Another Disk Operating System for OSI Superboard II / C1P

[Thomas]

Recently I converted my old Superboard II disk operating subsystem to standard RAM locations. It runs under SYM600 or CEGMON and does not require a special ROM version any more.

The disk operating system works closely together with BASIC in ROM and supports 5.25" or 3.5-inch floppy drives single and double sided. In the past, I was using a self-made Elektor floppy disk controller card and a double sided YE-625 (Y-E Data Inc.) disk drive. With a data separator board on a 610 disk controller, it is working as well.

This YE-DOS called software will link into the BASIC interpreter and provides a conveniently way to work in BASIC program code or directly from the input line. Twenty two new BASIC commands are included as described in the attached YE-OSI DOS X3.54.pdf document.

YE-OSI DOS X3.54.pdf

(433.84 KiB) Downloaded 25 times

At boot, start with "D" and Cold start. For example, DIR will show files on the current disk and SEL 0 or SEL 2 will change drives.
If you want to test it and you have already a GOTEK drive connected to your machine, YE-DOS TEST IMAGES.zip includes two HFE disk images, one for the Boot drive and a Demo disk. Both files are 35 track images, up to double sided 80 track drives are possible. If you don't have a GOTEK drive, you can use the attached IMG files on your preferred Emulator.
Set RAM memory to min 32k. Using it with a CEGMON ROM is my preference due to the Backspace capability.

YE-DOS TEST IMAGES.zip

(127 KiB) Downloaded 28 times

Some utilities can be found on the boot disk, like a disk Format or Chkdsk Basic program. These illustrate how to make use of the new Basic commands. If you insert a new disk into the system, YE-DOS will not automatically detect a newly inserted disk. Type DISK4 and the software will update the presents of a new disks.
In case of a simple disk change, type SEL0 or SEL2 to refresh the FAT directory. The command SEL 2 and DLOD"PINBAL" will load and execute the given program on the second drive.

YE_DOS.gif (118.19 KiB) Viewed 733 times

If your OSI is equipped with a semi-graphic character ROM for the upper half of the screen, BASIC commands like SCR, CLG and GDIS will provide line and text graphics. See GRDEMO.BAS example on the second disk.

Enjoy
Thomas

[davisgw]

Thomas,
I just downloaded your images and booted my GOTEK system...it works as documented. Thanks so much for another operating system for C1P.
But I'm curious about the history and origin of YE-OSI DOS. I did numerous Googles without success. And the document states this is "Version 3.54".
Could you please provide some of the history and background of this version of DOS? Thanks.

davisgw

[davisgw]

Hello again,
Since I tried the GOTEK images I created floppies from the supplied .img files. They appear to be correctly written and they also seem to boot
(I tried both on 2 systems) but when I enter any of the new commands I get a SYNTAX error. Then I tried to create new images using OSIHFE using the .hfe images as input but OSIHFE reports "UNKNOWN FORMAT".
Can you please post known good floppy images? Thanks.

davisgw

[davisgw]

Sometimes I cannot see the forest for the trees. It occurred to me that my GOTEK system also has a floppy drive so I booted the YE-DOS, executed FORMAT.BAS to the installed floppy, and typed DLOD "DCOPY" to copy the GOTEK boot track and files to the floppy disk. The new floppy appears to load and run fine!
I will try to do a disk dump to see if the image will be good. What do you think Mark?

[davisgw]

As promised I'm posting the floppy diskette image I transferred from a working floppy. It is an image, not a .zip file, to conform to the upload requirements. Let me know if it is bad.
Enjoy.

[bxdanny]

All it seems to do is present that fancy menu box of C, W, and E. C acts just as if I had pressed C initially, and likewise W acts like pressing that initially. E doesn't seem to do anything. No extra functions are available,

EDIT: The original .img files from YE-DOS TEST IMAGES.zip, namely YE-OSI_BOOT_XV54_40.img and YE-OSI_DEMO_XV54_40.img, do both work for me (in WinOSI), but since they are not in a known format, it makes sense that creating actual diskettes of them with Disktool wouldn't work. Why copying from the Gotek to the real disk drive wouldn't work right, I don't know. The DOSSUP file is listed in the copy's directory, but apparently not recognized by the YE-DOS boot code - nor are any of the files on it actually loadable when booted from the good copy.

As you must have noticed, the disk numbering is different from what OSI uses, with 0, 1, 2, and 3 corresponding to A, C, B, and D, respectively.

The new commands are all implemented by hooking the CHRGET routine at $00BC by putting JMP $70B7 there. The page 2 vectors and the JMP at $0003 are not altered. But the current disk drive is stored at $0230 (560) for some reason.

Edit #2: Or perhaps you just posted the wrong image here? If that's not the case, try using FORMAT but without the DCOPY. You could then use FCOPY to copy files over.

[Mark]

I didn't spend too long looking into this, but it seems like the software reprograms the disk controller to use a 10bit 8N1 encoding format whereas all other OS65D compatible formats use an 11 bit 8E1 encoding. This change is invisible to WinOSI since it only emulates disk byte I/O. Without the parity bit, data errors will go unnoticed unless the disk format uses some sort of sector checksum like OS65U, however more data could fit on the track, but probably not much due to 8 inter-sector gaps. Also because of this change, no existing OSI disk copy program will work to copy disk images between Gotek and real floppy drives. It would need to use 8E1 on the boot track, and 8N1 on later tracks I believe. Also OSI raw dump will not dump data correctly unless changed to 8N1.

The YE-DOS HFE images are 35 track single sided images, and look to be 8 sectors per track using ISOIBM_FM_Encoding.

YE54_BOOT_35.hfe

ye-dos.jpg (100.51 KiB) Viewed 13 times

C:\TEMP\YE-DOS>osihfe -i YE54_BOOT_35.hfe
HFEFile: 35 tracks, 1 sides, bitrate:250, Encoding: IBM_FM
Warning: HFE file encoding (02) is not "UNKNOWN_ENCODING"
osihfe: Unable to determine target format from HFE file

Maybe Thomas will post the specifications for his floppy format?

[bxdanny]

Maybe Thomas will post the specifications for his floppy format?

Actually, it looks like he did, starting on page 32 of YE-OSI DOS X3.54-1.pdf.

And davisgw seems to be saying that he WAS able to make a working YE-DOS diskette by booting the .hfe image and using YE-DOS itself to copy from the Gotek to the physical disk drive. Which makes sense, since the computer can't tell the difference between the Gotek and an actual floppy, right?

So I'm wondering if either

(1) he simply posted the non-working image rather than the working one somehow, or

(2) making an image file from the working YE-DOS diskette put too many (or too few?) bytes into some of the inter-sector or inter-field gaps, resulting in an image that WinOSI doesn't process correctly.

How does the image he posted (YE-DOS_BOOT_XFR_354.IMG) compare with the original one (YE-OSI_BOOT_XV54_40.img)? The original DOES work in WinOSI, but of course could not be used to produce real diskettes due to the unknown gap lengths and the 10- vs. 11-bit encoding needed.