drac030

Hello

SpartaDOS X 4.45 is now officially available on http://sdx.atari8.info/index.php (or http://spartados.com and http://spartadosx.com - these addresses, being for now aliases only, are recommended as being easier to remember).

It is this year's third edition, so the changes are not so many as in the transition from 4.42 to 4.43. We recommend upgrade anyways. A brief list of changes is available here: http://sdx.atari8.in...45/whatsnew.txt

As usual, we'd like to express thanks and appreciations to the work GoodByteXL is doing, who is restlessly working on the biggest part of the documentation (i.e. the User's Manual and online MAN help).

We are also happy to announce that a new coder has joined us in improving the SpartaDOS X, namely Mono/Tristesse, who is (among other things) responsible for the most fancy functionality of this SDX' edition: namely the filename completion (implemented in DOSKEY.SYS, 128k RAM or more is required to run this).

Some programs have been moved to the Toolkit disk. Please review the whatsnew.txt file carefully to know which they are, and, when they are necessary for you. please use the SDX Imager program to customize your cartridge image before flashing it into ROM.

Have fun
KMK/DLT

Hi

An update of the IDE Plus ROM BIOS to v.0.9 is available here:

http://drac030.krap....kmkjz-pliki.php

Despite some bugfixes, the BIOS contains an ATR handler, which allows to load ATR files from the built-in binary loader, and also access their contents from within SpartaDOS X.

The last time http://www.atariage....partados-x-443/ it was promised that SpartaDOS X releases would appear more often, and so here it is:

SpartaDOS X 4.44

http://sdx.atari8.info/

Here is a list of changes: http://sdx.atari8.in...44/whatsnew.txt

There is no new manual, but there are also no changes which would require one. Besides, GoodByteXL is on vacations

Because the last release was less than two months ago, there are not so much changes as in 4.43, but we recommend upgrade anyways.

Many thanks to everyone who helps us to continue this project.

Have fun!

DLT are happy to present a new release: SpartaDOS X 4.43.

http://sdx.atari8.info

As stated previously, there are no killer new features: the 4.43 is basically an improved and cleaned up 4.42. There are many changes all around the place, and not all of these are visible to the user: there are some internal improvements which facilitate future developments.

It is not that the development team has done almost nothing since the previous release. Just to give a clue, 837 days have passed since the 4.42 announcement, and CVS statistics say, that well over 400 source updates (commits) have been done since. To be specific, by strange coincidence, the number of commits is 443. This makes an average rate of 0,53 commits a day, i.e. once in each two days there was a change in the code.

Unfortunately, As always, not everything has been done which needs to be done. We decided, though, that the release should not be delayed anymore. The things which remain to fix will be fixed in subsequent versions. Also, the period of 4.43 development was definitely too long - we hope that subsequent versions will be released not less often than once in 6 months.

The detailed list of changes (and todos) is available as a plain text file whatsnew-443.txt. The file lists changes relative to SpartaDOS X 4.42. The size of the file is near to 17 KB. A brief overview of most important things is given below.

DLT would also like to thank all people who helped to release this version, that is: cooperating coders for coding and ideas, hardware guys for help, betatesters for bug reports and suggestions, authors of tools for the tools, and also users for feedback.

Special thanks go to GoodByteXL, who was working hard and patiently on the excellent and detailed SpartaDOS X User's Manual (Note: the release version of the manual is not yet uploaded, it will get uploaded soon; the PDF available on the page is a beta-manual).

== Most important news in SpartaDOS X 4.43 ==

* New Toolkit disk with additional utilities
* Improved hardware compatibility: SpartaDOS X now works on SECAM Ataris (equipped with FGTIA).
* Improved backward compatibility with SpartaDOS 3.2 and AtariDOS.
* Improved backward compatibility with 400/800 OS.
* Improved handling of AtariDOS/MyDOS disks.
* Improved compatibility with MAC/65 cartridge.
* Improved fast I/O driver for the California Access 2001 floppy drive (thanks to sup8pdct)
* SIO routines have been optimized to support transfers at higher speeds.
* "High" density added to the list of available densities in the Formatter.
* VBXE support: directory colorizing may be activated VBXE 80-column console. Also the formatter will cooperate with VBXE driver to avoid interference with 80-column VBXE display.
* Quite a few bugfixes all around the place.

Most important extensions to internal functions:

* It is now possible to read the Help key or Shift/Ctrl+key combos via U_GETKEY routine.
* MALLOC is now able to automatically align memory blocks to page boundary.
* U_LOAD is now able to automatically align binary blocks to page boundary (the SDX binary header defines an additional flag for that).
* New error condition: 183 Environment full (cure that by loading ENV.SYS)

Have fun.

Hi

I always thought that in MyDOS the VTOC size is indicated by the first byte of the VTOC, according to such a formula: vtoc[0] = vtoc_size-1.

Today it occurred to me that it doesn't work that way: for example, a 720k disk has two VTOC sectors, so I'd expect $03 as the first VTOC byte, but MyDOS puts $04 there. A 16 MB disk contains 33 sectors of VTOC, and the first byte is $23 whereas I'd be expecting $22. Moreover, a disk which has 65535 sectors, 128 bytes each, contains 65 VTOC sectors, so the expected value is $42, but on a real disk it is $23 again.

So, before I waste probably several hours digging in the MyDOS source code, would someone, who has the knowledge, be so kind to answer there two questions:

1) what is the correct formula that allows to calculate the value of the first byte of MyDOS' VTOC? (or in other words, what's the true meaning of vtoc[0]?)

2) what is the correct method of finding out, what is the size of the VTOC on a MyDOS disk?

Thanks in advance.