MYIDE IMAGE MANAGER DOCUMENTATION
by Shawn Jefferson (sjefferson@shaw.ca)
Last Update: October 5th, 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
3.4.4 Marking images requiring BASIC
3.4.5 Changing an image’s category
3.4.7 Writing an Image to Disk
1. What does it do?
The MyIDE hard drive interface, by Mr. Atari (Sijmen Schouten) is an excellent and inexpensive way to connect a hard drive to your Atari 8-bit computer. The MyIDE OS allows you to setup multiple partitions on your hard drive and assign them drive numbers from D1 to D8. There is also a method of copying whole diskette images to the hard drive, and a method to select any single disk to boot. Historically, the diskette images were referenced by a four digit number, so you had to maintain a huge list of your disk images on paper. Recent versions of the MyIDE OS allow descriptions to be added to each image. However, there are limitations with this method, such as the inability to sort, categorize or search the image descriptions.
The MyIDE Image Manager addresses these issues and allows you to assign names to all your image slots, and provides the ability to create, modify, rename, categorize and do searches on all your images as well as boot them from the Image Manager.
2. How does it work?
The FDISK utility that comes with the MyIDE hardware (or my own MyIDE Config program) allows you to section off a portion of your hard drive to use exclusively for disk images. You can select the starting cylinder of this space (multiplied by 256) in FDISK.BAS or the built-in FDISK program (or my own MyIDE Config program.) The image space continues to the end of your hard drive. If you selected 20 in FDISK for the starting cylinder of the image space, and the hard drive has 7698 ($1E12) cylinders, then your image space would extend from 5120 ($1400) to the end of the hard drive. Each image will take up a couple of cylinders, depending on the number of sectors per track and heads your hard drive has, as well as whether you selected 720 sector images or 1040 sector images when configuring image space.
I have chosen to steal the very last image slot to store all the status information per image. This image slot is given a description indicating its use by the MyIDE Image Manager. These image status bytes are referred to as the "image table". It's important to note that the MyIDE Image Manager program will not overwrite the image table with disk images, but the built-in MyIDE image routine has no knowledge about the image table. This should not be a problem unless you overwrite the very last image slot.
Each image is allowed 30 bytes of description, and a couple bytes of status information. There are 64 image status records stored per sector (a sector stores 256 bytes on the MyIDE hardware) with version 4.x of the MyIDE Image Manager. The number of image descriptions allowed in the image table depends on the number of cylinders per image, but you should be able to get several thousand. That should be enough! In fact, you will probably run out of hard drive space before you run out of image table slots.
3. How do I use it?
3.1 Prerequisites
Atari XL/XE.
MyIDE Hardware by Mr. Atari
MyIDE OS (software patch or EPROM-OS) version 3.5F/4.x
Hard Drive setup with FDISK or MyIDE Config
Image Space enabled
3.2 Starting the program
You must have the hard drive setup using FDISK.BAS or MyIDE Config (also written by me) and image space enabled. You also must have the MyIDE OS installed (either the software OS patch, or a replacement MyIDE EPROM OS). Run the program from a DOS of your choice that works with the MyIDE drivers (MyDOS works very well). You will be informed if the hard drive is either not setup, or the MyIDE drivers/OS is not loaded, and the program will exit.
If the above prerequisites are met, the program checks if the image table has been setup. If it hasn't you will see a message that the image table is being created. This overwrites the last image slot as mentioned above. After the image table has been created, you will be asked if you want to import the built-in Mr.Atari Image Manager descriptions. This is an easy way to populate the image table if you have image slots already setup using the Mr. Atari Image Manager. The import will stop at the first slot that has a blank description or an invalid density byte. Once this has completed you should see the main menu of the MyIDE Image Manager.
3.3 The Interface
The Image Manager screen is laid out with the title and version number at the very top, with a listing of images (in grey) below that. Each image entry consists of a four character category label, 30 possible characters of description, and a possible status of deleted. Also, if the image has been marked as requiring BASIC, you will see a ‘B’ on the far right. Below the image listing is a red display line that shows the starting cylinder of each image, size of image in sectors (720 or 1040), density (SD=single, DD=double) as well as the current category view mode. The menu is directly below and shows possible actions. The key used for each action is highlighted in inverse video. At the bottom of the screen you should see a status line that shows the type of interface, internal or external, the type of MyIDE OS, SoftOS or RomOS and finally a short description of what screen you are in. The main screen is called the "image manager".
The main menu actions:
[C]reate: create a new image
[D]elete: Mark/Unmark the selected image as deleted.
Bas[i]c: Mark/Unmark the selected image as requiring BASIC.
[R]ename: allows you to rename the image.
[M]odify: modify the selected image (copy another disk over top)
Cat[e]gory: change the category of an image (prompts with a list of categories.)
[B]oot: attempts to boot the selected image
[S]earch: search the image list for matching text.
[W]rite disk: write the image back to disk (physical or ATR)
[A]bout: credits and thanks screen.
U[t]ility: drive information and options.
[Q]uit: quits the Image Manager program.
[V]iew mode: change the category view mode
Other useful keys (not shown in the menu):
Arrow Up/Arrow Down: scroll through the image list (don't use Ctrl)
Ctrl-Up/Ctrl-Down: scroll a screen at a time through the list
Ctrl-<letter>: go to the next image starting with that letter.
Tab: change the selected image’s category (rotates through all categories)
ESC: quick key to change the category view mode to ALL
RETURN: boot the selected image
Joystick control:
Up/Down: scroll through the image list.
Right/Left: scroll through the image list one screen at a time.
Button: boot the selected image.
Aside from the keys listed above, options are always shown with the key command highlighted in inverse video. Most of the options from the main menu also work in the search mode as well.
Each image can be assigned a four letter category and these categories can be completely edited by the user (see the section on editing categories below.) Pressing [Tab] will change the selected image’s category. Each press of the [Tab] key will cycle through the available categories. When a blank category is reached, you will be back at the view:all mode.
Pressing [V] in the image manager screen will toggle which category of images is displayed. The default is view:all. Each press of [V] will cycle through the list of available categories, going back to view:all when the first blank category label is reached. If no images are assigned to a particular category you will see a blank list. Pressing [ESC] from within the Image Manager view will set the view:all mode immediately.
Pressing [T] from the image manager will bring you to the utility screen. Here you will see information on the geometry of the hard drive (cylinders, heads and sectors), as well as the image space settings and image table information. Below this information display is a few boot options you can set. All these settings are remembered for subsequent sessions.
Screen [A]ctivity toggle allows you to set whether or not MyIDE hard drive activity is shown on-screen with background color changes on image boot.
[W]rite protect toggle controls whether or not the hard drive is write protected on image boot. There are also a few user interface options you can set.
Search [M]ode toggles between case-sensitive searches and case-insensitive searches.
If you are using APE (Atari Peripheral Emulator) version 2.3.9 or above, the [G]et APE description option controls whether or not when you create an image, the description is automatically filled in from the long filename of the ATR. If you are not using APE version 2.3.9 or better and you have this option turned on, nothing will happen and you will have to type the description yourself.
You can also clear the image table by pressing [C]. You probably don't want to do this once you have everything setup, but the feature is available in case you need it for some reason. Just the image table itself is cleared, the actual disk images are untouched. Of course, without the image table the Image Manager program is useless. The MyIDE built-in routine’s image descriptions are not cleared.
From within the Utility screen you can press [E] to edit the categories. You will be shown two columns of categories listed from A-T (20 categories.) Press the letter of the category you wish to edit. Type in the new category name and press [RETURN]. Pressing [RETURN] only will input a blank category. Remember that pressing [Tab] or [V] in the image manager screen loops once it encounters the first blank category, so your category names must be listed in order starting at A and continuing to the first blank category.
If you don’t wish to use categories and you find them distracting, you can assign the first category to be a space (using the space bar), and the second category to be blank.
From within the Utility screen you can press [S] to sort the categories. There are four options presented: by name ascending, by name descending, by category and by slot. Pressing a number from 1-4 starts the sort routine. An animated bar rotates to show activity. Sorting could take quite a long time (tens of minutes) depending on how many images you have and which sorting option you have selected. Pressing ESC cancels the sort, and pressing the spacebar minimizes the screen to give a small speed boost to the sorting algorithm. Only the image info in the image table is sorted. The actual image disk sectors are not moved. The MyIDE built-in image routine descriptions are also not moved.
Hint: To sort your images by category and also alphabetically within each category, first chose the sort by name, ascending option and when that finishes, select the by category option.
3.4 Working with images
Ok, so you've setup your MyIDE hardware, connected your hard drive, ran the FDISK program and setup the image space. Now you want to actually start working with images in the MyIDE Image Manager.
The first thing you will want to do is create an image. Press [C] to enter the create image routine. You should see a prompt that asks you to press any key to begin disk copying, or press [S] to skip the disk copy. Skip disk copy is to be used if you already have an image copied into that image slot using the built-in MyIDE image routine. This will allow you to retain these images and assign them descriptions.
Assuming you didn’t press [S], you will be prompted to insert the disk to be imaged in D1. No other disk drive is used for copying images. D1: can be a physical disk, or an SIO2PC/APE connected disk image, or any other type of device accessible as D1:. NOTE: The MyIDE Image Manager software automatically turns off the MyIDE SIO patch so that D1: will not, by default, try to copy a MyIDE partition assigned as D1: (you could re-enable it with Ctrl-Shift-E if you needed to image a MyIDE partition assigned as D1.)
The copy will proceed (screen activity is turned on here so you know something is happening and turned off after the image copy). You will either see a message stating that an error has occurred reading the disk, or a success message showing how many sectors were copied. Check the sector count carefully. Some SIO2PC/APE images are not a full 720 sectors. If you don't see the correct sector count you can use [M]odify to try the copy again, or press [ESC] at the enter description prompt to cancel.
Assuming a successful disk copy, you will be prompted to enter a description for the image. You will not be able to enter more than 30 characters in the description, and any character is allowed. If you are using APE version 2.3.9 or better and have the [G]et APE description option in the utility view turned on, the description will automatically be filled out from the long filename of the ATR in drive D1, which you can then edit or accept as is by pressing [RETURN]. Pressing [ESC] at this point cancels the image creation and no image entry is created.
Press [RETURN] and you should be back at the image manager screen with the newly created image selected. The image will be assigned the category of the last image you created.
Select the image you are interested in with the arrow keys and press [M] to modify it. This will enter the create image routine as described above, except instead of creating a new image you will be overwriting the old one. At the description entry you can press ESCape to keep the old description. Otherwise, this function works exactly the same as creating a new image. This feature allows you to overwrite images you no longer want.
You can mark an image as deleted by pressing [D]. You should see the word "DEL" displayed next to the image description in the image manager. Pressing [U] will remove the deleted mark. This does not actually remove the image, but simply marks it for display purposes only. To re-use this image slot, use the [M]odify option described above.
3.4.4 Marking images requiring BASIC
You can mark an image as requiring BASIC by pressing [I]. You should see the letter "B" displayed next to the image description in the image manager. Pressing [I] again will remove the ‘B’ mark. When an image marked as requiring BASIC is booted, BASIC will be automatically enabled by the MyIDE Image Manager. Note: for this to work with the flashcart version of the MyIDE hardware, you must be using Mr.Atari’s flash bootloader.
3.4.5 Changing an image’s category
Pressing the [Tab] key will change the selected image’s category (category names are defined in the Utility screen). Each press of the [Tab] key will cycle through the available categories until a blank category label is found in the category list, which will cause it to loop back to the beginning of the list. Every image has a category assigned to it.
3.4.5 Renaming an image
Select the image you want to rename using the arrow keys and press [R]. You will be shown the old description and then prompted for a new description. Pressing [ESC] keeps the old name. Rudimentary editing of the old description is supported. Ctrl-left arrow or Ctrl-right arrow will move you left or right within the string. Backspace will delete the character to the left of the cursor.
Select the image you want to boot and press [B] or [RETURN]. The Image Manager will attempt to boot the selected image, using the boot options currently set in the Utility screen. NOTE: Not all programs will work with a SoftOS, since the SoftOS must switch the ROM space to RAM and patch the OS with the MYIDE drivers. Some programs will switch this space back to ROM, or bypass the OS routines altogether. With a RomOS, most everything should work. Contact Mr.Atari to get an EPROM version of the MyIDE OS.
3.4.7 Writing an Image to Disk
You can write the selected image back out to disk (either a physical disk or an ATR using APE, AtariSIO or another virtual disk drive program). Pressing [W] will give you a prompt asking you to insert your disk into D1: or press [A] to have APE create the ATR automatically. Pressing any key besides [A] or [ESC] will start the copy. The density and size of the disk must match that of the image or you will get an error.
If you are using APE version 2.3.9 or better you can press [A] to have APE automatically create an ATR for you. You will be prompted for the path (on the PC side) to create the ATR in. The name of the ATR will be the description of the image. APE will automatically create the proper size and density of disk.
3.5 Searching Images
Pressing [S] from the main menu enters search mode. You will be prompted for the text to search for. The search may be case-sensitive or insensitive depending on how the option in the Utility menu is set. The search is not done by whole word, so searching for "Dog" would match any image that contained those characters: "Dog Daze", "Dog Daze II", "Dogged Determination" would all be matched.
After entering your search string, and pressing [RETURN] you will either see a message that no matches were found, or be presented with a list of images that matched your search string. Searching a large image table can take a minute or more. The search mode screen is very similar to the image manager screen. Your search term is shown on the bottom status line instead of the interface/OS details. The category view mode is automatically set to all in the search screen and cannot be changed.
Most of the actions that can be performed on the images in the image manager/main menu can be performed here. Pressing [ESC] returns to the image manager at the location of the selected image. You can perform another search by pressing [S].
There is a limitation of the search routine which makes it impossible to scroll upwards in the list once you have scrolled down enough to scroll the first matching images off the screen. If you want to see them again, perform a New [S]earch.
4. Disclaimer
This program is provided as-is and any damage to your data, your computer or your mental health is completely your own responsibility, and in no way will the author of the software be held liable.