11–20 of 62 posts
> I've tried changing the fifth case to 2 heads, 80 tracks and 72 sectors... But it resulted in an I/O Error.
This happens because the BIOS (int 13) CHS read function encodes the sector number as a 6-bit value. (IIRC it's also 1-indexed, just to add insult to injury.) If you change the geometry to 2head/80[+]track/60sector, it works on everything I had on hand for testing half a decade ago.
+: Or more; it should work with up to 1024 tracks.
Not a fan of Calmira though, I do appreciate the original Windows 3 aesthetic.
MS Windows of some 3.x variety was apparently the original selected GUI for the Atari ST, intended to be running from ROM… however, MS couldn’t apparently get it to fit in less than a couple of megabytes, hex dumps of the code would show a hell of a lot of redundant x86 stuff in there, like references to hercules drivers and all manner of bloat that they couldn’t strip. They seemed to be disassembling the binaries to…
Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, whereas the Atari ST came out in 1985, so that story definitely doesn’t check out. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985 (though still much later than the ST) so maybe it was that?
MS Windows of some 3.x variety was apparently the original selected GUI for the Atari ST, intended to be running from ROM… however, MS couldn’t apparently get it to fit in less than a couple of megabytes, hex dumps of the code would show a hell of a lot of redundant x86 stuff in there, like references to hercules drivers and all manner of bloat that they couldn’t strip. They seemed to be disassembling the binaries to…
Reminds me of the 486 motherboard which would boot DOS with no SIMMs (RAM) in it. It had 64 kbyte cache on the motherboard...
Please use the author's page directly: https://sakamoto.pl/weblog/07-windows-3-flash-edition/