Quantum Mechanic

Salivating in anticipation… and I haven’t even unpacked my Atari collection yet!

Received my AVGCart along with ECI and SIO cables today… thanks! Now I just need to find a source for an XL PBI cable.

Darn it... I was hoping I'd find at least one AVGCART available somewhere for purchase.

Let us know when you're ready to take pre-orders and what the final cost will be for a USA buyer. I may get a couple of them.

My wife and I drove from Sacramento to the Bay Area and met up with Mike Hohman after he had purchased all the ICD/OSS stuff. I never got to see his office, but I did connect with him enough that he "hired" me to write some assembly code for him. I recall writing and delivering the menu system for the MARS8. He even ended up coming out to the Sacramento area and staying at my house for a short while. I gave him a bunch of my spare Atari equipment in hopes it would contribute to the success of his Atari product dreams. I always wondered what happened in his life that resulted in the dissolution of FTe. If you're still in contact with him, feel free to pass this note along and PM me with any response.

Ahh, the elusive Bob Puff interview finally comes to fruition. Great job, @Savetz! Kay, you're a gentleman and a scholar! So sorry I once complained about the audio quality of an interview way back in the early days. I've mentally berated myself for that action so many times. I even went to a couple of Bill Kendrick's Atari Party events on the off chance that you might be there so I could apologize in person. Hopefully it had zero impact and you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. ?

Wow, that brought back a memory! I totally forgot how the MIO was silent compared to its predecessors. I remember going to a buddy's house when they first came out. He had purchased two of them, one for his BBS and one for his personal system. I hopped on the BBS machine and was struck by the deafening silence as the characters zipped by at 1200 baud speed. It was disconcerting... like when someone would turn down the volume on their TV and you couldn't hear the comforting SIO bleep bleep bleep.

Kevin, Any luck on the re-upload? It appears the copy on ataripodcast.com has the same issue.

Enjoy the disks, Allan!

I'm not *going* to take any action on them at all. What I meant was, they were in my "disks that I can reformat if I need a blank" pile. But yes, it's *possible* that some of these were indeed previously formatted and have software on them. Of course, that format and software may or may not be for the Atari computer.

In the very early stages of going through my Atari 8-bit stuff, I came across a stockpile of "blank" disks. I say "blank" because they likely have content, but I was planning to just reformat them. There are ~160 disks in this set. If you're interested in this physical media, they can be yours for free... I only ask that you pay packaging & shipping costs from Sacramento, CA. (photo attached)

Here's a pic of me coding in Action! Which is plugged into an SDX and RT8 on my 800XL. On the desk next to me is another SDX, a Basic XL and a Basic XE cart. The 130XE is running my BBS (City of Grey in Sacramento, CA). My heavily modified BBS software ran on Basic XE and leveraged every byte of extended memory for the program code. I used Basic XE to write lots of software, mostly utilities used only by myself and friends in the local user group and BBS community.

I ran a couple of BBSes on my Atari computers. The first one was ultimately a trial run while I was living with a buddy of mine for about 6 months. It was called S.N.O.B.B.S. (Sacramento's Nonpareil Online BBS). I ran a slightly modified AMIS and learned what it meant to be a SysOp. Later, I took over a well-established BBS in Sacramento called City of Grey. I ran that for a number of years before taking it down when I was out of town for college. That BBS had an AMIS core, but was heavily modified. When I took ownership, it was running on Basic XL, bore almost no resemblance to the original AMIS, and used every scrap of free memory on the Atari XL. I switched to Basic XE to gain some coding room, then added/modified/rewrote many parts of the BBS until even Basic XE was out of space. I've still got my Atari equipment out in the shed and have a goal to unpack it, set it up, and maybe even restore the BBS with a Lantronix device.

Did anyone ever compare the output of CopyOS to the other methods mentioned in this thread? I'm really curious about the results. There shouldn't be any difference besides a binary header.

I used add a write protect switch to every 1050 I got my hands on. I did similar switch and LED placement (along the left side of the front cover plate), although I used a bi-color LED with silver bezel. I'm pretty sure it was exactly this one which allowed separate operation of the red & green lights, or light them both up to get yellow. So all my drives operate like an American stoplight: Red: Write never Yellow: Write maybe (based on notch) Green: Write always Dang it... this is making me want to dig out my old Atari stuff and take some photos!