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The
Fitting Room
All Good Things... |
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Mike
Jewison, AC Staff Columnist
It's A Small World
This being the final issue of AC, I'm feeling somewhat philosophical this month. Forgive me while I ramble a bit.
It's funny the way things work out. I live in a relatively small community about 40 kilometers north of Toronto, and to the best of my knowledge I'm the only owner of an 8-bit Atari in town. I've always felt a little isolated; even back in the heyday of the 8-bit computers all my friends owned Commie-64's. That's one of the great things about modems and networks: they really do turn the world into a global village. I may not have any 6502-based Atari friends in town, but via computer networks I have friends like Ben Poehland scattered over half a continent (actually, Ben's much more scattered than that, but that's another story :-). Considering the frequency and ease with which I correspond with my net-friends, they might as well live down the block. In fact, this magazine you're enjoying right now wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been for computer networks.
The staff of Atari Classics, too, is scattered around the world: from Itay Chamiel in Israel, to Don LeBow in Hawaii, to fellow Columnist Ed Hall who lives in Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle in Canada's Northwest Territories. I've never met any of these people face-toface, although I do communicate with some of them through electronic mail on an irregular basis. As fate would have it, my sister (who doesn't have the passion for computers that you and I do; I mean, she owns a Tandy of all things!) also lives in Yellowknife. So here you have Ed and me, thousands of miles apart, never met, both columnists for the Great Experiment known as Atari Classics. Wouldn't you know it, my sister works with Ed Hall's wife. Small world, indeed!
Back To Hardware Hacking
Last issue I made an ill-advised foray into the world of software, so I decided this month to wander back over to the hardware side of things. I figured after the problems of last time that hardware hacking would be easier on what's left of my nerves. Yeah, right.
As you know by now, my primary hacking computer is an 800XL which resides inside an old XT computer case. To the XL I have slowly added a number of peripherals: a TransKey adapter and 101-key PC keyboard (from DataQue), 256K memory upgrade (from Best Electronics), and a Black Box/Floppy Board combination (from CSS) to which I've connected two 5.25-inch floppy drives (360K and 1.2MB). One of the major features of the Black Box (BB) is its SCSI port which will support any industry standard SCSI hard drive. Even before I bought my BB I dreamed of owning a hard drive for my Atari so, figuring no time like the present, I decided to make the plunge.
New SCSI drives are plentiful these days. Although IBM clones are migrating from SCSI to other standards like IDE, many of the major players in the workstation market (like Sun and Hewlett-Packard) fully support SCSI drives. Many large SCSI drives now available have capacities from 1.3GB (that's gigabytes) and up. For my little of Atari 800XL that seems a little like overkill: I mean, I don't expect there was anywhere near a total of 1.3GB of software written for the Atari since it was first released back in the late 1970s. Just to put things in perspective, 1.3GB corresponds to roughly 15,500 SS/SD floppy disks -- as if I'm gonna have the time to play with over 15,000 software titles before I die!
Since I decided I didn't need a hefty drive like that (nor the hefty price tag that accompanies it), I decided to aim for a drive in the more modest range of 40-80MB. I thought this would give me more than enough capacity for my purposes at a reasonably low price. The problem is that new SCSI drives in the 40MB range are scarce as hen's teeth and, even if you can find a drive that size, the price differential between a 40MB drive and a 200MB drive is negligible.
I didn't feel like shelling out megabucks (OK, OK, kilobucks) for a new 40MB SCSI drive, so I decided to pursue an alternate route. I had heard a number of horror stories about people buying used hard drives but decided that for my needs, that was the way to go.
USENET To The Rescue
Many of you have probably heard of USENET, an integral part of the much-touted (and, if you ask me, vastly overrated) Information Highway called the Internet. USENET is the Internet's equivalent of a BBS and contains literally thousands of newsgroups. Some of these groups are devoted to the buying and selling of goods, so I decided to post a little notice seeing if anyone had a small SCSI drive they wanted to sell.
I got a number of replies, the most promising one from a guy who lives about 80km from my place. Alas, the deal fell through when he (apparently) took an offramp from the Information Highway and was never heard from again. A second posting resulted in a few more replies, the most promising of which was from someone who lives in Montreal.
After some haggling, we agreed on a price of $100 for a 5.25-inch, 40MB Quantum SCSI drive. I sent off a cheque (just a note to our Editor: since I'm Canadian, the word is spelled "cheque", not "check") and received the drive about a week and a half later. [Editor's comment: okay, you win. It's not my fault you guys up there can't spelllllll. - BP] I immediately ripped open the package, lovingly fondled the drive (making sure I was suitably grounded) and waited impatiently for quitting time to arrive so that I could take it home and plug it into my BB.
Grinding Away
Of course, I couldn't just get home and head straight for the computer. Oh, no. I first of all had to help get supper ready for the kids, entertain the kids, and get the kids off to bed. So it wasn't until around 9:00PM that I was able to slip off into the basement... er, Fitting Room, with the Quantum.
I had scavenged some scrap 50-pin ribbon cable and a couple of IDC (crimp-on) connectors from our recycle pile at work to fabricate a cable to connect the hard drive to the SCSI port on my BB. I plugged everything together, connected one of the power connectors from the PC power supply to the Quantum, and fired everything up.
The first thing to be done with a new hard drive is a low-level format. CSS includes a floppy disk with every BB, and included among the programs on the floppy is a routine which performs a low-level format of the drive. I loaded the formatting routine-- and it promptly told me the hard drive wasn't responding and that I should check my cables, which I did. Everything was fine, at least with the cables, which meant the problem lay somewhere else.
The documentation for the BB states that any hard drive connected to it should have parity disabled. On the underside of my Quantum was a row of eight jumpers, one of which was undoubtedly for controlling the parity. But since I received no manual with my used hard drive, I was at a loss to figure out which was the proper one. Each of the jumpers was accompanied by a two-character code which, I figured, likely indicated the purpose of the jumper in question. Some of them were trivial to decipher: the three marked A0, Al, and A2 obviously allowed you to the set SCSI ID address of the drive (from 08). Some of them were less intuitive, like SS and WS. But there was one marked PE, which I quickly deduced to mean Parity Enable. (Actually, I wasn't really all that quick. And the route by which I finally arrived at this conclusion was extremely convoluted, so I won't bore you with the details here.) I removed the jumper, powered everything back up and, sure enough, the BB and the Quantum could talk.
[Editor's note: The newer Quantum "slimline"3.5" drives in the ELSxxS series don't even HAVE a parity jumper. These drives are sold with Parity permanently enabled, and there's no way to change it. If you get such a drive, contact CSS right a way. For a small fee, CSS will provide you with a PAL chip you can add to your BB to overcome the problem. Other Quantum hard drives, such as those in the "PD-" and "LPS-" series, do have parity jumpers you can set (as of six months ago, anyway). The parity jumper on these drives is marked "EP": - BP]
I reloaded the format routine and started it up. The format only takes a few seconds, but afterwards it performs a verification of the media to ensure there aren't any bad sectors on the drive. The program told me I had just over 160,000 sectors on my drive, and since the verification would take some time, I decided to let it run unattended and check on it periodically. Unfortunately, the verification pass would never complete. I tried running the program three or four times, and each time I'd get an error message reading "Controller not responding. Check your cables." during the verification. The error was transient in the sense that it never occurred at the same part of the drive; it was truly random. Well, I knew the problem wasn't with the cables since I couldn't have gotten as far as I did with a bad cable, so I started thinking that my new drive was perhaps a little flaky.
I sent off an email message to Bob Puff, proprietor of CSS, to ask his opinion. Bob told me the verification routines in the BB formatting program drive the mechanism extremely hard, harder than in normal usage. One suggestion he offered was to try formatting the drive but bypass the verification. Of course, the risk with this is that if the drive is flaky I would very likely lose data down the road if and when the drive failed. As an experiment, then, I fired up the computer to see if Bob's suggestion would bear fruit.
Scuzzy SCSI
I never got that far. Once the hard drive spun up it emanated the most horrendous grinding sounds I've ever heard. And when I tried to run the formatting software it told me it was doing something but the busy light on the drive stayed dark. I got this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: my hard drive had just died.
So I wrote back to the guy from whom I'd purchased the drive. He claimed it was in perfect working order when he shipped it (which I have no reason to doubt), but the fact remained that when received its most productive use was as a doorstop. I tried to negotiate some compromise deal with him but he just stopped responding to me email pleas. He had my money and I had a dead hard drive-and the Latin phrase "caveat emptor" running through my head.
Needless to say, I was pi..., uh, miffed. So much so that I spread news of my misfortune to anyone who came within earshot. (Actually, I was able to get a lot done at work that week because people started avoiding me like the plague.) One person to whom I told the story is a guy who runs his own company and, among other things, dabbles with bringing dead equipment back to life. He asked if I'd let him have a look at the drive. Since it was useless to me I gave it to him. About a week and a half later, he got back to me and told me the drive was shot. (At this point, I'm thinking "Really? I wouldn't have guessed!") He then offered to buy it from me and also threw in a working, 40MB, 3.5-inch used Quantum drive in a combo deal. Well, my parents didn't raise any stupid sons so after thinking about it for a few milliseconds I said "yes". In a somewhat dazed state, I left his place $20 lighter but with a working drive. (And if it didn't work, I knew where to find him!) I still don't know what he wanted with the dead drive but, to be honest, I'm not at all sure I want to know anyway.
To avoid making a long story downright tedious, I took the new drive home, plugged it in, booted the computer, and ran the format software. The program came back and told me I had 16xxxx sectors on the disk. I then nervously watched the verification routine do its thing, and it finished with no reported errors. Hallelujah! I finally had a working hard drive!
Once the low-level format is finished, the drive is ready to use. The next thing to do is decide how to partition the drive. Partitioning allows you to segment your drive into a number of so-called "logical" disks-- "logical" because although they aren't individual physical drives you can consider them so. I brought up the BB Configuration Menu and set up the equivalent of eight 720-sector partitions on the Quantum. I picked 720 sectors because that matches the number of sectors found on a singlesided floppy. My intention was to copy a number of boot floppy disks to these partitions and then configure the BB to load one of these partitions as the computer booted.
As an experiment, I copied my backup copy of Scarborough Systems' "Your Personal Net Worth" to a 720sector partition, set that partition to be Drive 1, and saved my drive configuration to the hard drive. I then power cycled the computer, and upon rebooting YPNW loaded in from the hard drive. (The computer's actually pretty stupid in all this. All it knows is that it wants to boot the floppy in Drive 1. But the BB intercepts the computer's request to access Drive 1 and reroutes it the the hard drive partition instead.) It takes YPNW about 3 seconds to load in from the hard drive- roughly three times faster than it takes from an UltraSpeed formatted floppy and about 10 times faster than from the original disk. I copied a bunch of other programs I have to other partitions and tried them out as well. The results were generally similar to those of YPNW: programs would load from the hard drive roughly 10 times faster than from floppy.
I'm still playing with the hard drive. Eventually, I plan on setting up a number of large partitions (several megabytes each) and format them for use with MyDOS and SpartaDOS. There are also a number of great shareware packages out there which would benefit from their own large partitions: things like TextPro and DaisyDot III. Alas, as with all things around our house, time is always at a premium.
The moral of this month's adventure? Never buy a used hard drive from someone unless you can go and pick it up yourself. Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but I don't ever want to go through that frustration again.
Into the Sunset..
There's always a tinge of sadness when a chapter in one's life comes to a close. I'm saddened by the demise of AC, particularly since I feel like one of the half-dozen parents who saw it through gestation two years ago. I'm also saddened by what's happened with the magazine's readership and potential readership. I'm aware of a number of people who consider themselves avid 8-bitters but never subscribed, giving excuses like "Gee, I always meant to get to it" or "I don't have the money right now, maybe in a couple of months".
Unfortunately, AC couldn't wait for them. I guess these people figured AC would always be there, waiting with open arms for new subscribers. The truth of the matter is that as the number of subscribers began to dwindle, AC passed below the critical mass necessary for self-sufficiency. I guess what disturbs me most about all this is that this is not just another commercial publication disappearing due to lack of revenue. AC has always been "by the user, for the user". What we have here, then, is the 8-bit commmunity failing to support itself. Perhaps even some of the remaining hard-core users are being swayed by newer technology. Maybe people just plain didn't like AC. Whatever the reason, it appears our ranks are diminishing. I, for one, will be here to the bitter end, but it's starting to get a little lonely.
Although we've seen the last of Atari Classics in its present incarnation, it's entirely possible we may not have seen the last of The Fitting Room. Keep your eyes open-you never know when or where I may pop up again.
And in the words of some amateur astronomers when they part company, may you have clear skies ahead.
