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DOS XL is a discontinued Disk Operating System (DOS) written by Paul Laughton, Mark Rose, Bill Wilkinson, and Mike Peters and published by
Optimized Systems Software Optimized Systems Software (OSS) was a company that produced disk operating systems, programming languages with integrated development environments, and applications primarily for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. OSS was best known for ...
(OSS) for the
Atari 8-bit family The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE ...
of home computers. It was designed to be compatible with
Atari DOS Atari DOS is the disk operating system used with the Atari 8-bit family of computers. Operating system extensions loaded into memory were required in order for an Atari computer to manage files stored on a disk drive. These extensions to ...
which came shipped with
Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry. Based primarily around the Sunny ...
's disk drives, which had also been written by the same team.


Description


Features

A direct descendant of OS/A+, DOS XL provided additional features to Atari's equipped with
floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
drives. These included single and double density support, a
command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive command (computing), commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invokin ...
mode (called the command processor or CP), a
menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...
mode (an executable loaded in memory),
batch file Batch may refer to: Food and drink * Batch (alcohol), an alcoholic fruit beverage * Batch loaf, a type of bread popular in Ireland * A dialect term for a bread roll used in North Warwickshire, Nuneaton and Coventry, as well as on the Wirra ...
support, and support for XL extended memory and OSS SuperCartridge banked memory. Later versions included Axlon RamDisk support, Mosaic RamDisk support, BIT-3 support and BUG/65. In addition to supporting auto-booting AUTORUN.SYS files, DOS XL's batch features provided an auto-booting batch feature. Naming a batch file to STARTUP.EXC would have it execute batch commands on startup (same as OS/A+). Unfortunately, this feature wasn't compatible with some programs (e.g. AtariWriter).


Distribution

DOS XL was distributed on a
flippy disk The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the Floppy disk#8-inch floppy disk, 8-inch format th ...
. One side had the single-density version, the other had the double-density version. As more features and add-ons were included, these were placed on the double-density side only due to lack of disk space. The manual for DOS XL was a subset of OS/A+. OSS considered the manual an "addendum" to OS/A+. Over 150+ pages, it was bound at the spine, not in loose-leaf form like the OS/A+ manual. DOS XL came in two versions, 2.20 and 2.30 (2.20 users had to pay $20 to upgrade to 2.30). The last version was 2.30P. DOS XL originally sold for $30, but the price later increased to $39. File writing verify was turned off in DOS XL. This was due to OSS's own experience that resulted in faster writes with virtually no risk of errors. The command file VERIFY.COM was included to reenable writes with verify. Atari DOS 2.0S by default verified file writes to disk. Several disk drive manufacturers shipped DOS XL with their drives: Trak, Percom, Astra, Indus, Amdek, and Rana.


Commands


Menu Commands

C - Copy Files P - Protect Files D - Duplicate Disk Q - Quit to DOS XL E - Erase Files R - Rename File F - Files on Disk S - Save Binary G - Go to Address T - To Cartridge I - Initialize Disk U - Unprotect Files L - Load Binary X - Xtended Command


Intrinsic Commands

* @ - Begins execution of a batch file * CAR - Runs Cartridge * Dn: - Changes default drive * DIR - Directory * END - Tells DOS XL to stop batch execution (used in a batch file) * ERA - Erase file(s) * LOA - Load file(s) in memory * NOS - NO Screen. Turns off command echo to screen * PRO - Protect. Enables write-protect on file(s) * REM - REMark. Used for user remarks in batch files *
REN Ren or REN may refer to: Abbreviations * Orenburg Tsentralny Airport, IATA code REN, civil airport in Russia * Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN), Portuguese company * Renanthera, abbreviated as Ren, orchid genus * Ringer equivalence number ...
- REName. Renames file(s) * RUN - Jumps to run address * SAV - Saves a portion of memory to disk * SCR - Enables commands to be echoed to screen (for batch files) * TYP - Displays ASCII or ATASCII text files to screen * UNP - Turns off write-protect on file(s)


Extrinsic Commands

* C65 * CLRDSK * CONFIG * COPY * DO * DUPDBL * DUPDSK * INIT * INITDBL * MAC65 * MENU * NOVERIFY * RS232 * RS232FIX * SDCOPY * VERIFY


BASIC Extended Commands

* CLOSE * ENTER * GET * INPUT * LIST * LOAD * NOTE * OPEN * POINT *
PRINT Printing is the process for reproducing text and images using a master form or template Print or printing may also refer to: Publishing * Canvas print, the result of an image printed onto canvas which is often stretched, or gallery-wrapped, o ...
* PUT * SAVE * PROTECT (XIO 35) * UNPROTECT (XIO 36) *
RENAME Rename may refer to: * Rename (computing), rename of a file on a computer * RENAME (command), command to rename a file in various operating systems * Rename (relational algebra), unary operation in relational algebra * Company renaming, rename ...
(XIO 32) * ERASE (XIO 33)


Patch

Version 2.30p was a newer version to 2.30 to fix two problems. * In previous versions of ''DOS XL'', if you initialized a disk from the menu, the disk would not boot unless the file MENU.COM was on the disk. To alleviate this problem, type Q to quit the menu. Then type INIT or INITDBL from the command processor. Note: everything on the menu can be done manually from the command processor. * If you have a multidrive system and you initialized a disk in a drive other than one, when booted, the disk will always come up with the number of the drive on which it was initialized. To prevent this problem, use D1: as the destination drive. The patch for DOS XL 2.30 to make it a 2.30p:
OSS Disk Newsletter Fall 1986
Product News & Info
DOS XL - New-found Bugs
DOS XL Bugs and Fixes

BUG: The patch to convert version
2.30 to version 2.30p in our Spring
1984 newsletter didn't work.
FIX: Run the following program and
then use INIT with the "Write DOS.SYS
Only" option to write out the patched
DOS. Make sure that you don't have
DOSXL.SYS (either .SUP or .XL
version) active when you do this.
100 READ CNT:IF CNT=0 THEN END 110 READ START 120 FOR ADDR=START TO START+CNT-1 130 READ BYTE:POKE ADDR,BYTE 135 NEXT ADDR 140 GOTO 100 150 DATA 3,5481,32,1,21 160 DATA 29,5377,141,217,22,169,16 170 DATA 141,23,22,169,23,141,24,22 180 DATA 169,49,141,30,22,169,64,141 190 DATA 12,0,169,21,141,13,0,96 200 DATA 1,7425,112,0
BUG: INIT does not work if you use
drive numbers 4 through 8.
FIX: Run the following program:
10 OPEN #1,12,0,"D:INIT.COM" 20 FOR I=1 TO 116 : GET #1,C : NEXT I 30 PUT #1,ASC("9") : CLOSE #1


Legacy

Plans for DOS XL 4 were scrapped due to low demand and competition. OSS reissued OS/A+ 4.1, mainly for double-sided support. DOS XL, along with other OSS products, became part of ICD's catalog of Atari products in January 1988. However, DOS XL was dropped in favor of ICD's
SpartaDOS Atari DOS is the disk operating system used with the Atari 8-bit family of computers. Operating system extensions loaded into memory were required in order for an Atari computer to manage files stored on a disk drive. These extensions to t ...
.


References


Inside Atari DOS
Introduction by Bill Wilkinson, 1982 * ''A User's Guide and Reference Manual for DOS XL 2.30'', 1983 * ''OSS Newsletter - Spring 1984'' * ''OSS Newsletter - October 1984''


External links



Everything You Wanted To Know About Every DOS {{Disk operating systems Optimized Systems Software Atari 8-bit family software Atari operating systems Disk operating systems