Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

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zephyr
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Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

I know very little about the Cumana and Delta disk systems. My current basic knowledge of these systems is as follows:
DragonDOS Controller + DragonDOS/SuperDOS (THE BEST)

Cumana Controller + CumanaDOS = DragonDOS compatible (GOOD)

Delta Controller + DeltaDOS = NOT DragonDOS compatible (JUNK)
I would like this thread to become a place where myself and all other members of the forum can learn everything there is to know about all of the floppy disk drive systems which have been available for the Dragon 32/64. Please post all you know to be accurate and helpful about the hardware and DOS firmware of these disk drive systems.
zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

The following information is also based on my own basic knowledge of the Dragon disk drive systems. I have never owned a DeltaDOS or CumanaDOS disk drive system. Most of what I know about these systems came from reading articles in Dragon User (and other) magazines. It is possible that some of the information about the Delta and Cumana systems may not be 100% accurate.


The first ever disk drive system to become available for the Dragon 32 was the DeltaDOS system from Premier Microsystems. It was well built and came with a pretty good DOS (except for the SAVEM command which did not allow the third option of an EXEC address) and an excellent user guide.

The next disk drive system to become available was the official DragonDOS system from Dragon Data. This system was also well built and came with a pretty good (but very buggy) DOS and a rather poor user guide. This system has much faster disk read/write times than the Delta system. Floppy disks from this system are NOT interchangable with the Delta system.

The third disk drive system to become available was the CumanaDOS system from Cumana Ltd. This system was also well built and came with a pretty good DOS and user guide. The controller of this system was so similar to the DragonDOS controller that you could fit a DragonDOS ROM and it would work exactly like the DragonDOS system. Floppy disks from this system were not 100% compatible with any of the other two systems unless you swapped the CumanaDOS ROM for a DragonDOS or compatible ROM such as SuperDOS or DOSPlus. Floppy disks could then be swapped between the Cumana and DragonDOS systems once the CumanaDOS ROM had been replaced with a DragonDOS or compatible ROM chip.


Copies of the user guides are all available here at the Dragon Archive.

DeltaDOS system user guide

DragonDOS system user guide

CumanaDOS system user guide


An article published in the May 1985 issue of Dragon User (Correcting the faults and problems with Dragondos by Philip G Scott) describes in detail all of the known DragonDOS 1.0 bugs and how to fix them. I have attached copies of DragonDOS versions 1.2 and 1.2a which include all of the bug fixes and enhancements from that article. DragonDOS 1.2 is a copy of the original DragonDOS 1.0 which has been patched with all of the bug fixes and enhancements from Mr Scott's article. DragonDOS 1.2a is the same as DragonDOS 1.2 but with a bug fixed CHAIN command and an added routine which gives a superdos-like paged directory display.

Mr Scott also did a complete bug-free rewrite of DragonDOS with enhancements which he called DOSPlus. There is a very interesting review of what appears to be a very early version (2.3) of DOSPlus (BOSS DOS by R.E. Warwick) on pages 6 to 8 of the February 1987 issue of Dragon User magazine. The last known official release version of DOSPlus was 4.9B.

The Spanish company Eurohard later released DragonDOS 4.0 which they also claimed was an enhanced bug-free version of the original DragonDOS. But, according to the following quote from the "BOSS DOS" article mentioned above, their claim of a bug-free DOS could be false.
R.E. Warwick wrote: it also appears that all the DRAGON DOS version 1 errors have been corrected (including any still in version 4 from Eurohard)

After reading the above it would seem that the attached DragonDOS 1.2 is the only version of DragonDOS which has all of the bugs correctly fixed. Both SuperDOS and Eurohard's DragonDOS 4.0/4.1 still have bugs which have not been fixed.

There is a letter from Philip G Scott on page 2 (Letters) of the August 1988 issue of Dragon User in which he states that "SuperDOS E6 appears to be DragonDOS with about half the faults corrected".


EDIT: Archive updated on the 29th of March, 2014.
Attachments
ddos1-2.zip
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zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

Due to an error in the online copy of the article "Correcting the faults and problems with Dragondos by Philip G Scott" all previously uploaded versions of DragonDOS 1.2 are incorrectly patched. The error is at Problem 4, 3rd line down. The line reads "+179D 20 DD 12" but should be "+1795 20 E5 12". I have updated the above archive (ddos1-2.zip) and the archive attached to my paged directory display post (DIRv1-0.zip) with corrected copies of DragonDOS 1.2 and 1.2a.

You can read about all of the corrections to the original published article in the letter entitled "Patch problem" from Philip Scott on page 4 of the July 1985 issue of Dragon User magazine.
zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

I recently found the following statement about Eurohard's DragonDOS 4.0 in a review by the infamous Pam D'Arcy of an undisclosed version of SuperDOS on page 10 of the December 1986 issue of Dragon User magazine.
Pam D'Arcy wrote:Dragon-DOS 4.0 users will still be taking a giant step forward as 4.0 is still littered with bugs
Further proof that DragonDOS 4.0 and 4.1 (along with SuperDOS E6) are in fact still "littered with bugs".
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robcfg
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by robcfg »

I found an issue with 4.0 in which you delete a file, copy a new one with the same name several times, you'll end up with an unusable disk, and you'll have to format the disk.
zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

DragonDOS 1.2 is now available with further patching (DragonDOS 1.3) to fix a KILL command bug.
zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

New DragonDOS controllers are available. Further information can be found here, here and here.
Last edited by zephyr on Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
zephyr
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by zephyr »

An improved version of the DIR command is available for DragonDOS versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 4.0 and 4.1. Further information and downloads are here.
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Stig
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by Stig »

Rather than start a new thread, I thought I would post here as it is related.

What is the definitive version of DragonDOS ?

I recently got an original Dragon disk controller cart with DOS version 1 on it and want to put a new eeprom in it with the "best" version of DOS on there.

What is everyones opinion of the best version ?

Thanks
pser1
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Re: Disk drives and controllers for the Dragon 32/64

Post by pser1 »

Hi,
if I remember well, for instance Ciaran (Sixxie) had chosen DosPlus4.9 to work with to extend it in order to be able to access files in the CoCo-SDC card from Darren Atkinson.
I, myself, have used DosPlus50, the same with a bug correction and a better LIST command, to create an extender to be able to aply all of the DOS commands via Drivewire
to any VDK file attached at any DW4 server slot.

cheers
pere
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