Ksarul
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Posts posted by Ksarul
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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.
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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.
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Here's one other set of manuals I've found for it.
CHICAGO RAMDISK WHOPPERCART MISSING LINK.pdf Horizon - Midwest.pdf
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1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:
What up with the sudden glut of cartridges on eBay? And, of course, the prices...
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).
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18 minutes ago, chue said:
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.
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On 2/20/2024 at 3:27 PM, chue said:
The second power supply had the correct voltages, but the wrong connector - it had wires coming from the PS that went to what looked like a mini molex connector.
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.
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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.
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24 minutes ago, dhe said:
Alas I have all the common modules, but if someone was starting out and trying to collect all the TI PHM's, this would make a great way to start.
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.
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2 hours ago, brain said:
I'm wondering how the internals are set up on these carts. The slide switch suggests applying power to a single slot, but most carts don't work that way (having signals on them without power). Is there a schematic?
On the CBM front, I make one of these, so I could potentially make a TI version.
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).
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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. . .
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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).
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47 minutes ago, mattbert said:
Thank you! Ive heard reference to the fuse. That would make a ton of sense.
Matt
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. . .
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45 minutes ago, Kchula-Rrit said:
I have Version 1 in a floppy disk that I bought from Millers Graphics in the mid-80s; don't know if the disk is any good anymore. I went to make a backup copy and couldn't. The manual said something like, "The disk will not copy. If you want a backup copy, you will have buy another one from us." Soured me on them, but it was still a nice program.
K-R.
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.
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8 hours ago, Torrax said:
Are the module dumps different with Hunt the Wumpus, PRK, and PRG? Or are just the manuals different for those languages/regions.
Some of them have the TI-99/4 equation calculator embedded in them. Which makes the TI-99/4A menu a bit confusing.
You just have to press the right number to get the cartridge to load. Not sure who dumped them or are they originally that way?
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.
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Notes from my master cartridge GROM list:
Personal Record Keeping also had a F/NL version, Hunt the Wumpus had two different multilingual variants, and Personal Report Generator also had a GB/DE version and a F/I/NL/S version.
There were also quite a few single language variants in languages other than English. Demonstration also exists in French and German releases, Statistics also has a German release, Video chess has German and French releases, Logo II has a whole series of single-language releases, and there are a few others that also duplicate one or another of the languages in a multilingual cartridge.
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3 hours ago, 9640News said:
I pulled up my copy of Moon Patrol and it does not work on the Geneve and I could find no patches written about in Micropendium.
I know there was a patch out there for this one, as I remember applying it when I was still in Germany. It was in a document that also included patches for Video Chess and Q-Bert, IIRC
One other note: the Logo patch works on all varieties of Logo II that I've tested.
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Maybe it was the never-released speaker to plug into the sound jack on the front of many 99/4s.
The TI label is in a form-fit depression in the metal screen for that speaker too, so the nameplate might actually be normal here.
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12 hours ago, 9640News said:
@Ksarul Any more progressing solving the board issue?
The board I built is in testing by another individual here on AtariAge that has an original edition MEMEX to compare test results against. The testing has been done between other projects they're working though, so no progress to report yet.
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4 hours ago, Tursi said:
I wonder, how well written is XB2? Maybe it'd be easier to patch it to know AMS? (I don't know how different the Myarc 512k was)
Probably the most important thing to remember with Myarc XB-II is that development stopped before they'd shaken all of the bugs out of it. It has a lot of potential, but IIRC, some of the bugs could seriously bite you when writing complex programs. Commented source code isn't in the wild, unfortunately, so the only way to improve it now would be a careful disassembly/bug hunt. . .unless Lou Philips still has a copy of the source stashed somewhere, which would still leave the bug-hunting exercise.
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6 hours ago, retrodroid said:
John Walker, the founder of computer-aided design software company Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, passed away on February 2nd. He was 74.
There's an interesting TI connection to the Autodesk story that I wasn't aware of:
Details: https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/john-walker-1949-2024/4305
So far as I know, only one complete Marinchip S9900 computer exists in the wild--it lives in my basement.
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On sockets, I was using gold machine-pin sockets @hhos, so there really isn't something higher-grade to move on to. We did get a couple of boards working by the direct solder method--but there really are a lot of random issues with these chips, as we went through several chips before we had a set that worked right all the time. At the usual cost per chip, having 2-3 bad ones for each one that works is not even remotely economical. That was what put this on hold more than anything else. . .the design works, but the cost to make it work reliably is somewhat prohibitive, based on part reliability.
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6 hours ago, Lee Stewart said:
Jim (@Ksarul) was working on that a few years ago. I guess he has either abandoned the project or relegated it to a far back burner.
...lee
I have a set of cartridge molds to vacuum-cast shells, but the cost to make a shell that way was somewhere in the$2.50 to $3.00 range back when I tested the method. I suspect the resin is a bit more expensive now, but that would still be less than the current cost for common carts on eBay. The biggest problem with doing the vacuum-cast shells is the time it takes, as each set takes about an hour from start to finish (most of that is in the vacuum tank, so my time is mostly setting up the molds, filling them, dropping the assembly carefully into the tank, pressurizing it, and letting it sit for 30-40 minutes to cure). My time is thus about 20 minutes of work per set. No problem at all for low-volume personal use, but definitely not good for high-volume use.
The last time I looked at getting a set of professional molds done, it would have been a few thousand dollars to get the molds made, but the cost per shell set would have been very low. I had a contact that was willing to interface with the factory to get them at a somewhat better price, but his job at that company ended before we could discuss it in depth.
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2 hours ago, Serafini Lapo said:
Hello everyone, I found this offer which seems good to me (at least for those who live in America). A good batch to start a beautiful adventure with the magical Ti99👍🏻
That one does have all four of the Starter Pack/Gamewriter's Pack titles in the original packaging with the tapes, which don't show up very often. The books are easy to find--the rest, not so much. One note, this version with the cover and tapes also exists in French for all four books.
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7 hours ago, Goer_0920 said:
This was designed by Kenbe Goertzen a graduate of KSU. He was living in Wichita, Kansas at the time. There were about 5-10 employees at the peak however they were not able to compete with Microsoft and eventually moved on to other areas of computer engineering.
Did many of these make it into the wild and get used by customers, or were they stuck in the 'almost' sold mode? Thanks for the additional data you've given here too, as there isn't really much out there on them.
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Once it gets here, I will have a complete set of all known varieties of Logo II (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish).
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TI Related -- Ebay / Heads Up Notice
in TI-99/4A Computers
Posted
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.