benw@pyuxn.UUCP (B Weber) (05/24/84)
I gave in to my curiosity and bought Rana's Smartdos operating system. Review in brief: A good, flexible DOS with some nice utilities thrown in; BUT...if you have OSA+/DOSXL, Mydos, or Dosmaster, you probably don't need Smartdos...especially for the price. The DOS supports single or double density (not 1.5 density, even though the RANA drive supports it). Smartdos is menu driven (with a pretty large menu); commands are chosen by typing the first letter of the menu item. The usual commands are there (copy, format, etc) as well as some unusual ones, described below. Each command has subprompts, and good use is made of color to help the user know where he/she's at. The DOS has some useful shortcuts. For instance, the drive number (1-4) alone specifies the disk; no "DX:" needed. Another example is the single drive copy...the user can specify "=" to mean "copy all files on a single drive". One of the nicest features of the DOS is the ability to change drive configurations on the fly. It supports up to 4 drives in any mix of single or double density, and the "R" (reconfigure) command toggles any of the drives between single and double without having to reboot DOS or have a special double density version of DOS. There is other flexability. A command called (get this!) "OBVERT RESIDUP" allows the DUP part of the DOS to reside in memory; thus, when flipping from BASIC to DOS and back, there is no need for a MEM.SAV and no delay (OSA+ works this way). Smartdos may also be reconfigured for fewer than 4 drives, and adjusted for the max number of simultaneous open files allowable, thus freeing up some memory if you don't need the maximum configuration. There are some utility functions included in the DOS. There is a disk speed checker, a sector copier (great...now I have 6 sector copiers!), and a disk checker (reads sectors and reports errors). The disk checker is good...it even reports double sectoring, but the manual does not talk at all about the kinds of errors it can find. The manual is OK, but not great. One frustrating error occurs in the startup section, but most of the manual seems correct. There is not much technical info (give me a memory map and entry points, PLEEEEEESE), and sometimes the manual seems to wander and jump to seemingly unrelated information in the middle of a topic. It's better (and less cutesy) than their disk drive manual, at least. The DOS is big (9.5K), but the user has the option of writing the DOS out without the DOS.SYS file. It's also expensive... about $50. In conclusion, if you don't have a double density DOS already, Smartdos is worth looking into. If you already have a DD Dos, it's probably not worth your while. Ben Weber pyuxn!benw AT&T Technologies OSTC Piscataway, NJ