talanthalus

Thanks! I appreciate the response, and I'll be giving this a try soon.

After all these years, I thought it would be cool to see my old City character from before I entered The Dungeon, and I forgot a critical item: You must save the character after loading or it will be lost. My plan was to not alter the character at all. Has anyone ever messed with recovering one in this state? I have a million backups of pretty much everything except this one disk, apparently, which I am also surprised at. I didn't find any secret solutions in searching, so I thought I'd ask.

I built the cheap one and messed with it some. The ~$6 cable comes with a clone chip in it, so the drivers are a pain in the ass in Windows 10. Once you know that, it is just inconvenient to downgrade the drivers every time you change USB ports or Windows updates. I used this with RespeQT just fine to connect the Atari to the PC and load up a few things. Since the very basic one takes hold of the SIO bus, no chance of using it in conjunction with a 1050 or other drive. If you don't want the driver issues, probably spend more money and get the genuine chip version. Or, if you don't care and have time to wait, spend 1/3 the price and get the clone cable from wherever it shows up from for less. Just don't expect anything beyond the idea of connecting the Atari to a PC to load files.

Thanks. I got that all figured out. Now I can lurk there on the PC when I have time, and on the Atari when I have a LOT of time.

Ha! Now that I've learned how to connect, I'm in #Atari on chat.freenode.net through 850 Express on the 800XL. Maybe I'll see someone there. --Todd--

I was hunting to see if there was an IRC client for the Atari, and it seems like some work was done. Is there a currently working copy of something somewhere? I would much prefer to jump on with the Atari itself, since I have the capability to be online with it.

I'm in the same position in regard to the 8" drives I tossed out BEFORE I made copies of the disks onto another media I can still access. I'm slowly working to solve this issue, but it is a pain in the ass!

I haven't been on IRC in forever, but I might be inclined to jump in again. I was thinking the other day, that it would be cool to do again with the Atari computers.

All of my hardware traveled in boxes and crates for over two decades, because I didn't really have the time or the space to fully set them up and do anything with them. That said, I've pulled it all out, and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how I want to organize it. What I do now, is try to remember everything I've forgotten in the past 25 or so years. Once upon a time, I loved programming. I played a lot of games as well, and I spent a lot of time on BBSes and running my own BBS, and I used to spend time online in the early 90s on local telnet BBSes, IRC, and browsing whatever else I could get into when I still had a dial-up shell account to allow me to hop around the internet. What I do now: Look at all of the cool demos that have come about since I got out of things. Browse all of the amazing hardware that has become available, and I've made a few purchases. Dig through all of my old disks to see what the hell I was up to, and try to figure out how the hell it all works. Dial into a BBS or two. Played a few games here and there. What I hope to do: Dedicate one system to bringing my BBS back online. Regain my previous level of knowledge in programming and see what cool bits I left off with back in the day. Get my 8" drives connected and working again to recover all of that old data. Modify the hell out of at least one system. Mess around with music. I used to experiment a lot with trying to write basic programs to get sounds I wanted that were beyond the basic capabilities of the XL/XE. I see people have done that now, and I'd like to go back and play with that more. Write something cool. Put them all online, so I can access whatever I want from whichever I want at any given time. Maybe there is more... We will see. This is a very part-time hobby for now, and my first really big goal is to back up disks. While I'm at it, I will say, that from the very beginning, I wanted more out of my Atari computers. Better graphics, better games, better connectivity, better storage, etc. I know a lot of people have made that happen, and even in the past year and a half, I've seen much more come out and read about even more things that are possible that seemed like a dream just a couple of short years ago. It is cool to see that dedication to the hobby by people who have enough skill to make it happen. I'm preferring to continue my experience on real hardware to a large extent, but peripherals were always out there, so I'll definitely take advantage of the newer ones where I can.

Power: I'm using the external supply provided by Gavin with my SDrive-Max. My 800XL will not power it on its own, as there is simply not enough power going to it off the SIO to work. My switch is a little loose, so it accidentally got moved to the SIO power side while plugged in. The result was power going back to the 800XL, but nothing will work when you turn on the computer. I will be eliminating the switching option for future use or set the switch in, so it has to be changed by using the stylus or something to move it. Boot: Set Boot D1: in the CFG screen and save. Make sure you have an ATR that is bootable in the D1: slot. Make sure your physical drive, if attached, is set to D2 or higher. Usually I select the D1 entry, so it is highlighted, and it will boot. It is a great device once you get the hang of it. Don't use SpartaDOS, apparently, because it is a bit flaky, though two of my bootable ATRs are SpartaDOS formats. I'm still learning the rest by trial and error.

My 8" drives came in recently wrapped in about two layers of bubble wrap and laid directly in the bottom of the box. Next to them was the power supply, wrapped the same way. On top, there was some busted up styrofoam. On the sides and between these heavy pieces was only the bubble wrap, so needless to say, I have drive parts. Nothing in there to protect the heads either. I can imagine not everyone has an 8" disk lying around for shipping, but with a box that big and heavy, one would at least expect it all to be packed as if they cared for it to arrive in one piece on the other side. I'm guessing these sellers must make their money on the insurance claim, because otherwise, what is the point in all of the effort if there is no care if the item arrives in working condition?

Being the stubborn type I am, I went with the Wimodem232 and am leveraging my ATR-8000 (you can also use the 850 interface or others if you have them). This connects directly to WiFi, and then you can use terminal software to dial out to BBSes. I did this, so I don't have to tether my system to my PC to do everything. Someone showed me an 850 up for sale for $17 or so just a few days ago, if you wanted to go straight online with the Atari. This route is probably more cost effective long-term than having to get a landline and modem.

Almost revived... The Dungeon BBS (my version). I have to go through lines of code and modify all of the drive calls, since I'm not running four physical drives and a RAMdisk at the moment. Once I've done that, I'll be able to get it to work properly, I believe, then I can start testing putting this version up online.

I have no SIO2SD experience to speak from. My SDrive-MAX experience so far, is that it works great connected with my existing hardware for many functions. I've had issues being able to consistently copy files into an .ATR file before I get errors, and I have had issues being able to rename the files on a PC without them becoming corrupted. I haven't experimented with every single option out there for formatting, different DOS versions, etc., but it seems I'm fine if I copy the contents of one side of one disk most of the time, but the minute I try to move more files into the ATR, it goes flaky for me. I'd just chalk this mostly up to user error at this point, but that's where I am. I believe if I were just loading this thing up with files from the PC and using it that way, it would be flawless. I'm actually focused on transferring files from floppy to SD, so I'm having my own challenges. Once you get the hang of it, booting between it and floppy, or booting to it and having the floppy as a 2nd drive option all seems to work great. --Todd--