oracle_jedi
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Posts posted by oracle_jedi
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Are you sure the selected games work in mono mode?
Maybe try Flight Sim II, or Battlezone first to confirm everything works.
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47 minutes ago, Philsan said:
Unfortunately, if I am not wrong, this SCART is RGB only. I cannot connect composite or s-video.
Perhaps composite is there if I cut the case?
@351coug now I am using a cable like the one you mentioned but I would like to use TTL port free SCART port for other RGB machines.
I now see the image and TTL RGB is digital. This will not work for an ST output.
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7 minutes ago, Philsan said:
Unfortunately, if I am not wrong, this SCART is RGB only. I cannot connect composite or s-video.
@351coug now I am using a cable like the one you mentioned but I would like to use TTL port free SCART port for other RGB machines.
Are you certain the 8 pin DIN socket is analog RGB and not digital RGB? The ST RGB output is analog, whereas a CGA display is digital.
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23 minutes ago, leech said:
Is it an Atari SC1435 you are talking about that has a DE-9 port on the back? Look for something like this; https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Commodore-VIC-20-Computer-in-Original-Box-Manual-Power-TV-Adapters-/154921412260
Not sure a VIC20 is going to help much here.
The SC1435 looks to have a 8-pin DIN female socket. I am guessing it is a rebranded Philips/Magnavox unit. They used those 8-pin DIN plugs on some monitors, although mostly they seemed to use the "standard" CGA/RGB 9-pin DSUB style.
Anyway assuming you do infact have the 8-pin DIN. You will either need to see if the SCART connector carries RGB and if it does maybe use that, or call up one of the cable vendors and ask them to make you one. You need an Atari ST (13-pin DIN) to Philips/Magnavox 8-pin DIN RGB cable.
Basically this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/125191050781?hash=item1d25f7d61d:g:uuoAAOSwWMtal-WI
But instead of CGA as the source, you want an Atari ST video connector instead.
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Most 520STFMs are easily upgraded to 1MB by adding another 16 RAM chips, and sometimes a couple of resistors.
1MB will give you access to most games and applications. Even 512K will allow you to play a lot of the games and run the apps. There are a number of C compilers although I have not personally used any of them, so I will leave it up to others to comment on their efficacy. Although you certainly can develop on the 520STFM the spongy keyboard might start to annoy you and I would guess that most serious development is now done on emulators to give better speed and flexibility.
I don't know what a CosmosEX is. I tried to Google it and it took me to an Atari-Forum post full of blank images. So that's useful. If it is a solid-state floppy emulator akin to a Gotek or an HxC then there are loads of ST and STX images you can download and explore.
If it is a hard-disk emulator akin to UltraSatan then you'll need a hard disk driver and most likely TOS 1.02 or better. I personally could not get TOS 1.0 to work with Ultra Satan at all. There are a number of hard disk driver options out there, but @ParanoidLittleMan has probably the most commonly used one. He also maintains a site with most of the ST's game archive adapted to run on hard disk which makes life a lot more convenient.
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5 hours ago, Goochman said:
If Im reading this right a 2MB STE was only 50 pounds cheaper than a 2MB Falcon? Who wouldnt get the Falcon at that time?
I was thinking the same thing, but then started to imagine living with a single-floppy/no HD Falcon. Not sure there was a market for that.
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I know Shanghai by Activision supported an ST mouse on the 8-bit. I think "Brundles" - the Lemmings clone did too.
And Diamond GOS.
I know there were more. I just don't recall them.
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11 minutes ago, zzip said:
Yeah I think this was the era when I gave up on PC gaming, because it seemed like every game was broken or at least took a lot of effort to get running well. And you'd have to do things like downgrade your DirectX to specific version or check the vendor support site to see if they issued any patches and update them yourself.
Odd. I have some fond memories of that era.
GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas, Rogue Squadron, Star Wars Battlefront, Need for Speed 27... I have a shelf of CDs and last year I got an itch to play them. Tried running them on my Windows 10 gaming laptop but ran into all manner of compatibility issues. Found myself on some pretty sketchy websites downloading patches and drivers and in the end I abandoned the effort.
Next I tried to repurpose an old Sony Vaio laptop from some years back. XP loaded okay but could not recognize a good deal of the hardware. Fine if you want to play Minesweeper. Need for Speed however wasn't having it.
Instead I got myself an old Dell Optiplex 760 SFF desktop. Its pretty compact. Designed to run Windows Vista, Dell has done a good job of providing backward compatible drivers for older Windows releases. I guess because businesses often rely on some pretty old software. I added an NVidia 6300 GPU. That was pretty cheap and it came with drivers for XP. The Optiplex has a built in DVD-ROM which my current laptop does not.
And it plays all of my CD based games. I do need to rely on DosBox though to play DOS games on it. Doom/Doom II will run under XP but the sound is corrupted. Under DosBox they play as expected.
But I am Interested to know if there is any virtualization option that can handle the graphical demands of games like GTA3.
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I wish I had gone A8 to Amiga.
I bought a 520ST in early 1987. A combination of misplaced brand loyalty, impatience, youthful naivety and the inconvenient fact that the Amiga 500 didn't exist yet (it was launched in the UK later in 87 IIRC).
I spent a good chunk of the back side of 87 and most of 88 with a bad case of Amiga-envy. My mate got one and although the games looked mostly the same, they sounded so much better. Sold the ST in 89/90, went to uni, bought a few PCs of various levels of crappiness. Occasionally toyed with the idea of buying one of those Amiga 1200 from amiga.eu back when you could still buy NOS ones but mostly forgot all about it.
Until I bought an A500 in 2016. And then a few more. And then a couple of 1200s too. And yeah its a good machine. Better for games that the ST was due to that sound processor. But it has never impressed me the way the 800 did, and still occasionally still does. Maybe I just grew to expect too much. Perhaps the legend in my mind could never be matched by reality. I even got a ACA1221 accelerator and tried to play Sim City 2000, but it just sucked with laggy gameplay and that annoying interlaced screen.
I have an ACA500+ but more than half the WHDLoad games I try seem to crash with weird exception errors, or memory problems. Tried this on 3 different A500s - both PAL and NTSC, both KS 1.3 and KS 3.1.
One day I will find the time to get the most out of this machine....
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1 hour ago, johannesmutlu said:
if atari really wanted to release their atari xe ,then they should,ve bundle 1 set with both a keyboard and (thirthparty) diskdrive along with os software for it and sell it as a hybrid pc while in the other set they should and did had still put in a controller and light gun with it but they also should
In Europe Atari continued to offer the 130XE/800XE right through until mid 1992, so they did position it as a cheap entry level computer/games system. It was sold along side the XEGS. I think there was also a package with the XEGS, keyboard and Flight Sim II. Various packages aimed at different price points and potential buyers. I don't know what approach Atari was using Stateside, but I would imagine by 1991/92 the market was mostly consoles for games and 16-bit - and probably increasingly PC cloned - for computing.
We've had numerous discussions on the merits of Atari selling 3 different 8-bit systems all at the same time (2600, 7800, XEGS) and people have raised many good points. My opinion remains that it was simply a way for Tramiel to squeeze a last bit of revenue from the 8-bit line, and to monetize the portfolio of licensed IP that was the 8-bit game library with minimal capital investment.
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I decided to pull out my 520ST and have fun exploring some of the original disks that came with the my ST from Silica Shop back in 1987, and that included the CP/M emulator.
This is really a Z80 emulator on top of which is running a port of CP/M. Its a bit buggy at times, with the system refusing to recognize disk swaps, and it is almost unusable on a single-drive system. But with my 1040 switched to disable the internal drive, and the HxC emulating both A and B, I went down the CP/M rabbit hole, which was both frustrating and entertaining.
Attached is a ZIP archive of what I have been playing with.
There is a TOS format disk with the emulator. And a desktop INF file set to medium res and a color scheme designed to emulate phosphor green on my 1084.
And there are several "CPM" format disks of CP/M files I have transferred and played with including Microsoft BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Wordstar and the Infocom adventures Zork, Zork 2, Zork 3, Plantelfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. There's also two disks of Creative Computing's BASIC games including classics like Hamurabi and Hangman.
The CP/M "boot disk" isn't really needed to boot the system but is the original CP/M tools transferred to a CP/M disk. I've added a few extras like PIP and UNZIP.
Remember that the CP/M emulator can only read and write single-sided disks. You'll get sector errors and garbage if you try to read/write a double sided disk. The HxC Floppy Emulator GUI for Windows that I use allows me to create 360K Atari ST disks but they still end up double sided, so I have to reformat them again in TOS. You might notice every CP/M disk has TOSDIR and TOSCPM on it as this how you read and copy files from a TOS disk to a CP/M one.
Anyway, I am attaching the ZIP file here in case anyone else wants to explore this peculiar package from the early days of the ST.
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I ended up going with this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N5M94NT?ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details&th=1
And then replaced the fan with a 40mm x 10mm Noctua silent fan. It was a simple swap out/screw in replacement. The heat sink comes with an adhesive pad but I ended up using some artic silver thermal paste that once it dried had bonded to the top of the CPU quite well. The unit has been running without an issue so far, but I am at stock 66Mhz and have not tried any overclocking.
For the benefit of anyone else looking to install a CT60e, the two pins next to C45 on the last CT60e revision are indeed 12V/GND for a fan. The 12V pin is closest to the cap.
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When you figure it out would you share your sampling settings? I have an external RGB2HDMI which I use for Hercules and EGA mode on the PC1.
It has an ST and an STE setting.
From my 1040ST, the STE setting gives me a shaking image, and the ST settings gives me a blank screen.
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On the HxC, if you don't put an AUTOBOOT.HFE on the SD card the system just allows you to use the buttons to step through the disk images and select one.
If you have an AUTOBOOT.HFE file it goes into "direct access" mode and boots to the menu where you pick the images with the ST's keyboard
Does the Gotek not use the same approach?
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Most Gotek drives have manual selector buttons. So try removing the AUTOBOOT.HFE file, adding a few HFE disk images of games you want to try, and selecting them manually. See if the problem persists.
It will at least rule out the Gotek itself as the cause.
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I prefer the later revision without the Solid State Software badge, but still with the black and aluminum finish.
On the later model the keyboard overlay strip rested on a small indentation above the top row of keys. The earlier model had a raised strip you sort of have to feed the overlay into.
With that said my only remaining 4A is a beige one.
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The one with the Amiga chipset. I think it was tentatively named the 1850XLD.
Good grief. Between the 8bit 1450XLD, the sort of PC compatible 1650XLD and the 68k based 1850XLD the product branding would have been a disaster.
A Falcon040 would have been nice too.
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Did you get an answer Dan? I am preparing to install my CT60e and I cannot even figure out if the 2-pin header next to C45 is for the cooling fan, which side is positive/negative, and if it is 5V, 12V or something else.
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8 hours ago, Boteb said:
Ok...i've managed to burn a new 6 Rom serie i've found a set splitted on internet. (hard to find an allready splitted version). THis is an US 1.04 version.
The machine boots now.
I'd like to know if the video output related to the language of the rom's. The video output is now NTSC. I like to have a PAL version.
If this is the case then i have to split and burn new EPROM..
The video output is not governed by the ROM - except for the default video refresh rate in color mode.
Changing from a U.S. ROM to a European PAL ROM will change your keyboard mappings, and it will change the default video timing from 60hz to 50hz, but it will not change the color carrier signal from NTSC to PAL. That last part is governed by the physical hardware on the motherboard. Changing it is not trivial and probably not worth the effort.
I would expect most of the regulars here use RGB. RGB can be either 50hz or 60hz, but you can also software switch it. Most RGB monitors don't care either way. Most scalers don't care either. Some games do care though and will flicker if the refresh rate is not what they were coded for.
Composite color output is PAL or NTSC. As stated, changing the ROM won't change this. You'll just end up with NTSC at 50hz and unless your composite color monitor can handle the color signal you'll end up with a black and white image.
Mono mode is the same in both NTSC land and PAL land.
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Oh and the keyboard is quite responsive. Which is an odd thing to say when we're talking about a 400.
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Loving that scenery!
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Running this on a real 48K NTSC 400 for the last two hours.
The keyboard seems to work F H T B appear to move the aircraft pitch, and the <> keys increase or decrease throttle.
Been on conf calls so leaving it running and not had much time to experiment. But looks like great work!
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127,170. This is a Pac-Man cartridge playing on an NTSC 400.
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7 hours ago, ldelsarte said:
I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that the machine was supposed to cost just under $1,000.
So, in theory, when you look at the price of the components sold separately (computer, floppy drive, modem + voice synthesizer), it must have still been a good deal.No really, at $1000 it would not have been. I wanted one too back-in-the-day. Still would. But had they been released it would have been a Mattel Aquarius level marketing debacle.
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in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
For me its become a seasonal thing.
During the winter months the soldering iron is always out, and I work through my list of projects, upgrades and fixes. Each project is followed by lots and lots of testing of all of the new releases of the last 12 months, plus all of my favourites, and sometimes a round or two of the HSC. With all of the amazing conversions and ports, each Fall is a bit like Christmas 84 all over again, with new games to explore. Although this past winter was dominated by repairs to the Falcons and the PC1 ISA project, getting to explore the Fujinet cart for the first time, and play Prince of Persia on the 8bit was an amazing experience.
During the summer I don't have the time for retro projects. The time is better spent outdoors. Usually one of the Ataris is still out on the bench so gets occasional use during dull conference calls when the camera doesn't need to be on. "That man is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did.” Well it would be Galaga if such existed for the A8, but in the meantime....