99er Forums

Hello everyone! I am a Commodore 64 guy pretty much and mess with alot of old computer stuff. Well I recently Inherited 4 TI99/a's and also PEP-1200 system with everything you can put inside it, plus another drive controler with another 5 1/4" drive... I have alot of disks. tapes, carts, printers, cords, books, modem, i mean literally everything. and multiple of em... My deal is that i am not sure how to load a directory off of the disk drive with extended basic in i guess is how you so it. or even load from the disk drive... I dont really know what the proper commands are so i thought i would ask you guys... I can get it to auto boot some disks so i do know that it works. And havent gotten into the printing side yet... but we will get there... i have it all hooked up in my commodore lab! hehehe takes 3 tables. hehehe

Take care yall
Chris537

There's no built-in directory mechanism for floppies, sadly, you have to enter a program to get a listing (it could be that you already have an auto-boot disk that has such a thing, if so, you could copy that to other disks to make it easier). Sadly I don't know off the top of my head what the program looks like. The alternative is to get a Disk Manager 2 cartridge and use that, or better, to get a Disk Manager 1000 floppy. Many people used to print out their directory listings and keep the slip of paper with the diskette.

In BASIC and Extended BASIC, you load from disk with "OLD <device>.<filename>". Device is CS1 for the cassette tape (and there is no filename), or DSK1, DSK2, or DSK3 for floppy drives 1, 2 or 3 respectively. Non-TI controllers, RAMdisks, and some other devices go past 3, as well.

In Extended BASIC, the auto-boot file is called 'LOAD', so if you have a disk that autoboots, you can manually load the program with "OLD DSK1.LOAD". Then you can LIST and RUN like normal BASICs.

To save a program in BASIC or Extended BASIC, it's "SAVE <device>.<filename>". Again, CS1 doesn't support filenames. But for example, "SAVE DSK1.FILENAME".

Disk filenames can be up to 10 characters long and use letters, numbers, and most punctuation. Filenames are case sensitive but it is recommended not to use lowercase in filenames for compatibility reasons.

Printing is done ususally using the parallel port, which is the device "PIO". The same card usually has two serial ports, labelled "RS232" and "RS232/2".

From off the top of my head:
10 INPUT "DRIVE NUMBER:":DN
20 OPEN #1:"DSK"&STR$(DN),INPUT,INTERNAL,FIXED
30 INPUT #1:DISK$::PRINT "DISKNAME: ";DN$
40 INPUT #1:FILE$::IF FILE$<"!" THEN 100
50 PRINT FILE$
60 GOTO 40
100 CLOSE #1

This will just give you filenames, but not file types, sizes, etc. I don't remember that much off the top of my head these days...

Hi! i have recently been still messing with my TI99 setup. Going thru some disks...
I found all the carts mentioned Diskmanager 2 and extended basic. so i can see whats on the disks, most of em have printed directories taped to the jacket... But when i have extended basic cart in, Load and there is no load file on the disk it takes me to the
Ready prompt

Then if i type old dsk1.name
no matter what the name is i get a I/O error 00

So unless a disk auto boots i cant get it to manually load a program...
I am doing this in lower case so hopefully thats not my problem...

Chris537

I think the lowercase characters was the problem. hehehe working good now... It only took me 9 months to figure that out.
Chris537