jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (03/01/86)
I recently installed CDY's OMNIVIEW256 and OMNIMONXL along with the Newell 256KXL memory expansion upgrade in my Atari 800XL, and would like to share my initial impressions of these products with the net. OMNIVIEW is a replacement Operating System (OS) ROM which, among other things, gives the 800XL the capability of displaying text on the screen in 80-column format. I wanted to do word processing on my Atari, so I thought this would be a very valuable enhancement. Also, CDY provides a compatible word processor on diskette with the upgrade, so the price of getting 80 columns is more or less comparable to buying a WP software package. OMNIMONXL is yet another OS chip which provides a resident monitor/debugger facility. I want to become proficient at 800XL machine language programming, so I decided to get one of these also. To permit switching between the two and also (I am a very paranoid sort) to allow me to put back the "official" Atari OS ROM without opening up the cabinet every time, I also ordered the RAMROD board which provides 3 sockets and a switch to select the desired OS. Finally, I also elected to go with the 256KXL expansion to allow me to (a) run 130XE software and (b) run a "ramdisk", or simulated disk drive implemented in memory. I have only one disk drive, and decided that perhaps it and a ramdisk would be all I need for my contemplated operations. As for my impressions of all of this: INSTALLATION. I found the installation of the boards to be fairly straightforward, although I would not recommend the job to somebody who has never done any electronic circuit assembly work previously, unless they have expert supervision at hand while they are doing it. I had to unsolder two chips because Atari didn't provide sockets for them. This MUST be done carefully and one must have the right equipment at hand and know how to use it. I also had to file a little off the edge of the RAMROD board and the cartridge socket shroud to make the RAMROD board fit in place. Eventually this resulted in a very nice mechanical fit, with the ledge I had filed onto the tapered shroud providing a nice support for that end of the RAMROD board. The installation also calls for modifications (bending) of the top shield cover. As I plan to use the computer in a ham radio station...where even very tiny leakage signals can interfere with reception and spoil all the fun...I was concerned about minimizing the loss of shielding effectiveness. I was able to make somewhat less drastic changes to the shield than those called for in the assembly instructions. In particular the shield tab next to the cartridge slot does not have to be bent out of the way; all I had to do was to bend about 3/16 inch of it out of the way at the end nearest the RAMROD board. Also, I did a similar trick to widen an existing slit in the shield near where the switch cable has to exit, which I thought looked more professional than coming out of the corner of the shield after opening it up there. When all was said and done, the shield did not look as though it needed body and fender work, and I sincerely doubt that any measureable increase in hash leakage occurred; certainly I have not detected any new spurious signals on my ham receiver with the computer running. Replacing the memory chips was no big deal, as they were (whew!) installed in sockets. Mounting the memory mapping board required a little ingenuity but not much. A hint or two about where to mount it would have been nice, but a very satisfactory method soon became obvious. I talked with Wes Newell, whose company makes the hardware, and learned that he views this kind of product as something that a neophyte should not attempt to install him/herself, so he doesn't want to tell anybody how to do it lest they blame him for botching up their computer. I can see his point. However, I have no such liability, so I can freely tell the world how I chose to mount the board: I simply plugged in the ribbon cable supplied with it and folded the ribbon cable over so the board lies on top of the chips on the motherboard in that area, with its solder side facing up. It happens that it nestles contentedly in that position with nothing touching but the plastic of the ICs and the ribbon connectors. Also, it sits at just about the same angle as the sloping shield cover, with about 1/8 or 3/16 inch to spare. I simply attached two strips of adhesive-backed foam rubber to the shield cover over this area so it would clamp down on the foil side of the memory mapping board when the shield is installed. (I first tested the foam with my ohmmeter on the highest megohm range to make sure it was not at all conductive.) The resulting installation looks very satisfactory to me; the only thing you have to worry about is watching out for where the memory board flops if you turn the motherboard upside down while you have the shield cover off and power applied! I found it convenient to substitute a length of ribbon cable for the hookup wire they supplied to make a run of 5 conductors across the mother board to the PIA chip. I actually ran seven conductors of ribbon from the memory mapping board, and peeled off two of the to make the local connections in the middle of the motherboard, then ran the remaining five over to the PIA. This resulted in (ahem) an exceptionally neat installation, I thought. Also, I was able to arrange the cable so that it is easy to flop the memory mapping board over for inspection or servicing. RESULTS! The installation worked correctly the first time I fired it up, although I had a few scares because of differences in the way things operate. The instructions are vague about which switch position gives what OS chip, so you have to figure it out. Also, the OMNIVIEW OS uses the reverse convention that BASIC is only loaded if you DO press the option key. This convention makes good sense if you plan to use OMNIVIEW, as I do, mostly for word processing and maybe for Assembly language. TEXT QUALITY IN 80 COLUMN MODE (OMNIVIEWXL). Mind you, I fired this thing up on my Sylvania TV set, mostly because I couldn't wait to buy a monitor or add the monitor input jack I plan to put on the TV set -- I wanted to see if it worked! I was absolutely DELIGHTED to see that the 80-column text is entirely readable even on a silly TV set with probably 2 or 3 MHz of bandwidth through the IF amplifiers and whatnot! It's true, the edges are a little blurred if you tune for maximum blurriness (centered on the channel), but if you tune for best sharpness, the display is highly useable at least on the particular TV set I own. I do look forward to improved display quality when I do buy a monitor, but I am in no dire hurry to get one, now that I have seen the results on my TV set. If you know how the 80-column font is derived (in software), you will find it hard to believe that it can look this good. Not that I would want to send business letters out in this font, mind you, but of course normally one would do the actual printing with a printer rather than mailing out one's TV or monitor screen. Or doing a pixel screen dump, which is what you would have to do to print the actual OMNIVIEW font instead of your nice Near Letter Quality one. For purposes of entering and reading text on the screen, the OMNIVIEW font is quite satisfactory, although a few special characters take getting used to. The normal alphanumerics and punctuation characters all are highly legible. The numbers are if anything maybe more legible in 80 column format than in 40!!! The word processor provided (Omniwriter-80) is an enhanced version of SpeedScript, but basically works the same way. Cursor operations are a little more reasonable than with vanilla SpeedScript. No manual was provided, but COMPUTE! publishes a book on SpeedScript for $9.95, and Omniwriter responds to the commands described therein just as the book says. Note: OMNIVIEW also provides improved compatibility with software written for the old Atari 400 and 800. I haven't run into this, but some software that runs on those machines does not on the 800XL because the authors ignored some of the rules of the operating system to gain a slight performance advantage. With OMNIVIEW, most of the old software runs fine on the 800XL. OMNIMONXL. I haven't really gotten to put OMNIMON through all of its paces yet, but from what I have seen it is something that serious programmers ought to buy first and ask questions later. Basically, it is a resident debug facility, with ALL that that implies. I.e., resident sector and file I/O capability. An assembler and disassembler that live in your machine even if you don't have a disk drive attached!!! Ability to scroll through memory with either Hex or ASCII display. Search for strings. Load a file with OMNIMON figuring out the sequence of sectors in the file for you. Print out a disk directory with no DOS loaded. Etc., etc. Interrupt execution of a cartridge program and look at memory, disassemble it to see what makes it tick. Move it to RAM, disassemble it, modify it, write it to disk, you name it! Of course, you have to have a disk drive attached to write to disk!!! 256KXL MEMORY EXPANSION. ...Or maybe you don't!!! If you add the 256KXL expansion, you can write to Ramdisk! There's not much to say here except that of course a disk drive simulated in RAM is many times faster than a real drive. When copying disks, for example, one version of DOS that I use prints messages to the screen "Reading Source Disk", "Writing Destination Disk", etc. The message for the Ramdisk always comes up almost instantaneously, while the one for the real physical disk takes a bit of gyration of the disk and several seconds to complete the operation. Ramdisk operation is the main reason I bought the 256KXL enhancement, and it looks as though it will indeed be very useful, but I will want to work on automating operations like booting up and copying everything to Ramdisk in one operation. Right now I have to do this in several steps. A nifty Disk Operating System called MYDOS is provided along with the 256KXL upgrade, to facilitate using the Ramdisk. MYDOS is especially deserving of the adjective "nifty" because it can support hard disks and lets you configure weird disk structures. Also, it supports hierarchical directory structures, which may not be needed on floppies at 92K bytes each but sure would make life easier on much larger disks. One quirk of the memory expansion should be mentioned. It is LARGELY but NOT EXACTLY compatible with the 130XE. I was disappointed when I found this out, but it is not clear that there is a better way to implement the memory mapping (though I personally think there is). The net effect is that if the ANTIC (display processor) chip is mapped to the new extended memory by a software package that you want to use, you will have to install a manual switch to select this mode. Normally, the display is in an area of memory unaffected by the mapping to extended memory banks, but some special applications that need a lot of display memory might want to use the extended memory to hold graphic images. According to Wes Newell, only one software package he knows of at this time does this (Typesetter, by XLENT), so many users won't ever need the switch. However, "ever" is a very long time, and there will doubtless be other packages developed that will need the switch, or maybe even won't work because they want to switch this mode dynamically. Of course, such packages wouldn't work on an unmodified 800XL in any case. SOFTWARE SUPPORT. I bought these enhancements through CDY Consulting, which supplies most of the software. My initial impressions of the software are very positive, though of course I have not by any means run everything through all the possible weird situations that might show up bugs or problems. Still, one gets a "feel" for the personality of a software package fairly quickly, and I am getting exceedingly good vibes about the quality of CDY's products. (Don't blush, David, I am just trying to be objective.) Some users may object to the fact that CDY has taken the liberty of changing a few time-honored conventions, like OPTION KEY DOWN = omit BASIC and CTRL-1 for scrolling on/off. (CDY uses OPTION KEY DOWN = include BASIC and the HELP key for scrolling off/on, in the OMNIVIEW O/S.) However, I found I like these conventions better than the original ones, once I got used to them, and especially in the context of word processing. OVERALL IMPRESSION. These enhancements appear to be all I had hoped for and more, with the single exception of the incompatibility with the 130XE which I mentioned earlier regarding ANTIC memory mapping convention. I would have liked it much better if I had ended up with exact compatibility with the 130XE plus an extra 128K of memory. As I said, I personally believe that a more compatible memory mapping implementation is possible, with only slightly increased chip count. If there is a wave of enthusiasm for such a revision among 800XL owners, it MIGHT be possible to get one. If you want to upgrade your 800XL to be EXACTLY compatible with a 130XE but with more memory, get in touch with CDY or Newell industries and plead with them, as I have done, and maybe the next revision of the 256KXL board will be improved! The RAMROD and OMNIVIEW/OMNIMON seem to be just about perfect as they are, and of course the 256KXL is VERY NEARLY exactly 130XE compatible and EXACTLY compatible with the 800XL already. (Also, in fairness, the incompatibility that remains affects only certain specialized software with a lot of visual display storage requirements, and in most cases can be dealt with by means of a mode switch added to the back panel.) All in all, I am very pleased with the results of my 800XL upgrade after a week of experience with it. I think the upgrade will make all the difference in the world in word processing (OMNIVIEW and Ramdisk capabilities) and in Assembly language tinkering (OMNIMON). John Sangster jhs at mitre-bedford.arpa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTE: I have no financial interest in or connection with either CDY or Newell Industries other than being a customer. The above opinions and impressions are transmitted solely for the information of other Atari 800XL users. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DYOUNG@USC-ISID.ARPA (C. David Young) (03/03/86)
John, Thanks for the thorough reviewof of OMNIVIEW XL, OMNIMON XL, Ramrod XL, and 256KXL. I would like to add only a few more comments: I think you implied that you could readaccess the ramdisk from OMNIMON XL. This is true of the 8K OMNIMON and the AXLON ramdisk but it is not true of OMNIMON XL and 256KXL. OMNIMON XL has no ramdisk handlers. OMNIVIEW XL does. You would not have has to do any filing on the Ramrod had you installed a socket to elevate the board slightly. When those instructions swere written all 800XLs had sockets. I have pleaded with Newell to make the 256KXL instatallation instructions more explicit. Diagrams showing where to route the wires and exactly how to mount the boradordard would be very helpful. He claims that he does no want to make it too easy on a novice so that they will not attempt to do the installation if they do not have the skills. I of course totally disagree! Ass I mentioned to you before, I am busily converting AtariWriter+ over to work with OMNIVIEW. This is especially challenging because there is , at least on the surface no memroyory after the program is loaded in! This is a real problem becoause the OMNIVIEW secreen takes 7K whereas the GR.0 screen takes only 1K. But then I knowticednoticed that the 130XE version uses all 5 of the 16K banks at 4000-7FFF, but that 1 bank is only partially used. It appears that they only used 4K of this bank, leaving 12Kplenty of room for the OMNIVIEW screen. Howverever, there is a slight problem in that this is not the main bank ($D301=$FF). If it were then I could direct ANTIC to stay with this bank even though were swapping in other baknnks with the CPU. I plan to overcome this problem by reassighgning the banks. By the way, having ANTIC follow main memory just happens to be the conveiontntion that Newell chose fot tr the 256KXL, unless of course you add the switch to make it fiollow memorybanked memory. By the way, please ignore the typos. I am using a termianlnal that does not make it too easy to make corerections. David Young -------