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Ksarul

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Posts posted by Ksarul

  1. 10 hours ago, Gary from OPA said:

    yeah, i used to have a couple of these myself, i had a prototype TI Invaders one on a EGrom board.

    I just received one in the mail today built up as a TI writer cartridge with only English and German as selection options. . .along with a Logo II module in German--with real GROMs, so it was a qualification run cartridge. Interesting that I received one of each type of TI proto along with a fully built-up Heiner Martin board the day after I posted some data about the various types of cartridge boards. . .LOL

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  2. Oddly enough, TI actually made and sold GROM simulation cartridge boards to developers (EGROM boards). I have a pair of the bare boards squirreled away somewhere. A lot of the true prototype cartridges in the wild are also built on these boards.

     

    Mr. Martin's board was definitely an outgrowth of those TI boards, as one of the most common modules built on them were the Advertizer cartridges circulating in Germany.

     

    Most other cartridges identified as prototypes are actually from qualification runs (100-150 examples in a run) made to test the production equipment and parts before initiating full production. I have a couple dozen of this type, but only 3-4 of the ones built on the EGROM boards.

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  3. On 3/15/2024 at 7:27 PM, Tursi said:

    The easy answer is to just buy the board Jim made. :) It's only a couple dollars more on the AVR but everything's done, tested, and working. :)

     

     

     

    And I stayed with Thru-hole parts so that the boards could pretty much be assembled by anyone with a bit of soldering skill. The PLCC flash chip was a design decision based on a chance buy of a couple of thousand of the flash chips I used on the board for an insanely low price (bought sometime before I ever started working on the board with Tursi and Jon). I've used most of those up over the years for this and other projects, but they were a definite motivator. The plethora of options are the result of our brainstorming sessions and the desire to make the board do pretty much anything it could do without the designer having to resort to board surgery. We met that goal. . .and it was a definite team effort from beginning to end. :)

     

    I had a similar parts-epiphany when I found a whole bunch of 27C4000 EPROM chips (512Kx8) for about 30 cents each. Almost nothing out there can program them--but a few programmers will program their 27C4001 sibling which uses the same programming algorithm. One IC adapter later, I can program them on one of my programmers (the other one that says it can program the 27C4001s fails, but the BK Precision 844 works fine) and a few minor mods to the 512K red boards later and I can use them at will (current Red boards have this capability built-in). It is for weird experiments like this that I have 7-8 different EPROM programmers. . .

     

    Last but not least, a major shout out to Tursi for writing the software that made these boards so versatile. There is actually a pretty steady demand for the boards, as they are a completely different use-case than the FinalGROM or the various GRAM solutions. Sometimes, you just need that purpose-built cartridge, and the Blue boards with Tursi's wonderful software implementation meet that need quite well.

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  4. 7 hours ago, MrDave said:

    Great i look foward to designing and printing my own modules :)

    A couple of useful items to note. Original TI cartridges used two different types of read-only memory: ROMs, which are easily replaced by EPROMs, and GROMs, which are a TI-specific memory type. Each TI GROM chip contains 6K of programming data in a specialized language called GPL, with the chip occupying a single address on the bus and autoincrementing an internal 13-bit address counter on the chip (but all GROMs on the bus increment at the same time, so there is a bit of complexity there).

     

    There are layouts for EPROM-only cartridges available for anyone to use (the 64K Guidry boards posted on hexbus.com). There are also 128K EPROM-only boards that work like the 64K-Guidry boards (available from me or @arcadeshopper), 512K and 2048K versions that use a different bank-stacking mode (Guidry-type boards are an inverted stack, all others use a non-inverted bank stacking mode). In addition, there are UberGROM boards that allow you to replicate the functionality of both memory chip types (512K EPROM and 120K GROM). I produce all of the boards except the 64K Guidry boards, and all are also available through @arcadeshopper.

     

    Note also that there are options available that don't require you to permanently burn a set of files into silicon. If you are working with ROM-only data, there is the FlashROM99 board, and if you need ROM/GROM functionality, there is the Final GROM board. You can get either of these from @arcadeshopper or several other online sources.

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  5. 13 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

    I turned on my TV for the first time in a couple of weeks to watch something off my Plex server.  I was greeted by this notice which I cannot bypass.  I accepted terms when I bought the device, and now I am being told that if I do not accept new terms, I can no longer use the product I fscking paid for!

    I kept my "smart" TV fully isolated from the Internet for much of its life, until She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and my older son (not Turtles) decided they wanted to use it with Netflix. It was relatively easy to keep it isolated too: it required an Internet connection to set it up (why?), so I did so, but then immediately changed the password on my router so that the one stored in the TV went nowhere. That kept me from getting some really obnoxious Samsung updates that would have negatively affected my use of the device I'd paid for. Luckily, the Netflix phase has passed and I was able to isolate it once more, but I have serious issues with companies trying to usurp my control of devices or applications I've paid for.

     

    HP with their new "ink subscription" services that you can't opt out of and their patently illegal bricking of printers for using third-party inks. My printer, my ink, my choice.

     

    Microsoft with their increasingly strident attempts to force logons away from local accounts and funnel them into the online Microsoft ecosystem. They didn't buy my computer--I did. They don't get to decide how I will use it, even if the OS is one they produced. It was still relatively easy to avoid that quagmire when installing Windows 10, but the procedures to do the same with Windows 11 are much more complicated and are really only in the OS at all to satisfy the requirements of Enterprise customers, as the straight consumer versions make it nearly impossible to avoid. I suspect the next version won't even let you download the software onto your new machine without the Microsoft control links already being in place (as physical media have reached the point of being deprecated "dinosaur" fodder).

     

    I don't carry a cell phone either, as the ability to track my activities without my permission is a greater risk than I am willing to accept. Unfortunately, cars (a technology I do need, unlike cell phones) are reaching to point of complexity where similar levels of unwanted connectedness are becoming the norm. When the medicines I take start transmitting results back to the doctors that prescribed them, I'll have yet another technology to avoid.

     

    My TI doesn't do any of those things--making it a perfectly useful device in my eyes. :)  It is a lesson many modern devices need to heed. . .and emulate.

    • Like 4
  6. One important note on keyboards: brown circuit card=mylar matrix=not likely to work anymore, NOS or not. Green circuit card=individual keys=generally still in working condition.

     

    The key tops on mylar ones are also shaped differently: very square corners. All other types have somewhat rounded corners. . .

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  7. I actually bought an original disk of this one BITD while I was in Germany. . .along with Freddy. Each original was identified by a serial number, and if the game detected the disk was a copy during play, it would stop the game after a while and flash "Raubkopie" on the screen. . .some enterprising soul eventually disabled that little code snippet, but it was interesting that it let you play long enough to really want an uncrippled version of the game.

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  8. Just a random thought, here. The second row of chips from the top might work a bit better if they move down just a bit to align with the single large chip to the left of them. That widens the track raceway between the first and second row of chips and it optimized the space below both of those larger chips to maximize available space for traces. Routing can always be a pain, so having lots of useful space to work with is sometimes very beneficial.

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  9. Probably the main thing you will need to make your own UberGROM images from scratch is Tursi's base load for the UberGROM. There are also images for XB 2.7, Triton SEB, Winkler's XB3, and a nice 3XB image. @acadiel also made a whole series of UberGROM images for the never released TI cartridges a year or two ago. They're all here on AtariAge.

     

    Here's the base UberGROM load for you along with an UberGROM manual, as that one will let you build and modify images to your heart's content.

     

    On another note, there is a board available that has space on it for a RAM chip and an E/A GROM. It is also battery backed. They are available on @arcadeshopper's site or you can get them from me.

     

    512K UberGROM Cartridge Board Manual V1.0.pdf GROMSim2.zip

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  10. I loaded Open JDK and that cleared the issue for TIImageTool (but I think I have to reload the other slow program that may still be pointing at a much older version on the machine).

  11. I opened the program fine on my WIN10 machine, although it does have a somewhat excruciating delay between selection of "OPEN FILE" and the moment where the file directory actually comes up. This is not an issue specific to TIImageTool 3 on this machine, though, as older versions have always done the same thing. I suspect a corrupt config file setting somewhere, but I haven't really taken the time to hunt it down as it was more of the minor annoyance category and not a problem once I got into the disk file I wanted to look at.

     

    Thanks for the update, Michael! Vielen Dank, Michael!

  12. 3 hours ago, 9640News said:

    All Jerry did was have a disk with a modified skew and an interlace of one where system/SYS was written. I wrote about that in 9640 News at the time. You could create your own disk with HyperCopy. 

    Won't Jump Boot do this as well? I'm pretty sure that one was based on his code. . .

    • Like 1
  13. 33 minutes ago, RXB said:

    I would buy a bigger SAMS and would like up to 16Meg version for as much as $200

    A 16M version would probably be closer to $350, @RXB. Just the 8 memory chips in their adapters would cost over $200 in raw parts, no assembly included. . .then you have the cost for the boards and the rest of the components that go on them and some reasonable amount for assembly/testing. That's why I noted that a 16M SAMS is probably just a very low probability item, as larger 8-bit 5V chips just aren't out there (there are larger 3.3V chips that claim TTL compatibility, but using them does increase board complexity a bit). I also found an alternate 2M chip using the same footprint as the one I'm experimenting with, but no one willing to ship to the US seems to have them in stock (I found some in India and the UAE, but nowhere else). Some other sources do identify them as "on order" though, so the status may change. Based on what I've seen though, they are coming from the same production line as the ones I'm using now--just labeled for a different company (both OEMs are Taiwanese).

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  14. On the MDM III stuff, the straight MDM III disk was issued with the Myarc Floppy Controller card as an upgrade to the TI Disk Manager II Cartridge they issued with the earliest cards. The V1.40 disk was part of the early HFDC release set, IIRC, before they had MDM V ready (and thus the whiteout over the letter "V"). I do have a labelled MDM III as released for the Geneve as well, and I think it was V2.2 (I need to hunt it down to check).

     

    The other disks are interesting--thanks for posting them.

    • Like 2
  15. On 3/2/2024 at 7:40 AM, hhos said:

    *If you examine the schematics you will find that two of them do not alter the CRU base used to access the 74LS612 registers.  But if you were to access them as if the CRU base was >5FC0, which is the address I selected with the other two with ROM included, you would never know the difference.  This is because the entire 8K at >4000 - >5FFF is selected by an output from the '138.  No other address decoding is done except that which is done by the 74LS612 itself for distinguishing the individual registers.  It is just 256 mirrors of 16 word memory addresses, all pointing to the same single bank of 16  12-bit registers.  Unless I've misread something in the schematic, or there is an inaccuracy in the schematic uploaded by Ksarul, this is not only true of my design, but the 1M SAMS as well.  If I'm wrong I would appreciate someone setting me straight.

     

    Oh, BTW I do not have a SAMS, or any other memory expansion board, other than the 32K expansion that came in the PEB I bought 12-15 years ago.  All I know about the SAMS is from reading about it, but mostly what I can glean from analyzing the schematics.

     

    In the schematics with ROMs ("ROM"  is in the name of the file I uploaded) the CRU base address is >5FC0 and there is one mirror at >5FE0.  All of the functions of the mapper are available to any software that you want to use.  The CRU base address is the only change if you wish to ignore the DSR.  A port from the SAMS to the "16M SAMS W/DSR" might only require changing "SAMREG EQU >4000" to "SAMREG EQU >5FC0".

     

    *Some people will see value in it, or what it might lead to.  Everyone is allowed to make their own assessment as to cost vs. function.  If they want it they can beg or hire someone to do it for them.  These United States are still free, but even in China or Iran I think people can spend their money on a 16M SAMS(it might have to be made in China if they don't want to donate a kidney😨), if they wish.

     

    HH

    The schematics for the 1M (SW99ers) and for the 1M/4M SAMS boards match the hardware, so they should point you in the right direction for analysis purposes, @hhos. As a side note, I am waiting for some daughter boards to arrive that should just plug in to the 36-pin sockets of the 2020 Edition of the board (and should also work with the 2017 Edition, but that will need some further validation due to a couple of trace changes between the versions). If everything works, an upgrade to 4M on those boards would not be too terrible (although it would probably almost double the cost of the SAMS, as the 2M chips and adapters would end up costing about $25 per chip, just in parts). It would also require over a thousand dollars in advance parts purchases, just to get everything at a reasonable cost. That is still significantly less than the Zeropower option with questionable used chips, and way less than new Zeropower chips, so it is definitely an improvement. This method also lends itself to further expansion, as I do have a schematic on my back burner that I may need to turn into a board sooner or later that would use either 8 of these or 8 of the 512K chips to build a 4M/16M full-size SAMS board. That is seriously more than anything used today, and based on availability of the 2M SRAM chips, may not even be practical. There were 240 of these chips available two weeks ago from the only source in the world that has them in stock (many others list them, but all roads lead back to this single source). As of today, there were only 120 in stock (somewhat less after I bought a few more for testing), with a notice that future replenishment could not happen prior to early September, as it is a special order item with the manufacturer.

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  16. 1 hour ago, Gary from OPA said:

    Mine came with the color kit motor installed so hopefully at some point I can find a color ink ribbon at a decent price, but so far they around $60 on eBay and even though they unused they old so most likely dried out.

    Oddly enough, those ribbons generally sold for $50 or so when the printer was new. I had one of these too--but for some reason, the pins on it ate color ribbons like candy. Worked perfectly with the black ones though. . .

  17. Looks like I got the pin spacing right for the layout, and the rest of the routing is complete, so I'll probably send these of to get some sample boards sometime later this week (I still need to do a final sanity check to make sure all pins are routed properly). I probably would have finished sooner, but I was a bit ill all this week and the brain just did not want to concentrate. I am much better now though, so I'll start getting the next batch of boards @arcadeshopper is waiting for into the production hopper over the next two days. . .

    • Like 6
  18. I've been thinking a bit on this one too. ISTR that the source code for Partisan Village also appeared in an Assembler collection done by TI Revue or as an Assembly feature in CK magazine. I'll have to dig my issues of those out and have a look. . .

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