tep392

I think the Hakko's are well worth the money if you do much desoldering. I can desolder a 40 pin POKEY in about 5 minutes using my Hakko.

If I had to guess, I would say it was a cheap and easy way to make used switches look new during the refurb process.

This disassembly has been extremely useful to me. The disassembly originated with Don Hodges, though it looks like it's been updated a bit. Don gave me his disassembly back in 2012 when I was working on Donkey Kong XM for the 7800. I also found a few errors and a fair amount of missing details. I use my personal copy for reference now. D2K has a lot of additional code with the extra 4 screens, but it's built off the original, so has a lot in common. http://donhodges.com/Controlling_the_barrels_in_Donkey_Kong.htm

I'm very interested in your work. I'm working on a D2K port for the Atari 7800 right now, horizontal display, so I'm pretty deep into the arcade code. I'm going to finish up the graphics code before getting into the Z80 conversion. I'm pretty much keeping the arcades RAM layout as is, with my graphics code building the 7800 display from the 4 byte sprite data in RAM. I'm a little concerned I'll have enough time left to do all the game logic so I'll be optimizing as much a possible as I convert the Z80 to 6502. I have a lot of ROM space at my disposal so my graphics code is making heavy use of tables for things like coordinate conversions, and other optimizations to make it as fast as possible. For example, stationary animated objects, like oil can fire, Kong and the girl can be written to the display very quickly with their own optimized code vs. moving objects that take more processing. I'm trying to keep the 60hz frame rate, but can always fall back to 30hz for screen updates, while the main code runs at 60.

We did a test were I replaced BIOS at $1C000 with a 16k game. Centipede. It still failed. Should have been no issue with the signature test.

I don't believe it has been tested on a PAL 7800 yet. The console should just pass control to the XM after the self tests complete.

Do you mean to check the cart passthrough works? He's been testing 7800 and 2600 carts on it and they do work. It actually has to have the PLD installed for that functionality to work because the A12, A14 and A15 lines don't pass directly from the console to the cart. They are routed thru the PLD so that it has the capability of disabling the cart while the BIOS runs. With no cartridge and just the XM installed, the console is getting to the rainbow fuji graphic, which means it is passing it's internal RAM and CPU tests, correctly identifies the BIOS chip as a cart and proceeds with the signature test. It then exits the signature test and crashes. This is the point were we don't know what is going on. The only circuits installed at this point are what is required to run the BIOS. Curt has been probing the signals and they look ok as far as we can tell. Mark is looking at it also and preparing some tests.

So did I, if you look at the poll. But the 2600 looks so much nicer than the 7800.

I've had two 7800's for a while, but only one 2600 and that just arrived yesterday. I'm a little slow to the party.

It's been 30 years since I've owned a 2600.

Just received some shrink wapped games and hardware. Shipping was fast and packaged well, as usual. I tell Brad what I want, he confirms cost, I pay, and it ships to my door. Took 4 days start to finish. I'm never disappointed when I order from Best.

That works. Or I could use the old "my dog ate my router" excuse.

My laptop comes home with me every night. With VPN access to work files and Jabra, I have no excuse not to work.

Do you mean the XM version, without POKEY chip? I can make either PK (with POKEY) or XM (without POKEY) right now if you want one.

I have one on the way. Thanks for the offers.

It's time to re-aquire the 2600 from my childhood. Looking for a 4 or 6 switch woody model with power supply in good cosmetic condition. Thanks.

Maybe it's 48K, but I'm just going by memory. I don't look at the color chart often.

Nice "47k" resistor.

It's actually quite dumb. I didn't realize the ramdrive is D0: by default. In the past I've configured it as D8: using SDX on an atarimax cart. So I really had the drive configured the whole time. I figured out a way to flash SDX448 using my sdrive2 that's limited to 90k atr's. I split the 256k rom into 4 parts and put it on 4 atr's. I then copied the files to the ramdrive and put them back together. I was able to flash the u1mb from the file on the ramdrive. Hopefully the sdrive2 firmware get's updated someday to properly support large atr's.

I took another look at it this morning and figured it out. Working well now. Thanks!

I set config.sys to D1: but it didn't use the file I have on D1:. I'm going to have to dig into the SDX manual to see if there's something else I can do after it's booted.

Thanks for the advice. I flashed the new BIOS but I think you are talking about changing the boot drive in the PBI menu. I don't have a PBI device. In fact, I don't have a way to load a file larger than 90K so I can't re-flash SDX with a modified config.sys. I'm an SDX novice though so I need help on how to boot with a config.sys on D1:, if that's even possible.

Nope. Can someone post a sample of what needs to change? Am I supposed to put the modified config.sys on D1:? I didn't think I could modify the CAR: file.

I wasn't sure where to post this question, but thought someone reading this would be able to help. I just installed a new U1MB in my 800XL and seems to work fine, other than I can't seem to see more than 4 banks available in SDX. The expanded RAM works because applications can use it, but I can't seem to get SDX to see it. The MEM command shows 4 banks available. I've tried every memory config from the configuration menu.

I would like to see this as well. My sdrive2 is the only means I have of transfering files from my PC and it's tough being limited to 90K ATRs.