Curt Vendel

As long as he’s gone to 7800xm.com and provided that information for the transfer so that the order goes to him.

Money got dangerously tight for Corp in Oct 84 and all of the original "New" XL work was scraped. They were planning a lot of very cool new systems, also they had planned to originally retain the "XL" name on the line. Once I'm done with all of the updates on the XL section of my site, I'll be working on a complete rebuild of the XE section and the information I've uncovered from July 84-Jan 85 is amazing... One thing I will say, those who like their XE's are going to be very miffed when they see how shortchanged they were with what was eventually delivered. Oct 84 changed everything.

A lot more to come.... trying to put up a few things every week... Little work going toward many times at once: proto research, XL scans, XM work, super-secret "other" project that I'm not saying shit about because I've been putting in a little time here and there over past few years on it and I don't want a repeat of the stress like the XM again... I'll pull back the curtain once the XM's are all gone and I've spent the time I want getting next things ready.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/ASG/Chips/AMY/index.html

Batch of 10 SMD test boards, which are having the SMD IC's soldered on at the factory were ordered just now from PCBWAY. I'll update once that arrive.

I'd check with PacManPlus and/or Albert to make sure, its been a while since I played it, I had an early release version but I recall it playing audio in TIA mode if not POKEY was detected.

We've moved to the SMD version of the design and the first batch of test boards is being ordered this week, the game coders get these first batches to begin work on their games on real hardware. Still some work to complete on the BIOS and manuals have to be completed and printed. Once the 180 or so pre-orders are shipping, announcements will go out on here, FB, 7800xm.com, atarimuseum and I'm sure many other places. New orders will be $149 + shipping.

I thought so too until I realized there was far more to do than I bargained for, but the good thing was I finally was back in a place in my life where I was healthy enough to resume work on it and have spent that time fully debugging out every section of the design, finally overcame the huge Yamaha issues and made other important improvements along with way with the help of Mark and Perry. Now Ive converted the design over to its manufacture version in SMD components so I can have the PCB factory do most of the assembly which will help me out tremendously. I'm ordering boards of the new SMD design this week and then I can put of the non-SMD components and test of the fully completed boards - no more cut & straps and hanging breadboards on the WIP design any longer. Gonna send this batch of boards out to the Devs so that can have hands on with the real hardware so they can work on their games with them and incorporate the new feature code into their games. Meanwhile Mark is working on making the User version of the BIOS and Albert is helping me out with the manual, so things are progressing nicely.

HUH?!?!? Thats news to me. Ax bought like 10 XM case plastics from me for some project he was working on. Just plastic cases only - no name plates or anything else. So I don't know where the idea of Ax shipping XM's came from because he never bought any full XM orders from me and I wouldn't have agree to any such thing with a WIP design.

Super Circus Atari has two modes: Pokey and TIA for audio. If it sees a POKEY chip present it plays POKEY audio, otherwise it plays TIA audio.

There is a route - going with MOSIS and submitting your mask in with others and the unused space on the wafer can be used for your chips. The positive side is you can have a run done in the $25-35K area, the downside - you will only get a school or hobby run of a few hundred chips. It is an avenue.... still way out of scope for us mere mortals... But not to worry - I'll win the Powerball lottery someday

I've corrected the issue on the submission form, it is back up.

It will automatically sense any POKEY using the standard address. Bob, Perry and most other programmers all use the standard POKEY address, they also already been given the address info on the XM's registers and its been posted several times publicly and will also be part of pages on 7800XM in its Developers section when that goes up after that ship with all programmer info, samples and downloadable tools like the Yamaha tools with an X68000 emulator to create the Yamaha 2151 sounds, so its not an issue.

Absolutely. I go by the last entry given.

I will check the page and fix it today, thanks for letting me know

Big Announcement... I've received several requests from people working on the MIST FPGA project if they could have access to the chip schematics to the 7800 MARIA chip. I have just posted all of the sheets up for the TIA-MARIA-STEPHANIE chip. Now a word of caution, there is a memory hole error in these schematics, so if anyone plans to do some VHDL and/or Verilog work please keep this in mind. These sheets span work from 1983 all the way up into August 1984. The link is posted on the Left Side menu in the Atari 7800 page: http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/7800menu/

Finished all of the lines into the QFP. Mark suggested adding in an IRQ and moving the CLK2 line to an standard I/O and not using the PLD GCLK2 input, so I made those changes. I also add several PLD I/O pin test points since there were several unused I/O pins on the left side of the QFP. Sent over the updated Schematics and Board files to Mark and Perry so they can give everything and 2nd and 3rd set of eyes before I run off the test boards. Be nice to run off boards without any further cut & straps and to move the design from its testing & development design to the final design.

Okay the 100pin QFP is mapped out, the Jedec code has to be remapped to the new pins too. I have completed all of the GND and VSS connections and I worked on the JTAG connections to the PLD tonight. I will be working on the other traces tomorrow and by the weekend start rechecking everything. Then Perry and Mark will give everything a check over to make sure all looks good. Board conversion to SMD is then done, can have the factory run off a couple and lets see how they look. Having most of the components already placed on the boards is going to be a HUGE relief in assembling these.

The news that Rob Wyatt hasn't been paid for 6 months comes personally as no surprise whatsoever. As many of you who know me personally remember, I ran Legacy Engineering, well I was hired by Fred Chesnais to develop the Gene Simmons Axe Controller for guitar hero. I spent 6 months and put over $90k out of my own pocket to develop the controller and have several golden sample prototypes made. I was given a song and dance about getting royalties and such... well in June of 2008 I had to be admitted to the hospital for emergency open heart surgery. I suffered a severe heart infection and had to go in for emergency heart surgery. While I'm in the hospital, Freddy calls me and desperately asks if I could get the prototypes out to him, he needs to get them to Gene Simmons immediately as Gene is going to put them on his show and announce them. So I had someone get them packed and shipped to Freddy, well he took them, they never went to Gene, they went right to Freddy's friend up in Canada at Beat Street, they reverse engineered the samples (since they weren't protected yet and everything was on development boards inside) and had cheap knock offs made. He told me that they couldn't get on the show in time, after several weeks of recovering I finally called to get the status on the project, he said it was canceled which was a lie. He ended up bankrupting my consultancy and I was out all of my investment, my prototypes and royalties... sounds like he basically has done the exact same thing to Rob Wyatt. Freddy is a serial scumbag. BTW, notice how while they dangled all of the eye candy, they put in a small disclaimer --- the first units won't have any OS... that's because there isn't one, Atari also quietly announced that they have dropped development of their own custom linux distro. There won't be an OS, they'll give you your box and you're on your own. You of course could've just bought any of the Ryzen dev boards that are currently out there now and gotten what Atari is pushing for $300...

They were just testing out how well a Raspberry Pi will fit in the case so that when the lawsuits start flying, they can just ship that out and say - here is all we were promising, a console that can stream games down from the internet to play Atari Classics. Now excuse us while we walk away with the other $275 we made from your $300 purchase and shipped you a $25 system that you could've bought already back in 2017

Well, maybe you guys could install the quad pokey fpga's yourselves... I'm only putting on one Pokey max plugged into the boards. I tried to integrate it directly on, but I started this project using an old and not very capable CAD program, was never expecting the board design to have been complex so I used it. Should've stuck with KiCAD - there is no BGA part in the program and I wasn't fully comfortable with the footprint I made and BGAs have major issues on their own without making a poor footrpint to compound the problem, so I backed off trying and went to the 40 pin DIP carrier instead done in EAGLE.

Oh!!! Ooooops, I guess I should've read the thread before posting. Thank you Trebor for posting this up for me.

Sorry I haven't jump onto AA much lately.... I'm almost done with the SMD conversion, the PLD is the hardest part, but I've gotten most of the work done on the rest of the board. I also was working on integrating the POKEY Max directly onto the board, but the BGA is a massive pain in the ass, so I'm going to leave it as a plug in board instead onto the XM's. Trying to work that in sadly chewed up a heck of a lot of my spare time.

Just reading this thread... I think the better route to go would be to go off the PBI/ECI bus and build an 8530 based Appletalk compatible LAN interface. There is more than enough documentation on the protocol, its just a souped up RS-422 network. This would allow Atari's to be able to connect to Apple IIGS and older Mac machines. A check of IC stocks shows over 9500 available for purchase, so they are still readily available and this would be the least complicated LAN design. I personally would prefer Corvus Omninet but the protocol and command set are not as widely known and there are very few available devices to use where as the Appletalk products are still plentiful. Or there is the WIFImodem device that plugs into a serial port. I've posted up the schematics and Driver ROM to the Atari PBI Serial/Parallel board, so making a PBI serial port would be straight forward. At any rate, we need to start focusing more on external expansion devices to plug into the PBI/ECI ports and not doing internal mods.

Here is something NO ONE brings up... Atari hasn't built working hardware, still doesn't have an actual working OS, its front end GUI is still just smoke and mirrors (just like everything else)... Lets discuss the bigger missing component of all of this: The Backend. So Atari claims you'll be able to stream content, download games, get updates... blah blah blah... From where?!?!? They have no backend design at all. I mean sure, they can lease out some AWS space, but they still need an entire backend CMS and content delivery system, database, payment processing (gotta milk suckers out of even more $$$ because that is the ONLY THING Chesnais gives a rats ass about) and security... so while everyone is waiting the umptenth million time rehashing of the same plastics being held and heralded which still not definitive design specs (other than what is on an AMD stock dev board that they've tried several times to foist off as their "custom hardware" and they are trying to keep everyone focused on their bluetooth (oh wait, they aren't bluetooth anymore, they are now hardwired USB controls... anyone miss they little switcharoo they pulled? Many more to follow I'm sure... by the time they do actually release ANYTHING it'll have a 1mhz Z80 with 64k of memory it the way they are promising A and delivering B) But no one has confronted Atari on: So you're console will require a delivery network with an online account for users to play their games (there is no HD inside, no storage at all, everything will have to stream down which means users will have to have an account and storage their purchases, games, credits, etc... into an account online... so where is Atari on this marvel of account/content management???