fseipel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Frank E. Seipel) (10/23/90)
Having had the opportunity to use both the BlackBox from CSS (computer Software Services) and the MIO from ICD, I thought I would share what I have learned about these two unique pieces of hardware for the 8-bit Atari. The systems I have used include: 130XE computers (upgraded to 512K), 1-meg MIO, 256K MIO, BlackBox, Supra Modem 2400, Seikosha MP1300AI printer, 2 Happy 1050 floppy drives, an Adaptec 4000a hard drive controller, 2 Adaptec 5500 hard drive controllers, a Seagate ST225 20 meg hard drive, a ATASI 3046 40 meg hard drive, and a CMI 5516 13 meg hard drive. What is a MIO or a Blackbox? An explanation of just what the MIO and BlackBox are is in order. Both include a SASI/SCSI hard disk interface, a printer port, a RS232 port, and some type of printer buffer. The MIO comes with either 256K or 1 megabyte of dynamic RAM on board which can be used as any combination of ramdisk(s) and printer spooler. The BlackBox comes either with no user ram or 64K of static ram which can be used only as a printer buffer. Additionally, the BlackBox (BB) can use the standard extended banks of a 130XE as a 64K printer buffer. The RS232 and/or printer ports can be disabled in both units to allow an external device such as an Atari 850 interface to be used. Both come with clear manuals printed on 8 1/2 by 11 inch unbound paper. The pinouts for all ports are clearly shown in the manuals and there are examples showing how to set up a hard disk system. The BBS manual includes several short assembler listings showing some methods of accessing the BB from machine language. Appearance The MIO comes in a nice gray case with the SCSI connector and printer port on one end. The other end has the RS232 port, on/off switch, power plug, and two LED's - one is a power indificator and the other lights up when the MIO is busy. My 1-meg MIO has a second 9 pin plug on this end for a planned 80 column adapter which never happened. The 50 conductor ribbon cable which plugs into the computer is on one side. The BB comes with no case. Cases are available for it for $39.95 (and they are even black!). On the front edge is the connector which plugs into the 130XE. The other side has the SCSI connector, the floppy controller connector (see below), and the power plug. The printer plugs onto one end and the modem to the other. The BBS also has two LED's which serve the same functions as the ones in the MIO. Plugging it in The MIO has a 50 pin connector which plugs in to the parallel expansion port on a 600XL or 800XL. An XE adapter must be purchased for $16.95 to plug the MIO into a 130XE computer. This adapter plugs into both the ECI port and the cartridge port on the 130XE and has sockets for two cartridges on it. The second cartridge plug is primarily for R-Time 8 cartridge from ICD. The BlackBox is built to plug directly into the 130XE. It comes with a short 50 pin cable for plugging into an XL machine. No extra adapter is needed. For my own system, I use the XE adapter from ICD and plug the 50 pin cable on the BB into it (I use the R-Time 8 and this keeps the cartridge stack shorter). The MIO has the expected 9 pin and 15 pin d-connectors for plugging in your printer and modem. The BB comes with 34 pin card edges for use with 34 conductor ribbon cable. You can use both standard crimp-on connectors for both cables (use 25 conductor ribbon cable for the modem cable) or you can buy the cables you need from CSS. There is also an unused 34 connection card edge on the BB. This is for the floppy controller that CSS is planning to release. This floppy controller will allow the user to attach industry standard disk drives -- up to 80 track 720K - to the BB. The MIO comes with a heavy duty 9v power supply. The BlackBox comes with a power supply which has +12v -12v and +5v output. All three voltages are used by the BB. Menus Both the MIO and the BlackBox have menus. Here is a list of options available from the Main Menu of both: 1) Assign drives as floppy disks, or hard drive partitions. When assigning floppy drives, you can assign any physical floppy drive as and drive from D1: to D8: (and D9: on the BlackBox). Note: On the MIO ramdisks can also be defined. These ramdisks refer to MIO memory only - not memory available inside the computer. A DOS ramdisk handler must be used for memory in the computer. 2) Swap drives - shows up as 'Exchange Drives' on the BlackBox and allows you to swap the drive assignments of two drives. For example, you could swap drives 1 and 4. The drive assigned to D4: would then become logical drive #1 and you could boot from it while the drive that was drive 1 would then be addressable as D4:. I am writing this using PaperClip which I booted from my hard drive using this method. 3) Lock Drive - Write locks a drive if it a hard drive partition or a RAMdisk. 4) Save configuration - This writes the current configuration to the first sector of device 0,0 (the first hard drive on your system). If no hard drive is present this option does nothing. The other options available from these menus are different enough to need separate descriptions. The MIO Menu: The MIO Menu is entered by holding down the <Select> button and pressing <Reset>. This loads the menu into the computers program ram starting at address $3000. This destroys whatever was there, so it is best to re-boot the computer after accessing the menu. The Main Menu is the drive configuration menu. This is where you set up your hard drive partitions, partition the MIO ram into ramdisks, and assign floppy drives. The printer and RS232 menus are also accessed from here. Available from the Printer Menu: 1 - Pause/Resume printing 2 - Clear Spooler 3 - Print Repeat copies 4 - Set port type 5 - Set spooler size 6 - Set Port Number The 'Repeat Copies' option allows you to print copies of any text currently in the MIO print spooler. Setting the port type allows printing to either parallel and serial printers. This function is also used to turn line feeds on/off. Spooler size is adjustable in 32K byte increments from 0 (OFF) up to the maximum ram available on the MIO. Maximum available ram includes all ram on the MIO not already assigned to ramdisks. The port number can be set to P1:, P2:, or OFF. Available from the RS232 Menu: 1 - Set Baud Rate 2 - Set Stop Bits 3 - Set Parity 4 - Assign Port Number Baud rate can be set from 110 to 19,200 baud. Stop bits can be set to either 1 or 2. Parity can be set to None, Odd, Even, or Space. Since most terminal software handles these items, I am not sure why they are on the menu. Maybe it looked empty without some extra options (R1:, R2:, or NONE are the allowable port assignments). The BlackBox Menu: The BlackBox Menu is entered by pressing a button on the BlackBox. This menu does not use any programming ram and is therefore non-destructive. You can enter the menu and usually exit with no effect on the program you are running. Available from the BlackBox menu are: 1 - Drive configuration menu 2 - Port Status Menu 3 - 6502 Monitor From the Drive Configuration Menu you can partition your hard drive, assign floppies, add hard drive partitions to the partition list (explained below), enter the Controller Menu, or enter the Partition List Menu. The Controller Menu allows you to add up to 8 different hard drives to your system. The BlackBox allows you to have up to 96 hard drive partitions. The information on these partitions (size, start sector, controller and drive number, etc) is kept in the Partition List. You are allowed to name each partition with any name of up to 11 characters; 10 of which show up in the menu. The Main Configuration Table of the BlackBox has room for nine drives (and/or partitions). You can load any partition from the Partition List into the Main Configuration Table by going to the Partition List, moving the cursor to the partition you want and pressing <Return>. You will then be returned to the Main Configuration Table and asked what drive you want the partition loaded as. Options on the Port Status Menu are: 1 - I/O Sound On/Off 2 - RS232 Port On/Off 3 - Printer Port Number 4 - Printer Line Feeds On/Off 5 - Spooler Status 6 - HD Partition List Start Sector 7 - Save Configuration Yes, I/O sound with a hard drive, heh! The RS232 port can only be turned on/off with no option to be assigned as anything other than R1:. The printer port can be assigned as any one of P1: through P8:, ALL, or NONE. Spooler status cycles between off, XE extended banks, and BlackBox ram (if the ram is available on the BB). This is also where you tell the BB where to look for the Partition List which takes up to 14 sectors and can be located anywhere on the first hard disk on the system. You can save the configuration here as well as from the Drive Configuration Menu. The 6502 monitor is the best I have seen for the 8-bit Atari. It doesn't have as many features as others but it is transparent to the system and does a MUCH better job of interruping a program than either DDT or Omnimon. I have tetired my Omnimon and never used DDT much anyway. With the BB Monitor you can interrupt a program, examine/change memory, and usually resume right where you left off. Ever had a lockup you couldn't get out of by pressing RESET? With the BB Monitor you can change the program countert to point to $E477 (the cold start vector) and when you exit the BB the computer will cold start. This is nice for saving the files in your ramdisks. Note: While snooping in the BB ROM I discovered that holding the Help key and pressing Reset causes a cold start. Holding Shift-Help does not cause the cold start. This feature was not mentioned in the documentation. Software Other than programs to form hard drives, the only software I am aware of for these devices requires SpartaDOS. There are programs to: 1) Swap drive assignments 2) Lock/Unlock drives/partitions 3) Load/Save configuration tables from/to disk files 4) Load/Save BB partition lists from/to disk files 5) Print information contained in configuration files and partition list files 6) Load a partition from the partition list into the configuration table of the BB. There are also some .CMD files used by BBS Express Pro! sysops to work with the MIO. I am sure there is software available that I don't know about or forgot to mention here. Miscellaneous There are two buttons, two switches, and a bank of eight dip switches on the BlacKBox. One of the buttons is used to access the menu. The other dumps the screen to the printer. This can be done at any time. One of the swiches allows you to select either text or graphics mode for the screen dump. In graphics mode all Atari graphics characters appear on paper just as they do on your screen. In graphics mode, screen dumps take the full width of 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper. This makes a Graphics 0 screen look like Graphics 2 on the printout. The other toggle switch write protects ALL hard drives. This is handy when you want to try out a new program and don't want it to mess with the hard drives. The dip switches are used as follows: 1) Force printer fauly line to NO FAULT. This causes the BB to not send any data to the printer. You could have another printer interface (and printer) attached to your computer and control which printer prints with this switch. 2) Enable hard disk port/high speed floppy SIO. This allows you to disable access to your hard drives and disable the BB's high speed SIO code for floppy disks. 3.) Enable parallel printer port 4) Enable RS232 port 5) Enable printer line feeds 6) Printer is a Prowriter (Used by graphics dump routine) 7) MIO compatibility mode where hard drives are concerned. The MIO inverts all data as it writes to the hard drive. In normal mode, the BlackBox doesn't do this. Flipping this switch to the MIO mode allows a hard drive to be used by either the MIO or the BlackBox. Note: This affects ALL hard drives that are online. 8) Unused * Switches 3-5 are mainly for systems with no hard drives online. If a hard drive is present this information is contained on the configuration sector. The BB gives more storage capacity on hard drives than does the MIO. It is able to format a drive using 512 byte sectors. These are accessed as 256 byte sectors after formatting. (Each 512 byte physical sector contains two 256 byte logical sectors). CSS claims that using 512 byte sector format can add up to 20% to the storage available on a hard drive. I gained a little over 10% formatting my 40 meg hard drive in this mode. I have a 40 meg drive that formats out as follows: Format Type Sectors MIO 256 byte sectors 146685 BB 256 byte sectors 148994 BB 512 byte sectors 162530* *This is the number of logical (256 byte) sectors The onyl way I have fouund to empty the printer buffer on the BlackBox is to enter the port status menu and cycle the buffer off/on. Printing through the printer buffer with either the BlackBox or the MIO slows down both the printing process and the computer (especially when accessing other devices like disk drives). Reliability The MIO has been plagued by problems and rumors of problems since it was released. I personally know of at least 11 MIO's that had to be sent in for repairs at one time or another. (And I know only 8 people who own MIO's). I bought my MIO's second hand and both had been sent back by the original owners to be fixed. Here are some problems I have experienced when using the MIO: 1) Wierd things have happened when I used the printer buffer. Everything from wierd flickering and characters showing up on the screen to garbage being sent to the printer. 2) I could not use my Mac/65 cartridge and the ram in the MIO at the same time. When I tried, the ramdisk(s) formatted themselves whenever they felt like it and I had to use a sector editor to recover anything important. To my knowledge, no one else has had this particular problem. 3) When using terminal programs the MIO frequently locked up on me while I was online. I suspect that this is a problem when the MIO is the originator of a call because I know of many BBS's using the MIO that have been online for a long time with no such problem. Note: Boterm 1.20 claims to solve this lockup problem by supplying its own handler for the MIO which also allows it to transfer at a true 19,200 baud rate. I have had no problems with the BlackBox except when I wired it into my 230 watt power supply. I reversed the +12v and -12v lines and fried a couple of chips. A normal person would not have done this. Product Support ICD has apparently lost interest in the Atari 8-bit machines. At this time they offer little support for the MIO. If anything goes wrong, they are not likely to offer any help to the user at all beyond fixing them for $40.00+parts+shipping. My own experience with ICD has left a lot to be desired. I have been using ICD products since about 1984. I use the SpartaDOS X-cartridge and when I first got my MIO, I couldn't exit the menu without the computer doing a cold-start. Thinking something was wrong with the MIO, I called ICD for help. I asked for technical assistance and my call was forwarded to Howard. I explained my system and the problem to him and he told me that the MIO was faulty and to send it in for repairs. He informed me that repairs would cost $40.00+parts+shipping. Well, it turns out that exiting the MIO menu with a cartridge plugged in causes a cold-start with all MIO's. So much for getting good help from ICD for their 8-bit products (in fairness to ICD, I heard that they do a better job supporting their ST product line). CSS, on the other hand has proved to be a gold mine for Atari 8-bitters. As I mentioned above, I fried a couple of chips on my BlackBox. I called CSS and (with some embarassment) told Ron exactly what I did. Instead of saying "Send it in with your wallet, checkbook, and credit cards', he told me exactly what chips I had probably fried. I found the chips at Radio Shack (for about $2.00) and fixed my BlacBox. These folks really do care! The people at CSS have answered some pretty dumb questions for me (and one or two intelligent ones too). They have even helped people with their ICD products. They have also give me any technical information I needed - or thought I needed - to write programs for the BlackBox. Trivia BB really stands for BobBox (For Creator Bob Puff). Conclusion The MIO has been plagued with reliability problems. The RS232 handler has been known to cause lockups when online and drops the carrier (hangs up the modem) when RESET is pressed. The print spooler sometimes does wierd things and is only semi-reliable. I have been told that the spooler sometimes writes to hard drives instewad of the printer. I kept the spooler turned off when my hard drive was attached. I just didn't want to verify this the hard way. The MIO is also known to have (electronic) noise problems, especially when used with 130XE's. The result is loss of ramdisk configuration and/or contents. I have only heard a few complaints about the hard disk interface on the MIO. I have experienced no problems with the hd interface. Pretty is as pretty does. I have found the BB to be a far more reliable tool than the MIO. It is more flexible in most areas, offers more options, and product support is just fantastic. And it costs less too. The only problem I have heard of regarding the BB had to do with printer dumps when an older Gemini-10X printer was used. A ROM upgrade has fixed this problem. The RS232 handler doesn't cause lockups, and you can press RESET without losing the carrier. I have never had any wierd stuff happen when using the printer handler. I don't have the 64K spooler on the BB but am sure it meets up to the standard of the rese of this fine product. The screen dump feature works weel. It will dump any graphics 0-2 screen with no problem and has no problem with most other graphics modes. The hard disk interface works flawlessly and allows use of 512 byte as well as 256 byte sector formats. The BB also has an MIO compatible mode so that you can use hard drives that have been written to by an MIO. CSS claims that the BB is up to 20% faster than the MIO depending on the brand of controller and drive used. I noticed only a slight increase in speed after converting to BB format using my Adaptec controllers with 3 different brands of hard drives. I really like the BlackBox. I heartily recommend the BB over the MIO and encourage all 8-bit Atari users to support CSS. After all, they are supporting us. Now if they would only get that floppy controller out... The BlackBox $199.95 The Black Box with 64K RAM $249.95 BB Case $39.95 Available from: Computer Software Services P.O. Box 17660 Rochester, NY 14617 Phone: (716) 586-5545 BBS: (716) 247-7157 The MIO w/256K RAM $239.95 The MIO w/1 meg RAM $469.95 XE adapter $16.95 Available from: ICD, Inc. 1220 Rock Street Rockford, IL 61101 Phone: (815) 968-2228 BBS: (815) 968-2229
umhild11@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Jeff 'Zar' Hildebrand) (10/24/90)
I just finished reading the above-mentioned article, and I must say that it presented a good deal of useful information. The odd thing that I noticed (and that prompted me to post this message) is that I have NEVER encountered a single bug that is mentioned in this article. I don't know if I am just lucky, my mine performs flawlessly. Mine is the 1Meg version, and does not have the monitor port, so I suppose it is a slightly new model, and perhaps some of the bugs were repaired. Oops, I just remembered that I did encounter one of the bugs mentioned in the article - if I used BobTerm, and tried to do a file transfer with ASCII translation it would lock up. BobTerm 1.20 does in fact fix this problem. My print spooler displays none of the bugs mentioned, and I never loose my carrier spontaneously. I've had my MIO for about 3 years now, and I bought it 3rd hand. Jeff
fseipel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Frank E. Seipel) (10/24/90)
I personally have no experience with the MIO or Blackbox (I have neither; I have an old 11mb Corvus drive on an Atari 8oo). I know several people who have experienced problems with the MIO in running BBS's, and, in the early days at least, after it was first released, many were defective and had to be returned to the manufacturer for repair. Someone left me E-Mail to which I can't reply (I keep getting an error). So, to answer the question: No, I do not think it is possible to add memory to the blackbox, and if it were, it could probably be used only as a print spooler.