CharlieChaplin

This question comes up every now and then - by U1MB users, Antonia users, etc. See e.g. here: Space Harrier is ROM/CAR only and therefore works with 64k RAM, Atari Blast is available a) as ROM/CAR that works with 16k RAM and b) as XEX that requires 1088k RAM... On my AVG cart. I have some PDM sounds and AVF videos that are a "little" larger than 1MB (most videos in the range of 50-200MB, but some have a size of 500MB, 1GB or more) - luckily they work directly from the 64GB SD-card and therefore 64k RAM is enough for the A8...

Has anyone tested a certain game (one that shall not be named) on disk 454 with U1MB ? Does it work ?

$D000 - $D01F CTIA/GTIA (stock hardware) $D020 - $D03F reserved for second GTIA $D040 - $D05F reserved for third GTIA $D080 - $D0FF VBXE soft reset area $D000 - D01F 1st GTIA (Red) $D020 - D03F 2nd GTIA (Green) $D040 - D05F 3rd GTIA (Blue) $D060 - D07F 4th GTIA (Black/Greys) Only dreaming...

And errmmm, are they compatible with 65816 and/or 65802 ? But maybe you can make them incompatible with mapRAM, since A8 with available extra extra large RAM at $D000-D7FF is no longer an Atari...

There is a pre- or demoversion of Virtuoso on one of the Antic disks together with a demofile. Three (?) other Antic disks also contain a file with the same extender that are more demofiles for Virtuoso. If I remember correctly these demofiles all had the same length (approx. 52 sectors). But I did not like the gfx or snd of them, the Movie Maker demos were much better. So, the demo of Virtuoso was definitely out there and available for dozens or hundreds of Antic disk subscribers...

You should change your pseudonym from Poison into Speed Lightning or something like that... Thank you, Poison !

Well, the built-in robot factory is the construction kit, available on tape and disk! I have not seen any data disks for Mr. Robot, but there are four alternative XEX fileversions with new levels available, e.g. here: http://a8.fandal.cz/search.php?search=Mr.+Robot&butt_details_x=

Hmmm, the final XEX version of Pang by MadTeam requires only 192K RAM, but maybe someone created an 8MBit (1MB) atarimax cart. of it ?!?

Hello folks, I can hereby confirm that SDXC works with AVF cart when formatted with FAT32. If you have old PC's like I do (single core and dual core) and old + good WIN XP, you will be confronted with some problems you have to solve first: 1) you need an SDXC cardreader: My 35in1 model could read SD and SDHC only, so the SDXC card was not detected at all! Luckily I also have three USB sticks that are SD cardreaders and two of them could read SDXC... (they displayed the Sandisk Ultra 64GB cards with 59.x GB and exFAT)... 2) format with FAT32: even though the SDXC card can be read, it is formatted with exFAT and AVG cart. does not support this (afaik); Windows XP refuses to format with FAT32 for any flashcards bigger than 32GB, I knew this before and thought hey, let me use Sandisk SD-Formatter instead; nice idea, but bad luck: the Sandisk SD formatter (at least version 4.x for my Win XP) has no option to choose the format and after formatting it showed me that the card was formatted with exFAT again, sigh... Alright then, so I installed a FAT32 formatter program, one that should work under WIN XP, 7, 8 and 10. When I executed it under XP, it gave me a nice xyz exception error with some nice numbers and letters. Could send that to Microsoft, but guess they do not care any longer about Win XP Luckily the program showed a window with options REPEAT, IGNORE and EXIT. I first chose Repeat and got the same error again, so I chose ignore and to my surprise the program worked then. Formatted the 64GB Sandisk Ultra SDXC card with FAT32 and named it AVG-XL1. Then I copied the AVG firmware and AFV viewer onto the card, followed by some AVF movies from Poison. Finally I plugged the SDXC card into the AVG cart., powered on the A8 - and it works! Loaded several AVF movies without problems. So, as said before, you can use SDXC cards with the AVG cart. as long as they are formatted with FAT32. Hey, 256GB SDXC cards are less than 40 Euro now The next SD card standard is already defined, it's SDUC with sizes ranging from 2TB up to 128TB. Since FAT32 is limited to a maximum of 2TB, such cards require at least exFAT and as I just read at Wikipedia, Microsoft no longer wants licenses for that and the specs. for exFAT are publicly available... just as a note for future A8 hardware (and firmware).

Hehe, I was so evil to download only the german cartoon intros (and remove the redundant creator logos, whenever possible) from youtube. Poison was so nice to convert them into AVF format for me. There is more to come... (if Poison agrees), since I downloaded approx. 60 cartoon intros from the 70s, 80s and 90s and also two full versions (Sancho and Pancho with approx. 6 minutes and The Little Mole with approx. 5 minutes)... All thanks go to Poison for doing this great work!!!

I recently bought an original disk of Hawkquest and would love to see it patched in several ways, so that gameplay is more enjoyable (and easier for a lamer like me)... To tell the truth, I really like the Xevious-like part of the game, but I am not a fan of the secondary part of the game (jump and run a la Boulder Dash or Saracen) and would not mind if the game gets splitted into two parts (Hawkquest 1 with the Xevious-like game and Hawkquest 2 with the jump and run like game) - BUT I guess I am the only one who feels that way... Anyways, if I could get at least an easier and therefore more enjoyable version of Hawkquest, I would be very happy.

No experience with Verbatim SD-cards here (but the 5,25" disks that I have from Verbatim are very good)... Just ordered a 64GB Sandisk Ultra SD-card, so I will know soon if SDXC works with AVG cart. (will format it with Sandisk SD-Formatter and FAT32 and hope it works then)...

Sorry, looked for them but could not find any PSONG*.CMC in my collection of 10 CMC disks, nor in the disk images downloaded from aol (4 CMC disks, 1 DMC disk)... will examine the Vasco PD disks next... EDIT: No luck either on the 11 Vasco PD disks I have. They contain dozens of APP, CMC, MPT, MD8, FNT, GIF, SMP files, but no PSONG*.CMC files. Maybe there are more Vasco PD disks and I do not have all of them?

Hehe, yes - but read the adverts what the drive in a 1450XLD can do: 254k ! A DS/DD (360k) drive that only does 254k (since Atari said that dual/medium/enhanced density is 127k)... looks even more bad on their spec sheet. 1450XLD catalog 1 1450XLD catalog 2 1450XLD catalog 3

Hehe, maybe they tried to use the double amount of sectors per track (36 instead of 18) and that did not work ? So they tested like this: "36 does not work, 34 does not work, 32 does not work, 30 does not work, 28 does not work, 26 works! We have found a new standard for double density!" Remember, the A8 OS allows only single density boot sectors for SIO devices and maybe that was the reason they wanted to stay with 128 bytes per sector...?!? Was 180k a Percom standard - and did Percom ask for a licensing fee for using it ? (Like Microsoft wants a licensing fee for some of their formats, like NTFS, etc.) But maybe they simply did not wanted to be compatible to any 3rd party standards, 288 RPM (instead of 300 RPM) was a good start, 130k dual/medium/enhanced density was another big point in not being compatible to any other standards. (If you want to be compatible, buy an Atari floppy drive.) And maybe Atari could ask for licensing fees from anyone that wanted to be compatible with 130k format ?!?

Yep, a big waste of SD-card space, but the firmware only supports 90k and 130k disk images. So 100 disks with 130k, thats less than 13MB. Anyone out there that still has a 16MB SD-card ?!? On the other hand, if the LCD's always start with 00, then reaching nr. 99 may take a while; but if the up/down key logic supports going up+down in both directions and back to start/end (i.e. if you start at 00 and go down one step to reach 99), then reaching nr. 50 may take the longest time... Afaik, someone in Poland developed a cheap SIO2SD without any LCD, where the firmware is using onscreen A8 text display only. That one still allows to use many thousands of ATR images with FAT16 or FAT32 (and the images can have a size from 90k up to 16MB and afair up to 8 drives are supported)...

Hehe, played the card game as a child with my parents and nowadays I play the card game with my two children. The Atari Basic (1 player vs. computer) version is also available at atarimania: Mille Bornes - the 1000 milestones game

Hehe, Sven left the university and so his personal page at uni-chemnitz.de is gone. Originally he used a different loader (Cube-loader?), think you had to put the loader in virtual "drive 1" and the image with the demos in virtual "drive 2" to load them (or something like that). I found this a bit awkward and came up with the idea to use MyPicoDOS and also re-did all his demo ATR images (added MyPicoDOS 4.0x, also added Basic-off to some demos, packed some demos and added some more demos). He liked my new versions/images and put them online. So, if you have these 1MB ATR images with demos and MyPicoDOS on them, you already have the newer version(s)... There is a content-text for each image, the comments in (brackets) were also added by me, afair. Evil as I am, I continued these 1MB demo images for my personal collection up to nr. 30 or 32 but have not released them yet...

Hmmm, it could be one of these reasons: - the SD-card is not completely defragmented and/or the videos are not contiguous (solution: format the complete card with FAT 32, then copy the AVF files onto it) - the SD-card itself is the problem (Yes, some cards do not work very well with the A8, I mostly had problems with Transcend cards, but there are others as well; solution: try a different card / brand and see if it is any better) - you have a PAL system and try to play NTSC videos with it or the other way around, you have a NTSC system and try to play PAL videos with it Good luck!

The german word on the upper right corner is "Unterhaltung" which means "Entertainment"...

I did convert some pics of Cindy and other models and also some singers and actors, but only in greyscale HIP mode... Disk images 1+2 Alyssa Milano, Disk image 5 Cindy Crawford, also Christina Aguilera, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Laetitia Casta, etc. Disk images 1-24 do contain a viewer, disk images 25-37 do not (downloaded them from atarionline I think; use one of the viewers from the other disk images)... Also converted some pics of Claudia Schiffer, but do not remember into which A8 format (not HIP, it seems)... HIP.zip

You get a big "Thank you!" from me for doing this...

1) you are using a Mac (they often make trouble, errrmm, they save redundant files whenever they copy something; e.g. when I gave you one of my SD-cards and/or USB-sticks at last years HATZ meeting and you copied files from them with your Mac, they had several redundant files on them afterwards, that were not there before and I deleted them with Windows) 2) you are using a Transcend SD-card (they often make trouble, at least for me...) But maybe your SD-card is not completely defragmented and/or the movies are not contiguous ? I am using good old Win XP 32Bit SP3 and atm 32GB Sandisk Ultra SD-cards and everything works fine. Downloaded the latest stuff from Poison and now I have 279 AVF movies with a total size of 24GB (approx. 5GB free space). Think I have to buy some 64GB SD-cards soon (and try to format them with FAT32). Yeah, 64GB storage space for a 64KB computer...

On my wishlist for "AVF" videos... - Atari Jaguar Game intros and trailers (e.g. Blue Lightning, Battle Morph, Myst, Iron Soldier 2, Rayman, etc.) - trailers & intros of children tv cartoons and tv series (e.g. Captain Future, Tao Tao, Pinocchio, Heidi, Sindbad, Babapapa, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Speedy Gonzales, Pink Panther, The Flintstones, Nils Holgerson, the little Mole, D'Artagnan, Dr. Snuggles, Willy Fog, etc.) [I did many of them as TIP animations, but never with fullscreen and always very low framerate.]