| Subject: RE: Atari boot disks, how do you make them?? |
Author: Jason Frear (07-145.026.popsite.net)
Date: 06-20-2001 06:58
Atari 8-bit disk drives are intelligent, much more so than a typical floppy slave drive on a PC. The procedure for booting a diskette is built into the disk drive hardware. It automatically seeks out the dos.sys file after it reads sector 0 for the boot strap.
The only time dos.sys is on the diskette and won't load is if a "DOSless" boot menu like Fender's autoloader is written to sector 0. Its a great program since it takes an instant to load and creates a selectable menu for running binary programs by reading the file table off of track 21. It doesn't work with BASIC programs, or programs that need to go back to the disk drive to fetch data.
Jason.
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