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x=usr(1536)

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Posts posted by x=usr(1536)

  1. Posted

    Regarding cards, the best places to start would likely be with a memory expansion (amount TBD) and an 80-column card.  Documentation (to some extent) already exists for both, and both are items that crop up fairly regularly on various folks' wishlists.

    • Like 4

  2. Posted

    Recently bought a 1050 from Paul.  He described it absolutely accurately, packed it in such a way that it was likely resistant to everything up to and including Armageddon, and made me a happy camper upon its arrival.  His communication was top-notch as well.

     

    I'd have zero hesitation about purchasing stuff from him again; it really was a stellar experience.

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    5 hours ago, Master Phruby said:

    I don't think I ever saw a Federated Group commercial that highlighted anything from Atari.

     

    Funnily enough, I'm having a hard time recalling ever seeing any Atari products in a Federated Group store.  They must have been there, but things that stick in my head from them are the Vectrex, Spectravideo SV-318, and the VIC-20 on clearance.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    1 hour ago, danwinslow said:

    True enough, but using modern board production and components would be somewhat cheaper. Sourcing ancient parts and getting weird old boards made would be a lot more custom and more expensive per unit even if the run were in the hundreds.

    Maybe, but it depends on how exotic you'd need to get in order to build this.

     

    For the PCB, there are any number of places that can make them; just send them your gerbers and they'll run it off.  WRT the components, looking at the 1090 PCB sketch in the first post, it appears as though the majority of components consist of resistors, capacitors, possibly a small number of transistors, ICs, and card connectors.  Provided that the ICs are 74-series logic, they should still be available; if not, there (generally) are substitutes.  The card connectors, depending on pitch and width, might be more difficult but there are ways to work around that.  None of the parts involved should be terribly expensive, though the card connectors would probably be the single most-expensive component of the BOM.

  8. Posted

    1 hour ago, danwinslow said:

    i don't know that I personally would want an EXACT copy. Seems like we could do it better/faster/cheaper with at least some modern tech and still preserve the essential 8 bit nature. Easier to source parts, as well.

     

    True, but if the PCB is already designed and can use off-the-shelf components, there's no reason not to.

     

    Having said that: I'm not in total disagreement with what you're proposing, and can see some definite advantages to it.  However, there is an opportunity here to recreate something that Atari never released for sale but that was getting close to being ready to market.  This is where I see the expansion cards as being beneficial: if people want to build Z80, 80-column, etc. cards, they can - but it also leaves room for a FujiNet-style approach where modern hardware interfaces with the machine using its stock expansion slots and bus.

     

    Note that I'm saying this as someone looking right at both a FujiNet and a Concerto sitting on his desk, so I'm in no way opposed to modern hardware being used with 8-bit machines :D

  9. Posted

    Speaking as someone who missed out on the 1400XL/1450XLD boards, I would absolutely love to have a 1090 PCB and a BOM :D

    3 hours ago, Dropcheck said:

    Remember this box was never released to the public as a finished product, so there are a lot of grey areas and gotchas that never got fleshed out.  I was working with three other people for a time to create a modified version of the 1090.

    Agreed, and it would make sense to build something that is basically the same spec as the known-closest-to-final Atari revision is.  Anyone who wanted to make expansion cards for it could then work from a common set of known specs that should have a high degree of compatibility with both PBI and ECI (assuming that a 1090 can work with ECI via an adapter) machines.

  10. Posted

    Or pick up a CX78 joypad, which will work 100%, unmodified, with an A8.

     

    Pros: reasonably well-built, Bes Electronics sells upgraded PCBs for them, if you ever get a 7800 you'll already have a two-button controller to use with it that isn't a Painline Proline

     

    Cons: not the greatest joypad you'll ever use, but pretty far from being the worst, either

     

    It's a good controller for what it is.  There are arguably-better alternatives out there, but if you just want 100% plug-and-play, this is your best bet.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    On 2/21/2021 at 7:04 PM, Synthpopalooza said:

    But yes, you guys should try to make a game.  Even a port of Robbo would be great.

     

    Robbo, but with the TIA music from Robomechanik.  Not just because it's a great tune, but because it'll lead to all sort of questions about that thing 7800 programmers love: POKEY + TIA sound :D

     

    (Seriously, though, it has to be one of the better TIA tracks.  Would be awesome in Robbo, even if ported to POKEY.)

  12. Posted

    That's an excellent find, and congratulations!

     

    Is it possible that these machines were part of a test-market run that never went to full production?  It might go some way towards explaining the low numbers of them floating around, but also why they look to be final-product quality both in the unit itself as well as the packaging.

    • Like 2

  13. Posted

    On 3/11/2021 at 7:55 PM, fultonbot said:

    Does anyone have any interesting stories (usually horror, but they do not have to be horror stories)  of shopping at Federated Group when Atari owned them you'd like to share?

     

    Somewhere in the 1983 to 1984 timeframe, my family and I were at the Burbank, CA store.  While my folks were off looking at whatever it was they were thinking of buying, I was in a different part of the store fooling around with the computers, which happened to be sort-of close to the TVs and video cameras.  The store usually had one camera feeding multiple TVs for a single-source videowall effect, and today was no exception.

     

    Up near the front, there was something of a commotion going on and it seemed to be taking a meandering but surprisingly quick route towards where I happened to be.  As I was getting ready to go somewhere else, the commotion veered away towards the video section.  Shadoe Stevens, completely coked out of his mind, had managed to get ahold of the camera and began shouting straight into it.  The monologue went something like this:

     

    "FRED FUCKIN' RATED HERE FOR AND AT FEDERATED GROUP!  I KNOW YOU FOLKS FUCKING LOVE IT WHEN WE DO THIS, SO WE'RE GONNA BLOW SOME SHIT UP IN THE PARKING LOT!  YEAH!  CHECK IT OUT!  RIGHT NOW!  WOOOO!"

     

    This was where one of his handlers managed to wrangle control back and hustle him back out of the front door with only minor difficulty.

     

    The message may have been more effectively-delivered if the TVs actually had their volume set higher than 'off' (the store knew better than to unmute them), but he did manage to get the entire store to drop what they were doing and watch him go nuts for a few moments.

     

    I do not recall if my parents made a purchase that day or not.

    • Haha 4

  14. Posted

    24 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

    Oh,  Most definitely!  Between that and the theme to M.A.S.K.,  I've realized how much some 80's cartoons had 80's sounding music (like pop music I mean), kind of like how 70's cartoons often had 70's sounding music, and I know that sounds like an obvious observation, and it is in hindsight,  but excluding the orchestral type music like The Superfriends or Gobots...Those 2 themes I mentioned almost seem like they could have gotten radio airplay.

     

    Absolutely!  I'll also toss the opening theme to Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors into that mix:

     

     

    And the Ulysses 31 intro makes for an interesting contrast:

     

     

    What I find fascinating about those two is that they were probably only produced about three or four years apart - Ulysses 31 was made in 1981, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors in either 1984 or 1985.  They really do show how music evolved during that part of the decade: Ulysses 31 has just a hint of disco era to it, but Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors is powersynths, heavy snare drums, and over-the-top vocal work.  Like 'em both quite a bit :D

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    OK, here's what I'm seeing from the Macbook to the Raspi (still using python 3.8.8):

     

    Spoiler

    macos:tnfsd xusr1536$ ./tnfs_client.py raspi
    Connecting to raspi:16384...
    Remote server is version 1.2
    Contents of /:
        .
        ..
        subdir
        test.txt
    /> cd subdir
    /subdir> ls
    Contents of /subdir:
        .
        ..
        zerolength.txt
    /subdir> cd ..
    /> ls
    Contents of /:
        .
        ..
        subdir
        test.txt
    /> quit
    Bye!
    macos:tnfsd xusr1536$

     

    Now, on the Raspi side, here's what I'm seeing while the above is taking place on the client:

     

    Spoiler

    [email protected]:~/build/tnfs/tnfsd/bin $ ./tnfsd test/
    Starting tnfsd version 20.1115.2 using root directory "test/"
    Allocating new session for 0x00
    Allocated new session for 0x4567
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=30 q=08 | Bad command
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=31 q=09 | Bad command
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=30 q=10 | Bad command
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=31 q=11 | Bad command
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=30 q=19 | Bad command
    10.1.10.100 s=4567 c=31 q=1a | Bad command
    Freeing session ID index 0
    ^C
    [email protected]:~/build/tnfs/tnfsd/bin $

     

    At this point, it does appear that something's not quite 100% with how the FujiNet is communicating with either tnfs server.

     

    Just to level the playing field, all of the above testing was performed on both wired and wireless connections (which are the same subnet in the same VLAN).  No difference.  Internal firewall rules have been checked for transit between the LAN / WLAN and subnet that the tnfs servers are in; they're clear.  No software firewalling is in use on either server. 🤷‍♂️

  16. Posted

    Here's what I'm seeing between the MacOS test machine and the Server 2019 instance:

     

    Spoiler

    macos:tnfsd xusr1536$ python --version
    Python 3.8.8
    macos:tnfsd xusr1536$ ./tnfs_client.py server2019
    Connecting to server2019:16384...
    Remote server is version 1.2
    Contents of /:
        .
        ..
        .DS_Store
        Homesoft Collection
        archive.org
        collections
    /> cd collections
    /collections> ls
    Contents of /collections:
        .
        ..
        .DS_Store
        holmes cd
    /collections> cd ..
    /> ls
    Contents of /:
        .
        ..
        .DS_Store
        Homesoft Collection
        archive.org
        collections
    /> quit
    Bye!
    macos:tnfsd xusr1536$

     

    The client seems to be working under python 3.8.8, but I still need to test against the Raspi.

  18. Posted · Edited by x=usr(1536)

    5 minutes ago, MikeDijital777 said:

    Ok captain self important, ill keep that in mind the next time I'm trying to impress you.

    I doubt there's much you could do that would impress me.

    5 minutes ago, MikeDijital777 said:

    does this forum have a block feature?

    Absolutely.  Feel free to use it.

     

    By the way, adding in information to a post after it has been quoted in full will still show your post as having been edited.  Compare and contrast:

     

     12 minutes ago, MikeDijital777 said:

    Are you his lawyer?

    Then, a few minutes later:

    13 minutes ago, MikeDijital777 said:

    Are you his lawyer?  LOL, If its that important to you, the whole thing started as Emailing because he got some info wrong and my dad actually made whatever it was he was talking about, I was really nice about it and he replied in the most dick way, its been so long, and it was so insignificant I don't remember the actual product...  it would have been a parker brothers product, i know that much. Its all documented in the comments section of one of his video's , he even posted the private email between us in the comments .. I have to much going on to research a four year old tiff between me and David.. but if its that important to you, and you have nothing else going on. its all in one of his yourtube video comment sections..   Have at it.

    Not that it really matters; you're still airing your dirty laundry in public and in a place that it has nothing to do with.  Not a great look for you.

    • Like 2

  19. Posted

    1 minute ago, MikeDijital777 said:

    Are you his lawyer?

    No.  But coming in here and openly vaguebooking about a personal issue with someone that, frankly, has bugger-all to do with AA is extremely poor form on your behalf.  It's a personal issue; keep it that way.  And if you don't like the response you received, make better decisions in the future.

    • Like 3

  21. Posted

    On 3/11/2021 at 11:52 PM, MikeDijital777 said:

    I've had a couple 1 on 1 interactions with this guy ... Arrogant Pompous prick...   Doesn't surprise me captain know it all didn't realize he had a rare machine and hacked at it after he blew it up.....   

     

    Mind filling us in on the details?  If someone's going to be openly called out, it only seems fair to make the complaint known equally-openly.  It's also only fair to give them a chance to respond, and I'll stick my neck out to say that I'll extend the invitation.

    • Like 3

  22. Posted

    On 3/10/2021 at 11:36 PM, retrorussell said:

    I normally try to just make this a once-a-week thing but I'm cool with subverting the rules on occasion, so here's another:

    SPACE ODYSSEY (1981 Sega)

     

    Rather meh version of SCRAMBLE with choppy movement.  Multiple stages; some scroll vertically and some horizontally.  Covering enough distance warps you to the next stage.  Some special bonuses may be accrued by certain means.

    spaceod_screenshot.png

     

    I either saw this first at a five and dime (remember those?) a couple miles from my house in Portland or at a Chuck E Cheese in Vancouver, WA.  I remember seeing it in my book HOW TO MASTER THE VIDEO GAMES by Tom Hirschfeld, which supposedly covered the 30 most popular video games-- I did not see this one being very popular.

    Oh, you've just picked one of my absolute favourite games from the time.  Only ever saw it at one location: a liquor / convenience store a couple of spots over from my grandfather's VW shop.  Played the hell out of it for a month or so, and then it was gone.

     

    The black hole graphics on the vertical stages are still really clear in my mind (no MAME needed for those).  Had a love/hate relationship with them for looking cool but also sucking me in and almost always causing me to lose a life.

    • Like 2

  23. Posted · Edited by x=usr(1536)

    Apologies for the delay in replying; had laptop failure earlier this week and am only just getting (fully) back on-line.  With that said:

     

    On 3/10/2021 at 8:02 PM, Keatah said:

    This is a good CP/M board. Is it a revision K? If so, even better.

    Rev. N, with a 1986 copyright date.  Is that good, bad, or indifferent?

    On 3/11/2021 at 1:44 AM, CaptainBreakout said:

    The Computer History Museum might be interested.  They have some Apple II enthusiasts there.  They are in the San Jose area.  I've contacted them on a few things and it was always a good experience. 

    Yep, they have a few items I've sent them in the past.  Thoroughly recommend them as a possible resource for preserving stuff like this.

     

    Now, moving on to the photos:

     

    The underside in a three-quarter view:

     

    IMG_0090.thumb.jpeg.e8661c20eca92044898e411780b0cad8.jpeg

     

    And the top, also in a three-quarter view.  The coffee stains predate my tenure of this card, so they're assuredly vintage 🤪 :

     

    IMG_0091.thumb.jpeg.485dd0ebd1927ac56e533eef412fa8c1.jpeg

     

    Inside, top opened.  The same egg-crate foam in the same condition is under the disks, card, and documentation:

     

    IMG_0092.thumb.jpeg.556df640f36d3ae04192c1e7045eb935.jpeg

     

    The disks, up close:

     

    IMG_0093.thumb.jpeg.9e4d45c1d5ef9b3a9a08dc4320a56859.jpeg

     

    Top of the card PCB:

     

    IMG_0094.thumb.jpeg.a0d54544cce41e7d0851cdf1a75ff8f4.jpeg

     

    Underside of the card PCB:

     

    IMG_0095.thumb.jpeg.f00ef8ea5b2fd886cc9f8801c3a0eabd.jpeg

     

    The user manual:

     

    IMG_0096.thumb.jpeg.230b80e53b488ab6e93089a6222b09fb.jpeg

     

    And an AE catalogue:

     

    IMG_0097.thumb.jpeg.cddb97eef344f0b1b6ae96a49a3ebce2.jpeg

     

    And that's it.  Let me know what you think!

    • Like 2

  24. Posted

    1 hour ago, DrVenkman said:

    Firewall settings on your Winbox? Some kind of security policy in effect? 

     

    Firewall is disabled, and there's nothing in GPO (or software) that should be causing the traffic to drop.  It's literally just a base OS with some fileshares enabled.

     

    1 hour ago, mozzwald said:

    Try accessing both your TNFS servers (raspi & windows) using the python TNFS client. If it fails also, then you've got a windows problem.

    https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/spectranet-tnfs-fuse/blob/master/tnfs_client.py

     

    Will do.  Is there a recommended version of python, or is anything current in the 3.x release OK?

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