kenjennings
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Posts posted by kenjennings
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My carts from Roklan:
Gorf cart is brown.
Wizard of Wor is brown.
Deluxe Invaders is beige. (It could have been grey and the color has changed)
The labels are all yellow/white printing on blue. Never saw a Roklan card in blue plastic.
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4 OSS carts in one? I'll take one.
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It should be ebay policy to prefix all auction titles with the word RARE! It would save sellers a lot of trouble.
Or "MINT", which is often used when it shouldn't.
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I noticed a couple of years ago that they had parts for the Okimate 10 as well. It's intriguing. Is there really some Sears warehouse with parts for stuff dating back 30, 40, 50 or even more years?
No, they have no inventory at all. The warehouse is a wormhole that goes back in time to get what they want. I wonder if I can order an Ark 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits?
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Got an Atari 800 and three 1050 drives. (Yay! I'll have a real 800 again -- I rue the day I sold my original 800.)
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Either their inventory database needs a major league cleanup, or they have infinite warehouse storage inside a Tardis.
I'd be tempted to order it just to see what happens if it didn't cost so much. (The site did apply the board to the Shopping Cart.)
The only place I could find using that substituted part number (46-353101-3) rather than the Atari part CA014807 is the Sears site.
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So in short, the legend of the ST being designed from start to finish after the Amiga fell through for Atari Corp is nothing more than a legend ...?I didn't know that.
That's correct. A lot of it stems from misinformation from RJ, some from the press surmising, etc. Again, the Amiga deal never fell through with Atari Corp. - there was no deal with Atari Corp.
The deal was with Warner Atari who financed the developement of the amiga chipset ie Atari 1600XL
Speaking of the Atari 1600xl:
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS...0xl/1600xl.html
Oddly, the first picture on that page shows a box shaped like an amiga 2000.
1600XL/Shakti had nothing to do with the Amiga project.
I didn't say it was an Amiga. I was just noting the coincidental similarity of the case.
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Well, it figures that was a Tramiel-era failure. Probably his last parting shot to the computer he couldn't kill while running Commodore.
LOL, he's the one that kept those 8-bits on the market as long as they were. He could have very easily just killed them. Please tell me you're not buying in to the usual anti-Tramiel missinformation that's out there?
Yes, I exaggerate slightly. Of course he couldn't outright kill them. He needed the Atari logo worshippers to stay on the hook to buy his ST. In lieu of not being able to axe them he just made them a little less compatible, less reliable, more cheap. We got cost-reduced, while Commodore fans got the C128. (nobody here woould have wanted an Atari 800 with twice the clock rate and an 80 column display, Nah.) That's called being given the smelly end of the stick.
Well, by that time all the important people with clue tokens were already working elsewhere (Amiga).
So completely untrue. The advance computer projects being done from '82-'84 (Shakti, Sierra, Explorer, and more) were staggering for the time, let alone what was coming out of Alan Kay's R&D group.
I'm sure they did a lot of neat wizardy, but if it never leaves the lab it doesn't count for much. If the posts here and other sites on fixing the XL video are any indication then this staggering talent remaining at Atari didn't appear to include anyone who knew how to make a proper video signal exit a computer.
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As for hardware bugs, I consider removing the two joystick ports in the XL idiocy like an intentional bug/sabotage. Really?! To bank switch they HAD to steal hardware in use and couldn't add anything?
If you think about it, it wasn't that bad of a move. Most other computers of the time only had two joystick ports, and software was being ported from or to those systems, so most games didn't have 4 player options anyhow. Adding anything to the board would have increased the costs. As it was, they probably saved money, or at least came out net-zero by removing the two joystick ports.
As graphically lame as it was, Asteroids on the Atari 800 was the most popular game in my college dorm, primarily because it allowed four players. It was played more as a team Space War game than for shooting the asteroids. Multi-player breakout on the 800 was almost as popular. They were visually uninspiring, but the social aspect of multiplayer gaming made up for a lot. Ahead of its time.
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Here's another guy working on Atari ST /Amiga on FPGA.
http://www.fpgaarcade.com/atari_amiga.htm
He seemed to be farther along on the on the ST due to the much more simple hardware.
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The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.
The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.
It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).
. . .
The first Amiga OS defaulted to a similar color scheme as the Atari 800 (white on blue) for essentially the same reason -- both were designed to use a NTSC TV. People with deeper pockets could buy a nice RGB monitor for the Amiga.
In any case, the defaults don't mean a lot. The original GUIs on both computers allowed the user to change the colors. I usually set the Amiga to use black on light grey, which turned out to be the default used for the version 2 Workbench.
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So in short, the legend of the ST being designed from start to finish after the Amiga fell through for Atari Corp is nothing more than a legend ...?I didn't know that.
That's correct. A lot of it stems from misinformation from RJ, some from the press surmising, etc. Again, the Amiga deal never fell through with Atari Corp. - there was no deal with Atari Corp.
The deal was with Warner Atari who financed the developement of the amiga chipset ie Atari 1600XL
Speaking of the Atari 1600xl:
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS...0xl/1600xl.html
Oddly, the first picture on that page shows a box shaped like an amiga 2000.
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Isn't the AmigaOS [in]directly responsible for shared libraries like what Microsoft implemented into Windows with the curse-ed DLLs? Wasn't that part of the patents/IP that Amiga licensed to IBM/Microsoft for use in OS/2 and in return Amiga got ARexx out of it?
Unix existed long before the Amiga and it used shared libraries. Though the Amiga Os does do it particularly well.
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From http://www.atariarch...Atari_Basic.php:
POINT #reference number, sector variable, byte variable: This physically POINTs the disk head to the sector and byte. If that sector and byte are not located within the file opened with that reference number, you get an error message.So if you're getting an error, the sector and byte you're referencing must not be found within the file.
...which means a program uses NOTE to remember where it is in the file, and then later it uses POINT to go directly there again.
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Atari 800XL with 256K Ramrod XL and Newell OS with Fast Floating Point, Omnimon, and Omniview. Mac/65. After years of being boxed I just picked it up again last month. I'm still in the middle of imaging all my floppies, so then I can just use APE on a laptop as my "disk drives".
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If you need more books on Assembly language for Ataris check here:
http://www.atarimania.com/documents-atari-400-800-xl-xe-books_1_8.html
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Just some stuff that came in the mail today :')
sloopy.
Ok..... What is it?
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The 1025 sort of matches color-wise, but it doesn't have the venting or bevelled edge styling and too little of the coffee brown color, my Pansonic printer matches as well as the 1025.
I think I remember reading in the Atari mags that it's just Okidata Microline 80 (or 82?) with SIO port and different XL-style metal top cover.
Even without the beveled cut XL-style edge, it did match pretty well for an Oki!
I thought I read half the dot matrix printers ever made made were either rebadged licensed copies of the microline 80 (or unlicensed knock offs.)
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What GTIA bug/bad GTIAs? DO you mean what is referred to on the Wikipedia page for GTIA? "...The last Atari XE computers made for the Eastern European market were built in China. Many if not all have a buggy PAL GTIA chip. The luma values in Graphics 9 and higher are at fault, appearing as stripes. Replacing the chip fixes the problem...." ? Well, it figures that was a Tramiel-era failure. Probably his last parting shot to the computer he couldn't kill while running Commodore.
As for hardware bugs, I consider removing the two joystick ports in the XL idiocy like an intentional bug/sabotage. Really?! To bank switch they HAD to steal hardware in use and couldn't add anything?
Count the inept video output electronics added to the XL and later as a bug. You'd think for a computer that speciailizes in graphics they'd have the wherewithal to get someone who understands video to make the interface. Well, by that time all the important people with clue tokens were already working elsewhere (Amiga). (I guess it could be worse for us -- there's nothing uglier than a C64 NTSC TV display.)
Software-ware wise there were a few things. Atari BASIC didn't get to version C by being bug free in version A. Also, the move command in OSS's BASIC XL works fine on an 800, but breaks on an XL -- one of several things broken by the XL OS. How long did it take for Atari to realize we needed the Transformer?
The floating point in the Atari OS was pretty darned slow, not a bug, but a performance hit. Between the Newell Fastchip fixing FP, and the Fast mode in BASIC XL my 800XL ran like it had an overclocking an accelerator.
Given the size of the Atari OS, (at the time of release an unheard amount of features in a low end microcomputer) I'm surprised it doesn't have a lot more issues.
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. . .
the top-lid is also physically modified (which would not be desirable, because of the quasi-Faraday cage's design, when all parts come together).. . .
I ran an 800 for years without the top on and there was no unpleasant video interference.
(One small dab of solder bypassed the door switch -- a common "upgrade" for people without air conditioing.)
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Everybody hated waiting on the 410 to load games, badly. . . . Most gaming was still done on cart, because of the dreadfully slow 410.
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. . . I forgot about the slow tape interface.
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I was programming for years with that tape drive. It was so heavily used that the catch for the play button wore out and a small carpentry clamp was needed to hold the play button down. That thing taught me patience.... lots of patience. And the virtue of saving everything three times in different places. Did I mention patience?
This habit learned from using the 410 carried over to floppies when I was finally able to afford a floppy drive. It's turned out to be useful now. I've been working with the sio2pc-usb over the past week to turn all the 25 year old floppies into ATR files. Occasionally there's a sector error, but with redundant copies on multiple floppies I have not yet lost anything.
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Possible Atari 400 Keyboard Replacement?
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted · Edited by kenjennings
That's a Bkey? I recall a full stroke keyboard with yellow keys. Was that something different?
Too bad these are sold out
(to Atari-ize my PC)
http://www.geekstuff...e-keyboard.html