Atari 130XE Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 39)

5 Oldrunner – Atari OS Rev. B

The Atari 400/800 is the only 8-bit home computer class that contains a well-designed

and structured operating system (OS). This allows for changes, extensions and improve-

ments without the need to adapt current programs. That’s why Atari could use a more

sophisticated OS in the later Atari XL/XE series. Annoyingly, there are programs (from

1980-1983) that don’t run on the XL series. This is the fault of the programmers who did

not stick to the oﬃcial programming guidelines.

To be able to use these incompatible programs on the Atari XL/XE, so called“Translator”

disks were published. They disable the OS ROM and copy the old OS version “Rev. B”

into the RAM which is located under the OS ROM. Although this works well in most

cases, it’s time consuming and unpleasant to always have to load this alternative OS. Only

a hardware solution where the old OS is stored in a kind of ROM that is always available

and unmodiﬁable will work with all incompatible programs. Unfortunately these so called

“Oldrunners” normally require modiﬁcations within the Atari.

With the

TURBO FREEZER

it is now possible to implement an Oldrunner without

modiﬁcations within the Atari. The memory management logic makes this possible. The

Oldrunner can be activated and deactivated using the switch labeled “

OldOS

”. Move the

switch to the right position

to activate the Oldrunner. Move the switch only while the

Atari is oﬀ. Otherwise the content of the RAM will not match the required content of the

newly selected OS version and the system will crash.

For various reasons, it’s best to only activate the Oldrunner if it is the only way to get

a program to work. While the Oldrunner is active, there is no built-in BASIC, no RAM

extension and no warm start. Pressing the

[RESET]

key while the Oldrunner is active

always (!) triggers a cold start and the content of the RAM will be lost. The key which

corresponds to the

[RESET]

key of the Atari XL/XE was called

[SYSTEM RESET]

in the

Atari 400/800 and triggered a non-maskable interrupt (NMI). It’s not very diﬃcult to

retroﬁt this key (see section 1.5.2) but it involves opening the Atari and is therefore rather

an expert task. Besides that, this key is not really needed anyway because most of the

incompatible programs are games which have mapped the

[SYSTEM RESET]

to a cold start

or a system crash. This is the ridiculous attempt to annoy the “crackers”, but misses the

point and only annoys the user instead.

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Atari 130XE Manual de usuario Pagina 39

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