mytek

The combo FujiNet/Cart board is not so much closed source, since the schematics for the various parts was shared a while back. But the PCB design and manufacturing files are closed source. Or in other words, it's only available as a purchase from TBA.

I received an inquiry today... Well other than this topic, and what little information has been provided at my AtariBits website, I would recommend checking this out. Hopefully that posted topic will help fill in some gaps for you from an operational point of view. However you will not find a BOM or assembly instructions for this particular variant on my website, or in these forums. Keep in mind that the FujiNet/Cart daughter board for the 576NUC+ is actually the creation of @Mr Robot and is solely manufactured by @MacRorie of The Brewing Academy where you mentioned purchasing it from. Currently I'm not aware of it being an open source project.

Sounds like Lotharek's mini SDrive is very similar to the SDrive-ng by @kbr that I was fooling around with a while back. It also can rotate 4 drive images with a press of a button.

For a while it was everywhere

It's gonna be tight, but maybe shave off the side of the nylon standoff (on the NUC) and possibly use right angle headers on PokeyMax. I had forgotten that the nested 64K SRAM was under the CPU and not Pokey. So no additional socket height is required for Pokey or PokeyMax. This means that the clearance from the top of the socket to the underneath side of the daughter board for the 576NUC+ is closer to 12 mm. EDIT: There are some nested radial caps that stick up, but those could be bent over or replaced with axial parts if there is a clearance issue.

I didn't expect miracles. BTW, on that first first pic I posted. Instead of a female header for J8, it should have stated male pin header instead.

I attributed the problem to the color trim pot adjust circuit, and specifically a shift in the 5V power that feeds it. In the 1088XLD and 576NUC+ I used a precision thermally compensated zener diode to supply the color trim pot. And as far as I recall it works very well, with minimal thermal drift. Another method would be to use a high quality stable 5V power supply to feed your Atari - maybe a MeanWell PSU.

@foft here's the clearance specs for top of the stacked Pokey socket to underside of 576NUC+ Daughter Board (it's very tight). EDIT: Ha!!! Good thing I took this pic... I see that the corner of the nested blue capacitor is broken off - gotta fix that.

The 576NUC+ is the tightest for space. I drew this up many moons ago, and it should give you an idea of how much clearance there is in that design. Also keep in mind that the TK-II chip in 576NUC+ runs an onboard shadow of the Pokey 6-bit counter independently clocked by the PIC chip, while syncing to two bits of Pokey's actual counter (bit 0 and bit 5). Because of this, timing can be critical for any Pokey replacement. The standoff hole on the right is what really limits it on that side. Also there is an additional standoff hole in the upper left that sometimes gets used as in @Mr Robot's Cart Expansion board, so it's best to steer clear of that. And there is some taller stuff on the left of the PIA chip (inductor and capacitors). Space above the Pokey chip is also tight when any of the normal daughter boards are in use. I can get you that dimension later today. J8 was originally specified for PokeyMax expansion, but quickly went to the way side when I actually saw how much space PokeyMax required. I believe the header is still present in the TBA reproductions, and for sure the PCB footprint for it is still there so it could be easily populated. There is still present a means to feed out the stereo audio via the A/V jack (J5) and header J4 directly next to it which was spec'ed as a universal DIN-5 or DIN-8 plug-in (the 8-pin jack will work with either plug). EDIT: J5 is always populated as a DIN-8 jack. Although it would be very cool if PokeyMax4 could be made to work with the 576NUC+, I certainly am not expecting it due to all the restrictions that are present.

On the TK-II, I map the Tilde key to be the Atari inverse key since both characters printed on the key cap are not present in the Atari, And I assigned the Reset key to F5, with F1=Help, F2=Start, F3=Select, and F4=Option.

On the 576NUC+ and the 1088XLD I got away with some very simplified crystal oscillators, but the key words are "got away with". In reality a much more reliable circuit looks something like this... And I found that the 74HC14 part is more likely to work than the 74HCT14 version.

Fantastic gift to the community @foft 👍

I've heard this before, but it always puzzles me how people made the transition to a PC type keyboard from the Atari when they use a PC or a MAC. Personally I find it much easier to run a TK-II on all my Atari systems so that there is no readjustment for me to make when switching back and forth between retro and modern systems. And I don't know about you, but I use a PC much more often than an Atari, so for me switching over to an Atari keyboard and readjusting my brain hurts. But I know many don't like the remapping that comes with a modern keyboard when using it on the Atari, and for those I also supported an A8 mode that mapped an ISO keyboard as closely as possible to the Atari keyboard. Then it's just a matter of having custom keycaps made, which are available. Perhaps something like this could be done on this new FPGA based system as well. EDIT: Don't pay any attention to the Function key mapping, that was based an older TK-II scheme, and has since been changed so that the Help, Console, and reset keys better match with an AKI keyboard mapping.

That's a good point, and would have been even better if they had offered an Atari branded matching S-Video monitor for a perfect fit. And to take it a step farther, the 1450XLD could of had a stereo Pokey chip and that new monitor could have come with a built-in stereo amp and speakers. Not a giant leap to do this, since they already were experimenting with monitors around that time, and had been using dual Pokey chips in arcade machines. And the Gumby DIY upgrade had already set the addressing standard that is used to this day.

Agreed. But I look at it only as an example of what can be done with X+Y+Z, and not something I would prefer to use instead of just using Z (Rpi) which produces a great graphical presentation of the game. To me it's in the same realm as playing a movie on the Atari via a SIDE cart, which is a remarkable feat, even more so than throwing a Pi at it, but at the end of the day I'll be damned if I could stand actually watching the movie in this way, because it's really of such a poor quality that I feel like I've gone back in time to 8mm film (maybe even worse).

That might be a special case since it's driving a very rare vector display. So that is an interesting use. Yeah I agree that this particular use case gets a free pass. And I own a Vectrix, so guess what I'll be checking out 😋 And something like the Pi Pico being used for the Pico Cart also doesn't really break the rules, since I look at that more as a microcontroller and not full computer like the Rpi.

First of all this is about a C64 upgrade, but it could just as easily come to an Atari near you. So I was doing my usual browse this morning through YouTube videos and stumbled across this... So this guy was testing out what's called the RAD upgrade which is a cartridge type board that piggybacks to a Raspberry Pi board underneath, which essentially allows the Rpi to act as a configurable memory expansion up to 16MB for the C64. It can also do a few other things, but for the sake of this topic we'll just focus on the memory expansion aspect. So the guy doing the demo first boots up the Sonic the Hedgehog game, after first applying yet a 2nd Rpi as a emulated 1541 disk drive. Yes you heard that right there are now two Raspberry Pi's connected to the C64. Anyway after much fiddling and considerable time he finally gets the game to load and play and it does look great. Next he dispenses with the 1541 emulator, so we're back to the one Rpi on the RAD unit, and he loads up a version of DOOM and it looks like this... Nice 👍 Just kidding it looks like crap However it does play smoothly and doesn't appear to have much if any lag, so there's that. Now let's take a look at what DOOM on a Raspberry Pi all by itself can look like straight out of its HDMI port if it is the only computer in play (sans C64). Yes this really is nice 👍👍👍 So why in the hell would you want to add a Pi to your retro computer and play a game at such a greatly diminished video quality than what the Pi could do much, much better on its own? And this brings me to why I posted this here instead of over in the Commodore section. First of all I didn't want to catch a bunch of flak from the devoted fans of that machine And secondly as I see more and more modern day mini computer boards being used on our Atari systems as part of new upgrades, it begs the question of when has this gone too far, and wouldn't it be better to just use the mini computer to emulate the Atari experience and dispense with the retro hardware all together. It certainly would be more reliable, as well as smaller, and probably less energy hungry.

I've never owned a 1027 printer, but from watching videos showing it in operation I would never want one myself. Besides it being very noisy in operation (in my opinion worse than any daisy wheel printer), it's erratic placement of characters when printing would not be acceptable in anything calling itself "letter quality". However Atari did produce a true letter quality printer in the XDM121, which was quite nice and very reliable based upon an actual interchangeable daisy wheel print head. I had one for a short time and posted about it... When FujiNet came out with its ability to print to the PC, emulating any conceivable printer that might have been used on the Atari BITD, I donated it to a friend that could really appreciate it. These are not easy to find in the wild, and I lucked out that I got the last NOS one from Best Electronics.

Although I don't have one, I wonder if the newer Sophia 2 has a way to configure the output voltage level via software or a firmware change?

All of the ST RGB monitors require 1V signals, whereas the Sophia puts out 0.75V same as what a VGA monitor expects. So yes Sophia needs that resistor change to boost it's output up to 1V.

Thanks for the update 👍 Although his website still states that he does take PayPal, and even if he doesn't I would have appreciated a response from him to that affect. I don't really need those parts anyway, and was just trying to verify whether I was now a member of the "No Soup For You" club concerning Pokeys

I just thought of one additional reason that Atari, not Commodore, should have bought MOS Technologies. Chuck Peddle. It was Chuck Peddle who was working at MOS that persuaded Jack Tramiel to create an 8-bit computer based on the 6502, hence the reason the PET came into existence, with the VIC and the C64 to follow. So it's kinda like one of those SciFi movies where someone goes back in time and stops someone from meeting someone else that changes the whole course of history.

2 weeks ago I placed an order for a Pokey chip from Best Electronics via email which has always worked well for me in the past. However this go around I got no reply. Here's the email I sent... I sure hope Brad is ok. Anyone else been in contact with him in the last couple weeks? I didn't exceed the 3 item limit I've been hearing about, and I've never bad mouthed him. And he's always gotten back to me either the same day or the next. And even though I didn't have my customer number, this has never been an issue before. Very odd 🙄

Unless I'm mistaken, owning MOS's chip fabs was one of the main reasons that Commodore could undercut the competition with lower pricing. I would imagine so. Or at least it would have been considerably cheaper and faster when Atari R&D needed a new custom chip.

Atari should have bought MOS before Commodore did