Need some help with new disks? Working with another drive? yeah, a bunch of stuff

[kenp]

But let's tackle what should be a simple thing first.  Later we'll tackle booting from the ATR8000 and using the FujiNet as drives 5 through 7.  Likely getting the FujiNet to work with anything above slot 2 will take care of the other concerns.

 

Working with a 320XE and an ATR8000 (the ATR8000 is not plugged in for this question), got my FujiNet, making some progress.  Network config'd, access to remote servers working, booting to DOS 2.5 from remote server okay, found how to create new ATR files on the SD and mount them in slots other than D1:, can format the ATR in slot D2:   BUT   when I try to format the ATR file in D3: it returns an Error 160.  Maybe this is a "feature" of DOS that I don't remember.  Naively, I just repeated the steps for the ATR in D2: when I tried D3: but get the Error message instead of a formatted ATR file.

 

It will become important later that the higher drive letters work as I want to transfer a whole mess of old floppy disks to flash memory or HDD and that will, I'm sure, need me to be able to work with ATR files in slots 5 through 7.  But first let's get an ATR file from my SD loaded and formatted in some slot higher than 2.

 

TBH, it's blown my old brain just a bit being able to boot a DOS from a remote server.  I've tried a couple of games as well.  (Haven't found Buried Bucks yet.  Thank God.  I'd likely never get anything done.)  Saw a video showing a few other options that will be good to set up later like a local TNFS.  This is going to be very interesting.

[_The Doctor__]

@kenp

You have to setup 2.5 for more drives, so use it's setup program or peruse a manual and it will tell you what to poke and the write the DOS files out with.

So Setup.com on the Disk can set them and write it out, or do it this way as well...

 

add drives 3 and 4, change to Basic poke to POKE 1802,15.  Press System Reset, go to the DOS menu and you will be able to see the files on Disk 4 using D4: as the destination to make this change permanent, use the H option of the DOS menu to re-write the DOS files on the disk.  Now, every time you boot from this disk you will be able to see all four drives.

 

This works in DOS 2.5, DOS 2.0, and in DOSXL.  Just change the value at 1802 to either 7 or 15, press System Reset and then re-write the DOS files.

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[+David_P]

By default, DOS 2.0S / 2.5 are configured to support two drives only.  Adding more drives increases the number of buffers reserved by DOS, reducing free RAM.

 

Text version of the DOS 2.5 manual is at: https://atariwiki.org/wiki/attach/Atari DOS 2/Atari DISK OPERATING SYSTEM 2.5 Manual.txt

 

PDF version (not certain if it has been OCR'd)) is at: http://www.atarimania.com/8bit/files/Atari_DOS_2.5 _1050_Disk_Drive_Owners_Manual.pdf

[kenp]

Well, there you go or there I go.  I was beginning to wonder if there was such a limit.  Back in the day I didn't actually use DOS 2.5.  With the ATR8000, and looking back at some of the disks from then, I used SpartaDOS.  Plus I had 360K disks on the ATR8000 which Atari DOS wouldn't have understood.  I thought I'd go back to something simpler to start and look where that got me.  🙂   And, it fooled me into thinking that higher number drives were available because it used D8: for the RAMdisk.  Probably baked a special case into DOS for that one.

 

Many thanks to both of you.  I'll connect to a remote SpartaDOS (or maybe MyDOS and look up the likelihood of such a limit there.) and give this another try.  When I get that sorted out I'll try booting from SpartaDOS on the ATR8000 and see if I can get to slot 5 through it.

 

(When I get things all set up I'll have two 360K 5.25" drives and two 8" drives connected to the ATR8000.  I'll post pictures when I get it all working again.  🙂

 

Somehow the above didn't get posted when I thought it should so I'll add another comment and try again.

 

Progress.  Yes, MyDOS from a remote server recognizes the higher number drive slots and did a copy disk from the remote to a local ATR file so I have a local copy of the newer MyDOS to boot from locally.  Now I need to get the ATR8000 and the FujiNet working together with the ATR8000 serving as the boot drive.  (Maybe I can change the ATR8000 to not look to be drive 1.  I got the manual.  I can find that answer.

 

And in the glances of things I've been flooded with I think I saw that MyDOS can handle a custom ATR file as big as 16Megs.  Now that would be grand.  Step at a time though.

 

Again.  Thanks to both of you for the help.  I actually had a better nights sleep last night and it could just be the fact that things are looking up on this project.  Take care.

Edited January 13, 2023 by kenp
adding another statement

[_The Doctor__]

SpartaDOSX current version tops out at 15 drives. DOS variants normally targeted standard set ups of 2/4/8 drives plus a ramdisk. Atari Floppy Disk Drives normally would have switches to set the first four ID's, you needed to modify the drives to go above that.

Hard Drive setups normally had 8 partions available at a time, and you could swap the ones you wanted in and out if you needed more.

I prefer having all 15 available at once no muss no fuss

swap the SIO and PBI Drives in and out at will

Edited January 13, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[Stefan Both]

2 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

...DOS variants normally targeted standard set ups of 2/4/8 drives plus a ramdisk...

Imagine that "back in the days"...

pure science fiction 

[_The Doctor__]

that was exactly my experience back in the day, as it was for any number of people.

but who even said we were recreating back in the day, the guy just wants to use the extra drive ID's today for which he was given full and correct answers

although I see how the plus a ramdisk might read on the end of the sentence... but even they were used in my compupro s-100 so you can go about things with blinders on if you like

Edited January 13, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[Stefan Both]

I have the feeling that something came across wrong here because of the my "foreign language barrier".
More than ONE floppy disk drive was already privileged "back then". The developers of DOS probably also thought, that more than 2 drives were "improbable".
Against this background, 4 or 8 drives were pure science fiction.

Sorry, if Please excuse me if I have expressed myself incomprehensibly. 

 

Stefan 

[+Stephen]

32 minutes ago, Stefan Both said:

I have the feeling that something came across wrong here because of the my "foreign language barrier".
More than ONE floppy disk drive was already privileged "back then". The developers of DOS probably also thought, that more than 2 drives were "improbable".
Against this background, 4 or 8 drives were pure science fiction.

Sorry, if Please excuse me if I have expressed myself incomprehensibly. 

 

Stefan 

I knew what you meant, and I agree.  Took two years before I could afford a single 1050 drive.  I could never have afforded even one Indus GT, and the thought of having multiple drives was in fact, pure fantasy for me back then.

[_The Doctor__]

busted my @ss to buy my first drives and computers, the novelty of paper tape and cassette tape was not for me. So 8 inch drives and hard drives, and for Atari 810, 1050 and ATR800 plus 4 quads, critical connection between the machines. I can't fathom using only cartridges, though I did have a cassette deck for the Atari, it was normally a read only device, I would lend the cassette deck out to friends until they could get better storage from time to time. One major exception was the cassette deck was used with the Atari to make cassette tapes for a machine shop, the tape was used to load up computer numerically controlled equipment at a technical school, think about that one, a kid making tapes for a vocational technical school. My family certainly was poor, but we all worked our butts off to get what we needed and wanted. 9 years old laboring for masons, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, building bikes, fixing television, delivering orders to cars at the brewers outlet, picking up any penny on the street, helping junk cars, you name it, that's just sampling of it, farm work was in the mix as well... and it keeps going...

 

I can't stand damn near any work on computers today, but I still love the Atari/Amiga, select STE/TT/030 and certain old Apple machines. I don't know that I love the old Compupro but I find it comforting oddly enough.

 

In any event glad we got the Drive issue sorted for the OP.

Edited January 13, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[kenp]

Them 8 drive slots that I see in MyDOS should serve me just fine for what I want to do; transferring stuff from the old 5.25" and 8" floppies to SD storage and maybe HDD if/when I get a TNFS server set up for it.  I figured an 8G SD card would likely take all the disk images for what I've got but then there may be blanks in collections of disks and duplicates.  I'll be looking to see if there's anything in my set that can be added to existing libraries but it's more likely that everything I have that was from a publisher is already in another collection somewhere. 

 

Some of the things I'm really looking for are some of the things I wrote myself.  Not games but interesting things like a Conway's Game of Life that ran with lookup tables instead of counting neighbours and my own version of the ATR8000 terminal program for CP/M use.  That was wacky with a special 3 bit wide font so I could cram 80 characters on the screen.  Took some getting used to.

 

To be honest, I'm really surprised at the amount of activity still centred around these old machines but I'm glad to see it.

[_The Doctor__]

Interesting, would love to see stuff the hovered around the atr8000

[kenp]

getting closer.  I have a copy of Mach DOS 2.6.  It seems to be ready to talk to 4 drives.  Booting that up on the ATR8000 (that has two 5.25" drives at the moment) shows 2 single sided drives and two undefined drives at 3 and 4.

 

Mounting a couple of ATR files on slots 3 and 4 in the FujuiNet lets them show up on Mach DOS.  ( I use the web interface to mount and unmount the ATR files in the different slots.)

 

So, I have a DOS that demonstrates that the ATR8000 and the FujiNet can coexist to a point.  That DOS doesn't seem to know about slots 5, 6 or 7 as there are ATR images loaded there but the OS replies with error 160 if I try to do a directory.  Possibly another limit built into the DOS but I'll let that go for now.  This may have to wait until I can get a newer version of some of the DOS systems and be able to generate a new floppy to boot the ATR8000 from.  Everything I'm working with on real floppies so far is pre 1985 or so.  Might need to get another 360K dive to mount in a PC for that then find a PC DOS utility that can generate floppies from images.  I've seen notice of them about.

 

But we're getting there.  The possibilities are still boggling my poor old head.  My little Atari 130XE with gigabytes of space available to play with, maybe in 16MB chunks but with multiples of those at a time especially if I use the DOS that allows 15 simultaneous drive mountings.  Then the space on a TNFS server, Egad.

 

And I'm appreciating the comments made here that are helping me figure this out.  Would take a lot longer without the help.  I know the combination of an ATR8000 and the FujiNet is not one that going to crop up that often.  When it's all running I'll try to put together a set of notes in case someone else tries this.  🙂

[_The Doctor__]

Just for giggle, todays SpartaDOS X will do 32MB partitions ... well mostly...

Edited January 14, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[kenp]

I've noticed comments about SpartaDOS X but it seems it needs a cartridge?  I may be mistaken.  but yes, I noticed that the custom file creator in the FujiNet could create a 32MB file and I put one on my SD card just in case I found a DOS that would format it.

 

No, wait, SpartaDOS X can use the extended memory to store what used to be in the cartridge so since I'm working with an upgraded 320XE maybe that would be the way to go.  I'll look more into it.

 

Another thing just filtered through (and I mean just this minute) to the conscious layer  ....   I have, through Mach DOS, a system that will handle two floppy drives and two ATR files.  So I do already have a means to create a floppy disk from an ATR file.

 

 

( "Oh, yeah, it's all coming together."  Kronk,  Emperor's New Groove, 2000.   Sorry, couldn't resist.   🙂  )

[_The Doctor__]

Give a run down of your machines, and what modifications, including atarimax or other flashable/programmable cart or etc you might have

maybe you already have things you need to do some things.

[kenp]

Nope.  The only thing that's special is the 256K upgrade on the 130XE and the ATR8000 with the 8" drives left over from my old S100 IMSAI 8080 system and then the 5.25" floppy drives and that's pretty special in the Atari world, I think.  At one point I had installed a voice synthesizer chip in my 800 but took that out later.  No gadget cartridges or anything like that.  I bought some bits towards building an SIO2USB cable but then the FujiNet came in.  Admittedly, I saw a 1Meg memory expansion for the 800 and a few other items that make building out the 800 look like a good idea.  I think it's got a better keyboard than the 130XE.

 

Likely due to the VAST expanse of time between when I put the Atari away and took it out to see what I could do with it I'm off to a rocky start.  It's only about 6 weeks ago that I unpacked the 130XE to see if it would still power up and I had to rebuild a retro PC to test some of the components like the 360K floppies and cables to make sure they were working before I cobbled everything back together with the ATR8000 to test.  Like Gandalf the White, so many things from the past both remembered and forgotten.  It takes a bit to get it put back together but once I get going and collect more info I'm sure I'll start putting things together in more creative ways.  I already see myself facing the question of whether to keep the ATR8000 and old drives once everything is migrated.  I mean the FujiNet is everything the ATR8000 offered and more except the RS232 port but there's not really anything that connects with RS232 now anyway.  (AND it's so much cheaper than the old hardware was.  Amazing.)

 

We'll see where this all leads once I get the data on the floppies moved to newer media.  There's a temptation to see what sort of speed I'd get from an Atari emulation on one of my newer machines.  I spent most of last year upgrading some old machines by making them into sleepers with AMD Ryzen 7 5700G APUs, tons of RAM and SSD andHDD space.  I hear that Altirra will run well under the WINE package in Linux.

 

Being able to talk things over with others helps a great deal as well.  I'm glad I found a good group here.

 

 

Edited January 14, 2023 by kenp

[_The Doctor__]

The game play on the Atari still can't be matched using real equipment and CRT based monitors. Input lag and color system of modern displays are not nice. Add emulation layer on top of that and it's not quite the same. The emu's and all are beyond excellent for setting up, moving stuff around, development, debugging, hacking and testing though!

Edited January 14, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[kenp]

Well, that didn't work.  Mach DOS says the disks are dissimilar so it won't try to do a copy disk from a mounted ATR to a real floppy. 

Back to the drawing board or maybe I'll need that SIO2USB cable I'm waiting on some parts to build.

 

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, kenp said:

We'll see where this all leads once I get the data on the floppies moved to newer media.  There's a temptation to see what sort of speed I'd get from an Atari emulation on one of my newer machines.  I spent most of last year upgrading some old machines by making them into sleepers with AMD Ryzen 7 5700G APUs, tons of RAM and SSD andHDD space.  I hear that Altirra will run well under the WINE package in Linux. Being able to talk things over with others helps a great deal as well.  I'm glad I found a good group here.

All my later intel-based machines get between 2500% and 4000% speed increase over original Atari hardware when using Altirra. I hadn't put my latest and greatest through it's paces yet, but I expect to see a 4500% increase over stock.

 

1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said:

The game play on the Atari still can't be matched using real equipment and CRT based monitors. Input lag and color system of modern displays are not nice. Add emulation layer on top of that and it's not quite the same. The emu's and all are beyond excellent for setting up, moving stuff around, development, debugging, hacking and testing though!

I've been rather happy and impressed with the G-Sync or FreeSync monitors. In processing time, in pixel twist response, and gorgeously vivid colors on demand. I still get my hi-scores in Atari 400/800 Defender like I did back in the day. What I'm not happy with is the build quality of under-$500 monitors. Yikes! They're stamped together and if you look at them wrong they creak and make noise. They reek of minimalism and some only come with 1 or 2 input connectors. Just no.

[kenp]

In a pinch, I've found I can boot from the FujiNet with some DOS in slot 1 THEN turn on the ATR8000 and work with a real floppy in drive 2 and, depending on the DOS, I can work with mounted ATRs in slots 3 and 4.

 

I've booted from a remote MyDOS 4.53 and generated a new floppy boot disk.  Now can anyone suggest why I cannot get a remote SpartaDOS to boot from Slot 1.  Everything looks good but it just never comes back and there's no blinking on the FujiNet to indicate any activity going to the 130XE.  I let it chew on this problem for a good 10 minutes and still saw no action.  In other words has anyone else managed to boot a TNFS hosted version of SpartaDOS 3.2?

 

All the SpartaDOS X version I saw noted for download mentioned some special cartridge or extensions that I'm sure I haven't got so I'm trying with a SpartaDOS 3.2d or g.

 

SpartDOS will be important as many of my floppies are formatted in more than single density with SpartaDOS.

[_The Doctor__]

https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-platformio/wiki/SpartaDOS-X- -Ultimate1MB- -FujiNet-Utilities

https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-platformio/wiki/FujiNet-Networking-(N:-Device)-Quickstart-Guide

 

 

[kenp]

1 hour ago, kenp said:

In a pinch, I've found I can boot from the FujiNet with some DOS in slot 1 THEN turn on the ATR8000 and work with a real floppy in drive 2 and, depending on the DOS, I can work with mounted ATRs in slots 3 and 4.

 

I've booted from a remote MyDOS 4.53 and generated a new floppy boot disk.  Now can anyone suggest why I cannot get a remote SpartaDOS to boot from Slot 1.  Everything looks good but it just never comes back and there's no blinking on the FujiNet to indicate any activity going to the 130XE.  I let it chew on this problem for a good 10 minutes and still saw no action.  In other words has anyone else managed to boot a TNFS hosted version of SpartaDOS 3.2?

 

All the SpartaDOS X version I saw noted for download mentioned some special cartridge or extensions that I'm sure I haven't got so I'm trying with a SpartaDOS 3.2d or g.

 

SpartDOS will be important as many of my floppies are formatted in more than single density with SpartaDOS.

Yeah, quoting myself.  It's been a long day but just had another epiphany.  I've been waiting for SpartaDOS to boot remotely.  Why not find a copy of the ATR that I can download and put right on the dang SD card?  In fact in the pursuit of that and with some help from another post or two in the forum I found my way to a whole mess of ATRs just waiting to be downloaded.  It's at   http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/index.html.  

God help me, I'll probably find Buried Bucks and that will be the end of all efforts.  🙂  See you tomorrow and find out how I'm doing.

[TZJB]

9 hours ago, kenp said:

Yeah, quoting myself.  It's been a long day but just had another epiphany.  I've been waiting for SpartaDOS to boot remotely.  Why not find a copy of the ATR that I can download and put right on the dang SD card?  In fact in the pursuit of that and with some help from another post or two in the forum I found my way to a whole mess of ATRs just waiting to be downloaded.  It's at   http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/index.html.  

God help me, I'll probably find Buried Bucks and that will be the end of all efforts.  🙂  See you tomorrow and find out how I'm doing.

You are going in the right direction. SpartaDOS is a great DOS which was originally packaged with the US Doubler Atari 1050 disk drive double density modification. SpartaDOS 3.3 and it's successor RealDOS by @Stephen J. Carden which supports more recent hardware may be a better option for you. Regarding disk copying, I found that trying to blindly match disk densities from source to destination was my biggest challenge and I use MyDOS 4.53 to give a good indication, while then using the Happy/Laser copiers to do the actual copying as later revisions use the 130XE memory for less disk swapping/accessing. If anyone has a come up with an alternate solution please let us know.

[kenp]

2 hours ago, TZJB said:

You are going in the right direction. SpartaDOS is a great DOS which was originally packaged with the US Doubler Atari 1050 disk drive double density modification. SpartaDOS 3.3 and it's successor RealDOS by @Stephen J. Carden which supports more recent hardware may be a better option for you. Regarding disk copying, I found that trying to blindly match disk densities from source to destination was my biggest challenge and I use MyDOS 4.53 to give a good indication, while then using the Happy/Laser copiers to do the actual copying as later revisions use the 130XE memory for less disk swapping/accessing. If anyone has a come up with an alternate solution please let us know.

Except it doesn't boot from the locally mounted ATR either.  More reading suggests it may be changing the clock speed on the SIO port and the FujiNet not keeping up with the change.  I haven't found a RealDOS image yet.  Still looking.  And It's becoming more evident that setting up a TNFS server will be a good step as well.  I even have a machine that sort of sits out of the way with extra file space on it so that would be a good home for it.