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pixelmischief

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Posts posted by pixelmischief

  4. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    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.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1

  9. Posted

    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!

  14. Posted

    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?

     

    schematic.png.d054e67e4a99b1d0cb9338b3677346ae.png  actual.png.d4d935577c58f8ff552f7e5c506c83e2.png

  15. Posted

    1 minute ago, ivop said:

    A feature I could envision though, is a way to signal GTIA2PI2HDMI to interpret, for example, luma values totally different. Think creating a display list that is 201 lines of graphics 8 with background to black and foreground to white. The first line a a special line to tell the device to interpret the rest differently. The next 200 lines define 80x50 screen of two byte characters. First byte is the character, second one are attributes/colors. That's 8000 bytes directly accessible screen memory for a very fast 80-column solution. Or 4000 bytes if you leave out the attribute bytes.

    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.

    • Like 8

  18. Posted

    2 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

    Also, the BIOS of the original IBM PC was no more than a boot loader and associated libraries.

    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.

     

    2 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

    [Big] box Amiga's had expansion buses and Zorro slots (even ISA and PCI slots in some instances) just like the PC.  The PC won by virtue of its open architecture.

    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.

  21. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    7 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    And yet look at what the iMAC was... among all the other things Apple has done and does do... talk about closed and proprietary... they even made their hard drive slightly non standard so as to force you to buy theirs for the macintosh etc etc etc...

    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.

    • Like 1

  22. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    15 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    Everything about the Loraines design built apon the lessons of the venerable 800

    What you call "[building] upon the lessons" of the 800, I call lashing themselves to an obsolete architecture paradigm; namely integrated, proprietary co-processors. 

     

    15 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    it got better with the ST (E)nhanced (better pallete blitting etc.) But only started to be Atari like in any sense with the TT030 and Falcon030 machines..

    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.

  23. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    5 minutes ago, drac030 said:

    although it was already present in CP/M in 70s

    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.

  24. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    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.

    • Like 1

  25. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    27 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

    The irony is, at the time of the IBM PC's release the Atari and Commodore 8 bit machines were actually more powerful machines.

    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.

    • Like 2
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