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mechanerd

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Everything posted by mechanerd

  1. For what it's worth, I found the Antic magazine pokey player construction kit that allowed you make a bootable player, play in basic, and see if the music plays during the VBI correctly. Its from Craig Chamberlain himself. I don't have an 850 to test with right now, but I can boot a 130xe and then see if disk I/O trashes the music. I believe you are right. How about rewrite the code to play on the second pokey chip that some people have installed. ?... heheh https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vckfpwIMG7B3WxvSESilGBYIpEfywuY8
  2. I supposed one could just clip the caps off, leaving the pins to remain on the pcb intact, then move them to another area with wire wrap as needed to make the whole thing fit. I mean this would Frankenstein the board even more so. But at least you could identify the caps with the markings or an LCR meter. I had to do similar hacks on PC motherboards with the bad batch of electrolytics out there in 2004-2007. It was the devil to order the exact size to replace, so put the cap on a pair of wires going to the spot where they belong. Hot glue them in place and forget it about it. I was able to restore 5 or so Socket 478, socket 7, and several Nvidia graphics cards (PNY mostly).
  3. Bumpity necrothreading. I was chasing Y2K fixes from 1997-2000 at Tektronix Wilsonville to discover that there were DOS machines running somewhat expensive CNC machines. I had to upgrade the IBM DOS to 6.22 and sometimes upgrade the BIOS for the clock to read correctly past year 2000. Some of the machines needed an ISA clock card instead. These machines made metal and plastic machined pieces to prototype their printers and plotters they made. It was quick, cheap, simple and reliable. Any machinist using these new exactly how it worked, had all the bugs shook out of it, reducing the turnaround time. Sometimes it is easier to use trailing edge technology since for the fact that it had all the software, firmware, and mechanical issues fully developed. Sure, in some industries, you don't need the latest giggle feature or app on it. It just needs to work consistently and exactly. That's what these machines did, milled out parts with high mechanical tolerances. The CAD machines that made the CAM files were upgraded eventually, but the standard files they generated would make those dinosaur mills and lathes sing. About packet radio: You can now get a Chinese Baofeng hand held 2m radio for under $50 and hook a packet radio TNC to it. Great for tactical use in short range coms. I don't think it would survive an EMP unless you had it in a Faraday cage, but the insurgents in the Middle East use them for all sorts of mischief. Even a 6 pack of cheap FRS audio radios in the 433 Mhz spectrum would work for short range comms, and help defend a compound. Also there has been a redevelopment of QRP using the sound card for really low power (5 Watts), and be able to send digital information on the 2m net or moon bounce. For about less than $100 in parts and some ingenuity, you can reach someone on the continent or internationally. Then Google and Microsoft have internet radios that were blocked by the FCC using the white space where analog TVs used to work. now that broadcast TV is digital, there should have been a blossoming of white space bandwidth. The premise was that Google and MS would just give you a $30 radio, paid for by the ad revenue since you are sucking down MS and Google YouTube content. Even though Google and MS proved that the device doesn't interfere with a certified FCC RF test room, the Comcast guys had one of the FCC commissioners in their pocket so to speak. So if you want to blame the lack of computer radio digitial information transmission progress from 1990 to present, put it on the FCC for not encouraging development from opening more radio spectrum for packet and white space transmissions. Plus, all the really good radio guys are starting to die off, sad as it is. I am stil an Elmer to help those interested in it. The number of HAM licenses newly registered has been dropping for some time. :{
  4. Use it to resurrect a BBS and take the serial out from the 850 and pipe it to a telnet terminal with a HTTP front end. That way you can log on to your old favorite BBS and get Atari files using just about any web browser or telnet client. The doctor has a copy of the Action Annex BBS software.. I see where he is going asking me for a copy that is now freeware.
  5. Most pokey music is a few KB to 16 KB, a few longer ones I have in my collection are up to 28-32KB. There is a pokey player that is BASIC that can run during the vertical blank interrupt. That way you could add music to any BASIC game. I suppose you could use that with a BASIC terminal program. I am working on restoring my entire collection of pokey music and players from the Action Annex BBS back in the day. It's going to be at least on 16MB hard disk sized .ATR when I am done. At very least a bunch of smaller .ATR files. Here's a sample of one old pokey player from the BBS: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-UlX3Y5gcWyTiafb_AhtAEwrZqfwzDha Enjoy!
  6. Here's some tips right from the workbench where I used to repair electronics for Tandy Service back in 1992-1996. Let the molecules do some of the work. Plastic monitor case cleaner for smoker's stain. 1 part Windex, 1 part 409 cleaner. The 409 is a surfactant(soap) like no other for getting rid of oils, foods, cheeto crumbs, and tends to remove the nitrosamines that leach out of the plastic. Especially those yellowed white plastic cases on Apple monitors and Goldstar VGA plastic cases. If you rub it in hard enough or let it soak a few minutes, it can whiten like retrobrite peroxide. You can also add a part of 99% isopropyl alcohol. You might need to rinse the resulting debris off with water or 70% alcohol after getting the q-tips out. Use Rain-X instead of pledge, it now works as a great fan and grill cleaner where airflow accumulates dust. Add a low flow fan where hot areas are. There are cheap 5V and 12V fans that can be operated on 5V for less noise. Or, add a potentionmeter in the circuit to make the fan adjustable. A lot of audiophiles at my electronics store would line a cabinet or rack of equipment with fans with grills or filters. provides extra cooling tripling the lifespan the chips and hot parts. I just retired and 8 year old PC motherboard that had plenty of airflow. Not because it electromechanically failed, but it was just plain to slow for today's software. Put heat sinks on the ram and ICs. just in case and save the gold bonding wires from flexing to death from hot to cold cycling. Even the 1970s ICs suffer from this. Use aluminium or copper sheet to aluminium heat sinks. The chipsset IC heatsinks from dead IBM PC motherboards work great. You can permanently glue heat sinks on instead of using clips with JBweld on the edges of the top of the chip and your favorite thermal transfer compound in the middle. Got a hot, funny shaped transistor that doesn't have a heatsink made for it? Now you do. Hot glue in a stick from gun is available at any hardware store. It will adhere lose wires, and wire wrap mods, and is recommended for stabilizing those mods from breaking off at the solder joint. The older PC motherboards had them and it worked. Its low density polyurethane, LDPE, and will adhere aluminium shielding to plastic with it being removable. Heck the stuff comes in colors and does make a nice purple glow under UV leds. :}
  7. However you can trim a ATX power connector in such a way to make the pins line up for 4,3,5,7. Note that I removed the pins from the 1,12,13 to allow you to wiggle it on and align the male pins with the connector in the "socket"
  8. I scanned your xbios page and was wondering if there was a way to make a bootable disk to do the following. Boot an Atari 130XE with regular BASIC kicked out without having to hold down the option key (or force Altirra to unload a cartridge mounted). Load BAISIC XL 1.03 from a .rom or .car file (I have both). It's a 16KB cart file, so it would probably be best to boot t Then load RDOS 1.4 or Mydos 4.53 or Go the autorun.sys route, but that is already being used for a serial port driver specfically written for the ATR8000 or 850 for my old BBS software. (Action Annex 3 or 4). The last version of the code was written primarily for the XE. But I also have a few Atari 800s available if it just won't work that way. A very long time ago I probably could come up with a solution but why reinvent the wheel? I know I can just force mount the cartridge in emulation on Alltirra. I can load Rdos 1.4 with a DD 180K image no less) I used to have a BASIC XL cartridge , I don't know where it ran off to. Would a .XEX file be possible? I've been away from the Atari stuff for about 20 years, I did some searching.. Have you hugged your IBM PC PXE boot code today? I did the QA on the legacy 4.01 version that went on to be GPXE. :}
  9. Ataridsk.exe can be found here. Runs only in dos 6.22 or Windows 98 dos. It will not likely run in DOS Box. You must have a PC with a BIOS that can select 360K or 1.2mb floppy drives. http://www.horus.com/~hias/atari/ The utl.exe that reads mydos formatted disks can be found here: http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/8bit/Diskutils/Transfer/ util.arc The source code and original from charles marslett, the original author of mydos is here: https://www.marslett.us/mydos.html
  10. thanks for the tip. I got the files off the disks using ataridsk.exe for the ssdd non mydos formatted disks. A loaned 1050 did the trick for sssd disks. The mydos formatted ssdd disks were read by util.exe by marslett of mydos.
  11. I wish I had my 3D printer to just make an ABS SIO connector ports and cable ends. Alas, I am broke until some bills get paid off.
  12. I found the manual and schematics for the rev 3 ATR8000 board. You could make one from scratch I suppose. Don't worry, I won't use my 32KB Timex ZX-81 as a doorstop either.
  13. I can neither confirm or deny that there were any "warez" on the BBS. I had went to Phoenix to De Vry Tech from 1986 onward.
  14. The ATR 8000 I was using, died The stock power supply circuit was toast, so It was removed from the board and I put a lab power supply on the thing. There was a failure in several chips and the short overheated the ram and CPU. I had already replaced all the caps and checked for shorts before the board was turned on. I am finishing up the disk imaging and made a catalog of the disks. Some were labelled, some not. Some had a title name for the catalog that was sold with paper inserts of the titles. Some of the disks were never put on the BBS, but had hand written notes on which song tittles decode the short , eight character filenames. So a bunch of the files are just going to have to be identified by play and listen.. Name that tune! If I could identify the disk, I made a disk.txt file for each sub directory as a "disk". The Action Annex BBS software was also released to freeware by Mike Calvin. I am gathering up the disk images for versions 1 through 4. I helped write the ATR8000 and 850 serial driver assembler code for faster transfers. I will write up a quick FAQ and doc for the whole lot so that it can be decoded and put on some FTP archive for clarity.
  15. I also scavenged from the original disk of the MIDI MUSIC player that would play .MUS files to a MIDI device. It even runs on Altirra once you add the fictional MIDI MATE to the emulator options. Ir was a hybrid boot disk with assembler so it's not a standalone executable file.
  16. Wow, great piece of work! Now I need to look up that stereo pokey mod for my 130XE. I have an extra chip. Saving my rainy day funds to get the cart. Any more demo videos on Youtube lately?
  17. I have something you guys will want. I was the co-sysop of the Action Annex BBS that operated from 1982-1996. The owner had to move in with relatives in Connecticut . So he gifted me all the Atari 8bit stuff including the original disks for the BBS. He said I could do whatever I wanted, so I think it would be nice to gift them to the internet for posterity. I managed to recover about 80% of the DSDD floppies and a SSSD disks. Comprising about 4000-5000 songs. Also some of the .MUS Midi music maker files were converted to standard .MID on Atari ST floppies. Unfortunately, not all the ST disks were readable, about 50% were trashed. I kept them for when I get a kryoflux device and pursue trying again. I also have the Midi Music Maker 1.0 by Sythentic Software disk and in .atr format. Also, the Crider's .MUS player standalone disks that boot and play from a menu. You can switch disks if they have the autoplay.dat and play a total of 6 disks worth of music on the Atari Pokey synth. It looks exactly like the AMS 2 keyboard. It obviously used code from Craig Chamberlan's AMS2 player for Pokey playing. I also have the MMS disk that would play .MUS files to the MIDI MATE device. I think it would play to the Wiztronics one also. I have a MIDI mate, but no synth to play stuff on. I converted the AMS1 and AMS2 few disks of songs to SAP format using Windows tools. What I need is a FTP dump site and a small contribution to replace the Atari disk drive that I literally wore the mechanism and controller out reading the disks in. I have the files archived on my PC read directly using the old 5.25" drive. The disks that were bootable with players, I made into .atr files to catch the boot sectors. I noticed a few music programs missing on atarimania, I might be able to fill in the blanks with a dump to them if they want them. Does this forum have a common file transfer site? I went looking for a sticky or FAQ to clue myself in. Sorry if I missed it. Comments?
  18. There was also the MIDIMATE SIO device that had a DIN5 for a MIDI connection to synths, and two 1/8" jacks for sync in and out. I happen to have one in my hand. I also have the MIDI MUSIC SYSTEM 1.0 disk imaged into .atr format. I need to scan the manual and add it to the collection.
  19. It was Windows 7x64. the driver didn't work. Whichever it loaded. This FTDI cable does work with Windows 10 x64 at triple SIO speeds. I have to slow it down for the vintage POKEY beep for a disk load video. :}
  20. Well mine didn't work with neither Respect Qt , nor ape trial 1.02. No boot, no joy with a known good .atr disk image No disk drives connected I made the cable twice to be sure. APE says it detects it with CTS, like it should. But then defaults to USB mode since the RS232 failed to initialize. Respect does detect the serial interface, but doesn't transmit anything. I even went as far as using a female socket from an ATR8000 I scavenged, soldered the wires onto it and used a known working standard SIO cable. #@$@#$ I guess I got a bad one or a phony chip.
  21. I have two ATR 8000 boxes with 64KB handed down from my mentor in the 1980s. They ran the disk drives , modem and printer for the Action Annex BBS in Vancouver, WA. They were trick devices considering the alternative of hanging a daisy chain of SIO devices to do the same thing. There is a web site that has schematics and the ATR manual can be found online. The guy is in Bratislavia and documented more about all the disk drives in one blog than ever seen before. http://blog.3b2.sk/igi/post/ATR-8000.aspx All sorts of goodies on this site. My current problem resurrecting them is the power supply design was not the best. The 22 VAC transformer and it's so called bridge filtercap/regulation worked, albeit it was not designed for 20 years of operation. It did last 8 years for the BBS. I remember one of the ATRs blew a pair of voltage regulators out once, and was replaced. One of the ATR machines worked and the other has logic gates going from a probe ,but is not communicating on the sio port anymore. I patched in +12V and +5 from a PC supply and got one working for about an hour. Why would I want to wake up this bit of coolness from the BBS world? I was gifted 400 floppies of double sided, double density format disks with probably 1000-2000 MIDI files typed in by my mentor's wife. They are unique and copies of public domain songs in MIDI format that can still be played on todays synthesizers or your emulated ones on the PC. Two of the MIDI files ended up as demo files on the Windows 95 CDROM release my Microsoft. Bill Gates used to visit the BBS and download them. I have the actual drives used to write the disks, about 5-6 5.5.25" drives, so I know alignment issues won't be a problem. I'm leery of trying to just buy a XF551 drive and take my chances losing data. So, anyone an expert on finding glitches on a truly neat board? All the chips are labeled on the board. It needs sockets. I have a spare board with eproms that read, one spare z-80 and likely just need to xray the board and find the short in it. The ram was recycled from some other project and was installed. I can see where someone has used the 4264s with wire wrap on another Atari 800. The ram bank and the z-80 went thermal and quit. I even tried putting back in the stock 16KB ram and set the jumpers to see if that would get it working to no avail. Both boards are REV C. Which was the latest I think. The eproms have code version 3.02 written on the labels. I never really got into using CP/M for an OS, as I was chasing IBM PC sales and programming after 1986 or so. Anyone spare a true DSDD drive for a loan or know where I can get the controller parts cheap if I can't bless this mess of two boards? I have an several 800s, and some spare parts to trade for a controller for the drives. ? I am also looking into an ISA IBM pc floppy controller of the vintage with the use of the atarisd.exe app. which might not read dsdd anyway. Meanwhile, the other Atari 800s were sold at auction to fund some of this recovery project and a few Kindle Fire tablets for the homeless shelter in Vancouver, WA. ideas?
  22. I have two ATR 8000 boxes with 64KB handed down from my mentor in the 1980s. They ran the disk drives , modem and printer for the Action Annex BBS in Vancouver, WA. They were trick devices considering the alternative of hanging a daisy chain of SIO devices to do the same thing. There is a web site that has schematics and the ATR manual can be found online. The guy is in Bratislavia and documented more about all the disk drives in one blog than ever seen before. http://blog.3b2.sk/igi/post/ATR-8000.aspx All sorts of goodies on this site. My current problem resurrecting them is the power supply design was not the best. The 22 VAC transformer and it's so called bridge filtercap/regulation worked, albeit it was not designed for 20 years of operation. It did last 8 years for the BBS. One of the machines worked and the other has logic gates going from a probe ,but is not communicating on the sio port anymore. I patched in +12V and +5 from a PC supply and got one working for about an hour. Why would I want to wake up this bit of coolness from the BBS world? I was gifted 400 floppies of double sided, double density format disks with probably 1000-2000 MIDI files typed in by my mentor's wife. They are unique and copies of public domain songs in MIDI format that can still be played on todays synthesizers or your emulated ones on the PC. Two of the MIDI files ended up as demo files on the Windows 95 CDROM release my Microsoft. Bill Gates used to visit the BBS and download them. I have the actual drives used to write the disks, about 5-6 5.5.25" drives, so I know alignment issues won't be a problem. I'm leery of trying to just buy a XF551 drive and take my chances losing data. So, anyone an expert on finding glitches on a truly neat board? All the chips are labeled on the board. It needs sockets. I have a spare board with eproms that read, one spare z-80 and likely just need to xray the board and find the short in it. The ram was recycled from some other project and was installed. I can see where someone has used the 4264s with wire wrap on another Atari 800. The ram bank and the z-80 went thermal and quit. I even tried putting back in the stock 16KB ram and set the junmpers to see if that would get it working to no avail. I never really got into using CP/M for an OS, as I was chasing IBM PC sales and programming after 1986 or so. btw saw this other answer on this forum about where to locate the cp/m disks, images and tools. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/220185-atr-8000-and-other-cpm-system-disks-here/ --------------- For those who are still looking for ATR-8000 CP/M system disks, I found them here: http://www.retroarch...tari/index.html Link for other CP/M bootdisks: http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/ Here is all of Don Maslin's stuff: http://www.classiccm...oftware/maslin/ You need an old MS-DOS machine with a 360K floppy drive (and a good controller), and the TeleDisk program here: http://www.classiccm...06/teledisk.htm Hope this helps. -Kyle --------------------- Anyone spare a true DSDD drive for a loan or know where I can get the controller parts cheap? I am also looking into an ISA IBM pc floppy controller of the vintage with the use of the atarisd.exe app. which might not read dsdd anyway. Thanks,
  23. I wish I had never sold my Indust GT.. Too bad they never made a DS DD version. Guess what i got from a friend, A collection of 2000 MIDI files from the Action Annex BBS that I helped run back in 1982-1986. The BBS went offline about 1990. 206-892-8969 (disconnected) The BBS ran an atari 800 with an ATR 8000 with a collection of 5.25" and sometimes 8 " floppy drives in DSDD format. The CP/m was neat to run. However, about 1994, the 8 bit disks were archived to Atari ST 3.5" disks. about 75 of them . Only 25 read correctly. So I want to get an ATR 8000 working again.. The two hulks from the storage unit both failed within an hour of operation and even replacing the power supply with a pc one for +5v and +12 led to the boards just sucking power and heating up the ram chips. I am in search of an sio cabled, dsdd drive that can read these disks. The sio2pc cable is one route. but I found some old DOS IBM PC software that might read the disks correctly. I will gather up an old Pentium with an ISA FD controller, I have 5 5.25" drives that I know work and read those disks. Funny that the ATR 8000 also had a parallel and serial port with drivers for the Atari to add a p; and r: device. Basically for the cost of a handful of 74ls chips one could make an Indus into an ATR.. I am tempted to get a xf551 dsdd drive and run it to destruction to get the data. But for a real drive, the 1050 with the Happy mod sounds like the way to go.
  24. I am impressed by the hardware hacking going on here. I could not get ape 3.02 to work with an older plain 9 pin serial to 13 pin atari sio cable. I checked it with a meter and all the pins were in the right place. It did not have the diode in it. The serial port I attached it to is with an Intel 945P chipset with Windows 7 x64 talking to it. At first, the ape tool said config tested ok directly to the atari. But then when the application launches proper for launching a disk image, it says it can't talk to it. It appears that the Ape folks want to sell you the usb only version and support that. I call BS. RS232 is a standard for a reason to avoid this kind of nonsense. I was the guy 20 years ago who had to drive out and fix non standard wired adapters and interfaces using proprietary cabling. I looked high an low for a Molex equivalent part # back in 2005-2007. To no avail. About making your own SIO cable ends. However, there is nothing stopping someone from doing this as a mold making trick. 1. heat shrink the pins on the wires. 2. Insert wires on a scrap male 90 degree Atario SIO connector from a dead device. 3. put heat shrink tubes or plastic tubes on the unused pins to make holes for the unused pins on the female connector you are about to make. 3. Spray mold release or WD-40(which was originally designed for the Atlas missile program) into the socket. Swish and drip it out. Carnuba wax on a q-tip works also. 4. Inject hot glue from your hot glue gun. HDPE is non conductive and tends not to stick to the nylon or ABS very well. 5. Let it cool off, and very carefully pull the now made cable from the "mold". Now you have a positive mold. You can go from there and make a negative. or paint the thing and 3D scan it for 3D printing. etc..
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