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 Post subject: SIDE Compatible MyIDE Driver for SpartaDOS X
PostPosted: Mon Sep 05, 2011 1:24 pm 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
Brand new driver and software suite for MyIDE / SDX:

http://www.atari8.co.uk/myide/

Features:

- Partition table compatibility with SIDE and (eventually) IDE Plus (when the latter adopts the new APT partition standard).
- Software compatibility with SIDE: that means both MyIDE and SIDE use the same partition editor, mounting utility, etc, and are compatible with forthcoming versions of DEVINFO and EDDY
- Meta-data leader sector for each partition supporting NAMED partitions
- Up to 128 partitions (potentially unlimited, in fact)
- Support for FAT32 partition and APT partition on the same disk
- Dual-disk support, with drive number priority system for duplicate drive letters on master / slave
- MOUNT application for dynamic mounting and un-mounting of partitions
- All low-level disk access performed solely via LSIO, with 32 bit LBA addressing provided via XDCB registers[/list]

Now the bad news:

- Previous MyIDE/SDX partition table format dropped, so disk need to be re-partitioned
- Support for physical hard disks dropped - only CF cards which support 8-bit PIO mode are compatible
- Partition table format is no longer compatible with any exisiting MyIDE Tools

The last problem will be addressed by Candle's forthcoming FAT32 copier, which will allow in-place copying from SDX partitions to the FAT32 area of the CF card and vice-versa. This will allow-high speed transfer between the Atari hard disk and the FAT file system via your card reader.

I realize dropping spinning HDD support and adopting a new partition table may not seem like the best news to everyone, but it was becoming too much work to maintain two sets of drivers (three, if you count the software I've written for SIDE). If anyone wants the latest HDD compatible drivers (using the partition table format which Hias designed), please let me know and I'll prepare special images for you. In the long run, I believe that a unified partition table design is hugely beneficial. Without it, I'd have spent weeks writing special versions of FDISK, MOUNT, etc. As it stands, the versions of FDISK and MOUNT supplied on SDXMYIDE.ATR (and on CAR: on those ROM images where there's room for all the support files) are exactly the same as the SIDE versions. When I make improvements to FDISK and MOUNT, the same updates will apply to SIDE and MyIDE.

Note that FDISK and MOUNT require HDDLIB.DLL and UILIB.DLL. This is no problem if all the software's on CAR:, but if it isn't, you'll need to keep both DLLs in a location accessible via the SDX PATH.

No documentation yet: really it's a case of experimenting. The SIDE docs will be completely applicable to the MyIDE stuff when they're written. I'll probably write a separate manual for FDISK and MOUNT, since they work identically across all APT implementations. That said, the APT implementations should work the same anyway, so we could eventaully have a single user manual for MyIDE, SIDE and IDE Plus. ;)



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 Post subject: Re: SIDE Compatible MyIDE Driver for SpartaDOS X
PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 3:20 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
Updated:

http://atari8.co.uk/downloads/SDX444_MyIDE_APT_Images_050911.zip



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