pixelmischief

You have to get someone else to blow on your thumb. 😃

There was one where Handy Smurf was giving it to Smurfette. I got my ass kicked by my old man for showing it to my little brothers and their buddies.

Tried to PM you. Got... tjlazer cannot receive messages"

My wife would like to lodge an official protest to this project. Apparently, it has forced me against my better judgement and her financial wisdom to purchase a Mega STe. I find myself in the unenviable position of having to choose between my marriage bed and my Atari workstation. I am sure that I leave you in no suspense over which of the two I chose. Indeed, I made that choice a decade before we ever met.

Done! Thanks!

Ok! Thanks!

One more thing... What's the pro method for splitting a single voltage connection from a power supply to multiple pins/devices?

If someone can sell me a pair of TOS 2.06 ROMs for a Mega STe, please hit me up. Thanks.

So...I just went with "f%&k it" and connected the power supply as close to the schematic as possible. The PWRGOOD is unused and I figure that the missing pin is just...missing. Here's what I got... The system seems to be powering on as I get video output. In color mode, I get a white screen. In mono mode, I get a black screen. This seems to be a known state and it moves me on to the diagnostic cartridge stage. Here ends the power supply thread. I'll pick this back up as a system board troubleshooting thread at such time as I need guidance there. Thanks!

@snarkdluG I know what a PWRGOOD signal is. I just don't know what to do with it in the context of connecting this power supply to my Mega STe.

Also, any idea what I should do with the PWRGOOD signal?

No metals, and no connection. Below is a picture from the bottom of the board and it doesn't appear to even have a trace to the pin.

The pin is missing on mine and it doesn't look like a break. Also, I have seen several pictures online that have it missing. I'm not connecting live power to anything until I am sure.

I'm getting around to hooking this power supply up and am confused by a difference between the actual power connector on the system board and the schematic. In particular, the schematic has +5v on a pin that is absent on the board (marked by a red arrow). What am I missing?

No existing software will use it. No new software will be developed that uses it, because not enough people will implement it. Then there are the purists. Will it still be an Atari? What about artifacting? It goes on and on. I like the spirit of the initiative, but if the VBXE couldn't usher in a new standard for Atari 8-bit video, nothing will. Simius got it right with the Sophia. He focused on easing the path to modern displays. Its DVI output can be connected to HDMI with a simple cable. This idea for a Pi design is a solution that does with greater difficulty what another solution does better and more easily.

Did we learn nothing from the VBXE?

Sorry sir. Moving on.

True, but the genius of the design was that they moved everything that wasn't the CPU and the memory to the ISA bus. Even devices that were integrated on the system board were presented there. This meant that everything was managed by a minimally bootstrapped, software OS kernel using runtime loaded, retargetable drivers. The ROM-based OS and custom chipsets on Atari's and Commodore's platforms were hard-mapped to their memory locations, creating an inflexible architecture that was most effectively coded against using unsafe, un-portable, bare-metal access routines. Performance? Yes. Extensibility and portability? No. The Amiga 2000, which was the first Amiga with a well-implemented expansion bus, came out in 1987. By this time, even IBM had lost any hope of getting the genie back in the bottle. It was too little, too late.

For file operations, sure, a CLI is definitely the best way to work. But for content creation and consumption, the GUI is orders or magnitude faster and more expressive.

If they could have made 128K and the 80-column RGB video available to C64 mode, a C128 with Geos would have been an absolute killer.

I will grant you that the Amiga found the video niche, Atari found the MIDI niche, and Apple found the graphic design niche. In each of those cases, their custom hardware gave them speed and stability advantages over a more highly abstracted design that suffered from the necessary overhead that those abstractions cost. Apple has deftly jumped from niche to niche and their genius in marketing, innovation, and forward-looking design are second to none. That is not an easy trick to do and an even harder one to depend on long term. They have been close to the brink a number of times. The PC architecture, on the other hand, hasn't seen a moment of uncertainty since the mid-80's.

What you call "[building] upon the lessons" of the 800, I call lashing themselves to an obsolete architecture paradigm; namely integrated, proprietary co-processors. Yea, but even these improvements were better versions of the same losing architecture strategy. Yet another proprietary platform with custom graphics and sound hardware, OS in ROM, and no expansion bus was already years obsolete when TT, Falcon, and Mega STe came out. That they did a bad thing better doesn't change the fact that they were doing a bad thing.

You are definitely the f%*king man, so take this as an honest question and not argumentative rhetoric, but... Isn't CP/M an OS? If you mean that CP/M had a modular kernel and loadable driver design, then yes; apples to apples. But I'm not sure how that relates to the hardware modularity and abstracted architecture that I would submit as the primary reason the PC architecture spread like wildfire.

Maybe I am wrong in assuming that the leadership at either Atari or Commodore had any intention of trying to survive into the next phase of their industry. Perhaps they meant to do exactly what they did; drive the goddamned things as hard as possible until the wheels fell off, and just leave them dead, on the side of the road.

Really? In 1981, the 5150 had a 4mhz 8088, 8-bit ISA expansions, and a base architecture that abstracted the CPU and memory behind a BIOS, making them modular and upgradeable. Atari and Commodore 8-bits were running at half that. Then, the PC AT 286 was released in 1984, a year ahead of the Amiga 1000 and Atari 520ST. It was a 16-bit system that ran at 8mhz and was 99.9% backward compatible at the instruction set. IBM had proven that their architecture would be extensible and upgradable for multiple generations. Meanwhile, Atari and Commodore had left their 8-bit generations behind to go 16-bit and were staring down the barrel of having to develop yet another generation of proprietary systems. You can argue that their custom copper drove a more impressive user experience, but they could not have possibly believed at that point that they could win an arms race against IBM and Intel. They had already lost. Once the 386 came out and the combination of VGA and SoundBlaster were ubiquitous, anyone fool enough not to have seen the writing on the wall was laying beneath the bricks that once held it up.