Need help with Atari 1050 disk system

From: Steven Canning <cannings_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Tue Apr 20 02:35:53 2004

Dave,

I'm new at this so if it doesn't post correctly, 1000 pardons.....

Dave wrote:

#1) Can anyone tell me the power requirements of this drive?
    (voltage, polarity, current) - this information should be on the label
of
    the power supply - as you probably guessed, I did not get the supply
with
    the drive (had an Atari computer supply in the box).

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.

#2) The box says "Includes DOS 3 Double Density Disk Operating System", but
    there were no diskettes in the box at all - presumably I need some sort
    of boot disk... Anyone out there with one that can make a copy or send
an
    image (Can Atari images be read/written on a PC's drive?)

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.

Best regards, Steven
Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 02:35:53 BST