Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store  

retroclouds

+AtariAge Subscriber
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    2,123

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by retroclouds

  2. Posted · Edited by retroclouds

    I have a bunch of original TI casette tapes that I never used, got those at one of the german TI-trefs about a decade ago.
    They are in good condition as you can see in the attached pictures.
    Some of them are still shrink wrapped. Can't tell if they are readable or not though.

    There is some basic teaching stuff and quite a few adventure games for the tunnels of doom cartridge.
    Also 2 copies of "Pennies and Prizes - Quest for the King" by texcomp.
    One cassette has a custom label "Mini writer v1.0 use with TI MINI MEMORY".

    Could be that a few cassettes have some custom contents, as they have "disable write protection" labels on them.

    Now here's the plan:
    I don't want to longer hord/keep these cassettes and don't feel going through the ebay route.

    Therefor I'd like to trade the 39 cassettes collection for a TI peripheral (PEB equipment card or something similar).
    If you are interested PM via Atariage. I prefer to ship to Europe.
    The "best" offer receives the whole collection, I won't split it up.
    Shipping costs will be worked out privately.

    Trade deadline is Saturday December 15th. I'll contact the best offer on Sunday December 16th.

    Included are:

    • 5x Basic für Anfänger (shrink wrapped)
    • 5x Basic für Anfänger (2 with custom content?)
    • 1x Teach yourself extended basic
    • 1x Oldies but goodies Spiele 1 (shrink wrapped)
    • 2x Oldies but goodies Spiele 2 (shrink wrapped)
    • 2x Oldies but goodies Spiele 2
    • 2x Marketing plan spiel
    • 1x Ihr Finanzberater (shrink wrapped)
    • 5x Voodoo Castle
    • 1x Savage Island series (shrink wrapped)
    • 1x Savage Island series
    • 2x Mission Impossible (1 with wrinkled label bottom)
    • 1x Strange Odyssey
    • 1x Mystery Fun House (custom cassette case)
    • 1x Pirate Adventure
    • 1x The Count
    • 1x Pyramid of Doom
    • 1x Adventureland
    • 1x The Golden Voyage (crack in cassette case)
    • 2x Pennies and Prizes - Quest for the King (custom cassette case), Distributed by Tex-Comp
    • 1x Music Skills Trainer (custom cassette case)
    • 1x Mini Write v1.0 (re-used TI-cassette, custom cassette case)

    post-16219-0-32437000-1544280455_thumb.png

  3. Posted

     

    It's an interesting idea, but after looking at the documentation I don't think js99er is the type of application that would benefit from being available via Sandstorm. It is a pure client side app that doesn't need a server to store or share any data.

     

    What about turning it into an electron application?

     

    https://electronjs.org/

  4. Posted

    Think I read somewhere that the F18A also supports a 30 rows/80 character mode as opposed to the "normal" 24 x 80 columns mode.

    If that is true, can someone point me how the F18A VDP registers must be set to activate the mode?

     

    Thanks

    retroclouds

     

    *EDIT* It's 30 rows, not 31 rows.

  7. Posted · Edited by retroclouds

    Here's the first version of my device scan program. It's an 8K ROM and runs completely in scratchpad ram, so no 32K expansion required.

     

    DSRSCANC.BIN

     

    It can currently identify the following devices:

     

    Real devices:

    • TIPI Sidecar
    • TI Disk Controller card
    • TI Disk Controller sidecar
    • TI RS232/PIO card
    • TI RS-232 interface sidecar
    • PGRAM+ card
    • MYARC RS232 Interface card model RSIC-1
    • nanopeb SIO
    • CF7+

    Emulation:

    • Classic99 Controller (Disk/Clipboard/Clock)
    • JS99er Controller (Disk)

    Device identification is done based on a CRC-16 (Cyclic Redundancy Check) of the 1K block at >4000->43ff. The checksum of that block of memory is shown in the column CRC2. Note that I also do a CRC-16 check on the 8K block at >4000->5fff, (column CRC1) but it's currently not used for device indentification.

    I would like to add the checksums for more devices to this program.

    So if you're willing to help. Please add the checksums (value in column CRC1 and CRC2) to this thread, telling what device it belongs to.

    I can then add the appropriate identification strings to the program.

    Note that Device identification currently is purely based on CRC-16, so for devices that do not have a DSR (e.g. SAMS) or have a self-modifying DSR (HRD ramdisk) are not properly recognized at this time.

    Oh and as always, use at your own risk.

    • Like 3

  9. Posted

    This week my daily driver TI-99/4a console (that's the one with an F18a) broke down.

    I thought the easiest thing to do was to just swap the mainboard and keep on going for now (I have plenty of spare consoles).

     

    Oh boy, was I wrong. The tricky part was to transplant the F18a. I took out the F18a and you guessed it, I managed to break a pin connecting to the VDP socket. Felt like an idiot there.

    Luckily I was able to solder on another pin to the F18a board, so got the F18a working fine again (took me several hours and multiple attempts putting on that pin. I'm not a hardware guy so was pretty proud of myself doing the soldering without damaging the F18a board) .

     

    Anyway, what I noticed after putting everything back together is that when I typed on the keyboard, there was a very fast repeating of the keys while typing. Tried to type "call clear" and got "caaaalllll cleeeaaar"

    So I thought something was wrong with my replacement mainboard and swapped it again, this time being absolutely sure to be as careful as possible not to damage the F18a.

     

    I put the keyboard back on, and got the same behaviour. So this time I swapped the keyboard as well and now everything works as expected.

     

    Now here to my question, is there any real logic in the keyboard? I was under the assumption that it's just a matrix you poll.
    What would explain the above behaviour? At first I thought there could be something wrong with the clock, voltage being slightly of or whatever on the mainboard. But it did not occur to me the keyboard itself could be the culprit.

     

    The keyboard in error has the manufacturer "HI-TEK", the one that's working has no manufacturer at all, presume it's made by Texas Instruments (did they even do that?).

     

    Anway, long story short. My TI-99/4a is working again and I'm a happy camper. Never thought I'd have such an issue because of malfunctioning keyboard.

     

     

    retroclouds

  10. Posted

    Bummer is that my daily driver TI-99/4a console (the only one with an F18a) started having some issues this evening.

     

    The keyboard is no longer responding. This happened after I used one of my CF7+ devices.

    Dunno, always had a strange feeling as far this TI-99/4a console is concerned playing together with the CF7+

    Always had the feeling that the keyboard keys repeated too quickly while using the CF7+

    I'm not sure if this really is a keyboard thing or if there's something else wrong (9901 issue?)

     

    So further development will have to way for a while until I fixed the console.

    Do have sufficient replacement parts/consoles. The only thing I don't want to do is transplant my F18a to another console. Will see how it goes. ;)

  11. Posted · Edited by retroclouds

    I know the ROS/CFG package has a CRU scanning routine which identifies just about every legacy card that exists...

     

    Might be worth looking into. :)

     

     

    ***EDIT***

     

    Never mind.... looks like you're well aware. :)

     

    Thanks for the heads up. Actually my CRC check works real well for those cards that do have a DSR on ROM/EPROM.

    There are 2 cards I cannot identify via CRC, first being my HRD ramdisk and the other one is SAMS.

     

    The HRD has its DSR in RAM and it seems to overwrite parts of it quite often. Probably config settings. So no use doing checksums here.

    The SAMS does not have a DSR, so hence can't CRC it. I think that the SAMS is always at cru >1e00 so that should be good enough to identify it.

    • Like 1

  12. Posted · Edited by retroclouds

    So far I was able to successfully identify the following devices by doing a CRC-16 check on the DSR space:

     

    Real devices:

    • TIPI Sidecar
    • TI Disk Controller card
    • TI Disk Controller sidecar
    • TI RS232/PIO card
    • TI RS-232 interface sidecar
    • PGRAM+ card
    • MYARC RS232 Interface card model RSIC-1
    • nanopeb SIO
    • CF7+

     

    Emulation:

    • Classic99 Controller (Disk/Clipboard/Clock)
    • JS99er Controller (Disk)

     

    Still on my todo list (devices I own):

    • RS232-PIO Single-Step (TI Workshop)
    • CF7+ (in different flavours)
    • nanopeb SIO
    • Sidecar Disk Controller
    • Sidecar RS232

     

     

    Basically I have 2 ways of doing the CRC-16 check:

    • CRC-16 check on >4000->5fff
    • CRC-16 check on >4000->43ff

     

    To get a faster response I'm concentrating on the 2nd one.

     

    Not sure where this is all is leading to, probably add it as a function to my spectra2 library.

    But hey, it's about fun and learning stuff, so...

     

    Will probably release my "scanner" as a cartridge image by the end of next week. That way, results can be cross-checked / verified.

    Coming to think about it, would be cool to compile an online checksum list of the different DSR's flying around there. ;)

    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    There is nothing in DSR space that can be guaranteed to identify a particular card. For example, a TI disk controller card has the same first device name as a CorComp card, viz., “DSK”. The device-name list can certainly help and is maybe all you need, particularly with a controller with a unique device name like “TIPI”, but TI’s DSR development guidelines do not require the card name or manufacturer to be present.

     

    ...lee

     

    ok, here's the idea. I've implemented a CRC-16 check in assembly language.

    I think that it should be possible to identify most of the DSR rom's by their checksum. What I'd like to do is collect a list of checksums for the most common devices.

     

    Obviously you'd need to do more checking to identify the full characteristics of the device, e.g. to find out how much RAM a HRD has, etc.

    Will see how it goes.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    Do we have sample code showing how to do a device CRU scan.

     

    What I would like to accomplish is scan and identify peripheral expansion cards like HRD3000, RS232, SAMS, ...

    Basically something like we have in the CFG834 configuration program.

     

     

  20. Posted

    ok, here is what I have in mind for a 21st century text progs' editor on the TI-99/4a:

     

    * Support for SAMs

    * f18a support (80x24, 80x30)

    * split-screen support, panes (e.g. editing/viewing 2 files at once)

    * open-file dialog with possibility to select file from list

    * command-line option for running #EA5 directly from inside the editor

    * cartridge based

    * config options

    • Like 4

  22. Posted · Edited by retroclouds

    Can anyone point me to the latest version of DM 1000 ?

     

    Back in the day I was using v3.8 but I'm not certain it can handle my HRD 3000 properly. Seems to have issues with bigger disk drive size.

    Also is the source code for DM 1000 available ? Would like to assemble my own version if possible (just for fun)

     

    Thanks

    Filip

  25. Posted

     

    Hope your PEB and cards are ok doing well. As far as my HRD is concerned, did some measurements with my multimeter on the diodes and I believe to have an issue with both CR4 and CR5.

    I repeated my measurements multiple times to be sure. CR4 and CR5 seem to be conducting in both ways. Also checked CR6, CR7, CR3, CR8, CR9; no issues there.

     

    On whtech I found the horizon 3000 construction guide. At some point it says:

     

    We have found the germanium diodes CR4-CR7 can be the problem. The diodes can be replaced with Radio Shack Cat. No. 276-1123

     

    So my question is, what is a good replacement for these germanium diodes in 2018 ?

     

     

    The card is working fine now. I replaced CR4 and CR5, that alone did not do the trick. Same behaviour as before.

    I checked CR9 with the multimeter again and it was acting strange. I desoldered it, tested it isolated with the multimeter and it appeared fine.

    As I did not have replacement 1N914 diodes, I soldered the same 1N914 back on the board again, and now the card is working. Still going to get some replacement 1N914's though.

    Quite happy that it is working now, took me quite some effort, but that's part of the fun. ;)

    post-16219-0-19414900-1540146195_thumb.jpg

    post-16219-0-12938400-1540146242_thumb.jpg

    • Like 1
AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...