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

machf

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    138

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by machf

  1. Posted

    These may seem like stupid questions: But is the shiny metal shield still in place above the upper head?

    That's actually where my worries started. It came off, and I tried fixing it back on place with three points of glue on what's left of the original foam pads (this high humidity has taken its toll on them, apparently). Currently, I took it out to see if it made any difference... why do I have a feeling this may be the likely culprit?

    Are the heads clean?

    Yep, I cleaned them.

    Do all the pins in the data connector on the back of the drive (where the cable plugs in) look good?

    I've seen far worse, though maybe the top ones need a bit of cleaning.

    There is also a test point on MOST of those drive mechs where you can hook a scope and look at the actual analog signal coming from the heads when reading. Most of the time, its just a series of solder pads on the board, but some of the older ones had an actual set of pins (like a jumper)..

    The four ones in a row labeled "TR0"?

    Unfortunately, I never had the money to buy a scope...

    Does that drive have physical wires going to the heads, or one of those chinkadelic "film ribbons"?

    Ribbons. Everywhere (well, mostly).

    Is there an optical "track zero" sensor on that model?

    Uh huh. It's labeled [iK] N9V0 on the small PCB on which it's mounted.

    If you cycle power to the drive when the steper is in a "non-zeroed" position, does it "home itself" and return to track 0 ?

    Yes, it does.

    If the spindle is spinning at normal speed,

    That's something I'm not so sure about... I'll remove the cover from the working one and see if it spins at the same speed.

    the stepper is working, it can find "track 0" (or what it THINKS is track 0, anywayze.) and youve got a waveform comming in from both heads, then its probably an allignment problem. There are alot of really good head allignment utilities for the PC. You have to search for them.. Most are from the MSDOS days.. I cant remember the name of the one I use.. I have to dig it up.. Its probably stored on old Floppies.. hahaha.

    I'll try to find some... thanks for your help.

  2. Posted · Edited by machf

    Unfortunately, I'm broke, so I'd rather try to repair it myself.

     

    Do those drives do a half-disk seek in/out like most of the others?

    Nope. Just a short "hop" when powering up.

    Try powering it on with the top off to see if the stepper's working OK.

    I've kept it with the top off, seems OK.

    Error 163 = Fatal disk I/O errror, don't think I've had one before.

     

    There's a thread around where we discuss half-track stepping on the 1050. There's a couple of programs I put in there that can issue diag commands - not sure if they'll also work on the XF-551 but might be worth a try.

    No, they don't... the XF551 uses standard Percom block commands.

  4. Posted

    Well, as the title implies, today after a couple of years without using it, I found out that the Mitsumi mech of one of my XF551 drives isn't working properly. If I try to boot from it, I get the usual "BOOT ERROR" messages; if I try to read a disk's directory on it (using it as D2:, which was how I originally had it - changed it to D1: only to test it alone), I get ERROR- 163 (meaning the drive isn't responding). Any suggestions on where to look? On first sight, I can't see anything suspicious, I'm leaving the multitester testing for tomorrow since it's late already.

     

    I've already discarded any electronics problems in the board, swapped the mechs with the other XF551 and found out it's the mech. The motors seem to be OK (drive spins normally and head moves normally too), I also cleaned the head and tried to realign it just in case, no changes. Haven't checked solder points in the mech yet (as I said, it's late already - I'm tired and the artificial lighting isn't good enough either), if anybody knows what the "usual suspects" tend to be, I'd appreciate the help. As I said, I connected my equipment after a 2 year hiatus (more or less), last time it was working fine except for one of the SIO connectors (which I already resoldered today) so overheating and such isn't the issue here...

     

    Thanks in advance.

  5. Posted · Edited by machf

    I don't remember playing one of those on my 800XL ever... it's going to make a nice addition.

    Going through my files, I just came across a program I wrote named "LEM.3D" which is an animation of a wireframe "lander"... didn't remember it, but this is my disk with all the 3D stuff I made over 15 years ago.

  7. Posted · Edited by machf

    I'd advise to leave the Reset key out of the equation - since it's connected to all variety of chips in the Atari, there's potential for trouble there.

     

    I think the GTIA inputs probably do get grounded when the keys are pressed - like the joysticks, ie they return a logic 0 to the relevant hardware registers.

    But still, I guess you'd lose a lot of functionality without them, on a 1200XL they'd do nicely as substitutes for Alt, and the Windows keys.

    That's one of the reasons for using a detached A8 keyboard instead of a whole A8 - don't emulators already emulate the A8's custom chips? Just provide them with the input signals they need.

     

    Personally, I don't really see the point of the entire exercise beyond being some gimmick with novelty value that wears off within 5 minutes.

     

    You may as well just put a video capture card in the PC and run the real Atari through that - the end-user experience would be almost identical.

    In fact, I've done that - the only reason the A8 isn't currently connected to the capture card is because I connected the DVD player instead. Now that the DVD player isn't working, I could connect the A8 again...

    And, having a terminal environment on a real machine acting as keyboard on the emulated machine, to be done properly, would probably need the emulator itself to be extensively modified.

     

    Driver telling the PC how to treat data from the real Atari? Well, you already have things like DirectpadPro which can do that sort of thing, along with some of the other ideas that have sensibly been presented, and rejected by some for rediculous reasons.

    Hmmm, I'd like to hear more about that...

  8. Posted

    So many great ideas. The only thing is that they all stray from the initial idea of using the A8 as a serial terminal to the emulator.

     

    It's not mutually exclusive. If you get the atari keyboard to act like a PC keyboard then it would work with emulators too. I don't see the point in making it only work within the emulator environment.

     

    I agree... all you need is a driver telling the PC how to read data from the A8 keyboard.

  9. Posted · Edited by machf

    What this means is that to save money, atari used a board that has less than half the solder-joint-to-board strength than a conventional double sided board, and to add insult to injury, they used SIO connectors with flimsy plastic "mounting ears" and a single holow brass sheetmetal "rivet" on each side of the connector receptacle to secure it!

     

    Sorry for posting on an old thread, but I was just cleaning my XF551s and thought you might be interested in seeing this one:

     

    xf551image1by3.th.jpg xf551image2wi8.th.jpg

     

    Look at the SIO connectors, they use screws instead of the later crappy rivets (my other XF551 has those). It must have been an exceptional case, from the first run or so. They still need re-soldering, anyway... (that's what I'm doing right now)

     

    Funny enough, the riveted connectors have had fewer cracked solder joints than these ones... or maybe I only re-soldered those already a few years ago but not these ones. That would make more sense.

  10. Posted

    Thanks, I founded a year ago the Creative disk image, it surprise me and give some good regards. But it would be nice to view the scanned magazine on internet, because I lost my own collection.

    I'll ask IAQ about that when I see him... maybe this week. Although I believe he's still selling them as "collector's issues" nowadays (at least, the few remaining Atari Creativo #0 ones). From the later issues of Informática Creativa (#1&2) he had several issues lying around, I believe that was one of the reasons #3 never got published (too few sales). Later he started publishing the Sugoi anime magazine, which is still around (latest issue had just been published last week).

    Just I restarted working on Atari, doing a reprogramming of ACCION, and it should be easy to find the executable on Atarimania web site.

     

    I think I met you, some years ago, on a Star Trek Club. I never suspected you are a Atari enthusiast too. However, is good to know a Peruvian interested on Atari computers still.

    I didn't realize we had met there... I would have recognized your name if I heard it. Same to you.

    I didn't know about IAQ mother's, it's a pity, I hope God give him enough strength to go ahead, really hard moments.

     

    I know IAQ have unpublished Atari programs by his own work, it would be a great idea if he would interested on organize some of them to publish on Atari community. If you have some programs, don't wait, release them. I can help with my computer and accessories to pass the diskettes files to PC files. Don't let the programs die!

     

    I'll try to hook up my Pentium 3 (that one still has a 5.25" FDD and the needed programs to read DD Atari diskettes). In the meantime, I still have some on my old page:

     

    http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2645/atari.html

    http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2645/A8/

     

    Regards

    Likewise.

  11. Posted · Edited by machf

    You see, RS-232C is basically designed to transmit ASCII characters... as you said, you would get any characters that you can type. But there are programs that expect more than that. For example, I wrote a small "electronic organ" program (called XorganoL, IIRC) that would detect for example the keypress corresponding to the "SHIFT" key - that wouldn't work your way.

     

    Your way, you'd need:

    1.) A working 8-bit computer (with power source and cables)

    2.) A working 8-bit drive (unless you're using a cartridge-based program)

    3.) Loading a terminal program on the 8-bit

    4.) Connecting a monitor to the 8-bit to see what you're doing

    5.) Being careful not to exit the terminal program by accident

    6.) A working PC (for simplicity's sake, we'll include monitor, drives, etc. as part of the whole)

    7.) A connecting cable between the 8-bit and the PC (*****)

    8.) Loading an 8-bit emulator on the PC

    9.) Having modified the emulator so that you can toggle the input between the RS-232 connection and the PC keyboard,

    10.) but only for certain keys, since there are others for which you'll still need the PC keyboard.

     

    I don't really see it as too practical... and the "zero cost" you mentioned wasn't taking into account how you're getting both computers connected. Making an interface that would allow you to connect an A8 keyboard+joysticks to a PC would cost about the same as the RS-232C cable, and modifying the emulator to accept input from it wouldn't require much more coding, either...

     

    Don't get me wrong, either, but personally I wouldn't work on such a project when I see a simpler alternative.

  12. Posted · Edited by machf

    I guess that would involve modifying an emulator to accept input from an Atari 8-bit... but that wouldn't be too useful, there's only so much you can do with a terminal program in text mode (that's what you'd have to run on the 8-bit). A better option would be to use a "spare" A8 keyboard, detached from the actual motherboard, and hook it through an adapter to the PC, then modify the emulator accordingly to process the data from the interface. It shouldn't be difficult, the A8 keyboard is far less complicated than the PC one, IIRC. I would also include Atari joystick ports in such an interface...

  13. Posted · Edited by machf

    The final version have 9 levels, and have some important changes and adds. The work is very slow because i'm working on 3 games at the same time.

     

    Wow, I didn't know you were still programmming on the Atari 8-bits to this date... nice tribute to M.U.L.E., should show it to IAQ some time...

     

    I think you may like to know that several years ago, I uploaded a disk image of the (never released) Informática Creativa Diskette #1, with permission from IAQ. It included some of your programs too. You can find it here:

     

    http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/8bit/Magazines/

     

    I had been waiting for your game "ACCIÓN" to be published with issue #3 back then, but that never happened... I remember playtesting it for a while at IAQ's all this time ago. (BTW, don't know if you heard, IAQ's mother sadly passed away this tuesday...)

AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...