oracle_jedi

Looks like you could mount that board in an old SX212 case. The back of that unit already has cut outs for the SIO connector, and the DB25 could probably be easily replaced with a 34-pin floppy disk connector. Then just run a Shugart 34-pin to Atari 14-pin connector cable to a stock SF314. If the power draw from this board is low enough it could even be run off the SIO's 5V power line.

There was no SF414. The SF314 was a double-sided drive. The SF354 was single sided. To answer your question, set the drive to drive 0. The 14 pin connectors on the Power and IO board swap the DS1 signal to DS0 on the second floppy connector, meaning that the second drive in the chain would think it was DS0 but would respond to signals for DS1. In later ST machine, the internal drive was DS0 and the external drive was DS1. Pay attention when you are installing a replacement 34 pin floppy disk connector. On my SF354 the stripe in the cable was on pin 34, not pin 1.

There's a guy on Ebay UK called airey36 who has an enormous stock of Amiga parts including clips, screws and brackets, as well as whole systems. I've bought parts from him before, including trap door covers and such. Shipping to the USA was pretty inexpensive as I recall, although I was buying a few difference parts so it might be less attractive if you just need the one part.

I wish I could say Star Raiders too, but in my case, BITD, I relied on magazine screen shots to decide what games looked the best, and for all its technical brilliance, Star Raiders actually doesn't screen-shot particularly well. For me, in the summer of 1984, it was the glossy full page ads for Solo Flight, Zaxxon and Beach Head that made me want the Atari. I read Jack Schofield's "Top 10 Games" in Practical Computing and drooled over the screen shots of Flight Simulator II and Way Out. Solo Flight ended up being a huge disappointment, but 1984/85/86 brought so many amazing Atari games like Boulderdash II, Dropzone, Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer, Elektraglide and Mercenary. Any one of those games would be enough to buy the hardware to play them. Later in life my determination to play the unreleased Submarine Commander on a TI99/4A drove me to get a Peripheral Expansion Box with 32K RAM and a disk drive plus a Semi-Virtual Disk (SVD), which was a precursor to the Gotek/HxC floppy disk emulator so I could transfer the TI disk image to the real TI. That ended up being an expensive adventure, but I do love that game.

Just wanted to add my thank you for porting this classic to the Atari 8-bits. I love Radar Rat Race on the VIC20, and even the C64/Max version is pretty good too. This version is awesome too!

On the 8-bit Atari: The 1050 floppy disk drive. Oh hell yeah. No more waiting 40+ minutes for Dropzone to load (or not). The SIO2PC. Double hell yeah. Fire up the PC-AT, launch SIO2PC, start up the Atari and it boots a "disk" without anything mechanical happening on the aging 8-bit side. I have one of the original Nick Kennedy made units from the early 90s that someone at BaPAUG (Bournemouth and Poole Atari User Group) brought back for me from the States before I moved there in 96. After I got it I spent the next few weeks copying every single unprotected disk I had to the PC and basically stopped using real floppies on the Atari. The Incognito. Adds full XL compatibility and 1MB of RAM to my Atari 800. This expansion fulfills the original promise of an expandable Atari 800. On the TI99/4A: The Corcomp 9900 MES. Added everything I ever used from the PEB in a small device that makes no noise. Never used the PEB again after that. The CF7 is pretty cool, but connected to the SD based HxC the Corcomp is actually more useful to me than the wonky CF format used by the CF7. I also use it with a 3.5 inch drive I got from Tex*in Treasures. Laserdisc OMG I loved this format. Those huge 12" discs were beautiful to look at, and the packaging of the mid 90s Pioneer laserdiscs was awesome. When TVs were usually no more than 36" in size and used analog signals Laserdisc blew everything else out of the water. It made home movie watching an event. Early DVDs struggled to match LD in quality due to early compression not being very good. My first DVD of Highlander was practically unwatchable due to artifacts. The 10th Anniversary LD of the same movie was gorgeous. I had the boxed set of My Fair Lady which had the Audrey Hepburn audio on the analog audio tracks and the Marnie Nixon dubbed audio on the digital audio tracks allowing you to switch back and forth with a single button tap. I still miss that format, even though it would probably look awful on a modern HDTV. I finally sold off all the Laserdiscs and players about four years ago. Bluray has never given me the same buzz as watching my old Pioneer CLD-D704 load a disc and start to spin it up. 3.5 inch diskettes. As much as I loved the Atari disk drive, discovering the 3.5 disk format on an Apple Macintosh around 1985 was a revelation. The Mac interface was nice. The mouse thingy was kinda cool. MacWrite was meh. But the disk format! Now *that* was awesome. VGA. I always liked the 16-colour text mode of the IBM PC's CGA graphics. My Atari ST could only do four colours in 80-column mode. But the CGA and later EGA kinda sucked for graphics. But VGA could do multi-colored graphics as well as the colorful text modes. VGA was the missing link that made me actually want a PC. Winamp and MP3s. Damn I still love that interface, and I would tie up the phone line for hours logged into Dalnet downloading totally legitimate samples of music. Honest. Cable Internet. Man needs only 3 things to survive: Beer. A good set of tools. And high speed internet (so he can watch Youtube videos on how to use those tools - while drinking the beer..)

The disk controller daughter board also added the 32K RAM. Without it, all you have is an expensive serial/parallel interface. Shame. I love my CC9900 - it has the daughterboard - and is one of my favourite peripherals for any of my retro systems.

Stumbled across these three weird auctions on Ebay UK. Nov 1 is long past now, and I don't see why a stock 99/4A keyboard is worth anything close to what this guy is asking. Anyone know what this is all about? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Coming-Soon-Nov-1/323535482832?hash=item4b5437afd0:g:xWIAAOSwutlbzaLs:rk:1:pf:0 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Coming-Soon-Nov2/323535483975?hash=item4b5437b447:g:xWIAAOSwutlbzaLs:rk:5:pf:0 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Coming-Soon-Nov4/323535493503?hash=item4b5437d97f:g:xWIAAOSwutlbzaLs:rk:3:pf:0

The Amiga 500/600/1200 PSU outputs the same voltages as the 520ST requires: +5V, +12V and -12V. Cut off the cable and solder on the 7-pin female DIN required by the ST. Alternatively you can use a Mean Well RT50B which outputs the same voltages. Find a suitable project case and assemble your own.

Mine arrive this evening. So far I have tested them with Atari Karts, Tempest 2000 and Downfall. Next up is Raiden... These are really nice. Thank you!

Yep. Same here. And we had to drive for miles to find one, as it seemed in 1982 Commodore UK had imported a large shipment of VIC20s from West Germany, but forgot to order any C2N tape decks. My memory tells me the dealer my Dad found was based out of a warehouse in a trading estate, not a high street retailer as became popular later on. We got the C2N and a compilation tape game from Audiogenic called "Magnificent 7" - seven games for the VIC20, but two of them required a 3K expansion, and I didn't have one! Arghhh..... That place was also where I first caught glimpse of this strange thing called an Atari 400. Later an Adman VIC 8K RAM expansion, then a Vixen switchable 16K one, then a Super Expander, and I was debating spending money on a 4-slot expansion board and a Programmer's Aid Cartridge when I had an epiphany and settled on the next upgrade I wanted; an Atari 800XL. Got one for Christmas 1984.

Is this what you need? http://atariage.com/forums/topic/108472-xf551-oses/

+1 on the FE3. The unit allows you to add your own ROMs, as well as providing 3K, 16K, 24K and 35K expansion options. Also it includes an SD card reader which can be configured as any device number, and also soft and hard reset buttons. You can also add ROMs to the SD card using a configuration file, that then allows those ROMs to be loaded from the menu. My only complaint would be that the user-added ROMs are not alphabetically sorted, and changing the programmed ROMs meaning wiping it completely and reprogramming.

Hard to know with any certainty. Did the color work before you put the 600XL in storage? I am assuming it did. Modern digital upscalers usually have limited tolerance for out-of-spec video signals, unlike older analog devices, so your upscaler may simply not recognize the 600XL's output as a valid color signal. Kjmann had his own 600XL SVideo mod, and even though he made several posts about it, I have never seen one. Can you take a picture of the motherboard and share that? You might need to take a pic of both sides depending on how the mod was done. You mention the RF out has been converted to an audio line, but is the original RF modulator still in place? If it was removed was the shield ground restored or not? The mention of the power supply makes me very worried. Do you know what PSU you have? Check here in these forums for an Ingot power supply and find a picture. Compare it what you have and if that is what you are using, stop it immediately and toss that PSU in the trash. They are crap, and when they go, they take the XL with them.

Buy a larger desk.

There's some Polish guy on sellmyretro.com who has Skunk boards for £69 ea plus shipping. If you can't wait until Saint's Jag-SD Card solution is available, the Skunk will allow you to download 2 games at a time to a flashable ROM over a USB cable from your PC. Given the high prices of Jag games - and often the gameplay in no way justifies the price - the Skunkboard will allow you to explore some of the older Jag titles that can be found for download on the web.

No not really. I am not a hardware guy at all. Yet even I could tell from a simple glance at the image that the "Reimaged XF551 Original Disk Drive Controller v2.0" was a dual layer PCB with traces on both sides, whereas the stock XF551 controller board was single sided. It simply made no sense that this new dual sided design would be an exact replica of the layout of the stock item. Furthermore, a review of the text of the entry on Dropcheck's website from time states: "Two years ago I started playing around with the idea of redoing the controller board. I wanted to correct some of the design failures and hopefully add additional features. Fast forward to today and I now have a finished product. It reduces the size of the original board, while using an industry standard double sided pcb. It also incorporates an easy method to switch between two OS by using a SPDT toggle switch connected to the OS header. Mod board connectors built in allow upgrading to a daughter board allowing numerous additional features. An internal SIO header provides future internal upgrades. Best of all it can simply function as a dropin replacement for the original controller board." Emphasis mine. Furthermore I will state that I own one of these "Reimaged XF551 Original Disk Drive Controller v2.0" boards and have it in my 3.5 modded XF551. It has worked flawlessly from day 1, reading, writing and formatting without error. I know Dropcheck advised us that some units were not working as expected and offered fast and simple remedies. So even if this new design turns out to have some flaw I have no doubt she will continue to support her work 100%, and the fact that this new design is not a xerox copy of the stock XF551 controller board is no reason to reject it as a suitable basis on which to repair an otherwise useless XF551 drives. Original website as of Dec 2015 for reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20151207135825/http://www.bitsofthepast.com/?product=reimaged-xf551-disk-drive-controler-woriginal-power-supply Graham

Don't forget to add an Atari joystick interface to the order so you can use your existing Atari joysticks on the TI. If you have a composite video cable for the Atari it will work on a North American TI too. Lots of great games on the TI. Have fun

Well its PRGE again today. Excited for my annual opportunity to play Xevious on the Jag!

Exxos had replacement power switches on his site a while back. Maybe he still does? They were very cheap, but depending on where you live, shipping may add some.

Yep. Have the same situation with a boxed Commodore 64 I picked up about 10 years ago in a job lot. I know that machine can do amazing things but I never seem to find the time to explore it properly. When I do find time to power her up I tend to gravitate to the games I love on the Atari like Dropzone, Ballblazer and Mr. Do. Games that suffered less than stellar ports on the 64. Longer in depth RPGs I dont have the time for. I need to find the good pick-up-and-play games for the 64 and spend some time there.

Here's a video showing an alternative to the drop technique. The MMU is a possible candidate here. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wtXzFnpbVfE HTH

Besides the laughable soldering job, it also appears that the PROMs are inserted backwards. The notches are supposed to be at the top on a 4-chip Jag cartridge PCB.

Perhaps I have grown cynical in my old age, but this whole thread reeks of troll to me. Implying that all Colecovision titles were superior to Atari 8-bit versions, which of course in many cases they were not, and other choice nonsense such as "ADAM was unique back in 1983 since it had a square box form factor with a separate keyboard." Apparently our intrepid would-be Coleco historian is oddly unaware of machines such as the IBM PC, DEC Rainbow or the many other base-unit/separate keyboard designs from the late 70s and early 80s. Idiotic claims such as the Coleco having the “absoulte [sic] best videgames[sic] when compared to any other system”, which by definition would include the SNES, the Jaguar, the PS3 etc. and claiming that “Back in 1983 Buck Rodgers the Supergame was reference quality on the ADAM.” when that version of Buck Rogers requires an expansion option not produced until 2012. The example of Atarisoft Pac-Man is offered as rebuttal to @rpiguy9907 observation that the Coleco lagged far behind the Atari ST and Amiga even by 1985. An odd offering given that Atarisoft did not release Pac-Man for the Colecovision, and it was only available as a proto-type download. In 1983/84 if you wanted to play Pac-Man at home, the Colecovision or ADAM was not the machine you wanted. And gushing about the ADAM’s expansion bus in comparison to the ST, when the former did not include an RS232 serial interface or a parallel port and was never offered as an official expansion option. The Atari 8-bit did not have serial or parallel ports built it, but then in 1983 the 800XL cost less than $300 compared to the ADAM’s $700+. I remember the Colecovision, and I recall the ADAM being referred to as the “ADAM-bomb”, which I never could work out if that was a reference to the EMP/media-self-destruct on power-up, or that the machine almost brought down all of Coleco with it. It was all a shame. The Colecovision always looks very nice in print adverts. Zaxxon looked especially great in a screen shots and I get that some people love the machine and it had some neat features. But when I finally got to play a Colecovision at PRGE back in 2013 I tried Zaxxon and Mr. Do – two games that I love on the Atari 800 - and I came away unimpressed.

None of these strike me as irrational. Commodore monitors - especially the 1701s, 1702s and 1084s were pretty awesome. A TI99/4A is a different computer entirely once you add 32K of RAM and a floppy disk drive. Don't know much about TRS80s, but a friend of mine back when I was a kid had an EACA Video Genie II, and I loved that behemoth of a computer with its faux wood finish side panels. You should get all three...