31336haxx0r

Here in Germany, ST stuff usually sold for little money. Prices seem to have increased, though. If you can get STs and peripherals for cheap, I'd buy a few to refurbish and sell later on. Or keep them for their WD1772s, which I could use for replicating an XF551.

Shhhhhhhhhh! Don't tell her! I still need to retrieve that camera!

Thanks , but I already did.

It's indeed a CPU intensive process, as you'll need to do oversampling. What sampling frequency are you using?

I think this is exactly the issue I had back then. I (probably) had a 60 Hz XF while in Europe 50 Hz are used. Oddly, I had the correct 220V power supply (the drive was NOS). Try swapping the EPROM with a known working (60 Hz) one. If there is no EPROM soldered in, then you can solder in a socket and flip a jumper. IIRC it was the only jumper on the board.

A while ago, a VTech (Video Technology) Laser 500 home computer found its way into my collection. Resources regarding that machine are scarce. The most useful information I found was this Spanish Wikipedia arcticle. Does anyone happen to know more about that computer, like pinouts, wiring diagrams, software and programming information? Maybe even the scan of its manual? Is it a worthy collectable?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I DIDN'T GET IT WHEN I POSTED THAT! D'OH!

There was a version of Stealth that actually two players could play?

My god, 10 out of 76 cycles per scanline. There will be almost no time left for the game.

Ah, thanks!

Wasn't it like 360 RPM for 5 1/4" drives and 300 RPM for 3 1/2" drives regardless of density? I can't remember anymore.

I just noticed how old this thread is. Sorry.

Yeah, she's got a beautiful design...

I have a Model M keyboard, which in fact I'm just right now typing on. I just love it! It is indeed rather loud. As you suggested, I'd take it to the job and see if anyone complains. I wouldn't worry about it getting worn out. Those were IMHO the very best and sturdiest keyboards ever built.

As this is supposed to be the paddle FAQ, I have an entirely different question. The paddle schematic shows, that the paddle potentiometers aren't wired as voltage dividers but variable resistors instead. I suppose I'll only get correct paddle readings, if I use the correct 1 MOhm pot?

Colleen's hot.

The drives in XF551s are standard IBM PC compatible drives. They used some creative jumpering to use them in the XF551. I can't remember off hand what to do with the XF551 drive to get it to work on a PC, but I think it wasn't much. Then you could just try to format a 360 kB disk on your PC and see if the drive works. If it doesn't, the drive is bad. If it does, the XF's controller seems to have some issues. You could also try to ge a real 360 kB PC disk drive to work in the XF. I did that once with a Teac drive and it worked well for reading and writing (but oddly not for formatting). All I did was changing some jumpers. I remember there were different ROM versions inside the XFs.I have an XF here that just didn't want to read or boot correctly. When I changed the EPROM for a known working version of the XF ROM, it worked like a charm.

I don't speak Polish, so I don't know what exactly this is about. Does that mean that the single GTIA sound output usually used for key clicks is used as an audio output via pulse width modulation or something? This is waht I ALWAYS dreamt of to do one day. Nice work!

Did you already have a look at this: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/128279-cd4050-av-mod-on-pal-atari-2600/

How about using paddle input A as the input for a joystick and paddle input B for the trigger alone? Each bit of the 4 direction bits of the joystick would be encoded by resistors to yield an analog voltage. Much like simple resistor based DACs like the Covox: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Covox-Stecker.svg Then one will just need to read the paddle from the register and decode them into movement. The advantage is, that it's an inexpensive and non-intrusive way of having 2 joysticks per joystick port.