HARDWARE ADDITION FOR THE 1050 DISK DRIVE
I have owned an 810 drive for over three years now and it has given
reliable service. I remember well the day it arrived and the
excitement of its speed after using cassette tapes for some time - a
whole new world of practical applications like word processing and
accounting became a realistic proposition. Since then, of course,
the new 1050 disk drive has come out with enhanced (one and a half
times) density, and I have seen advertisements for various add-ons
giving true double density and higher speed, but funds are finite
and I could never really justify the expense of adding another
drive. Recently, however, I do seem to make quite a lot of transfers
from one disk to another in an effort to keep my expanding pile of
disk files in some sort of order and then, after a recent article
was published in Page 6 I swapped several disks with correspondents
and two that arrived would not run on my 810 ... formatted in
enhanced density! How galling!. I suppose I still cannot fully
justify my recent purchase of a 1050 drive and the IS PLATE to fit
in it, but I certainly have no regrets and I am happy to tell you
more about it.
BEST OF BRITISH
I am very fortunate living near Worthing as we
have an excellent, helpful, computer shop here - Chips - and it
specialises in Atari computers and software. I recently saw an
advertisement of theirs extolling the IS PLATE which interested me
as it sounded a bit like the US Doubler, or Happy enhancement, but I
had not heard of it before, even in the American Atari magazines,
and nobody else was advertising it. So I dropped in at Chips to ask
about it. It turned out that the Plate is a local product invented
and developed here in Worthing. This device is British and follows
up the recent expansion of good British software for the Atari in
hardware terms, however, I wondered if it would be a useful addition
to my computer system. With a price near a hundred pounds it is
quite expensive compared to the cost of the disk drive itself or to
the cost of a 130XE for that matter. Before my doubts could subdue
my enthusiasm I was being given a demonstration combined with a good
bit of informed salesmanship. My first impression of the machine was
of speed and quietness and I was captivated.
PLATE HARDWARE AND INSTALLATION
The Plate itself is a small printed circuit board
with five chips on it; these include a 6502 chip, 16K RAM and an
EPROM. The device appears well engineered and professional with
clean soldering. Installation is very straightforward and anyone who
can change a mains plug should be able to tackle this with
confidence. The instructions are clear and are supported by Xerox
copies of photographs of the assembly process which, though not very
clear, do give an adequate indication of what to expect. If you read
and follow the instructions carefully (including the precautions
against static) and don't rush you will have no trouble - it took me
well under 10 minutes from start to finish. The new PCB replaces the
ROM and CPU chips in the disk drive board and plugs into the CPU
socket - no soldering! There is a small cut out in the PCB which
fits over a crystal on the main board so you can not even put the
new board in the wrong way round.
SOFTWARE
The IS Plate is accompanied by a disk of software
for use with the device. On one side is the ISP driver while on side
two is the IS Menu.
The ISP driver is a menu driven set of programs
which are principally concerned with setting up the drive for your
requirements. You can select Skew, Fast Write, Verify, Slow down and
Write protect and these functions remain enabled until the drive is
switched off. There are also two high speed copiers on the disk, one
for 130XE and the other a general purpose copier. They are fast but
will not copy protected disks.
You can also select to emulate the IS Doubler or a
standard 1050 drive. This means that you can make the Plate
invisible to commercial software that will not run on an enhanced
drive.
The IS Menu (or Lighter Menu) is rather like
Multiboot XL allowing several boot programs to be menu driven off
one disk. It is colourful, has sound and a special character set and
is based around a special DOS which only works with the Plate and
gives a very fast load, something over twice the speed of Multiboot
XL. Also on the menu is the IS Customiser - this is a utility which
allows you to create your own custom disk formats with mixtures of
different densities, bad sectors, duplicated sectors and extra
sectors. If you are a skilled programer this means that you can
protect your great works but a good knowledge of disk drives and
operating systems is necessary if you are to make full use of this
facility.
DOCUMENTATION
I can not go into detail of all the attributes of
the Plate here so it is fortunate that the 26 page user manual is
quite comprehensive. To begin with you will need to refer to it
frequently and you will need further reference books to get the most
out of this very versatile drive unless you already have a good
knowledge of disk systems. The handbook introduces some of the more
technical details needed to start programming the drive yourself,
but such a task is certainly not for the beginner!
One very useful feature of the drive is not
mentioned in the manual - the drive can be switched to standard 1050
emulation by switching on with write protect enabled (either by a
write protected disk or an unprotected disk partially inserted). ISP
is enabled by switching on with the drive empty or an unprotected
disk installed.
WHAT DOES IT DO?
In summary the main features of the ISP are:
Provides an intelligent disk controller and buffer.
Reads
a track at a time from disk, speeding access and reducing drive
wear.
Gives
single, dual and true double density (with suitable DOS).
Fast read and write.
Archiver and ISD emulation (with appropriate software).
Standard 1050 emulation makes Plate invisible to commercial
software.
DEVELOPMENT
Having discovered that this device was designed
and built locally I thought it would be interesting to meet the
brains behind the product and coincidentally met Robert Perry in
Chips and he kindly agreed to talk to me about his product. Robert
has had an Atari from the very early days (about 1980) when he
started with a 400 with 16K RAM and a cassette recorder at a cost of
several hundred pounds! He clearly knows the anatomy of his Atari
and disk drive inside out and has previously developed the IS
Doubler which sold in small numbers, mostly locally, but was never
advertised. He has been working on the Plate since about Easter of
last year and showed me the prototype board on which the device was
assembled and tested before the neat PCB design was developed and
the boards made. Although he gets the PCBs made the rest of the work
is his own, and a very professional job he makes of it. He is
beginning to develop ideas for a sound sampler which will use the
speed and power of the ST and a video flash digitiser or frame
grabber which will digitise a frame of video transmission, possibly
with video mixing, allowing computer generated graphics and computer
manipulation of the frames for special video effects.
As well as informing me about his product, Robert
tried to tell me more about disk formats, sector skew, disk
protection techniques and so on, and I understood some of it. If you
are knowledgeable in these areas then you will surely make good use
of the plate. One factor that will be of interest to all Plate users
is that the modification does not give much of a speed enhancement
when used with an ordinary DOS such as DOS 2.5 but will read in a
program on a disk formatted under SpartaDos just about twice as fast
because the SpartaDos format matches the capabilities of the Plate.
If any of you develop software specially for this
device I am certain Robert would like to hear from you. With the
memory and intelligence that is built in there must be considerable
potential ... could the Plate serve as a printer buffer for
instance?
This is an excellent, innovative, well engineered
product and I wish Robert every success in achieving a wide market.
top
