Troy H. Cheek

I tried this and two other cables from Amazon. This cable doesn't seem to go all the way into the Portable's jack, and none of them cut off the built-in video and audio. I'm about to give up until the official cable is back in stock. That said, I find that I don't care for the built-in display (old eyes) or controller. I think I bought it just because of the SD card support. Has anyone else considered transplanting a Portable's guts into a Flashback's case?

+1 to this. I was trying to get a USB hub working recently and spent a week afterwards clearing out all the shi- um, malware. The answer turned out to be going to the motherboard's website and getting the latest drivers for the onboard USB chipset.

Whenever I get an 8 bit emulator going, the first thing I look for is M.U.L.E. I still have the packaging around here somewhere, though the original disk is lost.

Finally, a perfect version of M.U.L.E.! Every other disk I've downloaded has mangled store graphics or mangled "Please Remove Cartridge" screen. Seeding!

I'm listening to this episode now. It reminded me that the entire reason I got into Atari computers was because of a defective space bar! A friend of mine invited me over one weekend to help him out with his new computer. I was considered an expert because I already owned a TI-99/4A. He had an Atari 800, BASIC cartridge, a game (Star Raiders, maybe), cassette recorder, and a few manuals. The 800 had scuff marks, the space bar had a crack which was covered in green electrical tape, and it generally looked abused, but those things were built like tanks. It seems another friend had "just gotten tired of computers" and gave it to him. My friend's father was a TV repair man back when such a thing still existed and was able to fix it up and get the space bar working again. I showed him how to program in BASIC (it was close enough to TI BASIC that I had a leg up) and was impressed with the graphics. When I felt ready for my next computer, I bought a 130 XE and didn't buy a non-Atari until they stopped making computers. Thanks for the memories!

Thanks to everyone who's responded so far. It is most certainly not the self test tune. I don't think my friend's Atari 800 even had that option. This was not a simple collection of notes. It was raw and noisy and almost sounded like a badly sampled piece of music (low bit rate, poorly wired mic, clipping, etc). And I'm almost positive it involed PEEKing in memory locations, because I seem to remember we changed the start and ending values on the FOR loop to 0 TO 65535 trying to hear "the whole song." That just resulted in a bunch of squeals, static, silence, the little bit of music we'd already heard, more static. Here is me trying to re-create the music. Don't judge me. I actually have a half decent singing voice. http://youtu.be/GEbINsaQgbs And I am likewise shocked to find out that the self test music is the opening line of a classical music piece. I shouldn't be surprised, since every C-64 commercial in the early 80's had the same classical tune playing in the background. I can't remember the name or composer, but now it's stuck in my head.

Well, this is a longshot, but I figure here is the place to ask. A long time ago a friend of mine found reference in an Atari book or magazine about some "music" that is included in the ROM of every Atari 8-bit system. A simple Atari BASIC program that PEEKs a series of memory locations and feeds the value to a SOUND statement is all that is required to play this music. The "song" is about 10 seconds long but can be looped. The program was as simple as something like this: 10 FOR I=25000 TO 35000 -- I don't remember the exact values. 20 X=PEEK(I) 30 SOUND X... or something. I don't remember the syntax or usage. 40 NEXT I 50 GOTO 10 It took a dedicated short loop like this to play the music at full speed in Atari BASIC. We were able to use some sort of gosub with a timer to do a little graphics work without messing up the music too badly. Under Turbo-Basic XL I was able to use a timer routine to keep the music playing while I did all sorts of other calculations. I made a big demo program for a user group meeting that played the music during the title screen. I remember taking attention away from some new 520 ST demo. I was very proud. I was hoping somebody here remembered this music and/or how to create it. I'd really like to hear it again.

Good luck with this! It reminds me of a technique we used on the TI-99/4A back in the day. It didn't have a graphics mode (or at least not one you could access through EXTENDED BASIC), but you could redefine the printable characters to make some pretty good two-color graphics. Then there were a huge number (32 maybe?) of 16x16 sprites but the hardware would only let you display 4 on any horizontal line. That made about 6 colors and you could change 4 of them every 16 scan lines. I remember typing in a program from a book that made a clown head that smiled at you.

I was actually on Compuserve with an Atari 130XE and Atari's 300 baud modem (forget the model number) back in the day. A friend and I wrote our own terminal program based on some type-in program from a magazine, which we then proceeded to modifiy beyond any hint of recognition. There were no access numbers local to us, so I wrote a program that would call in the middle of the night and automatically download my messages and the like to minimize long distance charges. Good times!