Hi Josef,
I've retained floppy support in the left hand bay to remain backwards
compatible with version 1.9. And the fact that most people will have
a floppy drive there. However, it does support the ATOM-Lite with a
master and slave configuration in the right hand bay, this includes a
booting ability via the AL-BOOT ROM. The system functions fine if it
doesn't find a floppy in the left bay. It adjusts itself to whatever
drives it finds in the system. So you could have a (Pro-DOS bootable)
CF-Card and place it in one of your right bay CF slots. Which would
work fine. Similarly, you could manually load and run the system off
any of your CF slots, including the left ones. That would also work
fine with the proviso that after boot your two left bay cards would
not be visible to Pro-DOS.
Pro-DOS v2.0 also has full support for MMC/SDSC and SDHC flash cards
up to 64GB via Quazar's superb Trinity interface, it also saves any
custom palette colours you have chosen to the Trinity EEPROM, and will
automatically restore them on start up.
V2.0 also supports up to four 1024k external RAM packs as RAM drives.
With all of the storage options visible to the system simultaneously.
Giving a potential total drive count of eight drives, and something
like 196-Gigabytes of storage!
The system has its own 1024k "native format" for any flash cards that
were formatted by itself. This format is also shared with the external
RAM pack drives. It also remains backwardly compatible with the "CP/M
DISK" container format devised by Edwin for use with BDOS. So you can
mix CP/M "disks" and BDOS "records" on one MMC/SD/CF BDOS format card
if you wish.
Pro-DOS divides MMC/SD/CF cards into a number of logical "disks" and
are similar to BDOS records. The system is independent though, and
doesn't require BDOS to be pre-loaded. In fact, v2.0 will boot as a
DOS from a SAM floppy providing its the first file saved on the disk,
in the same way as SAM/B/MASTERDOS.
While I'm in a typing mood here are a few of the other changes in v2.0!
There are probably lots of others I've forgotten, but will add them to
the manual when I get motivated to do that tedious chore!!
The screen output routines are over 50% faster than v1.9 (which was
awful!) and noticeably so. The floppy disk routines are faster too.
This is less noticeable though, due to the translation between CP/M's
128-byte and the SAM's 512-byte sectors.
There is no more separate "system files" and "boot disk" either. The
whole thing is one self-contained 32k program now, with the utilities
automatically written to the internal RAM drive at start up. v2.0 is
better on memory too, so even though it carries the system files with
it it retains the same internal RAM drive size as v1.9, and gives you
a slightly larger TPA - of some 63238 bytes.
The internal RAM drive is drive A by default, with the left hand floppy
designated drive B. However, if that isn't to people's liking there is
a built-in SWAP command to software swap any pair of drives. So:
SWAP A:B
Will make drive A the left hand floppy and drive B the internal RAM
drive. You can swap pairs of drives as often as you like, there are no
restrictions.
The old external COPY utility is now built-in to the OS, so COPY is
now always available. As are the old PALETTE and DUMP utilities, they
are built-in too. PALETTE has a few more parameters, as the system
now has a flashing cursor. The cursors "on", "off", and "over char"
colours can be separately changed along with the usual ink and paper
colours. You don't have to change all palette parameters every time
either, so if you only want to change the ink colour then you can.
All of the built-in commands will accept a user number as well as the
drive letter. RENAME now accepts wildcards and COPY will allow you to
rename on the copy, also with wildcards. So, you can do things like:
COPY A0:*.com D12:*.bat
To copy all the .COM files from drive A user area 0 to drive D user
area 12 - renaming them to .BAT files as they go.
DIR now does a column alphabetised sort on the file list.
Pro-DOS formatted CP/M floppy disks (720k/706k usable) can also be made
to boot to Pro-DOS via F9 if you wish. Selectable at format time.
All of the remaining external utilities have been re-written. None
share any code from version 1.9. The old SAMREAD.COM utility is now
called IMPORT.COM and is more flexible allowing you to import files
from SAM floppy disks and MDDOS FAT12 floppies - which includes the
ability to traverse subdirectories. Ideal for importing CP/M files
downloaded from the 'net.
The command line interface has been improved too. With more editing
commands and also the ability to roll up and down the last 8 entered
commands using UP/DOWN arrow. Similar to MSDOS. It's faster too.
The cursor keys now return the Wordstar cursor control codes by default
You can also hold SHIFT/SYMBOL/CTRL + cursor keys to re-map to three
other sets of cursor control codes, including generic and KayPro/ADM.
The VT52 terminal is faster, and also includes KayPro cursor addressing
and a much faster inverse video - characters output in inverse video are
as fast as normal video characters. Unlike v1.9's dreadful routines!
The system "bell" now sounds like a bell and doesn't freeze the system,
like v1.9 did!
There is better CP/M 2.2 compatibility too, with programs that misbehaved
(or simply didn't run) under v1.9 now working fine under v2.0.
I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten!! I'll have to start
remembering for when I write the manual. If I can get motivated! I
hate manual writing and I'm not very good at it!
So, basically v2.0 is a brand new version, sharing pretty much none of
v1.9's code base.
Pro-DOS v2.0. Coming to a SAM near you... Soon... ish! ;-)
Chris.
On 09/11/2013 19:44, SCjoe wrote:
Hi, Chris,
It might be worth getting in touch with Steve
Hm, I sent him a message... without any reply.
New version of Pro-DOS (v2.0) coming soon... ;-)
Awesome! Have you a mind to support up to 4 CF-slots in the AtomLite+ (e.g.
slot per CP/M drive?)
http://img4.rajce.idnes.cz/d0406/8/8912/8912936_ee0ae33197d091a1cc1dcff8fe3b0fdd/images/IMG_1483.jpg?ver=2
Regards
Josef
