APT PBI BIOS 1.0 and SDX 4.46 for Ultimate 1MB Background ========== In 2012, Sebastian Bartkowicz (Candle) asked if I could write a PBI version of the SpartaDOS X soft-driver I had written the previous year for the SIDE cartridge. The reason was that he was considering adding PBI emulation to his Ultimate 1MB RAM upgrade, to be used in conjunction with the SIDE cartridge, which would then be present merely to provide the IDE interface itself. Sebastian made the necessary amendments to the Xilinx firmware and provided me with several PBI ROM banks and RAM under the hardware registers. I was able to get something rudimentary working for U1MB in a few weeks. In the months that followed, Sebastian thought of more and more things to add (such as the ability to read and write disk images mounted in the FAT partition of the CF card), and after weeks of coding and debugging, we had something approaching a final version. Nevetheless, it has taken quite some time to perform sufficient field testing and debugging in order to bring the PBI BIOS out of beta status, culminating in the v.1.0 BIOS presented below. The new v.1.0 BIOS provides great improvements across the board, in terms of ATR and software compatibility, efficiency, reliability and functionality. Thanks to testing data and samples provided by Marius Diepenhorst (ProWizard), many more bootable ATRs now work with the PBI BIOS than did with previous versions. Full compatibility with SpartaDOS 3.x, RealDOS and MyDOS is now also assured. Owing to bug-fixes and improvements in PBI BIOS v.1.0, it should be considered a required update. There are two ways to update the PBI BIOS in your Ultimate 1MB. You can either use the 8KB ROM image for use with uflash, or the stand-alone upgrade utility. Both are included in the ZIP. To complement the PBI BIOS update, a customised SpartaDOS X 4.46 ROM is also provided. As well as having all the APT tools on the CAR: device (including FDISK, MATR, APTDISK, MOUNT, etc), the uflash Ultimate/Incognito ROM flashing tool can also be run direct from CAR:. To install the PBI ROM, either run the XEX installer or flash the ROM with uflash. To install SDX, run the ATR installer or flash the ROM using uflash. You may download uflash here. Documentation ============= The APT Toolkit user guide may be downloaded from the APT documentation page (http://atari8.co.uk/apt/docs/index.html). The BIOS documentation may be downloaded via the link below: PBI BIOS v.1.0 for Ultimate and Incognitio Donations ========= It should be remembered that while I have been privileged to be involved in the Ultimate, Incognito and SIDE projects, I enjoy no licensing arrangements with the OEMs of the hardware. Development, bug fixes, and other work essential to maintaining the usefulness of SIDE, Ultimate and Incognito are thereby undertaken gratis, and I would therefore ask that users of the firmware, drivers and partitioning tools consider making a donation via the "Donate" button on these pages. Not only does a donation assist with my equipment and web hosting overheads, but it helps justify the very large investment of time required to enable users of Ultimate, Incognito and SIDE to exploit the hardware to its fullest potential. In addition, donations encourage me to continue offering personalised technical support via email, in addition to the general support I also provide on the AtariAge forums. Thank you! Copyright (c)2009-2014 atari8.co.uk. In no way affiliated with Atari Interactive.