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Marius

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Posts posted by Marius

  1. Posted

    Well, I am a huge fan of XDOS myself. For some reason it comes closer to my 'native' atari 8bit experience, which I had in the past, when I only had a 1050 and an atari 800xl. I did not grew up with SpartaDOS nor Spartados X. Later, when I got the amazing Black Box, I started to use Disk versions of Spartados (like 3.2d, 3.2g and the 3.3a and 3.3b versions). Of course that was a huge improvement to the way I had been using my a8 before. Even much later I discovered SDX and again, it is not difficult to admit that SDX was amazing, powerful and extremely versatile. There is no doubt at all that SDX is the most powerful DOS ever written for Atari 8bit, and I even can't imagine there will be any 8bit computer DOS more powerful than SDX. 

     

    That said though, I love DOS'es that can be booted from a disk, and are small and fast and compatible. XDOS is all those things. I run The Last Word now from floppy disk. One ATR with XDOS and The Last Word, and it works more than excellent. I also have some XDOS formatted and initialized disks full of sources and other stuff. It fits the way I use and love to use my a8. Just like the old days. 

     

    And don't worry, I keep using SDX with SIDE2, MyIDE2 and IDE+ ... it's way too cool to leave SDX. But I can imagine @jgrass wants to use his XDOS, and he would like to use his RT8 with it. I might contact MacRorie about my RT8's... thanks for the suggestion.

     

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    Very offtopic response here, but I found the need to write about it. I once bought two remakes of the RT8 carts from MacRorie The Brewing company, and although he did an amazing job in creating a 100% copy of the original, this also lead to copying the flaws of the original. The legs of the cart are too short, which results in many Atari 8bit computers where you have to pull the cart slightly back after inserting. That is a practice I dislike a lot. The legs should have been longer and in gold. So these RT8's are eating dust now here, since they fail all the time.

     

    I remember there was some technical know how somewhere about Z: device, which could/should work under Dos 2.5 ... probably also compatible with XDOS. I love XDOS as well, so I am also interested in this. One thing though: XDOS itself does not do any time/date stamp (which is in my opinion THE best feature where you could use an RT8 for).

     

    Since I am not so satisfied by those RT8 remakes, I know rely again on a APETIME kind of program, but then S2UTIME which downloads the time from my ABBUC-> Sio2USB device (not a sio2pc device!) which has a RTC built in. Also the amazing IDE+ has this facility. It is even possible to have an APETIME kind of tool for U1MB, which I wrote years ago. But I am not sure whether these tools do work with something different than SpartaDos. 

     

    I am not sure where I saw it, but you might be able to find more info when you search for Z: device and RT8 ...

     

  3. Posted

    5 hours ago, ivop said:

    Yes, I created a 1MB file with twice the firmware. Hence the label says 2x U1MBv2 unbrick chips :)  IIRC I just concatenated the original ROM. I believe I used some AtariMax tool under Wine to create the ATR. Boot over SIO2PC and flash the full cart. I has been a while and it's my only AtariMax cart, so I never use it for anything else anymore.

     

    After unbricking, I put the "bricked" flash ROM in the cartridge and ran the flasher again, so I still have two of them.

    This is very smart. 

     

    I soldered a DIP->PLC adapter on a SIC! Cart board which works also, but I realize now I shouldn't have done that. AtariMax works as well! 

     

  4. Posted

    8 hours ago, ivop said:

    Like @flashjazzcat said, it has 512kB of flash ROM. Two fit in an 8Mbit cartridge. It's called Ultimate 1MB because it has 1MB of RAM.

     

    AAh now I remember again what my question was. The Atarimax 8Mbit is 1MB ... how do you flash only 512KB on these boards? What is the trick? Creating a 1MB file with twice the firmware and flash it to two 512KB flashroms? Or could you leave one socket open on the cart?

  6. Posted

    On 6/7/2020 at 7:49 PM, ivop said:

    If you have another working Atari, and you have an AtariMax cartridge, you can use it to flash the same PLCC chips.

     

    atarimax-unbrick-u1mb.png.9c951a4923b23cee12389553c876baf2.png

     

    They reset my U1MB to the "ulrimare" firmware, after which you can reflash FJC's firmware again and/or fix hardware stability issues, et cetera.

     

    There is one thing I do not understand.

     

    The U1MB has one 1Megabyte flashrom. The AtariMax 8mbit has 2x 512KB flashroms. How do you do it? Does the U1MB flasher recognize the 1Megabyte flashrom? 

  7. Posted

    With all the respect for mr. Sobola's work, I can not remember I ever used a schematic from his hand that was not faulty. So please be careful with just using that schematic without checking everything twice or more. 

     

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  8. Posted

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/qLuxCp1LCn36wCrq5

    Those are pictures from the PANOS-remake freezers with info. Please let me know if you need more info. If you need the info from the original Abbuc freezer, let me know.

     

    Oh and do you remember the switches worked in the 'wrong' direction compared to the original in those remake freezers. Perhaps another thing to look at carefully for the new design. 

    original freezer 2011:
    switches to right is 'on' position

     

    remake freezer panos:

    switches to left is 'on' position

     

     

    • Like 3

  9. Posted

    15 hours ago, santosp said:

    Hi Marius,

    thanks for your contribution with all these info's. Every device will be come complete with its plastic shell and with the needed cuts for the 5 switches, the tactile switch and leds. Yes the correct resistor value have added.

     

    :?:Although I need an info from your device. Can you measure and respond back here, about the size of black spacers on bottom of XE and XL adapters?

     

    OH that is a good one. I remember the spacers were not on all pcb in the right size. I will look them up (the right) ones and give you the detailed information as soon as possible. Great to see you are working on Freezers again. Your quality is absolutely OUTSTANDING. 

    • Like 2

  10. Posted

    2 hours ago, tf_hh said:

    Count me in for 2 or 3 pcs

     

    I wished we could combine one day the bells and whistles of Syscheck AND this Freezer. A freezer with the possibility of external OS ROMS (not only OSB) would be awesome. And as long as I am asking, a way of making a real PBI harddisk from a MyIDE or SIDE2 cart (just like U1MB can do with SIDE2 would be awesome as well).

     

    Anyhow I am interested in 3 of these. But I am very unhandy so I can not built it into a case myself. Did I understand right you only deliver PCB?

    Oh and please tripple check the resistor value on the LS123 ph2 circuit. I had to change resistors to let the Freezer work on my XE's remember...

    • Like 2

  12. Posted

    I wrote (one day) an atr that you could mount to D1 on your real 1050, or Sio2SD/Sio2USB or whatsoever. That would coldstart the MyIDE 2 interface. I am not sure whether you are interested in that... if yes, let me know... I could search for it.

     

    Oh and if you have a turbo freezer (but I guess not) that is also possible to use to get back to the MyIDE 2 menu/fat32 loader.

     

    If you have U1MB or another upgrade that let you flash custom OS's you could also flash the MyBIOS custom OS to one of the slots. With that it will work too (just like @erichenneke explained in this thread)

    • Like 2

  13. Posted

    Just now, tschak909 said:

    (at the risk of bifurcating the thread) has anyone done a comparison of Visicalc and SynCalc in terms of features?

     

    -Thom

    Years ago, I decided I wanted to use my atari 8bit for more than just coding, gaming and beta testing stuff for @flashjazzcat.... so I moved my official business administration from Excell to atari 8bit. I tested several spreadsheet programs for a8 and I can not remember whether I also tried visicalc, but I tried many... and the only spreadsheet that actually was able to process my administration was syncalc. And although the administration itself is not that complicated, I had quite some data for one year. Syncalc did the perfect job, and I am STILL doing my business administration on atari 8bit. It is quite amazing, and since I hate administration, it is -thanks to a8- a little more fun to do. (I am running my own music school, and I am also doing quite some projects that bring in money... it all goes into the Syncalc). 


    But sorry... I can not exactly answer your question. I should check it out!

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    1 hour ago, xxl said:

    bug.

     

    but some say - planned action. probably the u1mb and incognito designers didn't want Synapse stuff to run on their hardware

    I use Syncalc all the time ( I know this thread is about Synfile+, but I respond to your Synapse comment) on my U1MB Atari. Not a single problem, ever. (Except for a known bug in Syncalc itself).

     

    Just like I said to the other guy, #doeslief ... 

  17. Posted

    19 hours ago, Faicuai said:

    The do not work on Incognito. PERDD.

     

    You did nit even bothered to try, and now you are complaining. Perplexing, to say the least.

     

    Kyle is a thorough, and day-in-day-out 800 / Incognito user. And stuff that does not work, is not going to help him.

     

    Anything else here is off-topic. 


    In Dutch we have a campaign running which is called "#Doeslief" which is about this... people on the internet are so easily upset and behaving hostile. So please be kind!

  18. Posted

    @Philsan

     

    In my humble opinion it stays important that people who use an emulator are aware it is not a real atari. As you say yourself casual users might not use those disks that format themself or format disks at all, but that is exactly the reason why it is better to keep a default setting the safest. Many people might not have an idea what they are doing or what is going on.

     

    Personally I am a huge Read Only fan. One of the most important and most used features on my blackbox back in the day (I really miss using it) was the centrally mounted large write protect switch. It was on read only by default. Ever! Only in the rare situation I had to write some data to my hard disk I put it in R/W setting. This story does only "proof" that there are more kind of users and the fact that there are also read only lovers here.

     

    I know though those situations where you run into an issue with a program and you would like to change it that it works the best like you think it should work. Sometimes it is easier to accept the way things work... that helps too :)

     

    • Like 1
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