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

flashjazzcat

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    17,025

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    25

Posts posted by flashjazzcat

  1. Posted · Edited by flashjazzcat

    I think I was spanked once for writing on the wallpaper when I was a kid. That was the one and only time and I was so horrified I never did anything like it again. I'll bet my parents were upset about resorting to that too. But it worked.

     

    As for 'tin foil hats': the education curriculum is absolute cancer now, no ifs or buts. Borderline child abuse.

     

    But with that I will ask that we veer away from this topic of discussion, lest we get into politics and have the thread shut down. If it's my fault it went this way (which I have no doubt it is), I apologise. I never really had much beef with the idiots of the world until now as long as they kept out of my way, but they appear to be running the assylum at the moment and my frustration about this got the better of me. I'm sorry about that.

    49 minutes ago, ilmenit said:

    Talking about XOR, here is an interesting article from 1983 by Chris Crawford describing this piece of code: 

    LDA FIRST
EOR SECOND
AND SELECT
EOR SECOND
STA RESULT

    https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue37/fragment_of_code.php

    That's pretty nice - thanks for posting it. :)

     

    PS: Thanks to everyone for their nice comments regarding the recent hassles with the neighbours. :)

    • Like 6

  2. Posted

    Well, as long as one talks to the neighbour first. We have to respect one another's property, peace and quiet, personal space.. and roofs!

     

    Well, in an ideal world, but we are now enjoying a generation of broken family, entitled kids who were never scolded for anything in their lives, never taught to show respect, and schooled by first-name terms, undereducared teachers with no powers to instill any form of discipline. Those kids are now in their thirties and forties. Terrifying.

     

    • Like 6
    • Thanks 1

  3. Posted · Edited by flashjazzcat

    Yes: I found it hilariously ironic that this dick-head said 'I wouldn't ask anyone else here to get rid of their dogs' (not that anyone suggested this). 'Why would I?' I said. 'I never hear anyone else's dog'. It's pretty much the same with kids. I politely asked the son of the neighbour on the other side to stop bouncing his football up my front path and off the front door some years ago, and the fact I did so not only triggered the parents, but seems to have passed into neighborhood folklore as evidence of what an intolerant son of a bitch I must be.

     

    I rather like Judge Judy's take on this kind of 'my kid/dog would never...' business. Namely: 'Don't visit your own stupidity on others'.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 2

  5. Posted · Edited by flashjazzcat

    Most welcome they will be too. We noticed one of the neighbours across the road out in the street earlier this evening: she was bawling at the shit heads about the noise. I went out and joined in. One of them was saying 'I can't take the dogs out... I've got a bad leg'. 'That's a you problem, not a me problem,' I hollered. The other woman rang the police after one of them threatened to set a dog on her. The owner of the place eventually came back and started with a door-to-door soft-soaping exercise. Back-story about his ex dumping the dogs on him, but no actual solutions to the problem offered. 'i can't stop the dogs from barking,' he said (attempting to deal with Deborah instead of me). 'Not my problem,' I said calmly. To which he said 'Hey... No need to get aggressive'. Eventually I told him: 'Look: sort the problem out, and if you don't, I'll sort it out'. He didn't seem to like that.

     

    A moron. Tight vest, skinhead and flip-flops. Fucking social housing. I have a shit load of work to do and it's almost impossible to relax and focus on anything at all. Tomorrow I'll be phoning the council, but this is all bad energy. My mother's in hospital as well.

     

    We would like to move, preferably into Deborah's parents' house, but it's gonna be tough getting a mortgage. Her dad died a year ago and her mother's in a home with dementia, but what with the coof, etc, the sale of the house (which requires power of attorney) is still months away. Half of the proceeds go to the home, and the rest to the three siblings. That would leave us about 100K short to buy it back. :)

     

    Anyway: there you have it. Hopefully things will be peaceful enough that I can do my work and keep writing software. All I want in life is peace in which to work.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
    • Sad 2

  6. Posted

    2 hours ago, bf2k+ said:

    My U1MB is the old dark colored board.  What exactly do I have to do to get it to work with the new firmware?

    It may already run it: check that the current firmware has the 'SIDE Hardware' option. If it does, you're good. If not, you may require an update to the later CPLD code before you can safely update.

     

    I haven't heard from Candle in almost a week now despite sending numerous messages about the Incognito JED; hopefully all is OK with him. I'll have to return the second 800 I have here next week, so all opportunities for decent beta testing of the new JED here will be lost. Thanks to Gary the owner for being so patient, even if his time ends up being wasted.

  8. Posted

    1 hour ago, Rybags said:

    The ideal (maybe) would be to use our non-existent (at this point) device that does DMA transfers rather than relying on the CPU.

    SIDE3 is capable of this already at a rate of 1 byte per 6502 machine cycle. So - on the face of it - you could position the display RAM in one of the cartridge SRAM windows and move upwards of 1MB/s off a FAT formatted SD card without too much trouble.

     

    • Like 3

  9. Posted

    Take Rapidus out, remove the SIDE2 and get VBXE working properly first.

    4 hours ago, Mark2008 said:

    btw, in rapidus mode reset key always works - like 100% of the time, it just doesn't work in 6502c classic mode very well.

    Yep. Nice, eh? I observed this behaviour with a SIDE2 and Rapidus (no U1MB or VBXE anywhere to be seen) in 2016.

    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    8 minutes ago, CaptMatteus said:

    If it's any consolation, after I put the pin assignments and jumper connections I would need to make on paper and double checked everything I needed to do, I did all of the soldering work and replaced the resistors in about an hour.  Worked on the first boot.

    Good stuff. It was nearly eighteen months since I'd last installed Incognito, but everything ultimately went like clockwork here too. Even the famously fiddly ATR button wasn't too bad. Went together right first time, although I later had to adjust the position of the momentary switch slightly since the bottom of the light conductor wasn't sitting dead centre once the case was fully reassembled.

  13. Posted

    I was a bit pissed off when days after making the video the cable turned up with a different colour scheme on the wires, but I completely agree with the response I received (that one should go with pin numbers anyway). My bad for colour coding the captions, but there is a note under the video.

     

  14. Posted · Edited by flashjazzcat

    The single most common cause of boomerang machines at the moment seems to be power supplies. I'm using a modern switching power supply here which puts out 5.36V and I was puzzled when a perfectly working 600XL with U1MB, Sophia, PokeyMAX and SIDE3 was sent back because it crashed with the SIDE3 plugged in when at the owner's house. Plugged it in with my PSU: worked. Plugged it into the owner's PSU: crashed. Bingo. The Meanwell PSU the owner sent up appears to be a perfectly good piece of kit, but puts out 5V on the nose and this seemed to be the issue. Tried another (mains to USB) PSU with the exact same miserable result. The 600XL works fine with either PSU as long as SIDE3 isn't plugged in.

     

    Other than that, we have connectivity problems (crappy third-party video cables, etc), choice of SD and CF card (which is why I now ask people to send in their storage media as well), and good old PEBCAK. But this is all 'part and parcel' of the undertaking, and a big part of it is talking the user through any problems they may have. Managing expectations is extremely important. With these old computers, there are innumerable variables, and with the current crop of interesting new upgrades using BGA FPGAs, we appear to still be in the discovery phase regarding what will actually work reliably with what on the user's desk.

     

    4 hours ago, Mark2008 said:

    The problem is, you cannot just send someone the machine to have it fixed. It might get fixed, it might not.  It'll take 3 months and it'll be expensive.

    Send it to someone who charges reasonable money (preferably no-fix, no-fee) and won't let the thing gather dust for months. I can't imagine any tech who conducts themselves in that manner would get much in the way of business.

    4 hours ago, Mark2008 said:

    Nevermind my recent experience, even in 2016, despite the genius skills of the techs, and undisputably perfect installs - the reality is rapidus and u1mb wasn't a valid combo and none of us even knew it.

    I knew it from the get go since it was abundantly apparent from install #1 in 2016 that Rapidus and U1MB had issues. Unfortunate that it took four or five years for this to actually be acknowledged.

    • Like 4

  15. Posted

    I was following my own video instructions the other day and I regret colour coding the pin number captions at all (I did this before it became apparent that the colours had changed). Even going by the pins, one's brain is easily fooled into going by the colours instead.

     

    • Like 3

  17. Posted

    53 minutes ago, Mrarkus said:

    I would be happy to test if needed.

    Thank you so much. That might not be a bad idea.

     

    Unfortunately some shit-heads have been moved into the social housing on the corner and I am currently serenaded by two vicious, barking Rottweiler dogs permanetly roaming around the yard directly under my office window at random intervals. This, along with several other ongoing external dramas is making concentrating on anything extremely difficult. Not trying to make excuses for delays here... just venting. :)

     

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    Just now, Faicuai said:

    Any plans for low-level integration with Sophia, via plugins?

    Yes: explicitly so. The plugin already works on the U1MB (and I understand people are impatiently waiting for it), and it's trivial to complile it for the Incognito.

    1 minute ago, Faicuai said:

    As for the rest, there is quite a large set of cases and intricacies to be tested with Incognito, especially if a CPLD update is involved.

    Correct, and I would say results are currently inconclusive. Many users have SCCC installed, and if the VBXE timing fix works inconsistently and causes regressions on machines where VBXE isn't even present, we have a bit of a problem.

     

    It's not that often that I have two Incognito 800s in my hands (normally only one: mine), so this is a great opportunity to iron out the issues. I can't hang on to the customer machine indefinitely, though.

  20. Posted · Edited by flashjazzcat

    Progress update. The new firmware is basically complete, although it's helpful that I'm privately deploying it on a number of machines I'm working on here, and cleaning up bugs along the way. The user manual and technical documentation updates are done, but one final hurdle is presented by the Incognito CLPD update (JED) which provides access to plugins (which have now grown from 1KB to 2KB in size on the U1MB; the same 2KB plugins are available on the Incognito once the new JED is applied). This JED was also intended to provide VBXE compatibility on Incognito 800s, although I have been unable to get the FX core to work on mine. I can live without it, though; plugin support is the most crucial part from my perspective, and there are a couple of other useful enhancements (the ability to recall the loader via JMP($0A), EXTSEL mode selection, etc). However, when I applied this CPLD update to the customer Incognito 800 currently on my desk (which works perfectly with the previous JED), the machine went completely haywire. Clearly there is a little more work to do on the CPLD update, but once those problems are resolved, I guess we can roll everything out.

     

    PS: the Incognito firmware update works just fine with old and new JEDs alike, but it's hardly worth having the new features available to the new JED if said CPLD update is not yet sufficiently well tested to release.

     

    • Like 6

  21. Posted

    1 hour ago, DrVenkman said:

    My “most equipped” is either the one with an Ultimate 1MB + VBXE or the one with U1MB + SIDE3. But do those “count”? I mean, most people don’t have VBXE set up with the core to provide additional RAM, nor can the SIDE3 RAM be used easily and transparently like the banked memory in U1MB. I mean, for anyone who isn’t Jon or Candle. 😛 

     

    I don't see why it wouldn't count. If you have VBXE, U1MB, and SIDE3, the SIDE3 loader uses RAM on the cart; you might then run a cartridge demo which fills 1MB of cartridge RAM, or an XEX demo which fills 1MB of on-board RAM, and then fills 512KB of VBXE VRAM with bitmaps and XDLs. If 'PORTB' RAM had been stipulated, then only the U1MB RAM would have counted, although Rapidus' linear RAM would have also been disqualified since it requires a 65C816 CPU to access it.

     

    I suspect PORTB RAM was implied in the original question, though, since AFAIK the largest PORTB RAM expansion is currently 4MB (Antonia).

  24. Posted

    Although a full PBI implementation isn't really necessary for fast data transfer (the SIDE cartridge being a perfect example; without U1MB, it's accessed via a SpartaDOS X driver which simply patches into DOS's SIO calls at a software level), the nice thing about PBI devices is that they can seamlessly hook into the OS SIO handler. They can also register CIO device handlers, external IRQ handlers, etc.

     

    Some useful links if you haven't already found them:

     

    http://www.atarimuseum.com/articles/pbi-1.html

     

    https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/Parallel_Bus.html

     

    https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/myatari/issues/may2001/pbi.htm

    https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/myatari/issues/jul2001/xl_pbi.htm

    https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/myatari/issues/aug2001/pbi_p3.htm

     

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    Yeah, there are other factors I didn't go into, including ANTIC DMA and VBLANK. SDX appears to do an especially good job of mitigating overheads, but it has the advantage of supporting 512 byte sectors, which blow lower densities away.

     

    I expect people will want to have the display enabled most of the time, but the crux of it is that divisor 0 SIO gets wiped out by parallel devices in terms of speed.

     

AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...