CharlieChaplin

Thanks a lot for that info! Will convert some songs again into PDM and check (listen) if the quality is better with your given settings. (There is no 16/14/0 in Preset, only 16/16/0 and 16/14/1 - guess you mean 16/14/1 then.) If I remember correctly FJC's PDM player was limited to ~3000 clusters, so try re-formatting your SD or CF card and set the cluster size to 16k or 32k - with 32k cluster size PDM's up to 96MB in length should theoretically play fine. (My largest PDM file is 35MB in size, it is the 14 minute instrumental from Hoverstrike U.L. for the Atari Jaguar.)

What pulse? Linear pulse or non-linear pulse? The standard in Fuji Convert 0.3.3 is 2/4 for non-linear pulse and 3/5 for linear pulse. (Also note it uses / instead of - so your example maybe should be / could be 4/6 ?!?) And since a picture says more than words, can you make a screenshot please with your settings of Fuji Convert ? (I originally converted 550 songs 2x into PDM, but was not that impressed with the stereo-versions playing thru my stereo-Pokey enhancement, so I kept only the mono versions. The PDM stereo versions did not keep the separation of vocals and music which you can find in some old songs, like e.g. California Dreaming and errmm, the white noise was much higher than with the mono versions. Since no-one would listen to so many songs in pseudo-8Bit mono anyways, when all of them are available in much better 16Bit stereo and sometimes even 20Bit or 24Bit surround quality, I kept only 100 songs for demonstration purposes. Some of them are of good quality, e.g. "A Girl like you" by Edwyn Collins and some of them are of bad or very bad quality, e.g. "My Immortal" by Evanescence, "All night long" by Lionel Richie, etc.; some of the PDMs are only 2 minutes short, some of them are over 12 minutes, e.g. "Shine on you crazy diamond" by Pink Floyd or "I would do anything for love" album version by Meat Loaf)

tschak909's rainbow fuji logo looks like 16:9 (or 4:3 stretched to 16:9) and errmmm, I prefer the original 4:3 look of the 5200 rainbow fuji logo... ;-)

Yep, noticed it and edited my post while you were replying...

So, R/W-Test on the A8 gives: - max. 9000 B/sec. for a real (?) SIO device - max. ??? B/sec. for an emulated SIO2xyz device - max. 90,000 B/sec. for a HDD device Or are there higher speeds (for real/emulated SIO or HDD) available?

Is AR-Dungeon (and AR-City?) on cart. now fully playable? I thought that the cart version was a wip, which still has bugs and crashes here or there. But if it is fully playable, I would like to order a copy from you... (Or maybe Albert could make a deal with PP, Ken and Dan and sell City+Dungeon carts. officially in the AA shop?)

Funny and weird. Looks like you randomly grabbed the user disks and played some programs on them - and here and there did not know what to do. The funny part was e.g. when you loaded a german program (Roulette by Wolfgang Burger, the former Abbuc boss) and the program asked you in german language for the amount of money you want to spend and you typed in your name instead and therefore received an Error message. The same happens to me, when I run A8 programs in foreign languages that I do not understand (italian, spanish, portuguese, polish, czech, slovak, hungarian, russian, etc.)... There are also many strange/weird parts in the video, e.g. your Atari Basic screen appears in green colour (and some programs also show false or weird colours), several programs appear to run in slow motion and it looks like you changed the 12-sector Autorun.SYS ML-menu by Craig Chamberlain (?), which was often used in the Bellcom PD-library into your own KWEST version (removing not only the title of the menu and replacing it with KWEST, but also removing/not showing several of its functions anymore). I did not have the motivation to watch the complete video, instead I only jumped to several parts of it (mostly the beginning of a new program) and I doubt I will ever watch this video in full length. It reminds me a bit of the early 2000s, when I bought a DVD recorder for my tv and also connected my A8 to it and then recorded several A8 programs onto DVD. Allthough I recorded one-hundred A8 programs onto DVD, there were no titles or subtitles, there were no intermissions or transitions from one program to the other and most of all, there was no music for the whole video and so the end result simply looked boring and weird and in the end, I deleted the video some weeks or months later. (There are still a few A8 videos from me available at youtube, mostly recordings of TIP Animator demos, without any sound and extremely simple and amateurish, but most of them are less than 1 minute in length.)

AVG cart. works with up to 4 ATR slots that can be changed/exchanged with a button press, enough for most multi-ATR games. See here: https://atari8bit.net/tutorials/de-re-avgcart/#Loading_ATR/_ATX_Files The limitation regarding ATR is that AVG is a cart. and ATRs/disks normally load via SIO, so in order to load ATR images you a) either require the OSXEX2 file (and this requires RAM under OS, so only ATR/disk programs that do not use that space will work) or b) require a separate/external AVG-SIO-cable (which makes it possible to boot any ATR via SIO off the AVG cart., so 99,9% of the A8 programs should work)... I guess that SIDE-3 has a similar limitation, either a) only some ATR's will load from the SIDE-loader (those that do not require RAM under OS) or b) you require a U1MB in combination with SIDE-3 to load almost any ATR image you want (with the exception of a few ATRs/disks that use custom SIO loading and will therefore still not work).

Here is the topic at aol. Afaik, Zaxon also sells at allegro.pl, but I guess the first batch is already sold out.

Future request: Please "convert" all your TB XL programs into Fast Basic programs (e.g. re-write them from scratch and then compile them)... Why ? Fast Basic works on 48k machines, Fast Basic is much shorter than TB XL (66 vs. 145 sectors) and most of all, compiled Fast Basic programs are much shorter than compiled (+linked) TB XL programs. Of course, since I am NOT a programmer, I have really no clue how much work this would be (and if it would be possible). But I really like those short/small Fast Basic COM/XEX programs. ...and then Vitoco renamed his pseudo into "Don't ask software"...

@tf_hh: The small utilities for the 512k SRAM upgrade are released on a disk image with XDOS 2.4 f (where f = fast/ultraspeed) on it. This *can* cause problems, if someone uses e.g. two (real or emulated) floppy drives with different speeders, it seems. If one boots the disk on drive 1 with e.g. a Happy enhancement (or SIO2xyz set to Pokey divisor 10) and then copies a file to drive 2 with e.g. an XF551 - an Error 138 may occur and copying does not work, due to different speeders and/or different Pokey divisors. Furthermore, afaik, XDOS 2.4f does not work up to Pokey divisor zero, so working with some SIO2xyz devices and XDOS 2.4f may also cause problems, if these devices (or a patched OS) are set to Pokey divisor zero or 1. I would suggest to use XDOS 2.4n (n = normal/slow) or simply DOS 2.5 instead for the utility disk (image). One user just reported to me, that he has problems with XDOS 2.4f, when he was using two drives (one of them a SIO2xyz device, the other a 3,5" drive) and I guess this could be the source of the problems... Therefore find attached the 512k SRAM utilities a) on a DOS 2.5 and b) on a XDOS 2.4n disk image (90k single density format). SRAM_512k_tools.zip

Hmmm, Softsynth is a nice (Basic-like) tracker from Germany. Afaik, you only get good sounds when the screen is switched off or a very low gfx mode is used, otherwise it is very noisy. There is a nice demo, named World of Wonders which contains several Softsynth sounds. Besides, the first sound above from Jakub Husak, named "Schlecht_Korrekt" is The Model/Das Model by Kraftwerk. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2meuYmtjzdc

Yes you can, they are fully compatible in 90k format and with 130k format you can choose if you want MyDOS or DOS 2.5 compatibility. (If XDOS was set to MyDOS format, you can change this with a config file afair.)

Yes, me! But only for the transfer process to disk and testing various C-Simulators... I am loading A8 game tapes via JVC tapedeck and record them with a Pioneer CD-Recorder. Then I playback the CD while the CD-Recorder is connected (via tape-adapter) with the 1010 and finally save the data onto an A8 diskette. (The CD can later be used to create WAV and CAS files on the PC, allthough I personally never use WAV or CAS.) There are easier ways to do that, but I simply like using my Hifi system, the way I did in the 80s and 90s.

Newest Version of Sys-Info is 2.26 from March 2021.

Think it can be found in several topics here at AA, but you can also download it from the developer's page: RW-Test Please note, that he uploads everything in ARCed from (you may use IZ ARC on the PC or Unarc on the A8 to unpack the archive).

XDOS is not so much different to other command-line DOS versions. Here are some commands for command-line DOS versions (most of them work with SpartaDOS, BeweDOS, RealDOS, DOS XL, Happy DOS, DOS II+D, XDOS, etc.): - DIR: directory, e.g. DIR D2:*.* - CAR: cartridge (goes to cartridge, e.g. Atari Basic, if available; READY should appear) - COP filename.ext: copy file(s), e.g. COP D1:*.*,D2:*.* - LOA filename.ext: load binary file, e.g. LOA JAVA.EXE - LOC or PRO: lock/protect file(s), e.g. LOC *.* - UNL or UNP: unlock/unprotect file(s), e.g. UNL *.* - DEL or ERA filename.ext: delete/erase file, e.g. DEL WIN.EXE - REN filename.ext,newname.ext: rename file, e.g. REN DOOM.EXE,BOOM.EXE - TYP filename.ext: type/display file on the screen, e.g. TYP ENIGMA.TXT Attached you will also find a short reference card for XDOS (uses german language, but you should still understand most of it; Datei = file or filename.ext, Gerät = device, Quellgerät/Zielgerät = source device/destination device, Laufwerk = drive, Abkürzung = abbreviation). If you still have questions, feel free to ask. Think there was an english manual and reference-card for XDOS, but could not find it now... In XDOS you can also type BON or BOF to switch Atari Basic (if available) on/off. XDOS_24_RK.pdf

Yes, "Think and Work" was a type-in listing from german Happy Computer magazine. The original version had 25 levels, but someone made another 150 levels (three disks with 50 levels each) with its editor, downloadbale e.g. here: http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=4540 And there was also Atari XL Sokoban (PD) from KE-Soft, Sogon (commercial) from KE-SOFT (and several level-disks for it), Atari Socoban from Compysoft (B.Mueller) and several others.

The Speedy was advertized with 78kBaud, thinking of multiples of 19.200 this should be 76.800 baud (4x), but in reality it is much slower and only a tad faster than a Happy drive. I somehow doubt that the Speedy High Speed Sector Copy (or HSS Copy II), which was part of the firmware, really reaches the advertized 96k Baud. Maybe someone can measure the mini Speedy's speed a) in normal mode (a bit faster than 19k2 baud, which would be slow mode), b) in ultraspeed mode and c) with HSS Copy or HSS Copy II. Think the german Turbo 1050 is comparable to an Indus GT drive, it reaches 68k2 Baud with special sector interleave (known as turbo-format). I once tested both mini Speedy 1050 and Turbo 1050 and when both were set to highest speed*, the Turbo was somewhat faster in reading and writing the same disk than a Speedy; but the Speedy was so much faster in formatting the disk (Turbo 1050 was/is as slow as a standard 1050 drive when formatting), that it won the whole diskcopy speedtest. * Did not use HSS Copy or HSS Copy II with the mini Speedy drive, instead used 1) Diskcopy (from TurboDOS XL/XE) for both Speedy and Turbo and also 2a) Sectorcopy 1.5 for Speedy vs. 2b) Trackcopy for Turbo. The Super Speedy, Mega Speedy and mini Super Speedy however do have so much RAM onboard, that they can copy a 90k/130k/180k disk within a few seconds internally (and the special Super Speedy Copy program also recognizes if a disk is already correctly formatted, so it will not format it again).

You mean Memramchecktest.ATR from post #18 or post #25 ? Each of them is a 130k MyDOS format ATR and when loaded without Basic you get MyDOS 4.55 beta 3. You can simply use option "L" to load the *.COM and *.EXE files. Boot the ATR with Basic and when READY appears type RUN"D:FILENAME.BAS" to load a basic file (use the real name instead of Filename.BAS of course). For Sys-Info there is a newer version 2.26 now, attached it here as a ZIP (instead of an ARC). There is also a newer version of eXtended RAM check or XRAM V0.22. And here you will find some more system checker programs: http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=utils&sub=F. Diagnostyczne Sys_Info_226.zip

Gryzzles and Jumping Jack say thank you!

Hmmm, I thought page 6 is where they publish the nude girls?

Wow, this is so cool! Played your (Basic) Sokoban version several times and liked it (or the other way around, I liked it and therefore played it several times). Another favourite of mine is "Kooky's Quest" - hope to see an assembly/ML version of it...

- RAM expansion is already there (more than 1MB XRAM for the A8 seems overkill to me anyways) - 80 columns, why not - for those that need it (I never use that on the A8) - 640x480x256c ? huh? Falcon030 or VBXL onboard? A bit too much I guess and most likely requires more space than available - realtime clock, okay, for those that need it (I am a DOS 2.x user and luckily DOS 2.x does not need a realtime clock or time/date stamps) - PBI passthrough sounds good (allthough I doubt I will use another PBI expansion attached to this AIO device) Hey, you forgot to mention a built-in GUI (another thing I never really use on the A8)...

1) RAM upgrade: already there, up to 4MB 2) PBI IDE-interface: using a CF or SD-card instead of a harddisk? (should be able to create native APT/harddisk partitions and also load/save ATR images without U1MB and with any DOS) 3) sound-upgrade: Covox? SID? AY? YM? AMY? TIA? Jerry? Paula? ... 4) gfx-upgrade: 80-columns? same resolution but more colours ? same resolution but more lumas? higher resolution? 5) sprite/PM upgrade: more player-missiles, e.g. 8, 16, ... 256 sprites/pm ? 6) display-upgrade: UAV? VGA? DVI? HDMI? Display-Port? ... 7) OS-upgrade/switcher: already there 4 OS ? 8 OS ? 16 OS ? 8 ) speed upgrade/turbo: 65816 with 3.5 Mhz, 7Mhz, 14 Mhz, 28 Mhz ? Personally I would prefer options 1, 2, 7 plus one of the things of option 6 and maybe option 3 with Covox, but that's all.