Geister

Plexiglass puzzle-piece cases will never "resemble" the original cases. Their point is to put a protective shell around the circuit boards and to allow the owner to ogle the said boards. If you want to recreate the 1090XL case, you'll need to spring for injection molded plastics.

I can't speak for any future plans to recreate the 1400XL/1450XLD, I don't think there was anything in the original design that would have precluded the U1MB.

Who cares what the other 29-39 people think...I'm the important one 😄

I'd like to see a plastic case for the new 1090XL expansion bus.

This is a sad statement of the about how bad things have gotten in the world that people will steal anything and everything they can get their hands on even if it's not likely to be something they can use or sell just on the chance they can make money on it. Luckily, I am retired and can be at the door to receive the package if it comes during normal delivery times, but we have seen that not even "signature required" can guarantee that the package won't just be dropped and abandoned by the delivery person if you don't get to the door quickly enough. I would rather have to get the package redelivered or make the trip to the industrial park to receive the package than have the box unceremoniously dropped on my porch. @TGB1718 I would love to see video of a porch pirate climbing an electric fence! As for having your package stole in the building you live in, maybe you need to talk to the building security about constant surveillance in the lobby and see if they have better than a potato-cam that caught the thief. It would suck to find out that a neighbor stole your package but maybe it wouldn't happen a second time it they were caught.

When I worked in a group that designed circuit boards at Air Products, the Wintek software we used referred to them as traces.

Do you know anybody in the UK with a working 800XL? Maybe spend an evening swapping parts as you appear to have a fully socketed machine. I was able to fix my 600XL by swapping chips with an 800XL to determine that the 600XL must have been subjected to a bad power supply that killed multiple chips (CPU, Pokey, PIA, & RAM). If not, perhaps FJC can fit you into his repair queue.

Also, XE is too ambiguous. Do you mean a 65XE, a 130XE or an actual XEGS as this thread was originally about? (Oops, forgot the 800XE.)

Anybody else feel the earthquake this morning?

I agree with all of the above. I used to work at Air Products and Chemicals when they had 4 or 5 R&D buildings and the company was making a ton of money. Then a new generation of management killed all the R&D for short term profits. Now the company is a pale ghost of what it used to be. Atari sold the 8-bits nearly as long as Apple sold the 8-bit model and maybe if they had not deliberately hobbled the IIGS it would still be selling a variant of that. It was a better MAC than the MAC.

This is amazing! We should certainly see a functioning CPM on the 1090 CPM card with all this to draw on. An 8080 emu on the Atari? unbelievable!

There were people predicting the death of Atari in 1984. To most people Atari was the 2600. They thought Atari was dead with the video game crash.

In any case, I can't wait to see what comes out of this.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking about the SWP ATR8000 and how that could be a stand-alone computer.

Since the video card also shares the header that the Z-80 and memory card use, I was guessing that there may be a direct usage mode or signals to bypass the Atari and go directly to the video card.

Can the Z-80 card use the 80-column card for video output? It seems like that was meant to work.

If I recall correctly, Western Design Center had a 32 bit CPU waiting in the wings. I believe they were waiting for the 816 to get wider acceptance before bringing it out. https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Electronics/CPU/WDC 65C832 Datasheet.pdf Apple absolutely hobbled the 2GS to prevent competing with themselves. At the time the 2GS already had a more finished GUI in color. If it had more speed, the MAC would have died the early death it deserved. The 8-bit 65C02 had a speed advantage over 16 bit 8088/6 CPUs, who's to say how that could have played out if WDC had customers for a next gen CPU? Atari was at a disadvantage for advanced operating systems. They had Gary Kildall's GEM system while Apple stole Xerox's WIMP interface. Could Kildall have developed an interface better than the MAC's monochrome misappropriation? But remember, all those who keep bringing up the ST and XE systems...in the alternate universe Tramiel stayed at Commodore and continued to build second-best systems (spec-wise, there's no accounting for cheap buyers), while Atari stood by its deals and paid for the Amiga development and distributed the Amiga as a 16/32 bit business system alongside it's 16/32 bit home Atari systems.

Cool!, Now what are they doing for a ROM on that thing?

I didn't see a 1090XL in there. But yeah, awesome collection.

As a beginner Linux user who has just managed to get Altirra to run on wine in Linux Mint, I'd love more information on running Atari on Linux. I'd like a video on setting up a developer load of tools for Linux and Atari as I intend to never run Windows again after I get that done. Well that and proving that I can do my taxes on a Linux machine as well. This is well under way.

I don't want to ask for too much, so I'll leave Quake II and III, and all the new Wolfenstein's off the list.

Well, now that we have Doom, how about Doom II, Duke Nukem, and Quake?

Two questions, does anybody have sheet 2 (Analog section), and are Amy chips even obtainable?

What about an rp2040 Z80CPM emulator? https://github.com/ExtremeElectronics/RC2040

Would this also require the original 80-column card as I expect that the original design had no video out of its own. Could the current 80 column card be used as a terminal from the Atari side?