¢HANDY HINT¢¢by Alan Hitchen¢¢¢RAMDISK XL¢¢ It is possible to create a small ramdisk on a standard 64k XL/XE if you do the following.¢¢1. Boot with DOS 2.5 and Basic.¢¢2. POKE 1802,PEEK(1802)+128.¢¢3. Press RESET¢¢4. POKE 2924,101: POKE 2925,0: POKE 2926,101: POKE 2927,0¢¢5. Go to DOS¢¢6. Format D8:¢¢7. All done!¢¢ You now have a 101 sector ramdisk. If you want to run DUP.SYS and MEM.SAV from D8: go back to Basic. POKE 5439,56, then return to DOS, write the DOS files, delete DOS.SYS, and then write MEM.SAV to D8:. You now have DOS available in an instant, and 30 sectors are still free for your own use.¢¢ Location 1802 is the drive allocation byte, this would normally be set to 3 indicating D1: and D2: are available, adding 128 activates D8:. Location 5439 tells DOS where to find the DUP.SYS and MEM.SAV files and is normally set to 49 for D1:, 56 changes this to D8:. These locations would automatically be changed by RAMDISK.COM on bootup with a 130XE or expanded machine.¢¢ So, how does it work? What seems to happen is that DOS searches for the extra ram of the 130XE and finds the 16k of shadow ram under the Operating System instead, this exists from 49152 upwards. However, 53248 to 55295 is used by GTIA, POKEY, PIA and ANTIC and is unavailable. This leaves 14k or 112 sectors available, less deductions for the directory and VTOC and you have 101 sectors free for use.¢
