Hi Steve,
>The 1050 uses the "standard" Atari 9 volt AC wall-wart that also powers the
>early computers (400 / 800). It was a 31 Watt unit. They came out with a
>"beefier" unit later, but for the 1050 the earlier one is fine. As such
>polarity is a non-issue. If you plug the unit in without a computer
>connected and power it up, the LED on the drive will come ON and you can
>hear the spindle motor turn ON and hear the head stepper motor "seeking"
>track zero, and then the LED goes out and the spindle and stepper motors
>stop.
Last night, I took the drive apart and checked it out (all looks good), I
could see a rectifier on the input, so I concur that it is AC.
I cobbled together a 9V ac supply and powered it up - I did observe exactly
what you indicate, the drive comes on, spins, and the head steps out and back
from and to track zero.
>The software that came with the 1050 only made it a "dual density" as they
>called it drive. It actually provided 1.5 times the capacity. Later 3rd
>parity software provided actual "double density" performance. The disks are
>not IBM compatible. I could probably find a disk for you if I look hard
>enough.
>
>Your last question is kind of a "trick" question. On Ebay you can
>buy a SIO2PC cable that will allow your PC to emulate an Atari disk drive,
>and there are "images" that can be downloaded to do this function.
>
>The Atari disk drives contain a "micro-computer" system (6502 based) that
>talks to the floppy disk controller and interfaces to the Atari computer
>over a 19.2 KBaud serial data link. You can send commands directly to the
>drives (without DOS) to do "primates" like Format a disk, and data sector
>puts / gets. I hope this helps.
If I connect the drive to a computer, I observed the following:
With not disk in the drive, the computer rapidly issues "Boot error" messages
continuously, and the drive remains stopped.
With a disk in the drive (not an Aari disk), the drive activates, and the
computer issues "Boot error" much more slowly - clearly it is trying to read
the unformatted disk.
So - I think the drive is working.
I was unable to find any way to get the system up with the drive connected,
so I don't see how there could be DOS in ROM as some people have suggested.
Any ideas? Is it possible to do anything with the disk without a DOS boot
disk.
This sounds like a very simiar arrangement to the C64 1541 drive, except
that the commodore boots "normally" in BASIC and you can send commands to the
drive via BASIC file operations - the Atari appears to want to boot from the
drive before you can do anything.
I'm planning to build a SIO2PC cable as soon as I can dig up an extra Atari
peripheral cable.
Regards,
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 06:30:08 BST