SIO2PC, APE and XE Problem

[Mindfield]

I finally got around to trying out my 8-bit setup, which naturally included testing out the SIO2PC interface I bought from AtariMax. I managed to create a few real disk images from ATR images and they work great -- SpartaDOX 3.2X didn't make a working image, but 3.2D worked fine. Awesome.

 

Next I tried using the PC as a virtual hard drive for the 8-bit. This is where I ran into problems. I mounted a "mirror" in APE that included an entire directory full of binary files for the 8-bit. Here's my problems (using a real SpartaDOS 3.2D disk on the 8-bit as my boot):

 

1. It won't display the full directory listing; it stops somewhere around the end of the "A" files. (Yeah, there are a ton of files in there) Is this an issue with Sparta or the timing issue below?

2. It won't load a full program; it keeps stalling. Hitting BREAK seems every time it stalls seems to get it moving again, but of course that requires hitting break numerous times during the load. I tried playing with the Framing Threshold and Safety Margin settings in APE but they didn't seem to accomplish much. What sort of settings should I be setting or looking at?

[Rybags]

I've used 2 different PC's as hosts for APE. A Pentium 200MMX and a Celeron 500.

 

I found that the 200 in Windows 98 was just too slow to maintain a good connection, and that tweaking settings and hitting BREAK on the Atari was the only way to get anything to load. As is mentioned in some places though, I found that the DSR setup worked better (although I made my cable myself, don't know if the premades are switchable).

 

Booting into command-line mode, I found APE to work great on the slower machine. Even at warp speeds, serial reception was clear and didn't require intervention at any stage.

 

On the Celeron 500, I found APE in Windows to work fine so far.

 

I only use these machines as APE hosts as I made my own cable and didn't want any risk of frying my Athlon.

 

I haven't played around with directly hosting files in PC directories with APE yet, so can't comment on that aspect of the system.

 

I feel that timing could well be an issue. Even on a fast machine it would be possible for other tasks on the PC to cause problems.

 

What speed PC are you using? And, how much memory and what Operating System is it running?

[classics]

Next I tried using the PC as a virtual hard drive for the 8-bit. This is where I ran into problems. I mounted a "mirror" in APE that included an entire directory full of binary files for the 8-bit. Here's my problems (using a real SpartaDOS 3.2D disk on the 8-bit as my boot):

 

1. It won't display the full directory listing; it stops somewhere around the end of the "A" files. (Yeah, there are a ton of files in there) Is this an issue with Sparta or the timing issue below?

 

For binary files, boot directly from the PC-Mirror drive. You will get an on-screen menu that you can use to navigate your pc hard disk and load EXE files from.

 

I imagine the problem you are seeing when listing the files via SpartaDos is that the PC-Mirror simulates an Atari DOS formatted disk, which is limited to 64 files in the root directory.

 

If you boot directly from the PC-Mirror and use the APELoader to load your EXE files, you wont experience this problem.

 

2. It won't load a full program; it keeps stalling. Hitting BREAK seems every time it stalls seems to get it moving again, but of course that requires hitting break numerous times during the load. I tried playing with the Framing Threshold and Safety Margin settings in APE but they didn't seem to accomplish much. What sort of settings should I be setting or looking at?

 

Spartados 3.2d cannot keep up with 56k transfers and loses characters as a result.

 

Try changing to Spartados 3.2g, that should correct the problem. If you cant change to 3.2g for some reason, you will need to set the maximum SIO speed to '2X SIO' in the APE options.

 

Steve

[Mindfield]

Well, the problems, they keep on a-comin'.

 

Now, I doubt my computer's speed is an issue here; I'm running on a Sempron 2600+ with a gig of PC3200 RAM. APE is also using DSR mode by default. The 1050 in question is also upgraded with US doublers, in case that makes any difference. Now, I can't even get a complete disk to write out from ProSystem. It gets getting Bad Frame Checksums, usually immediately after trying to write to the floppy disk, but sometimes I can get it to write out a few sectors before it errors out. I've tried with different disks, too -- same deal. It seems like it's either a timing issue between the PC and the 1050 via the SIO2PC and APE, or an RFI issue (the SIO2PC interface has no casing; just a bare, open PCB, a serial at one end, an SIO at the other, and the circuitry in between. This probably shouldn't be an issue, and although I have WiFi in the house, it consists presently only of a PCMCIA card on my laptop, and it isn't currently turned on)

 

I've even tried rebooting the system just in case it was some random program interfering with the timing, but that wasn't it either. It seemed to be working fine earlier, other than the problems with directory size of the mounted mirror and the stalling problems. I was able to write out disks with ProSystem before just fine. I can format okay (most of the time) but that's about it.

 

EDIT: More oddness. If I tell it to write out empty sectors, then once I can get it to stop erroring out on sector 0, it will actually write out the whole disk. That leads me to believe it's definitely a timing issue, as it was usually erroring out when it skipped the empty sectors.

 

Bah.

 

EDIT 2: Okay, now that I got SD3.2G on to a disk I can indeed use APE at full speed without any I/O stalling. Nice. Now if I can work out how to display more than 64 files in a directory and the problems with writing out real disks I'll be a happy camper.

Edited November 6, 2005 by Mindfield