DavidM

Played around a little more this weekend. I found a StarTech 16550 PCi express 2-port serial card on Ebay for cheap and it showed up Friday. I am still unable to get the SIO2PC to work. It does the same thing it did with the other card and USB converter. Pretty sure I saw a thread where somebody got the StarTech card to work, but not for me. So at this point I'm really wondering what is going on. I'm trying to get a serial card to work because I have 2 systems and 2 SIO2PC boxes and my idea is to hook one system to each serial port and just switch com ports in the software. Don't know what else to try so any suggestions on what to try are welcome..

Did you have to do anything special to get the USB converter to work? I've also tried a USB converter cable with no joy, but it used the PL2303 chip not the FTDI. Why is the Atarimax SIO2PC so finicky about the serial port? I would think a serial port is a serial port is a serial port in Windows once the driver is loaded, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I have a SIO2PC cable I made myself and could get that out if it will behave different than the Atarimax one.

My Atari stuff was put away for a couple years and I recently got it back out and set it up. I have an Atarimax SIO2PC interface that I purchased many years ago. I was using it with an older PC that had serial ports on the mother board and WinXP previously and am now trying to use it with a newer PC that does not have builtin serial ports. I purchased a generic Chinese made serial PCI port card off Amazon that is using the WCH chip thinking it wouldn't matter what serial card I used. I have been unable to make it work with either APE or RespeQT. Both programs seem to recognize the SIO2PC, but APE fails to initialize it and RespeQT initializes, but the Atari doesn't see the PC drive when it boots. I got out the old WinXP PC to make sure the SIO2PC still works and was able to use it no problem. I did some searching on here and there's some indication that you need a true 65550 UART serial card for the Atarimax SIO2PC, but then other folks say they have it working with generic cards or USB-to-RS232 converters. I've tried everything I can think of with no luck. I'm just using the unregistered 3.0.2 version of APE if that matters. Anybody have any suggestions? Thanks. David

Thanks for the response. The mechanism is set as drive 0. That was one of the first things I tried playing around with. It uses a DIP jumper package for the Drive # and master/slave select. I pulled the controller board out and looked at it. Based on what I was able to learn from the Indus and 1050 schematics I have a pretty good idea of how things work on the Percom. I bought a logic analyzer off e-bay to play around with things some more. Should be fun. David

Anybody ever happen upon the schematics for Percom drives? Specifically the AT88 series. I found a post from 2007 asking, but there was never a response. My Percom drive is acting flaky and I figure the schematics would help diagnose the issue. It doesn't seem to want to respond to commands. It powers up ok, but never responds to anything. I figure something is wrong with the command line itself or with whatever the line terminates in to or possibly with the drive select switches. I've looked at the schematics for the 1050 and Indus and they each do things differently so I'm wondering how the Percoms do it. Thanks. David

Posting a follow-up. I received the LG M237WD monitor/TV last night. I hooked both a 130XE and 800 up to it. The 130XE via s-video & composite and the 800 via composite. The composite for both looks pretty decent. I just booted up to a blue scree with basic and the characters are a little fuzzy, but nothing you wouldn't expect. The s-video from the 130XE is much clearer, but I'm getting some serious vertical banding. I'm using a home-made s-video cable with no diode or anything in it. I'll try some of the fixes that have been mentioned and see what happens. I didn't take any picture, but can if someone wants to see. The monitor seems to handle the Atari input ok. I'll have to try it with some more graphics intensive programs to see how it goes, but so far so good. One little peeve is that the monitor seems to use resistance/capacitance to sense whether or not a cable is plugged into the s-video port. If it senses a s-video cable then it assumes that s-video will be used. The composite and s-video inputs are shared so you can't use the composite input if you have a cable plugged into s-video. You actually have to unplug the s-video cable even if there is no signal on it. My plan was to plug the 130xe into the s-video and the 800 into the composite, but I have to unplug the s-video cable to use the 800. Not that I use the 800 that much, but it's still annoying. David

I think you should buy it. My LG has done nothing but impress since I bought it: it hasn't been flummoxed by anything I've thrown its way. I haven't heard too much about the US versions of these TVs. I'd certainly be interested in your findings if you do decide to buy one. My feeling is that you won't regret it - but that's purely based on my PAL experiences... Went ahead and ordered one last night off Amazon. Won't see it for a week or so since I used super-saver shipping. I'll post up something after I get a chance to hook up to it.

I bid on it, but didn't win. The $90 final price was a lot more than I was willing to pay. I already have an Ultima IV with everything but the map. I wanted the map was well as the other Ultima games. Too much for me, though.

The LG M237WD seems to be available here in the states. I've been debating whether or not to pull the trigger on one. I've tried a 20" CRT TV and a 20 inch EDTV LCD and neither worked as well as I would like. I had a Commodore 1702A monitor, but 13" is just too small when you're used to larger displays. I had an Amdek color monitor back in the day and it was great, but those are hard to find. David

SIO2PC interface and APE are the best bang for the buck IMO. I have some 1050s and even 850s, but I use the PC for everything. Store the ATRs on the PC and use APE. You can find ATRs on the web in several places. If you don't want/have a PC near your Atari then the IDE interface would be good as mentioned. David

I'm trying to use it with other drives on the SIO bus. I have a 1050 and I'm using APE on my PC. I want to use APE for drive 1 so that I can just boot from ATRs. I want the 1050 and Percom to be drives 2 & 3 (doesn't really matter which is which). Not sure I follow you on tossing the board and making a cable. Was that to create a slave drive? David

I've had Atari 8-bit stuff for a long time and pull it out every now and then to play. I've been playing with the stuff lately and was able to get a Percom drive I had sitting around working again. I found the 8-bit Alchemist's article on Percoms and was able to revive the drive by replacing all three voltage regulators. What I've discovered, though, is that the drive only works as drive 1 (or 0, ever how you want to look at it). There are DIP switches on the back that supposedly set the drive number, but if I set them to anything other than 1 the drive can't be accessed. I found an old article reviewing a Percom RFD drive that indicated it could only be used as drive 1, but then why put DIP switches on the back? I did some poking around and found the jumper socket on the smaller board attached to the drive itself. This is mentioned in the 8-bit Alchemist article as controlling the drive number for slave drives, but it also seems to affect the master drive as well. Only the pins labeled DS0 and HM were jumped. I'm guessing that stands for drive select 0 and master. Other pins for DS1, DS2, DS3, MUX, and HS were not jumped. The "jumper" is actually a 2x6 chip looking thing that plugs into the socket. I tried a couple different combinations of pin settings, but could never get anything other than drive 0 to work. The pins started to break off so I stopped playing. Anybody out there have a Percom that works as other than drive 0? Or know how to do it? Could you let me know what the jumper settings should be? Also, anybody know where to pick-up a 2x6 jumper "chip"? I tried looking at Digikey and Mouser with no luck. Maybe I'm just searching wrong, but I couldn't find one. Thanks. David