🚀 go-pugleaf

If you buy from CDY what you will want is his OMNIVIEW operating system chip
which, among other things, includes the Ramdisk handlers you need.  It will
also give you 80-column capability, and he includes a very nice word
processor.  I recommend you also get the Newell RAMROD board (also available
from CDY), which lets you keep your standard ATARI O/S chip available at the
flip of a switch in case you want to verify that some problem or other is NOT
caused by running a non-standard O/S.  OMNIVIEW by the way is designed to be
more compatible with old 800 software than the new 800XL O/S, so will run many
old 800 style programs that require translation to run on the new machines.
With the RAMROD board you have sockets for 3 O/S chips.  If you don't want to
experiment with your own (which you can do in RAM anyway) you probably ought
to get CDY's OMNIMONXL O/S to fill the third socket.  If you do any Assembly
language work, take my word for it, buy OMNIMONXL first and ask questions
later.

-John Sangster
jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa
...ihnp4!linus!mbunix!jhs

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

In article <546@tekigm2.UUCP> wrd@tekigm2.UUCP writes:
>Does anyone out in netland know how to modify DOS 2.5 to allow it to see
>the additional 128k RAM when you add any of the four 256k RAM expansion
> ...

The CHAOS BBS at 517-371-1106 has much information about memory upgrades
for XLs, XEs, and STs.  This includes instructions on how to do it, and
software to use when you are done. File QXLINFO has abstracts of what is there,
and file QXLDOS25 has instructions on how to set up DOS 2.5 to have two
full size single density ramdisks.

The instructions are about two pages (including about half a page of things
to type into the mini-assembler), and I only have a hard copy, so I would
prefer if you got the stuff directly.

                                 Hans Breitenlohner
                                 University of Maryland
                                 Computer Science Center
                                 Systems staff.