ricortes

I'm doing OK. Kind of got the stuffing knocked out of me recently with the Prostrate thing => surgery, radiation, and all that. Trying to get back up to speed but maybe 2-4 years behind Atari in real terms. I still login here, just not a lot to contribute. Nice to hear the demo worked. I made about 5-6 into stocking stuffers as miniature paint screens for my grand kids. The one I still have one that identifies as a ILI9340 and I recall at least one with the Samsung 0154 that must of been given away. I'm just trying to get my feet back under me. I'm still currently a joke when it comes to stuff like soldering, out of practice.

Digging through some old stuff. I found one of my old Arduino that was running the 'Deadbeef' sketch so looked around and found one sketch that worked. This isn't a panacea as the manufacturers of these screens seem to stick in whatever is available and call it whatever is the most popular. I just thought I would toss this up since it works with my ~4 year old 2.4" tft display. Anyway, if you want to see if your MCUfriend screen is maybe dead or maybe working, try this. BTW: It would be good to hear from you if it works. I can't imagine they are still using that old of chips but they could be using a compatible derivative. I'll get around to picking up some later model screens in the next week or two but I don't really have a project in mind to use them. This sketch is completely self contained, doesn't need any included libraries. MCUfriend.ino

Does it use the same connections as the Sdrive <no Max>? Looks like you are switching white and black leads. That is, the black lead should be going to the diode if I read it right. SCHEME.PDF

Check the diode polarity

Accuse me of being pedantic with a pedantic reply? OK Sheesh, read the text I was referring to one more time. "Those mcufriend screens seem to cause more trouble then it's worth. I have two that are worthless and not usable with any of the drivers. Ended up with two ILI9341's and they work flawlessly." We will have to agree to disagree me thinks. This strong of a statement needs to be qualified. I didn't point out your post as being a problem because it was qualified rather then a blanket statement like the above.

Qualified yes. I've used that exact display and it works fine. Problems are similar to people saying our Atari RS232 pin out is non standard: They say the IBM PC is 'the standard' but it came out ~3 years after the Atari so you could correctly say IBM is the non standard. There is nothing inherently wrong with the MCUFriend displays other then being really cheaply made. The problem is IIRC the screen layouts are different between what is the considered the 'standard' Sdrive Max i.e. the upper right of the display of one is the lower left of the other. The other problem is they use a different addressing/pins for the touchscreen. When the Sdrive software tries to read it, it just comes up ~floating or no input when used with the MCUFriend display. Which brings us to a dilemma: Even if the authors of the SDrive software wanted to support other displays, where would it all end? I mean they don't own every display ever made to test it out with. Kind of an impossible task to support everything ever made and everything that will be made. Easiest way to do it is as they have done, support a good choice of available devices. I kind of object to the characterization of the MCUFriend being more trouble then they are worth because the way it is stated, it reads like there is something inherently wrong with them. If the designers of SDrive happened to chose the MCUFriend display it would be the standard. Here is a link to a tutorial where they put the exact display traindriver69 is trying to use through its paces. https://electropeak.com/learn/arduino-2-4-touch-screen-lcd-shield-tutorial/ I can also vouch for the SD card on these working just fine.

I buy a lot of parts from China. It has been my experience for anything going as individual items i.e. a TPA2030 audio IC for instance, you really have a better then average chance of getting something that is a manufacturer fallout if not just plain mislabeled. Seems to make sense in that I've heard a lot of projects never get done. You find a barrel of TPA2030 in the dumpster outside a factory, sell them on eBay as new. You refund maybe 30% of sales but for the 70% or so of projects that never get put together, nobody knows and you keep the dough. I do get good luck with assembled devices or sub assemblies. Apparently the manufacturers of devices know how the game is played there and use legit suppliers. Some of the stuff, particularly with displays, go under such cost cutting I'm more surprised we get anything that works. Stuff designed to work with headers and connectors just soldered directly to the board kind of things. I still have some displays I bought 2-4 years ago made this way and they are still chugging away.

IDK. I have grandchildren and the funny thing is, they literally don't know what FM radio is and could care less about what is available on it. Me on the other hand, I constantly listen to the radio at home and in my car. I have become a parody of myself. Bought a new 3 in 1 workstation [hot air, power supply, solder]. Promptly turned several boards to charcoal: DOH! Solder composition has gone through several iterations to low melting stuff that flows when you look at it. All the old junk I have i.e. Atari, boards catch on fire before the solder melts. Setting up a home brew Bluetooth amplifier sent the power supply into shock, taking out the adjustable power supply which sent full current to the soldering iron which failed shortly after turning red hot. DOH! Preset volume at full 50 Watts/channel will do that to your power supply. I am now on my second 3 in 1 workstation. hehe Trying hard to get up to speed on modern techniques and methods. I've bought a number of practice boards for surface mount and a couple of tubes of solder paste. Seems hopeless in that even if I do get going with something that uses current technology, my grand kids will still prefer YouTube. That is the problem with anything we can do or conceive. About the only project they seem to think has merit is me building a ridiculous electric guitar + amplifier that uses the old spring type reverb. It's hard to stay relevant. I am satisfied winning small battles. After taking over my tablet a couple of months ago my girlfriend told me yesterday she wanted an upgrade and is interested in a Bluetooth amplifier for her home entertainment center: Small wins.

There are a lot more practical reasons for being upset with the direction things are headed if some wags are to be believed. I actually have a Yahoo mail account that is virtually unusable because of the level of advertisements and junk they shovel at you. According to one wag, 40% of the Internet is tracking and advertising. You pay for that with your connection fees and slower response from web sites. Think about it if that figure is right, it is in the face of all the streaming Netflix, YouTube, et al that goes on. It has the ring of truth to it in that one of my friends from Mexico only pays $11/month for his cellphone service. Not funny particularly. I made a 911 call because of a psycho that refused to leave my house. Once they knew police were on the way she agreed to leave and I gave her a ride back to town. I notified the police their services were no longer needed. About 8 miles from my house a cop car came up behind me and pulled me over to the side of the road. I then went through ~an hour of searches and questioning and genuinely rude questions and accusations on the side of the road. Understand for some reason I get swatted a lot. I've had two people call in that I was armed and murdering someone. I've had people say I own a 100 lb pitbull that was attacking people in the neighborhood. I've had people call in domestic violence reports as in wife beater, I live alone.<sic> I've had people call in my house was on fire with choking black smoke coming in their house through the foundation, fake of course. I won't own a cellphone that doesn't have a removable battery. Understand a lot of this I've brought on myself. I do some charity work with homeless and their mental problems are an impediment to their own best interests. One woman showed me a report from 911 where she had called them 19 times to report the same guy as proof she wash't paranoid.

This. Not that I agree with that particular set of goals, just that it narrows down what can be done with what is available. I don't think it could be approached by an Arduino and an RPi would have some latency problems due to its multi tasking environment. Electrotrains did an excellent fpga in a cart. You start to run into acceptance problems with costs when you go this route of course. I *THINK* they were about $95 with all options. Don't get me wrong, adding a RPi to something like this would be good for Bluetooth, HDMI, WiFi, et al, just that the RPi with SD card and interface will add another $50-$100 to the $95 price tag. When stuff starts approaching $200, I usually opt out.

To what end? A simple interface like is done for 8 bit data could be done similar to the SPI. The protocols are usually pretty simple like first write is command and subsequent bytes specify parameters followed by data. i.e. first write say $0 is write memory, next two bytes are start location, next two bytes are number of bytes, data. It would have some speed advantage, just that what would be the purpose? We already have fast I/O parallel devices, you are limited to what you can display on an Atari screen to ~8k bytes. It's possible to do something like a quick 80 column screen, just that a lot of people that need 80 columns just switch to a Intel platform cross compiler/assembler.

Right, only 16k RAM BUT the carts have 32k address space. Natively the 800XL only has room for 16k of cart space. Probably a lot of ways to do it, all tough. You would need some way of banking the 5200 cart in an XL to read out the 16k that isn't normally accessible. Somebody hot could probably do it. Something like a latch/decoder circuit like the OSS Supercarts<74ls74 + decoding of Phase 2 clock<?> and cartridge select line> to bank it, a bit of program to copy the 16k that can't be addressed to the XL RAM area, switch to the upper 16k of the cart in to appear in the normal XL/5200 area. You would probably have to see if the XL could run the 5200 OS ROM w/o crashing since it uses different vectors IIRC. The thing is some Atari 800 cassette programs were converted to CARTs. All they did from the cart was add a bit of code to copy the program to low RAM i.e. $1000-$4000 like they may have been loaded from a cassette, then jump to the code. IDK, if someone was to say do something like an Infocom game, you could probably program it in C and assemble it to run at ~$600-$3FFF. All the unchangeable maps, DLs, and responses could remain in the CART and run from there. You can use old analog joysticks from IBM/Apple on an 8 bit, just need to rewire them for different resist/caps. Not a lot of stuff could be used with them though. I think Blazing Paddles and maybe Rambrant.

Something nobody asked for. Use P/M graphics for cursor.

It would be really hard w/o some extensive work under the hood. Making a simple plug in adapter to read the 5200 carts would be easy with a little bit of work but the 32k of address space just won't fit into an 8 bit's memory map. You would have to modify the 8 bit to something like copy the first 16k of ROM into RAM and let the remainder reside in CART space. Keyboard input vs joystick would probably be a little silly i.e. pressing q for up, z for down, ... not sure as I have never done key codes on a 5200. Just a by the by. OCD kicked in and I ordered parts for a 5200 expansion adapter. Just some proto board with enough fingers and a 36 pin edge card connector. I used to have a lot of left over 1489s laying around but seem to have misplaced them. *IF*<big if> I do put soldering iron to contacts I will be back begging for someone to risk their real 5200 to see if we can get it talking RS232. I'll take a look at getting my 5200 to work, little chance of that as it has suffered greatly from improper storage. It was never much of a system anyway, just a populated board I got surplus for $7.50 at Halted Specialties.

I think I see a black wire under the other two running to the DB25 which makes it make sense. There were a lot of file transfer utilities between the ST and 8 bit, I even wrote one myself using the ST joystick. There was the original ST Xformer that used the ST printer port to read a 1050 and ST 800xlDJ which was the ST equivalent of SIO2PC. I also see a 7805 there so with the diodes and caps, implies they needed or thought they needed a 5V supply. => The ~200 mamp available on the SIO bus is more then enough for an interface ergo they were either being cautious or they actually needed 5V! Is that is the case, then this interface is likely to be an ST equivalent of 1050toPC for reading an 8 bit drive. I can't remember the female/male DB25 of the printer vs. serial port of the ST, but that should narrow it down a bit more. There's lots of ways to get 5V out of a printer port or serial port 'cheaper' but the 5V supply really suggests to me 1050toST because the drives don't work without it being available. Could be the designer just had the parts laying around and decided to throw them in.