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pixelmischief

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Posts posted by pixelmischief

  1. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    43 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

    Then we have DOOM. Once DOOM was released m68k's days as the dominant gaming platform were numbered, all it took was Gabe Newell to push for Windows as a gaming platform via D3D and Intel/3dfx had their market.

    Agreed, but DOOM came out in 1993.  By then, both Atari and Commodore had not only failed to predict the market, but had willfully ignored what was right in front of them through several industry milestones.

     

    The time for Atari and Commodore to see the oncoming train was in 1981, when IBM released the 5150.  The Atari 800 and Commodore 64 machines were still pretty strong, but both companies had a decision to make about how to move to 16-bits.  Each could either make another closed architecture with bespoke co-processor hardware onboard and another proprietary expansion architecture or adopt IBMs open standard and use its 8-bit ISA slots to implement their copper.  I can almost forgive them for having the balls to go proprietary at that time, but by 1984 the market for PC clones and compliant ISA adapters was growing at a geometric rate.  They should have seen that between IBM, Intel, and third-party hardware developers, the PC architecture had excellent compiler support, a long roadmap being delivered by two of the biggest companies on the planet, and a growing pool of hardware providers that could empower the ISA bus to do what the PBI bus and User Ports had largely failed to.  This was the las chance for both companies to realize that the track their trains were on was going to run out, and transfer at that last station.  They didn't.  And it did.

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    My summary post-mortem of Atari and Commodore is that they lacked the capital, leadership, and research prowess to predict the transition of the desktop computer from novelty to ubiquity and commit to a sufficiently forward-looking development practice.  They got caught in the "no-man's-land" of  taking themselves too seriously while not taking their industry seriously enough.  And while they were busy doing parlor tricks with their onboard copper, boring old IBM created the same modular and extensible hardware architecture that we STILL use today.  It was truly "The Tortoise and the Hare".  Atari and Commodore might have taken an early lead off the starting line, but didn't have enough juice in them to finish the race.  I wish they would would have transitioned their custom co-processor tech onto ISA cards and moved to branded PC's that booted into BASIC.  An Atari 5150 with a Pokey/Antic/SIO card would have been freaking awesome.

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    You can buy both the adapter and a Mach chipset video card.  I just did it.  As far as how it works, you need to run NVDI with the Mach driver.  The system will first output via the onboard display and then switch to the video card when the driver loads.  It's a bitch to get set up, but pretty reliable after that.  I use a VGA auto-switcher to get both the bootup and the card video in pretty seamless fashion.

  5. Posted

    Another possibility is an inline VGA adapter, like this:

     

    https://centuriontech.eu/product/st2vga-r4/

     

    You will still need a monitor that can handle the signal or a scan-doubler.  Also, you will still need to reboot when switching between color and monochrome.  What IS nice, however, is that if you use ST Medium on a wide-screen monitor, it stretches the image back out, so you get 80 columns wide in a color mode.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    I don't play on, or collect for the 5200.  But if I did, I would pass on $8.00 each for a set of carts that are essentially the most common.  You might get more traction by selling them as separates for people who want to get something they already have, but with a better label.  Yours appear to be in really nice condition.

     

    Also...forum denizens tend to punish posters who put their stuff in the wrong forum by ignoring the post.  I get that you DO ask for some feedback on the price, but many readers may not get that far after deciding that this is simply a "for sale" post in the wrong place.

    • Thanks 1

  7. Posted

    The attached is a series of GIMP images, captured from scanner.  They are numbered as whole pages (1-9) and sides (A and B) of the material, opened at the center.  Page nine (9) is the cover and, therefore, only includes side B as the front (inner, A) side of the page is entirely blank.

     

    In the next iteration, I will perfect the rotation, normalize the page sizes, remove the edges, tweak the contrast, solidify the cover color, and convert page whites to alpha.

    supradrive-atarist-raw-600dpi.7z

    • Like 3

  9. Posted

    I have the manual and the addendum for the SupraDrive Atari Hard Disk.  I have no use for them, but don't want to bin them in case the community needs them scanned.  I've searched a bunch online and haven't found them anywhere.  Permission to toss?

  11. Posted

    @bfollowell Actually, my question is much more embarassingly simple.  In cases where I need to connect multiple inputs on the system board to a single output on the power supply, can I just split them out?  Should I chain them to the same wire?  Do I need to add some component that protects against reverse flow?  Yeah, I'm that green.

  20. Posted · Edited by pixelmischief

    I have received the power supply and am immediately frustrated.  This frustration repeats itself over and over when I try to work with this kind of thing, and I'm hoping that someone here can put me out of my misery.  Let's go through it.

     

    Here is the data sheet for the power supply: https://www.meanwell.com/Upload/PDF/RPT-60/RPT-60-SPEC.PDF

     

    I have the RPT-60B.  Page 2 shows that the power supply provides 3 voltages; 5V, 12V, and -12V on channels C1, C2, and C3, respectively.  And then, INFURIATINGLY, channel designations CX are NEVER F$%KING USED AGAIN.  The diagram on page 4 has designations for V1, V2, and V3.  The number of those designations encourages me to believe they can be mated to the three CX designations, but I can't be sure.  And since we are talking about ELECTRICITY and the potential to DESTROY equipment that is just this side of UNREPLACEABLE, I am reluctant to do so.  The physical device has a 6-pin connector for output and page 5 ties the VX designations to those pins, but abandonment of the CX designations after page 2 makes it unclear to me if I can rely on the IMPLIED but UNCERTAIN correlation between those pins and the voltages.

     

    Rant over.  Frustration in full effect.

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