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oracle_jedi

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Posts posted by oracle_jedi

  4. Posted

    I'm almost to the point of sending XF314 proto boards to the board house. In prep I am trying to collect 3 1/2" compatible BIOS files.

     

    I believe there are two, Hyper+XF and I believe another from Bob Woolley. But I have neither one. Can someone with a modified 3 1/2" XF551 upload their bin file or point me to a download link?

     

    Here you go:

     

    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/108472-xf551-oses/?p=1314823

     

    Very excited to see an XF351 in action!

  5. Posted

     

    I found a post on the English Amiga Board from Jens that states the ACA500plus works just fine now with the NTSC Rev 5 machines (which is good to know):

     

    "The Rev.5 NTSC version was critical with the previous version, but it's not any more with the ACA500plus."

     

    http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=79303&page=21

     

    Awesome! I am going to have to find time to pull a Rev 5 out of the closet and test this. Wont be today however, the kids want to go bowling.

  6. Posted

    I also got the Lotharek built HxC. Great guy who makes awesome stuff.

     

    I also got the Amiga External floppy disk adapter. This little device saves you a bunch of hassle by turning the Amiga's external floppy disk interface into an industry standard 34-pin adapter with a 5V power connector too. The cable is just long enough to sit the HxC on top of the Amiga making it very convenient.

     

    https://amigastore.eu/en/440-amiga-external-floppy-disk-drive-adapter-m1.html

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    The XF551 is one of the most troublesome drives for the Atari.

     

    The problem is the lousy build quality of the main PCB. A cheaply made single-sided PCB, the traces to the SIO connectors break very easily. If you're buying form the usual scalper/extortion site do what you can to make sure the unit actually works before spending money. Also the XF551, due to its relative rarity, tends to cost much more than a 1050, 810 or common clone.

     

    Dropcheck on this forum has replacement XF551 PCBs that require parts from the original PCB. If you are handy with a soldering iron this is a wise investment to keep your XF551 running long term.

     

    Also note the XF551 is more temperamental with respect to flippy disks. Such disks require two timing holes to work, so inserting many disks upside down to use access the second side doesn't work. If you are planning to use the drive for commercial software this can be a problem.

     

    If your 130XE is PAL the stock XF551 doesn't work at all. You need to replace the drive's ROM.

     

    With all that said, the Mitsumi 360K drive is okay and the drive's styling is nice. It is easily upgraded to better ROMs and can also be modified to support 720K 3.5inch drive mechanisms which are great.

    • Like 2

  9. Posted

    The external Gotek can be used to boot the Amiga.

     

    Some users simply replace the internal disk drive with a Gotek, although that typically involved cutting pieces out of the case which is a mess in my opinion. Alternatively you can buy or build a DF0/DF1 switcher that causes the Amiga to treat the drive connected to the floppy disk port as DF0 and boot from that.

     

    Also if you have Kickstart 3.0/3.1 you can use the Early Boot Menu to tell the Amiga to boot from DF1.

     

    I personally use an HxC2001 device which is similar in function to the Gotek but uses SD cards to store disk images instead of a USB stick. The advantage to me is that I can use the same HxC on a number of retro computers including the Amiga, a TI99/4A, the Atari ST and an old Atari PC1. That said I am not aware of any compelling reason why one variation of Gotek or HxC is inherently superior to another.

     

    The ACA500+ that sm3 mentions gives you hard disk functionality provided by a pair of CF cards and the second CF card can be DOS formatted to provide for easy file transfers from a modern PC. However this now means you will need to use hard-disk adapted games using WHDLoad, and not the floppy disk images. WHDLoad is pretty good but requires a truck load of RAM to work, so make sure you get the 500+ and not the older ACA500 which only had 2MB of RAM and therefore would not load alot of WHDLoad images.

     

    Connecting to LED TVs is a more subjective matter. Some modern TVs have a composite video-in and can take a signal directly from the A520 video adapter although the picture is likely to be pretty crap. sm3 above has already mentioned the Indivision adapter to use the Amiga with a VGA monitor. Another option is the XRGB Framemeister which converts the Amiga's RGB to HDMI and does alot of other nice things.

     

    I hear good things about the Framemeister but I personally use an older Commodore 1084 RGB monitor so I have no personal experience.

     

    One note on the ACA500/500+. Its a great expansion for the Amiga 500 but does not work on the NTSC Rev 5 machines, which are the most common Amiga 500s in North America.

     

    HTH

  13. Posted · Edited by oracle_jedi

    I guess what I am wondering is if there was a period, however brief, when an Atari 800XL and pair of 1050's might have been seen on a business desktop and used as a daily driver for spreadsheets, word processing, etc. Did our beloved have it's day in the mainstream sun?

     

    If Atari had any aspirations to being taken seriously as a business machine they should have delivered on CP/M compatibility, 80-column text and high speed disk drives.

     

    CP/M was an already established standard when the Atari was released in 1979, and Microsoft shipped the Z80 Softcard for the Apple II in 1980 further expanding the CP/M market.

     

    Of course there were vague plans. The 815 dual disk drive, the 1060 CP/M module, the 1090 expansion module and an 80-column card but it was all half-hearted. Atari ploughed R&D dollars into holograms and hopelessly unrealistic video phones while Apple, learning from the mistakes of the III, sensibly brought us the IIe with vendor supported 80-column mode and 128K of RAM. At the same Atari thought the future of home computers was a built in 2400 baud modem and a speech synthesizer.

     

    There there third-party solutions. The Bit3 80-column card. The ATR8000 etc, but who seriously would run a business on an Atari 800 with a third-party 80-column card to act as a dumb terminal to a CP/M solution from yet another vendor who had almost no distribution network?

     

    And seriously guys. You could have put a full stroke keyboard on the 400 it would have no difference. No one was going to run a business on a 16K computer with RF only output and no factory authorized way to increase the RAM (until 1983).

     

    Atari could have better positioned the 800 as a business machine. Indus' idea of using a Z80 as the CPU in the disk drive would have been a master stroke of brilliance had Atari done it first with the 810. An Atari "800 Plus" stripped of the RF shielding and with externally exposed expansion slots might have helped by making expansion cards feasible. A 1200XL that included 80-column mode as a default option perhaps?, and a dual disk drive that support actual double-density mode or better yet double-sided would have helped.

     

    Amstrad proved there was a market for a small-business/prosumer 8-bit machine with their Amstrad PCW range (which was CP/M based - and even used a 3 inch disk drive). I remember Atari briefly packaged the 600XL with a 1027 printer and a copy of Atariwriter, but would you really expect your secretary to type the company letters on that sorry excuse for a real keyboard, and then save her work to a 1010 tape deck? And that would assume your office fire marshal didn't freak out at the multitude of power supply bricks now dotted around the floor, and that no typed letter required more than about 10K of RAM.

     

    I recall the Atari 8-bits were often used by cable TV companies to run TV listing channels, and Atari User magazine in the UK carried stories of them being used by the Lawn Tennis Association for something-or-other. But I also seem to recall that Atari themselves used VAX terminals to do the serious work in the Atari offices, probably using the VAX/VMS All-in-1 software package.

     

    Given Atari Inc didn't eat their own dog food. I don't think many others would have either.

  14. Posted

    Thanks for the link.

     

    It's odd. If I press the PLAY key very firmly then it seems to stick and run the tape. Also, starting with the Pause enabled, and then releasing it seems to help. It definitely seems like its starting to fail. Hopefully I can get the last of the tape games moved to disk before it completely gives up.

     

    I've got a number of projects lined up right now, and rebuilding the rarely used tape deck isn't high on my priority list of things I want to do.

  15. Posted

    I think my TI cassette deck is dying.

     

    After a long afternoon of transferring tape based files to disk for my Camputers Lynx, the cassette deck is now acting as if it is at the end of the tape when in fact it is at the beginning. Tried several tapes, and even advanced forward half way through, with no change.

     

    I am guessing the belt has stretched?

     

    Before I end up with yet another half dissassembled piece of retro hardware on the desk, and another small pile of screws that I am not entirely certain where they came from, does anyone know the belt specs for these units, and better yet, where to buy them from?

     

    This is the beige colored unit styled to match the later 99/4A computers.

  16. Posted

    This might do the trick. Dropcheck made a small XF board for mounting the drive in a small case (along with a 1088XEL). You'd have to add SIO ports and power.

     

    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.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    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.

     

    post-10949-0-64896100-1544676548_thumb.png

     

    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.

     

     

  18. Posted

    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.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    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.

  21. Posted

    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..)

    • Like 3

  22. Posted

    It doesnt have the disk controller.

     

    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.

    • Like 2

  23. Posted

    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

    • Like 1
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