DOS/65 Richard Leary

[MK14HAK]

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I checked the software versions on the current 5.25 inch OSI diskettes and they are out of date.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.

[MK14HAK]

Rich

I have 5" images of your DOS/65.

I have tried booting in winOSI emulator and get the A> prompt but with a PEM -Bad Sector error after responding to the number of drives prompt.

Warm boot with CTRL-C - hangs accessing tk 0/1
Go $xxxx -hangs accessing tk 4/5 ? ( Was hoping to call some code loaded by 65D loader beyond the actual loader routine to test R/W calls in SIM) Disk access for a Go $ command ??
Transient command files - PEM error
DIR on any drive/image - PEM error

CCM @ $9C00 ; PEM @ $A400 ; SIM @ $B000 seem to have loaded ok and pg1 has JMP inits.

Have I got bad SIM disk read routines or DCB incorrect ??

PS. Is the format of the boot tracks different from the rest of the disk and do I need to use the CP/M FORMAT on a 65D formatted image to load/save any transient files. (hexedit an image maybe?)

Mike

[MK14HAK]

Success !

DOS65ok.jpg (116.84 KiB) Viewed 18759 times

[nama]

Fantastic!!!!

[BillO]

Very nice!

[dave]

Beautiful!!

[RichLeary]

Very good!

I just wrote a long reply and when I tried to submit it the system asked me to log in again. When I did I lost the post.

Past my bedtime - I will redo it another day.

Rich

[MK14HAK]

Ha that's familiar.

Rich, I have sent you a PM on the forum mail for your thoughts on distribution of these images I have. They may be of interest to some meantime as is until an updated version is available.
Mike

[RichLeary]

I tried to send the source code for C1 monitor ROM that makes DOS/65 easy to start up as a file attachment. The forum software would not accept either ASM or TXT as a filename extension.

What is accepted?

Rich

[MK14HAK]

A zip should work Rich.