JD6502

Thanks Philsan! A quick look shows a lot of new features.

Can you recall where you found it?

In the past they were built and sold by the Frankfurt chapter of the ABBUC on a pre-order basis. I've lost the link to their order page so I can't be sure they are still taking orders. You could try sending an email to sio2usb@abbuc-raf.de. Thomas Grasel was the guy handling sio2usb orders.

By coincidence I've been wondering about printer support in A8 emulators myself lately. It seemed odd that there was this big hole in the emulator world where a lot of popular (at the time) software whose primary output is to the printer is effectively useless on an emulator. I spent ( or wasted) a lot of time creating fonts with daisy dot, and thought it might be fun to see them re-created on a PC. I assumed that there weren't many other people who thought so, otherwise there would've been more done in that area. My thinking was... after all, a dot matrix page is just a bunch of black dots on a white background, how hard can that be? A driver to translate control codes for the more common printers, then put a bunch of dots on the screen with the right spacing, and an option to save it as a bmp or jpeg. But I'm not much of a programmer. My skills (such as they are) are limited to basic and I have no idea how to create a modern bit map file. It sounds like it might be more complicated than I thought, though.

I'm with Mathy on the BlackBox!. It's so amazing that CSS had to put an exclamation point in the name. Of course they did that with all their products. Still... The only modern equipment I have is the SIO2USB, so my favorite by default. I do like it, though.

I have a rev 3 and a rev 4. Neither has jumpers. The rev 3 has one cap soldered directly to the SIO, the rev 4 has none. Can't remember if there are any on the PCB's. They both have a mess of diodes on the SIO. I've seen a number of pics of XE boards and one oddity I've noticed is that they invariably have MT DRAMS except for the upper left, which always seems to be some other brand. I assume there was a reason, but what? As it happens I finished repairing bad ram on the rev 4 just yesterday. The pattern on the memory test was bad even numbered cells for bank one and three, and all bad cells for bank two except 5 and 6. This is a pattern other people have reported as well. Testing all the chips in a working XL showed that only one chip was bad, but I replaced the eight main bank chips anyway and installed sockets. ( The second bank was replaced with a Newall 1meg ages ago). I lucked out on replacement chips, the local electronics parts store (creatively named "The Electronic Parts Store") is a quirky old place that's been around forever, and has an astonishing number of parts that have been on the shelf for the same period of time. They had exactly eight TI and OKI 4164's NOS.

Here's my attempt at one of Chesley Bonestell's Saturn paintings. CB_Saturn.xex

Hmmm.... not sure how to vote here. Other 16\32 is closest, but misleading. I bought an XE in '86. Around '92 I bought a guy's 8 bit collection, which included an XE and XL. In '97 my sister gave me a Win 95 PC, but hardly touched it. In 2010 that I bought an HP Mini 'cause I'd heard vague information about something called the "interweb" (or something like that) and wanted to check it out. One of the first things i did was search for an SPO 256 chip to complete a DIY speech synthesizer for my Atari. ( An outfit in Britain had some-shipping cost more than the chip ). So while it's true that I spend more hours on the Mini, I'm not sure I can say that I ever actually have "moved on". I guess you need to add a "Never did" check box.

I found a reprint of an article from the Assembly Language column in Antic June 1983 that explains how to do something similar, but if I read it correctly you need the basic cart and it makes a direct boot disk-not a binary. Here's an excerpt... The system works by loading the BASIC token file to a suitable address with a program used with the Assembler Editor cartridge, and inserting a short header program in front of the token file. This, upon loading, sets up the pointers required by BASIC and then jumps into the BASIC cartridge at the address of the RUN routine. A suitable return address is provided by pushing values onto the stack. A third program is then used to dump the header and token files onto cassette or non-DOS disk. It sounds cool, I may have to try this out.

I'm a bit jealous. My firmware is much earlier and I lack options D and E. Still, I feel lucky to have a BB at all. One tip I've not seen documented is that when holding the help key during a reset you force a cold start. Very handy for moving from boot disk to boot disk.

I've installed the UAV in my 130XE and I can see much improvement -especially for text. Last Word 80 column text is actually easily legible. I used Bryan's recommended XE install method and output is S-Video. BTW I also read the instructions as running the signals through the ferrite beads, not after. I am still getting the dreaded vertical interference pattern but not as badly as before. I should note that I have the old Newell 1Meg ram module installed and no shield. Fortunately my LCD has a noise reduction option which has all but eliminated the banding. I did have one minor problem with the install, the T-6 connection on the terminal block didn't work - I had to solder the color-in lead directly to the board. But all-in-all I'm pleased with the UAV, and I want to extend many thanks to Bryan for a very nice mod!

"Aliants" !! I curse the very ground upon which the programers walk for this travesty they called a "game". (By which they meant torture) Developed by Starsoft it's really a set of mini games that came on a double sided disk and no provision for saving progress except between sides. So after waiting forever for the "you failed" screen to load you'd have to do the whole side over again if you screwed up. I think you had to go through the preface which told the story of ant-like aliens attacking the earth every time as well, though I may be wrong as I've made every attempt at forgeting this game as possible. Basically it was a giant waste of magnetic media.

It runs fine on Altirra 2.7 under ATOS.

My mistake, I should have taken more time looking at it before chiming in. I ran through side one and two using Altirra 2.5, XL LLE and side two ran fine. Side two won't boot on it's own. I'll try running both disks under 2.7.

I'm no expert on this stuff, but I tried looking at the disk contents using a couple of different tools and the ATR looks to be unreadable. It may be corrupted. Since Altirra is not the only program that has trouble reading it, it's probably not an emulation problem.