Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!bbn!bbn.com!slackey From: slackey@bbn.com (Stan Lackey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit Subject: Re: A65 problems Message-ID: <46526@bbn.COM> Date: 5 Oct 89 13:56:34 GMT References: <19810004@hpfinote.HP.COM> Sender: news@bbn.COM Reply-To: slackey@BBN.COM (Stan Lackey) Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 75 In article <19810004@hpfinote.HP.COM> den@hpfinote.HP.COM (Don Novy) writes: > Has anyone else had trouble with the A65 assembler posted a while ago? I >downloaded it last night and tried it without success. The byte count of 4732 I haven't tried it, but I do have a copy. Did you get the message about making sure you can have (is it 4?) files open in order to save the listing to disk? > If this doesn't work, does anyone know if the standard Atari assembler will >work to generate Mydos? This is really why I am trying to get A65 running. AMAC (the disk-based Atari assembler) works. That's how I assembled MYDOS for my system. MYDOS is the fourth OS I have used on my system, and it is the one I'm using now (well not right now, right now I'm using a Sun). The reasons follow: At first I used 2.5. Really ran out of gas when my XF551 showed up. I used SpartaDOS for a while. AMAC won't run under it, though. I lost some work once due to what seemed like not great handling of error conditions. Likely more my fault that SpartaDOS, but you know. Next DOSXE came out. I had a loving relationship with it, except that AMAC wouldn't run under it; I think it was because as the AMAC disk is copy protected, I couldn't copy it to a DOSXE format disk. So I had to load in the 2.5 translator, which took up too much space. Disclaimer: I am only guessing. In fact, I had so much good luck with DOSXE that I didn't seem to need to keep backups. Well, as you can guess, the fateful day finally arrived. I got a copy of ARC, which I attempted to run under DOSXE. It was really my fault, I'm sure, because I did give it invalid input. I know instruction manuals are boring, and not at all in the true spirit of hacking. But the first 256 sectors somehow got blown away, and guess where the root directory is. Well I ended up plowing through the description of the file formats, wrote some hack programs, and surprisingly enough was able to reclaim most of the disk. That pretty much did it for DOSXE, even though I'm sure its just an ARC compatibility problem. I don't know if ARC actually works under it; I never got around to trying. Then, someone sent me a copy of UTIL.COM, the IBM PC program that writes MYDOS-compatible disks. I started bringing files home from the net now. To my great joy, I discovered that SpartaDOS could translate them to 2.5. Finally, MYDOS showed up. Complete with sources. And AMAC runs under it! With one slight problem; I use the XF551 as drive 1, which switches to SSSD when the $%^& copy protected AMAC is loaded. Then it stays SSSD even when the disk is changed. I have been looking over the sources to try and find a fix. There are several I am contemplating, even the ability to have a logical name translation capability so that ^$%& copy protected disks can be loaded from drive 2. Other stuff I am trying out is to put command line or desktop style into it, and move it under the ROM. I'm trying to decide which is better; DUP under the ROM, or ramdisk. (I have a ramdisk program that uses the 12K or so under the ROM. Was made for 64K machines. Only works with 2.5 though. This is the first ramdisk I have had; I had to modify my editor to coexist with it. I am trying to decide whether I should modify it to work with MYDOS, or just use the RAM as emacs-style buffers. Anyway, yesterday I finally put the US doubler I have had for like 2 years into my 1050. I was told that it makes the 1050 DD, even when ultraspeed sector skew is not used. It does, including under MYDOS. Now finally I have 2 DD disks. I may sack the DS feature of the XF551, just so that disks can be interchanged. Comments appreciated. -Stan "My Atari isn't dead yet! It's just sleeping!"