Jump to content

Ksarul

+AtariAge Subscriber
  • Posts

    7,896
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

Everything posted by Ksarul

  1. Hmmm, that coworker sounds somewhat normal in my book. The snack bar at work had some really tasty ghost pepper chips for a while. I bought a bag one day and the cashier said to watch out, as they were too spicy to eat. I had them as part of my lunch--and went downstairs to the snack bar a bit later to buy a second bag. The cashier asked who I planned to prank with them--my answer was that the first bag was so good that I was hungry for a second helping. . .the look of horror on her face was priceless. They stopped selling them soon after, as I was about the only one that regularly bought them.
  2. If you are looking for a program that allows use of a SCSI Floppy drive on the WHT card, I don't think there was ever software written to allow that. There are SCSI Floppy drives out there, but they were never common enough that drivers/DSR hooks were written to support them on the TI. It was always listed as a "future" capability.
  3. The rotary switch type is actually seriously rare. I have one, as do several others in the community, but the total count of known examples in the wild is definitely less than 10, with maybe that many more moldering in random basements around the country.
  4. Wasn't the BASIC graphics Expansion called Torpedo BASIC? The manual for it is on the IUC site, it is on WHT, and I have one as well. Here's the disk and the manual for it. The third disk has an excerpt from the source code of Partisan Village (VILLAGEX) on it (along with a lot of other unrelated E/A tutorials and source code). torpedo.dsk Torpedo Basic (Hagera).pdf ea-prg-1.dsk
  5. I think that may be my Juno limit as well. . .it is either that or 20 MB. . .
  6. On yet another note, I was able to get a few samples of the 2M TSOP-II SRAM chips. Now I have to finish the layout for an adapter to plug them into the 36-pin socket on the SAMS cards. I'm in the middle of some serious layout-calculating fun there, as the socket footprint is a bit space-constrained, so much so that I'll need a 2-level board to do it easily. Thanks again @hhos, you set me on a possible path to success. . .
  7. One note on the nearby hotels: all weekends in October are already blocked out as unavailable on the Graduate Hotel's website.
  8. This looks like one of the Mechatronic 8-slot expanders. When Michael Becker bought the rest of Mechatronic's parts stock, there were a few of these in the boxes in various states of completion. The originals never made it into series production, IIRC, so all of them in circulation were test/prototypes.
  9. Not exactly--ROM connected to the side port has to include some memory in the >4000 memory space, as that is the area polled as part of the PEB bus power-up routines built into every single PEB card (usually ROM, but sometimes persistent RAM, as in the Horizon RAMDisks). A side-port cartridge with a power up routine there will be able to put an entry onto the logon screen and execute in spite of the V2.2 OS. These cartridges generally put most of the rest of their data in the 32K memory space normally used by the 32K card. The side-port GROM-Buster worked almost the same way, by adding a short routine that polled the >6000 space to add the entries it found there to the logon screen and allow ROM-only cartridges in the cartridge slot to execute on a V2.2 console. Note that V2.2 didn't completely lock out GROM access on the side port/PEB either, as the P-Code card which had 6 GROMs on it, did work (its >4000 power up took complete control of the system, making the V2.2 OS redundant until one forced the P-Code card to exit to the TI OS). The P-GRAM operated within the confines of the normal OS, and thus didn't have this kind of total system control option.
  10. I only know of two cartridges that used the TI-Calc mode. TI-Calc used four bank-switched ROMs and a GROM. TI at Almelo also did an experimental cartridge called the 32K EPROM module that used the same ROM schema. Here are the ROMs and the GROM for TI-Calc. The dump I had was in Inverted format, thus the _9 (it was actually a really old dump, as when I looked at it this morning it still had the deprecated _3 identifier). I may have a manual to the 32K EPROM module somewhere, as I remember reading it at one point about 25 years ago. TICALC_G.BIN TICALC_9.BIN
  11. That is a mostly insane price. I say mostly only because they don't turn up often enough for a lot of folks to realize that they are uncommon but not exactly rare. . .I have two of them, but one was bought as a parts supply, as it was sold as non-working. It had a really good case though, and my working one was all banged up, so it was definitely worth the price I paid for it to combine them into a really nice working unit.
  12. Here is an example of the 32-pin flap style test and burn-in sockets. These are always in live-bug configuration (chip is placed top side up in them). Here is an example of the 32-pin square test and burn in sockets. These can show up in live bug or dead bug style (dead bug has the chip placed upside down in the socket). Both types can be obtained without the DIP adapters they are soldered into for use with programmers. I have a couple of each type loose, as one of my programmers expects the bare PLCC sockets in its programming slots (ADVIN gang programmer for PLCC chips). Pomona also makes some really nice plug sockets for the various PLCC chips that give you test points at the top for every pin, but they can be a bit pricey. The 32-pin also only seems to show up in the kits with everything from 20 to 84 pin adapters as well, making them even worse on pricing.
  13. I've never had any socket issues with PLCC stuff once I got them seated properly on the board. I have had problems getting them to program in a normal PLCC socket, but once I switched to the flap-style live bug sockets for programming, that problem disappeared too. I haven't had issues with the dead-bug box-style sockets for programming either, but I personally prefer the flap style when programming a bunch of chips. The only thing I could think of that might damage the regular sockets is too much asymmetrical stress on the contacts that make a few of them lose their grip on the chip. Probably near the insertion notches.
  14. Here's one other set of manuals I've found for it. CHICAGO RAMDISK WHOPPERCART MISSING LINK.pdf Horizon - Midwest.pdf
  15. The sudden glut included an auction in Germany that had a TI-Logo II cartridge in German among many other interesting tidbits. The weirdest thing of all was that the seller was the son-in-law of the original owner--and I was friends with the original owner BITD when I lived in Germany. . .and yes, I got the cartridge Once it gets here, I will have a complete set of all known varieties of Logo II (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish).
  16. The other thing to note is that the /4 motherboard and the keyboard are soldered together via a whole row of metal fingers. The chiclet keyboard and the mother board are basically a single unit, because you really don't want to try and separate them.
  17. These power supplies were used in 99/4s and early 99/4As. They are a bit HTF. Somewhere, I have a bag of the mating connector for those and the proper connector to make them work with the later motherboard connectors. The resulting cable needs to be kept a bit short so as not to get in the way of anything, but it does work to make them compatible with later consoles.
  18. On the Parker Brothers files, they didn't actually use TI GROM chips. They developed their own GROM-workalike chips called PCROMs. They were also 6K devices though, so your instincts are right. Starship Pegasus was intended for release by TI for the MBX, so its GROMs should also be 6K, but there is no guarantee of that until you do your slicing test. I included the documentation on the Parker Brothers chips here, in case they come in useful. wickstead_ti994a_PCROM_overview.pdf
  19. Looks like this one no longer exists. Just a thought, but we probably should include a link when referencing a neat auction--makes hunting them down just a little bit faster, especially when eBay seems to be doing its level best to hide things from their customers lately. . . Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Dan. If it was still there, that would be a lot of useful shells for homebrew cartridges.
  20. One note on these. If you are doing a respin, it might be good to cut all of the voltages to the slots that aren't in use when you move the switch, as that would eliminate some known issues with some chips still responding when they aren't selected. @Sinphaltimus attempted to do this here on AtariAge a few years back, but didn't make it too far into the project before he realized it was a lot of trouble for a little gain (the adapters were seriously cheap at that time, unlike the somewhat crazy prices being asked for them lately).
  21. I've been doing a bit of random digging on 2M SRAM chips. Interestingly enough, there is actually "one" chip of that size that is 5V tolerant and outputs at TTL levels. It isn't through-hole though, as it is a 44-pin TSOP-II. It only uses 37 of those 44 pins, and one of those can be tied to 5V at all times, leaving me with the same 36 pins I had on the 36-pin Zeropower SRAMS (but in a much different pin order). I ordered a few of the chips to play with and I'm working on a pair of little plug-in adapter boards for the chips that move the pins around to where I need them to be for the sockets. This idea may or may not pan out, but thanks to @hhos for inspiring me to take another look at the problem. The chips themselves are not at all common, but I've found at least three vendors that apparently stock them (although the numbers available at all of them are suspiciously close to each other, so they may all be relying on just one vendor's stock). One does have two more shipments identified as inbound as well, so they are apparently still being produced. Note that it may be months before I can have these in-hand and tested, due to a serious lack of hobby time lately. With luck, I may have something to say about progress by the Chicago Faire. . .
  22. Note that the card doesn't have the switching circuitry for more than two RAM banks, but that it may be possible to add them with some potentially extensive surgery. I was given permission to make a new run of the cards, but I haven't had time to finish the new layout yet. I'll have to take a close look at it to see if it can be done without a major board redesign (and if it goes to a 378, it would actually be possible to expand the ROM side to 512K, or 64 Banks--that would make it fully compatible with a lot of the homebrew cartridge images out there).
  23. The symptom when that fuse blows is identical to what you describe as well. There is a whole thread on the subject (with pictures) here on AtariAge. You probably want to read that whole thread from the point I linked on, as well as looking at the description on the Mainbyte site I linked to in my post there. Note that the post also shows the fuses you need. . .
  24. If the V1 disk is still good and you have a CorComp or BwG floppy controller, you can use a nifty program called CopyC to copy it. Christopher Winter had issues with copy protected disks, and so he wrote this program to analyze the disk and fully replicate the formatting/sector data in 1:1 mode. The first programs he tested it on were some of the QualitySoft and MG disks he got his hands on. There is also a much less common version of the program out there called CopyA, for Atronic disk controllers.
  25. The embedded selection for the Equation calculator is an artifact of the time the cartridge was written, as it was expecting a 99/4. That bit of weirdness is part of the original cartridge. On the cartridges, look at the master cartridge GROM list I built a few years ago. Each variant has some GROMs that aren't in the English version of the cartridge. The GROM list is in numerical order, so sometimes, you have to search it to find all of the related GROMs. It is probably still missing a few, but it is the most complete list out there. There is one odd one where the Video Chess cartridge is the English version but the manual is Spanish. I have the Spanish manual in my collection. That variant only seems to have been released in Argentina and the South American market, as I've never seen or heard of a version of it released in Spain. GROM List V9.odt
×
×
  • Create New...