Organization: Computing Technology Services, Michigan Technological Univ.
Date: Tuesday, 22 Dec 1992 10:03:00 EST
From: Jeff McWilliams <JJMCWILL@MTUS5.BITNET>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: SPARTADOS

Ryan,

There are two flavors of SpartaDOS that you should be looking for.
Neither is sold by their parent company, ICD though.  ICD stopped
manufacturing stuff for the 8 bit about 1 year and 4 months ago,
and most of their stock has sold out since then.

What made SpartaDOS simultaneously both popular and unpopular among
users is that it looks a lot like MS-DOS, or in a limited way,
Unix.  When you boot up the DOS, you don't get a menu like on
Atari DOS or MyDOS, but rather just a little prompt, like

D1:

if you want to get anything done, you need to know the commands
that get things going.

DIR D1:*.COM
COPY D1:MYFILE.DAT D3:

are examples.  Actually, SpartaDOS isn't the first DOS
for the Atari computer to offer this "ease of use".  OSS put out
OS/A+ and afterwards DOS XL way before ICD produced SpartaDOS.
Both of the OSS offerings were very similar to SpartaDOS
in the respect that they had a command line prompt and all that.
ICD took the idea one step further, and added time and date stamping
and subdirectories to the system.  Every file, when you look at a
disk directory, will also show the time and date the file was
created or last modified.

If you don't like the Command line interface, there are still
traditional Menus out there for SpartaDOS.  One comes on the
construction set disk, one on the "SpartaDOS Toolkit" disk, and
yet another is located on the SpartaDOS X cartridge.



The first one you should look for is SpartaDOS construction set.
On there you will find SpartaDOS 3.2d.  This DOS loads part of itself
into the RAM located beneath the OS ROM, thus saving some space in
normal memory for things like BASIC, or Word Processors, whatever.
By far one of the best enhancements for this DOS is the Wedge,
which takes up your XE extended memory, and adds all sorts of
extra features, all of which seem to escape me now, since I haven't used
it for a couple months.  Another is Prokey, which is located on the
SpartaDOS Toolkit disk.  Prokey among other things will show
you which subdirectory on your disk you currently have open,
allows you to recall the last thing you typed on the command prompt,
and allows you to assign some commands to Hot Keys, called Macros.

SpartaDOS X was ICD's latest and greatest offering.  It came on
a cartridge, with a slot in the top to plug in another cartridge,
like BASIC, MAC/65, Action!, whatever.  Putting the DOS on cartridge
allowed ICD to add features to the DOS itself, and additionally
they put utility programs in ROM along with it, so that you wouldn't
have to wait for them to load from disk.  SpartaDOS X is the DOS
I use in my main computer.  Since I only have one copy, I use
SpartaDOS 3.2d, or a variant of it, in my other one if I have to.

SpartaDOS is good at mass storage, like hard disks, and 3.5" 720K
floppy drives.  Either version of SpartaDOS can handle disk
sizes up to 16 megabytes. If you have a hard drive that is say
20 megabytes, you would have to make two partitions on the drive,
say, each 10 megabytes large, and they would appear as two separate
drives to DOS and your computer.

In order to connect a hard drive to your computer, you need
some sort of electronic interface that goes between your 130XE and
your computer.  At this time, there are two options that I
can see.  First, is the Supra Interface.  Not too many bells and
whistles, and I don't know too much about it, except that
somebody bought it off of Supra Corporation, and to my knowledge
still lurks out there selling it.

The Black Box from CSS is the Mercedes of disk interface hardware
for the 8 bit.  Not only does this box give you a hard drive
interface with all sorts of bells and whistles, it also
gives you a Modem and printer interface, and a built in machine
language debugger.  You can add a disk sector editor/monitor program
to the device, as well as a floppy board.  The floppy board will allow
you to connect IBM type floppy drives, even 3.5" 720K, 1.44 meg, and
5.25" 1.2 meg drives, and use them on your Atari, at very high
data transfer speeds.

One thing you need to know about disk interface technology:
The interface you buy for your Atari,whether it be Black BOX,
Supra Interface, or perhaps another called the MIO from ICD
(also not available from them anymore), they all offer a SCSI
interface for hard drives.

This means you can connect a SCSI drive directly to your computer.
You cannot connect an IDE or ESDI drive.
You can connect an MFM or  RLL drive if you buy a SCSI to MFM
or SCSI to RLL interface.  CSS sells both of these if you need them.
Since the interface is a SCSI interface, you can also use the
removable media type hard drives, like the SyQuest 44 meg removable
cartridge drive.  What I haven't seen is drivers for
those new floptical SCSI drives or any CD-ROM type stuff.
But since there are probably few to no 8 bit users with this sort
of hardware, it hasn't surprised me.

Hope this helps a little, my fingers are going numb with this
terrible editor.  Gotta go.

Jeff McWilliams