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ClausB

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Posts posted by ClausB


  1. I held out until 1997! At work I had the latest PCs and fast internet so I would surf there after hours. My Ataris served me well enough at home. By '97 I had a toddler ready to play with preschool programs and another on the way so it was time to upgrade. That year my company downsized and dumped their '486s so I grabbed a low profile one with W95 and a dial-up modem. It made a good family PC for several years.

     

    I recall New Year's Eve '99 when I teased the kids to stay away from the PC at midnight in case it blows up. Really had them going!

    • Like 4

  2. In my senior year my high school bought two Altairs, each with 16K RAM, no ROM, and serial and cassette interfaces. To boot from cassette we had to toggle in a short boot loader program. Once BASIC loaded we typed on terminals and forgot about the switches and lights. There were two terminals, an ADM-3 CRT/keyboard, and an ASR-33 teletype with paper tape. Those were the days!

     

     

     

    • Like 9

  3. Nice work!

     

    You can avoid wiring to the motherboard by plugging into the second RAM slot. There you get all your signals except one, and that one you get from the OS ROM board in slot 0.

     

    Slot 2 has A0 - A13 and /S2 - /S5. Slot 0 has A15. So your /CE would be A15 AND /S4 AND /S5. Your A14 would be /S2 AND /S3. That gets you 48K. So you don't need /S0 or /S1, and the /S4 and /S5 you get from slot 2 are already disabled by inserted cartridges.

     

    Of course banking is more complicated (I recommend the Axlon scheme) but the point is you don't need anything beyond what's available in slots 0 and 2.

     

    Here's how to modify that Axlon-compatible SRAM board linked above so as not to need any 16K boards: 

     

    • Like 3

  4. On 4/23/2020 at 8:16 PM, Colleton said:

     

    After removing the remains of the case I fired it up, and it works like a champ.  OS Rev A, and it has an 8K memory card.  I'd never seen one before and expect that they aren't that common.  Anyone know what they're worth?

     

    l_sm.png

    m_sm.png

    Certainly rare. Valuable? I don't know. Many 8K boards were converted to 16K in the day, a fairly simple mod. Every club had a guy who would do it for members. Some shops would do it for a price. One down side of those boards is they have tin contacts instead of gold, so they're prone to corrosion.

    • Like 1

  5. On 4/17/2020 at 5:09 PM, pixelpedant said:

    For example, a demo called TREKKIE, which I didn't bother including here, but which I've attached now to this message, written in Console BASIC and portraying the Enterprise being attacked by an enemy ship, clearly features the same main graphics (minus some minor defects) as the demo above (STAR-TREK) featuring Sam Moore Jr's version of the theme. 

    Hope the music's good, cuz that drawing sucks on every level.


  6. Wow, I read those old threads and see that my excuse was my robotics team coaching, which has been quite a time sink, though a rewarding one. Well I'm retiring from that after 12 seasons, so I should have more free time now. But is it too late for this project? How useful would this enhanced S-video thing be nowadays?

    • Like 1

  7. On 4/8/2020 at 8:18 AM, jeffpiep said:

    @ClausB

    I was thinking of

    - PRANTIC 6502 code captures graphics and sends over SIO in some format.

    - ESP32 receives over SIO and converts graphics into a color PNG much like an emulator screen capture.

     

    I don't know if this is an appropriate use of the PRANTIC emulation of ANTIC and GTIA.

     

    -Jeff

     

    @jeffpiep PRANTIC could do that. PM sent.

    • Thanks 1
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