samspock

self test shows all good. No socketed chips. Going to get a new power supply before I do much else.

Dug out my old 130xe from under the basement stairs (it was in a closed container so should not be physically messed up) and I can get it to turn on and get to basic. What happens though is the composite video is a bit fuzzy and I can't seem to do things that need any graphics. I tried booting up MULE and it boots and all, music plays but the graphics are all a mess. Looks like ATASCII soup! It freezes up when the mule gets to the right side. It's the only disk I could find at the moment that does not give a boot error. I tried two different power supplies. Both old ones though. They read around 9v dc so I am assuming don't use them. This machine had a 320k upgrade done way back in the day. I am very out of practice on the 8-bits. I used to do repairs on them years ago. Remember Toad Computers? If you sent an Atari there to be worked on I did the work. I don't have any spare parts anymore though so doing any swaps would require me to buy the parts. Any thoughts or should I just put it back for another decade or so?

Got one. Don't count it though. I was using the save state function on the emulator and reloading when I got pirates, planetquakes, store fires and acid rain to see how good a game was possible. This was one player. Note how they misspelled Luxurious.

The other day I was talking to my boss at work about another employee. I said he was a sharp kid but lacked an 8-bit education. The guy was born in 1987, the year AFTER I graduated from high school and 5 years after I got my first computer. In 1982 my parents gave me an Atari 800 and a 410. What I had not known at the time is they gave me a carrer also. Before that first year was out I had already takent it appart and put it back together. I was scared to death that I had killed a $600 computer! For the next xmas I got a Percom disk drive (the one that had a printer port) and an Epson printer. The printer was a mistake. My father had gotten a quote from the computer store for the drive and the printer. He sent one of his employees to pick up and pay for the drive. The clueless person behind the counter gave him both! From there I played WAY too many games. Once I got bored with just playing I started into BBS's. I wound up setting up my own. At one point I ran it with 4 Indus GT disk drives! The final set up had a 130xe with a 256k memory upgrade, an ICD MIO with 256k running a 20mb hard drive (odd how 20mb is now a small file!) programed in Basic XE and using Sparta Dos. I learned a lot about programming that I eventually abandoned in favor of systems and infrastructur work. All that led to starting a computer store with a friend I met through the BBS (he bought the Percom from me!) that was doing a couple million a year in business before I sold my share out. Now I have had to go to the dark side (Microsoft) as I never thought of doing anything besides something computer related. The early days and the computer store taught me diagnosis and gave me more of a hardware bent than anything else. Ask the average programmer to change out their hard drive and video card and they will probably mess both up. I still have the 130xe, the MIO and all the stuff needed to start up my old bbs sitting in a closet. A decent asortment of ST stuff as well. If it were not for the fact that I live in a townhouse with a wife and two kids I would probably have it all set up someplace. I have a recent 8 bit story to add to this. A dozen years ago my former busness partners at the computer store gave me the last piece of 8 bit software they still had. An unopened copy of M.U.L.E. I did not need it, I had other copies. But this one was special since it was all they had left. I took it and put it someplace in my house. A few years later I was having financial trouble and selling everything I could to get by. I did a search on Ebay to see what people were selling M.U.L.E. for. I found a couple of them had sold for $299! Those were open and played copies! I wondered what a shrink-wrapped one would be worth. I searched the whole house and I just can't find it! Now when we say we can't find something in the house we say it's probably playing M.U.L.E.! See if you can guess the computer store I used to own. Hint: If you bought a hard drive for an ST in the '90s then there is a pretty good chance you bought it from me.