DOS/65 Richard Leary
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2015 2:58 am
Richard Leary wrote in OSIWEB.org wish list post : viewtopic.php?f=8&t=160&start=10#p1393
I can help with DOS/65. I am the developer of DOS/65 and am continuing to maintain and improve it.
I released (sold in those days) a version for 5.25 inch drives for OSI and an eight inch OSI version. Development of these was frozen in 1986 as there was not enough demand to continue OSI support.
However this past week I finished a safe enclosure for my external power supply for my Superboard. The Superboard is mounted in a C4P cabinet but until now the PS was dangerously exposed. I connected the Superboard to the D&N interface plugged into a D&N motherboard that also had the D&N memory expansion & 5.25 inch floppy interface on board.
It came right up and then immediately booted DOS/65 when I issued the appropriate monitor command. Note: One of the things I developed was a monitor ROM that included DOS/65 boot capability. That was not essential as I did normally ship DOS/65 as a two disk start up where the first disk was used under OS65D. I did the ROM because for all practical purposes I never used OS65D. If I remember correctly the 5.25 inch version need 9 or 10 diskettes and the 5 inch version a lot less because of the increased diskette capacity.
I checked some of the diskettes for errors and some were clean and some had parity errors. The core that I need to do anything I was able to recreate from back ups or old working copies.
I checked the software versions on the current 5.25 inch OSI diskettes and they are out of date. I can download current versions using XMODEM (MODEM65.COM) but that will take time that I probably won't have available until August or so.
The SIM (system interface module) code - that is what talks to the hardware - was straightforward and could easily be expanded to handle larger capacity drives. I strongly recommend that for 5.25 inch systems.
DOS/65 manages disk use by dealing with 128 byte logical records. However because of the characteristics of the OSI floppy disk controller the physical sectors are full tracks and a full track is what is read from or written to the diskette. THE SIM code maps logical records from or into the full track buffer. A physical track for the standard 5.25 in drive is 2048 bytes. Every track on a DOS/65 5.25 inch diskette is 2048 bytes long.
It has been a long time since I looked at the code but I do have DOS/65 utilities that will read and display the directory of an OS65D diskette and the utilities include ones that can transfer OS65D files to a DOS/65 diskette.
DOS/65 uses the same UART parameters as OS65D so RAWDUMP should work just fine.