toddtmw

The second package has changed to "Acceptance" as of this morning at 8:44. Okay, at least now I should be able to track progress. (Honestly, I don't know how my friends put up with me in the 80's and 90's. I will go ahead and apologize now to all of you.) Which will arrive first? The Happy mod or the SIO2PC?

Opened all four. Only one has a Tandon mechanism. It happens to be a Singapore unit. So that will the The One Drive to Rule them all.

Well. Just opened a third one. This one Singapore. It has a novacomm mech. Now to see if the other Hong Kong has a tandem mech.

Thanks for the info. I just opened my Hong Kong one and the drive mech appears to be Novacomm So, I opened the Singapore one and it is Tandem. I can see that the drive mech looks like it is much nicer. (Interestingly, this one didn't have a metal cover over the board like the Hong Kong one, I wonder if it was removed.) So, Tandem and Hong Kong seem to be contradictory at least given the two I've looked at. I'm assuming Tandem is more important than Hong Kong? Man, that Tandem mech does look WAY nicer than the Novacomm mech. (Plus, since the shield is already out, it will make installing the Happy upgrade easier!) Thanks.

I have four 1050 disk drives. I am looking to make one my "main" one with a happy copy and a write protect switch. I'd like to pick the "best" one to do this to. two are made in Hong Kong, two are made in Singapore. The Hong Kong ones have FCC ID's of BPA83A1050 and the Singapore ones have FCC ID's of BPA7VD1050. The date codes are: 474 (Singapore) 474 (Hong Kong) 484 (Hong Kong) 303 (Singapore) Once I open them up, are there different drive mechanisms they used and were some better than others? What else should I consider in making this decision? Thanks all for the help! -Todd

You have no idea. It's why I tried to buy everything I could from a real store. Electronics Connexion and Fairborn Home Computer have (well, had) a LOT of my money.) Up until Amazon perfected two- (and lately one- and same-) day shipping it was Microcenter, Best Buy, CompUSA and Circuit City. Strangely, even though I often tried, it was rarely Radio Shack. They never seemed to have what I needed. (Except for small components and project boxes) but from a computer standpoint they were not competitive.

HEY! One of my packages was accepted yesteday at 9 am (despite the tracking status saying all day yesterday that it had not been received) and arrived in Cleveland at 2 am this morning. So, at least one thing is on its way. Hopefully the other one is coming too and the status just hasn't been updated. I check the status of both packages every 12.5 seconds, so hopefully I'll see that soon too. Todd

You should have seen me when Ihad to send my Atari ST mmonitor back to Atari to get fixed. I was impossible to be around. When they told me to send it, they gave me an estimate on how long it would take to get back to me. Once that day came, I sat at the door waitng for the UPS truck to o by and each day he didn't stop was another day of agony. This is not a new thing for me. -Todd

I don't know. That one looks much nicer than most of the ones out there. Box is in great shape.

But if you don't get a tractor feed printer you cannot do printshop banners!!!

I will admit, I am a very impatient person when it comes to things like this. If I just knew what to expect that would help, but the uncertainty drives me crazy.

Hive mind: Back near the end of my experience with 8-bit Atari, a friend had a 3" drive (not 3.5) for his Atari. I think it had 2 drives. Does anyone remember this? Anyone have links to what it it was or more information? Or was this a hallucination brought on by too much Def Leppard and Scorpions music? Thanks.

Okay. Yeah, that deserves some negative feedback. I bought an Atari 800, 2 1050's, a 1027 printer, the atari daisy wheel printer, all the power supplies and 4 sio cables and the shipping on all that was $29. The package was 53 pounds and as far as I can tell, it was shipped overnight.

Well. I thought I would provide an update on my order. I got USPS tracking numbers Monday evening. It is now 3 days later and both packages still say: PRE-SHIPMENT INFO SENT TO USPS, USPS AWAITING ITEM I realize that this is not a "normal" store, but even with eBay, if I experienced this type of interaction, I would be considering less than 100% positive feedback. (Especially without any proactive communication about the delay.) Anyway, I will continue to update here with how it goes. It has now been one week since my first order and as far as I am able to tell, it has not actually made it to the source post office yet. Todd

I think that is pretty common with the original 800, isn't it?

It was!! Just got it today. Everything works, but I doubt I'll ever be able to find an ink wheel for the 1027...

I heard from Steve at Atarimax this morning. He said the items I ordered had been shipped. Just wanted to let everyone know. Thank you to everyone for your help.

Dave Small was one of my favorite developers ... ever. Not only did he do incredible things with the Atari ST, but he had a great sense of humor. I cannot find it, but the readme for his Spectre software for version 1.9 had a section that I will never forget. It had a bunch of quotes with dates from Dave Small stating why Spectre would never be able to do sound. Things about how the architectures were too different, it could never be done. Then, there was a single line: "Version 1.9 now supports sound." Today, I was looking at the Spectre GCR manual. The boring page at the beginning had this:

If I am looking at a computer (like an 800XL) and I plan to hook it up using the monitor port to a composite input on a TV or monitor, does PAL or NTSC matter? What about power supply? Can an American Power Supply power a PAL computer and Vice Versa? Thanks! -Todd

I'd love to get an 800. That was the first computer I ever owned, but they tend to be hard to find and when they are found, pricey. Plus, if I did get one, I'd never want to use it for fear of it crapping out. For now, 800XL's are pretty plentiful.

Agreed. Who would want ten DOS 3 disks? I never used it, but as I understand it, it was not vdery good...

Wow. I just ordered 4 six-packs of Mad Tree PshcHOPathy beer from them and it will be here in less than an hour. Earlier, I ordered some electronic components and they will be here tomorrow. (Could have gotten them today, a Sunday, if I had ordered them earlier...) Most of the stuff I order from China takes at least a week and I have to go to the post office to pick it up so I can sign for it. Maybe it's because Amazon has a pretty big distribution site in Northern Kentucky, near my house. I am also a Prime member, though, so things that cannot be delivered same day or next day do get here in at most 2 days.

The Radio Shacks in our area (at least when I was in high school and college in the 80's) were filled with people that were clueless. I would fix people's electronics, set up their computers or stereos or other technical things. They would say, "You should work at Radio Shack" and my response was always, "I'm over-qualified to work at Radio Shack." Back then, things were easier. Computers could be repaired and when you opened the hood of a car, you could actually see through to the ground below. I replaced the cam in a '72 Monte Carlo and I stood IN the engine compartment and removed the cam without removing the radiator. My favorite example of Radio Shack staff cluelessness was when I went there one time with a guy, named Jerry, that lived in my neighborhood. Jerry taught me a lot about cars (when I met him, he was building a 1929 Gazelle Replicar on the frame of a Pinto in his garage), computers (He bought an Atari 800 and later a 1200XL to run a mailing list for a local Right to Life group) and elecronics (He held several patents, including one for a computer controlled hole measuring device called SoftMIc). Anyway, in the Dayon (Ohio) area, they built a new highway, I-675, as a bypass for I-75 around Dayton. The highway went through a field that was adjacent to his back yard, and the noise was noticable, but he did not qualify for a sound wall because they said it wasn't loud enough on his property. So, we went to radio Shack to get a Sound Level Meter to check it for himself. We walk in, and immediately, someone comes up and asks if they can help. Jerry, "Yes, I'd like to buy a sound level meter." "We don't have anything like that." "You have them in your catalog." He gets a catalog and Jerry opens it and shows the listing for "Sound Level Meter". The Radio Shack guy was like, "Oh, one of THOSE." Jerry was like, "What would you call it." He turned to me and said, "I could have really made it hard for him and asked for a dB meter." Anyway, I did spend a lot of time at Radio Shack, and I always felt like they should have been more on the pulse of current electronics, while still keeping their roots, but more and more everytime I went in there, it was just a terrible experince. It got to the point, where my Wife was like, "Why do you even try to go there, every time you end up not getting what you want." I am lucky that I have a Micro Center near my house. They actually have a pretty decent Arduino and robotics section and that has partially filled the void left by Radio Shack.

I don't know if this board (or this particular forum) has moderators, but if it does, I would like to request that this topic be moved to a more appropriate forum. I do not see how it is topical to Atari 8-bit computers. Radio Shack (as far as I know) never sold Atari 8-bit computers, and even if you accept the OP's claim that this is about more than Radio Shack, none of the sites referenced in the video (or the commercial Internet for that matter) existed while Atari was selling 8-bit computers. I see no justification for this topic to be where it is.

That is weird. I did not have that issue at all. Is this a PAL or NTSC computer? (Mine is NTSC, maybe PAL has another screw somewhere?)