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From: jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari8
Subject: Re: DOS 2.5 Modification Question
Message-ID: <8604021902.AA12144@mitre-bedford.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 2-Apr-86 21:51:29 EST
Article-I.D.: mitre-be.8604021902.AA12144
Posted: Wed Apr  2 21:51:29 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Apr-86 05:28:57 EST
References: <546@tekigm2.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 25

Is Newman (?) a real vendor or do you mean Newell Industries?  If so, the
board that they sell is the same one that CDY supplies -- CDY does the
software and sells the package bundled.

Also, it is not necessary to modify DOS itself, although it might have
advantages if it knew about the extra buffer space for disk copying etc.
What you really need, though, is driver software to make the memory act like a
ramdisk.  Once you have that (the beauty of the Atari and all well-designed
computer systems), the DOS won't know there's anything funny at all about your
ramdisk, it's just another disk (although a darn fast one!).  With the ramdisk
installed, sector copying is a two-pass operation and is very convenient with
MYDOS or any other DOS:  Copy the source disk to the Ramdisk in one pass, pull
it out and insert the destination disk and copy the Ramdisk to that in the
second pass.

Of related interest is a very simple BASIC/ML program by William W. Tan, a
Berkely CS student, in the January, 1985 ANALOG magazine.  The whole program
is about 7 or 8 numbered BASIC statements (though most of them do a lot of
work!) and a couple of DATA statements full of machine language.  The program
turns the 130XE into a fast sector copier that can be run from BASIC.  It
could easily be modified (on the CDY/Newell board anyway) to use the extra
128K if you needed to do double-density sector copying.

-John Sangster
jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa