeks by reordering files (so files to be read consecutively should be placed back to back on the disk ?). Not a big gain but I need to update the SD version to use nodir as well and that pretty much requires the same work.

 

 

[tschak909]

"burst" mode is wholly something that the "D:" CIO handler does. It was introduced in DOS 2, and is documented in the DOS II technical reference, in detail.

 

The CIO routines in the OS (via CIOV) nominally operate on one character at a time. Even when the buffer length is specified, CIO will still call the requisite operation per byte, decrementing the length before doing the operation.

 

Burst mode effectively takes the length requested, and does a number of SIO sector reads to fulfill the result directly into the buffer area and length requested - 1, and getting the last byte through the normal code path.

 

Depending on the FMS in use, this can carry with it some interesting quirks, e.g. in write mode under DOS 2 and compatibles, the buffer is temporarily modified to contain the sector linking information in the last three bytes of the sector, you can see this by writing a routine that writes screen memory to disk (you'll see the FMS temporarily alter bytes on the screen, causing a 'ripple' down the screen. This also means that trying to save cartridges using BINARY SAVE under DUP isn't possible, because the FMS can't alter address space occupied by a  ROM.

 

-Thom

 

[Kyle22]

Why would FMS / DOS change anything when saving from ROM?

It is straight up read a byte from memory and write it to a file.

 

[tschak909]

sigh. You didn't read my description close enough.

 

 

In write burst mode, the FMS will modify the buffer it is reading from, altering the last three bytes of that buffer, to contain the three bytes of link data. This is so that it can send that buffer as an entire sector to SIOV.

 

If you try to set the ICBAL/ICBAH to ROM space, then the FMS will try to modify the ROM data, which it can't. The resulting write would corrupt the disk, so DUP checks for any addresses that go into cartridge space, and forbids them.

 

Don't believe me? Try doing a BINARY save of your BASIC cart from A000 to BFFF, and watch what happens.

 

For a visual example of what is happening, watch this video: 

 

-Thom

Edited July 20, 2021 by tschak909

[Heaven/TQA]

1 hour ago, tschak909 said:

sigh. You didn't read my description close enough.

 

 

In write burst mode, the FMS will modify the buffer it is reading from, altering the last three bytes of that buffer, to contain the three bytes of link data. This is so that it can send that buffer as an entire sector to SIOV.

 

If you try to set the ICBAL/ICBAH to ROM space, then the FMS will try to modify the ROM data, which it can't. The resulting write would corrupt the disk, so DUP checks for any addresses that go into cartridge space, and forbids them.

 

Don't believe me? Try doing a BINARY save of your BASIC cart from A000 to BFFF, and watch what happens.

 

For a visual example of what is happening, watch this video: 

 

-Thom

Thanks for the video…. First time I have seen ever how slow dos 1 was… 1 byte IO… and we pointed to 1541 of being slow? ?

[Mazzspeed]

1 hour ago, tschak909 said:

sigh. You didn't read my description close enough.

 

 

In write burst mode, the FMS will modify the buffer it is reading from, altering the last three bytes of that buffer, to contain the three bytes of link data. This is so that it can send that buffer as an entire sector to SIOV.

 

If you try to set the ICBAL/ICBAH to ROM space, then the FMS will try to modify the ROM data, which it can't. The resulting write would corrupt the disk, so DUP checks for any addresses that go into cartridge space, and forbids them.

 

Don't believe me? Try doing a BINARY save of your BASIC cart from A000 to BFFF, and watch what happens.

 

For a visual example of what is happening, watch this video: 

 

-Thom

So, technically what we're seeing here via xbios is vastly slower than SIO 1x under DOS 2.0?

[Level42]

25 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

Thanks for the video…. First time I have seen ever how slow dos 1 was… 1 byte IO… and we pointed to 1541 of being slow? ?

I have never even heard of DOS 1……was that ever even released ? At least the Atari people were able to fix it in a proper DOS (and apparently quickly too), quite unlike the 1541….

Edited July 20, 2021 by Level42

[Level42]

1 hour ago, tschak909 said:

sigh. You didn't read my description close enough.

 

 

In write burst mode, the FMS will modify the buffer it is reading from, altering the last three bytes of that buffer, to contain the three bytes of link data. This is so that it can send that buffer as an entire sector to SIOV.

 

If you try to set the ICBAL/ICBAH to ROM space, then the FMS will try to modify the ROM data, which it can't. The resulting write would corrupt the disk, so DUP checks for any addresses that go into cartridge space, and forbids them.

 

Don't believe me? Try doing a BINARY save of your BASIC cart from A000 to BFFF, and watch what happens.

 

For a visual example of what is happening, watch this video: 

 

-Thom

Gotta love the 250 END command…..very interesting video. Sounds like he’s using an 810 judging by the head bursts going on….

Edited July 20, 2021 by Level42

[tschak909]

Oh yes, it was shipped with the earliest Atari 810 drives.

-Thom

 

[tschak909]

There is a sequel to the burst mode video above, where I implemented a test of burst mode on the N: device. Because the length of data transfer can be sent along the SIO payload, there is no need to break up N: transactions into "sectors", so if you ask for 7680 bytes, it will send all 7680 bytes in a single SIO transaction (aka long ass beep): 

 

[Heaven/TQA]

16 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

Oh yes, it was shipped with the earliest Atari 810 drives.

-Thom

 

But an 810 would perfectly fit to my 800 tank… hmmm  

[JagChris]

This still require 130xe or equivalent? I only have a 600XL with 64k

[+DjayBee]

2 minutes ago, JagChris said:

This still require 130xe or equivalent?

Yes

[Poison]

what is wrong with frame ? it looks weird

[Irgendwer]

16 minutes ago, Poison said:

what is wrong with frame ? it looks weird

and following posts.