readers letter!
A reader writes! This one is from one of the Hungarian Enterprise scene
dudes, who read my fairly lengthy history of the machine from the last
issue, and decided to comment on it further. Welcome!
From: NŽmeth Zolt‡n <zozosoft@freemail.hu>
Date: 16 January 2006 23:08:31 GMT
To: cih@atari.org
Subject: Enterprise
Hi!
I read your article at here:
http://alive.atari.org/alive12/ent64.php
Great!
But I think, you don't know the whole story of Enterprise in Hungary,
because you are not perfect in the Hungarian language :-)
Some additional information:
Many Enterprise owners want to buy EXDOS card, but the official shops sold
only a few cards :( this started the non official hardware developments.
Many EXDOS clone were born.
The most important EXDOS clone is the Microteam EXDOS. This is not only a
floppy controller, it also has 512K RAM, and 3 sockets for EPROM's. Many men
copied this card pcb, and made very similar cards. This is the most popular
card in the early 90's.Gyula MŽsz‡ros is the best hw developer for the Ep at
this time. He developed the Bus Extension card, for attaching multiple
cards to the EP. And many other cards: 1MB RAM extension,6 socket EPROM/SRAM
card, Real Time/Clock, hw RS232 port (can used with serial PC mouse), XT
keyboard interface card, and a prototype co-processor card.
You can see most of these cards here:
http://enterprise.8bit.hu/Bovitmenyek/bovitmenyek.htm
The 6 Mhz Turbo Card was developed by the SMD Team.
Only one official Hungarian hw was developed: The hw Spectrum Emulator Card,
developed by the 'a' Studio. But because this card have many, many bugs, it
did not sell too well...
In 1993, I got a Spectrum Emulator Card as a gift :-) So I disassembled it,
made some modifications to the hw and wrote a completely new sw.The modified
Spectrum Emulator is more compatible with the Spectrum programs, and it has
more features: you can use the joysticks, the card can be used with other
cards as well, for example the EXDOS...
...And yes, you can load programs from floppy disk! An extra function too:
as you can save/load snapshot files!
My other hw things include: overclocking the Z80 to 7.12Mhz.
Overclocking the WD177x floppy disk controller chip, at 10Mhz you can format
the DD disk up to 13 sectors/track. And at 16 Mhz it can work with HD floppy
disks! (HD floppy drive, WD1772 chip, and 6Mhz boosted Z80 needed for this)
I replaced the 32K internal ROM to 64K EPROM, and modified and extended the
EXOS with many extra functions, I named this version as EXOS 2.3, You can
see this modified EXOS in some configs in the EP32 emulator.
The most important programmer is L‡szl— Haluska (Hsoft), he developed the
great file manager utility program, called as EPDOS:
http://www.ep128.hu/Ep_Util/EPDOS.htm
This is the Norton Commander of the EP :-)
Another great program of Hsoft is the Heass editor and assembler. This
program can use all of the available memory! The previous assembler programs
only used about 64K.
And the HWP,this is a WYSWYG word processor program with many functions, and
using all of the memory. (The internal WP only uses 16K!) This is the Word
for EP :-)
Current projects:
I developed a prototype IDE interface card:
http://enterprise.8bit.hu/Bovitmenyek/Picture/IDE02.jpg
I've started writing driver software. I started disassembling the EXDOS,
and discovered a very important things: the EXDOS from 1985, can handle
logical disk (at this time: partitions) up to 32MB without any
modifications!!! Only the require d low level driver program is needed to
extend the EXDOS.
This program is mostly completed, and working. You can use any EXDOS feature
at hard disk partitions. Because the EXDOS limitations (program from 1985!),
currently only a FAT12 filesystem is supported and a maximum number of 65536
sectors/partitions. But you can make 21 partitions (drive F: to Z:), I think
the total 672 MB disk space, is more than enough :-)
Some special hard disk utility (FDISK,DEFRAG,etc) will be written in the
immediate future. Now I working with Hsoft, on the EPDOS, developing a hard
disk compatible version.
Last December, I released a new version sw for the Spectrum Emulator Card,
this version can load .TAP and .TZX files, these are the most used formats
for Spectrum archives at the internet.
If you have zny more questions, please write to me!
Best Regards
Zolt‡n NŽmeth
(Zozosoft)
Ps: sorry for my poor english
That's alright Zoltan, I had a go at tidying it up! :-)
Thanks again for that update, and see you around. Hope you enjoy our continuing
interest in Enterprise stuff, and feel free to comment further :-)
CiH, on behalf of the Alive Team, June '06..
PS. Sorry for the delayed response, I don't know where time goes to!
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