Chris Strong

Thanks for everyone's pointers. I've not yet had a chance to try it out. I hope my other three boards show up. I'm afraid he thinks I'm done and I am off of the list. I bought one for myself, two for friends, and two spares.

Two of my five arrived today. So where would I look for instructions or documentation on the board? Thanks.

The Corvus should be very fast. People cried "it uses the joystick ports", but those ports run right out of the bus lines of the 6520, just like the PBI bus. I suspect one major factor is the speed of the hard drive on the Corvus. I know when I test the RPM on my "black box" with an old Atari 810 test utility, it returns 3600 just like it should. The Happy drive fools it because of the buffer and it returns around 800 AFAIK. But I've not really played with it since the 1990s.

I have some BASIC programs that do it, but I don't have sio2pc set up either. I ran that years ago, but I don't remember what I found out. I need to find time to get my Corvus running.

I'm dealing with a main job, two startup companies, and a six-month-old myself, so my batteries are basically drained all of the time.

Thanks for the clairification, good to know. One reason I never tried to kickstart mine is the lack of spare gate array chips. I know there is some documentation on those...I wonder if there is enough to replicate them using an FPGA? I've never looked into it. I do wonder how long the gate array chips on our prototypes will survive. I don't know about everyone else, but the lids on mine are just taped-on like a MOSIS chip, and those parts generally have a limited lifespan because of contamination.

So this came up when I discussed my 8-bit Gremins prototype. It was in a brown plastic shell, such as used for the bankswitching XE cartridges in the Tramiel era, but in brown plastic, prototype non-textured tooling, and made during the Warner era. Clearly Atari Corp had the Warner tooling modified for their cheap cartridges later on. When I posed the images of Gremlins, some people were more interested in the shell than the cartridge. I had said it was the same brown color as the XL trim, but I was wrong...the cartridge is more "milk chocolate" and the XL (or old 800 carts) are more of a bittersweet chocolate color. So here is another one I have. These are high-res photos of a standard XEGS cart, a prototype Final Legacy cart (which I assume is bankswitched) in the unusual case, and then a normal-cased Final Legacy for color comparison. Again, I made an agreement with the engineer who sold them to me to not reveal my source, so I've blurred his handwriting. But it just says "Final Legacy".

Now this RSZ cart. According to my notes, somewhere in this box is apparently a SALT 1 cart board from 1979, which is really neat, as I did not remember that I owned one. That's just the sort of thing I like. Anyway, this is a strange board; the PCB is unknown to me. I don't know if it is the SALT, it's bag was unlabeled.

An odd BASIC cart (not the cool one with the white ceramic ROMS, I don't know where that is right now). I wonder how this will work with the active high/low logic issue. But this is the way I got it.

Okay, I'm running a speedskating even this weekend and I probably won't be back to this until next week, so here is some quick cartridge porn. I found the box. Sorry they are a bit out of focus, I could reshoot them later when I have better light. I only got three hours of sleep yesterday (we were up late aligning timing cameras), so I can't reshoot them. Dorsett cart in high-rest:

This is exactly the sort of thing that I am most interested in with my collection (early 400/800 development, production testing, and field service gear). This is the neatest 800 I've ever seen. I have several of the early (1979) release models, the ones with the tin card edge connectors and the female keyboard socket on the motherboard, but none like this. I have one from Atari HCD engineering that was probably like this when it was made, (there is no silver date code molded into the case as it is not a production model, but most of the components are very old) but its motherboard had been replaced with one from 1981. I don't see the power board anywhere. Does it have the white SIO port?

Claus Buchholz! Now that is a name I know very well. I used to do your memory upgrades for friends when I was in high school (sorry, I guess that dates me as a bit younger). Did you do the 288K 800 or the 256K 800XL? Or both? I remember it back in the days when I used to glue the address logic chips onto the boards "dead bug"-style and wirewrapping it all up. Then Brad Koda started selling premade PCBs for some of them in my last couple months of high school and it was so much easier...and then the PC/AT craze got going and 41256's went up out of sight. And I was out of business. Anyway, I'll be happy to photograph it but it will take a couple days. I shot that photo in June of 2006, I just found the image recently. I've not seen that cart yet (I'm unpacking my Atari collections from years of storage), but I've found several containers with prototype carts and I saw that same SALT board right on top. so I'm sure the other one is with it. I got several odd carts about that time. BASIC on Signetics PROMs, some ROMS in white ceramic packages, etc. Several carts I don't know what they are; they appear to do nothing but I suspect are some early diagnostics. Dumping the ROMS will be a bit longer but I will get to it. I need to dump all of those EPROMS anyway.

Wow, that is probably the coolest Atari prototype I've seen, at least for my collection. But I will reply in that thread.

If you read the postings from Curt's site I referred to above, http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/http://www.atarimuseum8BITS/XL/1450xld/1450xld.html, you will see that they mention having motherboards available for the January CES. Even if they did not have the newer 1450s available, they still had all the first generation 1400s/1450s from the previous fall.

You traded it to me for some 1090 boards and a couple other things. This is kinda sad, as it shows how well my memory is working. I thought you were the one who told me it did need the gate arrays (mine is missing most of the ICs) and therefore we were sure it was a Tong prototype! I've never tried to build mine up, it needs a lot of work. I've not seen it in four years, I only recently uncovered it but I've not unwrapped it yet (my life is wrapped up in antistatic bubblewrap). I don't doubt for a second that you've done more research into this than anyone in the Atari community, and I though I was basing that statement on your facts. My hunch is it's still somebody's rough prototype board; someone who did not want do do the whole thing in wirewrap so they laid out a proto board to work from. I need to get mine out and look at again and see why I came to that conclusion. I can't imagine it would ever go into a case (looking at a low-res photo from 2001 now); why would you want the PBI on one long side and the SIO on the other? So there are 7 40 pin DIP sockets on the PCB. CPU PIA ANTIC GTIA POKEY And what are the others, if not gate arrays? Freddie and a 2793 controller? Mine has no drive header but it looks like there might be a place for one. though that's a strange place to put a Freddie. I'm sure you've traced it out.... Again, I never inteded this to be a major debate, I just wanted to put to bed these rumors that every single 1400 or 1450 without a case label is out of a dumpster, that they did not have actual plastic cases, or that they were rescued from the New Mexico landfill. There are enough rumors about these machines without people making up more, if you know what I mean. One of the machines I have (without a label) Bruce Carso got straight from Atari....