Opry99er Posted November 16, 2018 Share Posted November 16, 2018 Does anyone have an original physical copy of this cartridge they would like to move? I have an original manual, and I'd like to have the cartridge to go with it. I've been keeping an eye out for a year or so but haven't found one. Thanks in advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apersson850 Posted November 19, 2018 Share Posted November 19, 2018 I've only seen one once, but I've never owned any. They may be about as common as hen's teeth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted November 19, 2018 Share Posted November 19, 2018 They show up on the German or French eBay sites once every few months or so, so it isn't too difficult to find one if you're persistent. Note that there are two versions of the Mechatronic XB cartridge as well: The first version came with a silver label and was exactly like the TI cartridge. Later, Mechatronic upgraded to the II+ variant (with a gold label). They also offered the upgraded boards to folks that purchased the original cartridges. A lot of people upgraded them, making the silver label cases a bit of a crap-shoot on contents. The cartridge selection screen identifies the cartridges properly, so if the cartridge is listed as tested, it is probably what the seller thinks it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 23, 2018 Author Share Posted November 23, 2018 Thanks for the heads up on International eBay auctions. I will be watching. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ewbray Posted December 17, 2018 Share Posted December 17, 2018 (edited) The Mechatronics Extended Basic II+ cartridge is one of the only five (5) TI99/4A Cartridges that I have kept since I packed away my real hardware in the basement and went to the use of emulators/simulators. Those five (5) Cartridges were 1.) Mechatronic Extended Basic II+ Cartridge, 2.) 8K Super Cartridge [actually a Myarc Basic II Cartridge with a E/A Grom {contains no battery}], 3.) Mini-Memory Cartridge, 4.) Microsoft Multiplan, and 5.) The PLATO Interpreter Cartridge. With those five cartridges I found that I could run ALL the software for the TI99/4A, since everything had been converted to disk files over the years. What I had noticed about the Mechatronics Extended II+ cartridge is that it run EXTREMELY warm when plugged into the TI99/4A console for any long period of time; fearing heat damage to is chips and components, I removed the circuit board from the cartridge case and proceeded to drill a series of ¼ inch holes in the cartridge case to allow the excess heat that would accumulate to leave the cartridge by those ¼ holes through convection. If you should be fortunate enough to acquire a Mechatronics Extended Basic II+ cartridge, please consider making that simple modification to its cartridge case. Edited December 17, 2018 by ewbray 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Schmitzi Posted December 19, 2018 Share Posted December 19, 2018 Just as a small teaser (no, i dont have the doubles anymore. I´ve exchanged them IIRC) 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ewbray Posted December 19, 2018 Share Posted December 19, 2018 https://www.dropbox.com/s/vxe0pkwieiw9klr/Mechatronic%20Extended%20Basic%20II%20Plus.TICart?dl=0 You can download a functioning Win994a version of that cartridge to use and get accustomed to using it until you can get possession of an actual cartridge! (from the above location) https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8r10bin1xi7v4a/Mechatronic%20Extended%20Basic%20II%20Plus.TIDisk?dl=0 You can download a functioning Win994a version of the demonstration disk to use and get accustomed to using its programs until you can get possession of an actual cartridge! (from the above location) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted December 19, 2018 Author Share Posted December 19, 2018 Wow, Schmitzi--- those are beautiful!!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted December 19, 2018 Share Posted December 19, 2018 Just as a small teaser (no, i dont have the doubles anymore. I´ve exchanged them IIRC) IMG_9400.JPG We should do a reproduction run of these labels. They are so beautiful! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ewbray Posted December 20, 2018 Share Posted December 20, 2018 The ONLY reason that I ever stopped using Mechatronic Extended II+ was that I bought a Myarc 512K ramdisk and the Myarc Extended Basiic II software. That is when I noticed that the Myarc Extended Basic II software had many of the same graphics available as the Mechatronic Extended Basic II+ and I didn't need to use a special command (CALL APESOFT) to access the graphics commands and those graphic commands didn't occupy the lower 8K of memory in the TI99/4A, meaning I had access to the machine's full 32K of memory when running Extended Basic programs. That is when I discovered that the Myarc Extended Basic II cartridge that was sent to me ALSO had a socket for a GROM chip; in which I placed an Editor/Assembler GROM therefore making it a Super Cartridge without a battery. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
globeron Posted December 30, 2019 Share Posted December 30, 2019 On 12/20/2018 at 12:54 AM, ewbray said: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vxe0pkwieiw9klr/Mechatronic%20Extended%20Basic%20II%20Plus.TICart?dl=0 You can download a functioning Win994a version of that cartridge to use and get accustomed to using it until you can get possession of an actual cartridge! (from the above location) https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8r10bin1xi7v4a/Mechatronic%20Extended%20Basic%20II%20Plus.TIDisk?dl=0 You can download a functioning Win994a version of the demonstration disk to use and get accustomed to using its programs until you can get possession of an actual cartridge! (from the above location) I got this one to work, but I could not get it to work in Classic99, JS99er.net, V9t9 I also noticed that the menu 2 option is sometimes different in description (It should show MECHATRONIC PS/EXTENDED BASIC) If it is MECHATRONIC EXTENDED BASIC (then it is a normal Silver one) and the Extended Basic Plus is I think another type of module. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barry Nelson Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 Does anyone have a dump of this cartridge in any format other than .Ticart, like rpk, bin, etc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HOME AUTOMATION Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 1 of 3).zip Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 2 of 3).zip Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 3 of 3).zip 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barry Nelson Posted March 14, 2020 Share Posted March 14, 2020 23 minutes ago, HOME AUTOMATION said: Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 1 of 3).zip 21.9 kB · 2 downloads Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 2 of 3).zip 5.65 kB · 1 download Extended Basic II Plus (1985)(Mechatronic)(Part 3 of 3).zip 5.6 kB · 1 download Thanks! 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HOME AUTOMATION Posted March 15, 2020 Share Posted March 15, 2020 Found this too... MECHATRONICS_PS_EXTENDED_BASIC Dunno. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eric-bray Posted March 27, 2020 Share Posted March 27, 2020 (edited) On 12/30/2019 at 10:36 AM, globeron said: I got this one to work, but I could not get it to work in Classic99, JS99er.net, V9t9 I also noticed that the menu 2 option is sometimes different in description (It should show MECHATRONIC PS/EXTENDED BASIC) If it is MECHATRONIC EXTENDED BASIC (then it is a normal Silver one) and the Extended Basic Plus is I think another type of module. I know that this cartridge uses 8K GROMs instead of the normal 6K GROMs! Edited March 27, 2020 by eric-bray Correct grammar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted March 27, 2020 Share Posted March 27, 2020 On 12/30/2019 at 4:36 PM, globeron said: I got this one to work, but I could not get it to work in Classic99, JS99er.net, V9t9 I also noticed that the menu 2 option is sometimes different in description (It should show MECHATRONIC PS/EXTENDED BASIC) The Mechatronic Extended Basic is available in MAME by cartridge name "exbasm". I declared its type as "gromemu", as it does not use real GROMs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted March 27, 2020 Share Posted March 27, 2020 On 12/30/2019 at 7:36 AM, globeron said: I got this one to work, but I could not get it to work in Classic99, JS99er.net, V9t9 I also noticed that the menu 2 option is sometimes different in description (It should show MECHATRONIC PS/EXTENDED BASIC) It's a Win994A cartridge. The author of Win994A either encrypted the cart images or compressed them in a proprietary manner, and refused to share the file format for other emulators to use. It's a shame, it was a nice all-inclusive format with a simple to use tool. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhataKowinkydink Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 3 hours ago, mizapf said: The Mechatronic Extended Basic is available in MAME by cartridge name "exbasm". Will it be uploaded to whtech? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
senior_falcon Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 2 hours ago, Tursi said: It's a Win994A cartridge. The author of Win994A either encrypted the cart images or compressed them in a proprietary manner, and refused to share the file format for other emulators to use. It's a shame, it was a nice all-inclusive format with a simple to use tool. The format is very strange. It is certainly not compressed, in fact just the opposite. Most of the TI produced cartridges are over 200KB in length! Oddly enough, the non-TI cartridges are about as long as you would expect, in the 20K range. I've looked at some of the files with a sector editor, but nothing looks familiar - i.e. no headers or recognizable test. So I assume they are encrypted somehow. I don't think it would be too difficult to write an assembly program that would copy the GROMS and ROMS to disk and then you could put that data together to make a cartridge in a normal format. Of course, that is only useful for extracting cartridges are not available elsewhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 4 hours ago, senior_falcon said: The format is very strange. It is certainly not compressed, in fact just the opposite. Most of the TI produced cartridges are over 200KB in length! Oddly enough, the non-TI cartridges are about as long as you would expect, in the 20K range. I've looked at some of the files with a sector editor, but nothing looks familiar - i.e. no headers or recognizable test. So I assume they are encrypted somehow. I don't think it would be too difficult to write an assembly program that would copy the GROMS and ROMS to disk and then you could put that data together to make a cartridge in a normal format. Of course, that is only useful for extracting cartridges are not available elsewhere. I actually spent a fair bit of time when the format came out when he "invited" me to try to reverse engineer the format. And then I spend another hour or two last night to see if I learned any more since then. I can tell you that single byte changes have the potential to make large differences in the output file. When the emulator was released, the author also released a set of TI cartridges that include embedded PDFs of the manuals - so the size is not unsurprising. It was all the effort into making a nice set that I was hoping could be shared. Based on the changes to output files with single byte input changes, and the fact that Win994A includes references to bzip, I had suspected at least compression. However, there are no bzip header sequences, nor can bzip make sense of the data if headers are injected. I also tried a tool (binwalk) that claims to test similarly for deflate and lzma - I got an interesting result from lzma seeming to retrieve part of the description field for a tiny test file, but it was clearly not completely correct. You are correct though.. there's honestly nothing stopping us from doing it ourselves - and we have many more cartridge types these days. I still think the old XML version of the MESS files lends itself best to expansion - add some tags for the manual, description and screenshot, and zip it all up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 6 hours ago, WhataKowinkydink said: Will it be uploaded to whtech? It is there, see Cartridges/MAME/zip/exbasm.zip. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 18 hours ago, eric-bray said: I know that this cartridge uses 8K GROMs instead of the normal 6K GROMs! So does RXB version 1005 on. Also REA is in GROM 7 too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.