unbibium

oh crap, am I too late to chime in on the name? I would have picked "Carata".

I can't help but notice that the BASIC screenshot has a "POKE 709,156" in it. I guess that is there because by default, the text color is green. Is there a screenshot of the default text color? I wonder whether this effect will be noticeable in many old programs, who never had to worry about the hue value in that register before.

This looks like it would be useful for parallax scrolling, with each region being a different color. Or, having a different window for the left and right player. though, to nit-pick a bit, on the Atari 8-bit this can be done with an ordinary display list, and not an interrupt. You can reset the memory reading origin at any line.

So I bought a 32-in-1 WarpOS upgrade from AtariMAX, and installed it in a working Atari 800XL It works fine, mostly -- sometimes the machine doesn't boot, it goes to a pink screen and maybe a beep... but eventually it starts up. But when it does start up, I notice that if I don't have anything plugged in, after it makes the three "device not found" raspberry sounds, it pauses for about 2 seconds before displaying the READY prompt or going to self-test. it didn't do this before. what could be causing it? i'd like to make sure it's not serious before I buy a 256k upgrade for it

If you had 3.1, it would tell you what version you had when you first powered it on. If you had 2.5, it would tell you that version when you entered config mode by holding SHIFT at power on. I was able to upgrade from 2.5 to 3.1 by putting sio2sd.bin in the root directory of the SD card, entering config mode with SHIFT, and then pressing SHIFT-K3. This took a while because I got K3 and K2 confused. The upgrade was successful, except that I can no longer select disk images from the Atari 800XL. I installed a default boot image, which kinda works, but when I select a new disk image to boot from, my selection is ignored and it just boots whatever it was going to before.

If you hold the device's SHIFT key at startup, what happens?

This contest blows me away. For one, that little bonus Atari 2600 game is another example of how surprisingly good the compiled BASIC tools are for that platform. I never expect games in BASIC to be any good, but somehow someone got a Tempest clone. Using that string as a pre-rendered background frame buffer was brilliant. I did notice that the joystick handling could have been optimized ever so slightly: IF S=7:A=A-1:IF A<0:A=11:END.:END. could be reduced to IF S=7:A=(A+11)MOD12:END. If you can add FOR L=1TO200 to the beginning of line 60, then you can replace the end of the loop's L=L+1:IF L=200:END:END.:GOTO60 with NEXT L:END

Well, I brought it back to my local hackerspace, where I have my working Atari power supply. It turned on, but video was a black screen. I took out the 32-in-1 WarpOS upgrade and put the factory ROM back in, and same result. The DRAM chips are the eight identical-looking chips on the left, right? I noticed those were all very hot to the touch. So I think I will swap them out. I'll keep you posted.

So, suppose you attached a Commodore 64 power supply to an Atari 800XL and turned it on. This kills the 800xl. What components were likely damaged, and is there any hope of repairing it? The red light came on for about a second, and then off forever. Apparently my vivid memories of using a C64 power supply when I was a kid are false. To make this slightly easier to solve, I'm linking to the atari 800xl pinouts in this thread, I googled for the commodore 64 pinouts and the pins seem to be numbered differently since the DIN plug is upside down in some of these diagrams.... but I'm thinking I'm not the first person to be this stupid, so maybe there's a well-known remedy that people can already know?

Actually, for Carina, I got past registration by entering the number "1"... but now the emulator crashes after the "Programming Modem" even though I have the R: patch enabled and he SIO patch disabled. It makes that "device not found" noise a bunch and freezes.

I've been trying to set up an Atari 8-bit BBS at a local hackerspace, but I'm running into a lot of obstacles getting the software working. I found Oasis Jr but the ARC files are corrupted. I found Carina 2, but can't get past the "Enter Registration #" prompt. I found the "BBS on a Stick" version of BBS Express, which works, but displays the user's password on the screen, and the BBS's display is going to be in a relatively public place. Most other packages seem to require more RAM or hardware than I have; right now I'm trying to run them off an unexpanded Atari 800XL. Can't find the really good options like Express Pro or Oasis 4. is it normal to get stuck at this point?

What material is the Atari 800XL's case made out of? I'd like to use a laser cutter to cut a window for my SIO2SD device, but I need to be sure that it's safe to do so, i.e. no chlorine fumes or anything that will corrode the equipment.