Hulsie

I've still never met with the group but would love to. Is there any interest in meeting up sometime again soon?

Yes, October sounds great. Let's make it happen, brothers.

Hello everyone, I really, really, really want the book Matilda the Computer Cat (digital copy here: http://www.atarimania.com/documents/Matilda_the_Computer_Cat.pdf) Is there any chance somebody has this and would be willing to sell it to me? Thanks, Hulsie

Fair renough. I made my attempt so I'll let somebody else pick the next date. I might still go today because I'd like to check the place out. It sounds cool.

I had to remove my Happy Drive board not too long ago and I stupidly broke three of the pins off (see attached pic). It is too tiny to solder (at least for me) and I don't know how to fix it. I would feel bad throwing it out, so if anybody knows how to repair it and wants to take it off my hands I'll ship it to them for $5. I will be ordering a new one from Atarimax. If you're interested, send me a PM. Sorry, I no longer have the pins.

Sure, I'd be down.

All right, guys, are we still good for Saturday at 2ish? Pinball Pete's?

Great! I'll see you guys there then. I'll wear something Atari-oriented so that it is painfully obvious who I am. I'm also looking forward to the convention on Saturday. theloon, what are you working on?

I'd definitely contribute as well!

Fascinating stuff. I wish I was older and active in the community at that time. I was but a wee lad and didn't really have the social experience that seemed to come with the Atari computer scene. I just learned and acquired games from various family members who also had Ataris. Though I did go to computer shows and get disks from the MACE booth (Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts), who were sympathetic to my plight about being too little to have money to buy games, and they were amused that such a little kid was an Atari fan, so they would give me free shareware disks from time to time. I was always fascinated by "cracking groups" from the moment I learned what they were, and would begin to follow who was cracking what, even though I didn't know anybody or anything about it. I would think, oh yeah, this game came from Captain Wizard, he also cracked my Spy Vs. Spy II game, etc. Glenn was always particularly enigmatic because I just couldn't fathom the concept of a guy converting games to a new system, though it seems a lot more reasonable now.

You guys wanna do the first Saturday in July? Maybe 2:00 or so?

I will be checking out the Cleveland show for sure. It will be my first time. Let's do Pinball Pete's sometime, guys. When is best for you all? Weekends are best for me personally but I can make other nights work if necessary. I need to meet some other Atarians because there are far too few in my neckothawoods.

We've all heard of him, but how did he do it? How was a guy in the 80s able to port Atari 5200 games to A8 without some crazy expensive hardware? Does/did anybody know him or know how he achieved this?

Fascinating. Thank you.

This question is more of a general computer question than just an 8-Bit question, but since I've experienced it the most there, I thought I would ask it here. Do CRC errors always equal damaged/corrupted/unusable data? I've been imaging a lot of old disks I've accumulated and got a lot of CRC errors in ProSystem. The disks weren't kept very well. All the games on the disk still seem to work though, and I don't get any load errors, and everything works on the image file too. I can also write the image back to a disk without a problem. I only vaguely understand what CRC is used for (other than the fact that it is a method of checking for errors) but it isn't clear to me if CRC errors always mean bad data. Also, does copying/imaging disks actually copy the bad CRC properties?

Here's a list of hardware vulnerabilities from Wikipedia, which includes the PET's monitor problem.

I know this thread is years old, but I never thanked everyone who responded to my questions. So a great, big belated thanks to all who replied and educated me about this stuff. I've always found copy protection routines fascinating and I learned a lot here .

I love that it is version 3.1, as if there were earlier incarnations. There was such a high demand for destroying your home computer that they needed to update it!

Bob, I tried putting in several disks, both commercial and home-made, and none of them worked. It gave me that really slow BOOT ERROR, where it pauses and blips once every 5-10 seconds, giving me one BOOT ERROR message each time. I'm sure you know what I am talking about. I used a trial-and-error approach to adjust the RPM speed very slowly back to how I had it originally, but this didn't help either. I cannot even get it to boot to DOS or anything to try formatting in the first place. Luckily, a couple years back I bought a truckload of Atari stuff from AtariAge user JeremysArt and a 1050 drive was included in this. It seems to be working well so far, so I'm not too concerned with getting my old one working. 1050 (the user) has offered to take the dead one off my hands. The switch is kinda interesting, because it is clear that my replacement drive wasn't used nearly as much as my old one was. The disks seem to go in "tighter" (not sure how else to explain it) and the gate to hold the disk in stays in place more firmly. Thank you for your help, though!

Welp, I must have broken it :-( I tested the RPM using a couple different utilities and the test showed that it was too slow (282 RPM). I found an old article from Page 6 magazine and followed that. I was excited because I seemed to be doing everything right -- I was adjusting the potentiometer and I got it right to 288 RPM on the nose and the utility said the speed was "just fine". Now it won't read any disk at all. I don't know what I could have done to break it, because I didn't mess with anything else. Oh well, this drive was used consistently for 27 years and was rock solid all that time, so I'm not too upset. I just need to re-read how to remove my Happy enhancement so I can put it in a future drive. Does anybody want a dead 1050?

Thank you for your responses everybody! I will try the software that russg provided first and see how that works. I do have diagnostic software that will determine the RPM. Could the RPM be the cause for my problem? If so, is there a way to manually slow it down or speed it up?

Hi guys, I am having a strange problem. I have a Happy modified 1050 drive and it will no longer read/format dual density disks. I can still read disks that were formatted in single density, but that's it. This just happened out of the blue after transferrring some disks using APE. I unplugged the APE device and turned the Happy mode off and it still is doing the same thing. Any thoughts on why this is happening and how I can fix it?

Hey, PM me your address and I'll send you some Michigan ones.

Welp, I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to that show in Cleveland. Anyone else committed to going? I'd like to get to meet some of you there.

Hello, and congratulations on your foray into the 8-bit world! Some good music programs are: * Music Composer (relatively easy to find, and available on cartridge) * Advanced Music System (AMS) & Advanced Music System II (I have some amazing song files composed using this) * The Music Studio I am sure there are others but that is all I know of. AtariWriter is the word processor that most people used. It was available on disk or cartridge. You can work from the cartridge and save to a disk like you said, or if you are using the disk version, you can just swap the disk with your blank disk when you are ready to save. Paper Clip is another good word processor. Some of my favorite games are: Getaway (I LOVE this game) Frogger Spy's Demise H.E.R.O. Jumpman Junior Loderunner Montezuma's Revenge Nightraiders MegaMania and so many others. I am not willing to part with any originals, but if you'd like, I can copy a bunch of software onto disk for you and send it over for a fee. I can sell some blank disks too. PM me if interested.