spiffster

Do what? I don't have any complaints; I thought that you and Amanda, as well as everyone else involved, did a great job. Granted, this is my first time to attend an event such as this, so it kind of set the bar, but it is what it is. I enjoyed it thoroughly. At one point, I drove back home (about a 10-minute drive) to grab my Sinclair stuff, and my SO said that she could tell as I ran into the house how excited I was. Also, I was initially only going to attend Saturday, but that obviously changed. So yeah, great job, no complaints here. Whichever, I have a new (to me) cart that I'm immensely happy with. Even if he could go through the trouble to build himself a new one, @FarmerPotato was kind and generous enough to give me a cart that obviously held significance for him, and I'm grateful. Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm somewhat familiar with Forth from my Spectrum clones, which also have Jupiter Ace ROMs, but alas no means to save or load programs. The Forth session wasn't all Forth, though; neither FarmerPotato nor I had any idea how to emulate DSK1 on a TIPI, so part of it was getting the environment set up.

To recap the online stuff: Fusion BBS is at fusionbbs.ddns.net:9640 and anyone with a TIPI can connect to IRATA Online by typing the following in BASIC: CALL TIPI("PI.HTTP://TI99.IRATA.ONLINE/PLATO") Jeff.

It was great meeting everyone. I'm super-stoked about fbForth right now.

So, yeah... Meet Clarence, the unofficial Fest 99/4ATX mascot.

Hey, it was awesome seeing you there!

By the way, I'll also be at CGF next weekend, in a booth demonstrating IRATA.Online on a TI-99/4A, Atari 800XL, and ZX Spectrum clone. If you happen to be there, stop by and say Hi!

I'm planning on attending with a TI-99/4A IRATA.Online setup. I may do a presentation but would definitely like for folks to get some hands-on time with the system. Jeff. IRATA.Online: jthiele/atari

I have an 800XL and a 130XE that I use quite regularly. I prefer to keep the machines themselves stock but am much less of a purist regarding carts and peripherals. Surely I am not alone.

In case anyone is interested... Classic Game Fest 2019 in Austin, TX has a select number of FREE tables (electricity included) set aside for showcasing retro-inspired indie games. Submission deadline is October 31, 2018. Details here: https://classicgamefest.com/apply-now-indie-game-showcase-cgf/ I do not represent Classic Game Fest. I receive announcements from them because I had a booth demonstrating Irata Online on an Atari 800XL at CGF 2018 and plan to do so again (with more computers) at CGF 2019. They're a good group of people and treated me very well.

You're welcome. It all works out. I enjoyed it and if I had not done this, I probably would not have gone to CGF at all. And that would have meant missing out on an awesome weekend. I saw a lot of 2600s and 5200s, and even a couple of Jaguars and a table-style Pong, but I only saw one other Atari 8-bit computer. Unfortunately, it was being sold for parts. So as far as I know, I had the only working Atari 8-bit computer in the whole place. I'm also pretty sure it was the only online 8-bit of any type.

I set up a booth at Classic Game Fest 2018 in Austin, Texas, to show off Irata Online on an 800XL. It was running The Learning Phone cartridge and was connected to the internet over Wifi, via the Raspberry Pi in the Lego case. There was a fair amount of interest and a whole lot of nostalgia, both for the Atari and for the PLATO service.

For what it's worth, I ordered some flash carts: Ordered 5/30/18, Confirmed 6/1/18, Shipped 6/3/18, Received 6/5/18.

How does it provide 5V outputs while running at 3.3V? .

Update: I'm still on this. It's almost finished. The only part remaining to be done is the SIO connector. I couldn't bring myself to cut an SIO cable in half, so I'm waiting on a 3D-printed connector. I don't have a 3D printer, so someone else handled that and the connector sans contacts and nut/bolt is being mailed to me. I have the contacts already, and hope to find a suitable nut/bolt at the hardware store. I did find out, though, that my local library does have a 3D printer. I just need to take a class to learn how to use it, before I'm allowed to use it (probably a wise choice).

Alright, I think I have everything I need. Here's the plan for the hardware: The device will use a Robotdyn NodeM ESP8266 with 32Mb (4MB) of flash. Here's a pinout showing the pin mux: http://www.kloppenborg.net/images/blog/esp8266/esp8266-node-mcu-pinout.png I've decided on the following pin allocations: GPIO1/TXD0: USB/unused GPIO3/RXD0: USB/unused GPIO13/RXD2: SIO DATA OUT GPIO15/TXD2: SIO DATA IN You can use the latter two as GPIO pins if you want to roll your own serial handling, or use the pin mux to switch the UART from TXD0/RXD0 to TXD2/RXD2. Your choice. GPIO4: SIO INTERRUPT GPIO5: SIO PROCEED GPIO12: SIO COMMAND GPIO14: SIO READY I'll also connect GPIO16/WAKE to RST so that you can put the ESP8266 into deep sleep if you wish, perhaps upon loss of the READY signal using a timer to wake up periodically to see if it's returned. Or not. The device will be powered via the NodeM USB port. It will have two level shifters, one for 5V->3.3V, one for 3.3V->5V. If I can't get 5V from the NodeM to drive the 3.3V->5V level shifter, I'll get it from the SIO 5V/READY which will mean that the device will only be able to send signals when SIO READY is active. (I can see if the device will run entirely off of the 5V provided by the SIO, but I have my doubts. Also, that would mean loss of power to the device whenever READY was low. I'm not familiar enough with the behavior of that signal to know if this is acceptable or not.) Comments? Concerns? Suggestions?

I'm waiting on some things in the mail, and then I'll see what I can put together. The ESP8266 only has one fully-functioning UART, and it's connected by default to the USB programmer. An additional problem that I had not considered is that the ESP8266 spews out some informational messages upon booting, before any uploaded firmware is even run. It looks like the safest bet is to put the SIO DATA IN/DATA OUT on GPIO15 and GPIO13, respectively. (See http://smallbits.marshall-tribe.net/blog/2016/11/13/esp8266-quiet-uart) That way, the startup messages will go to an otherwise unused pin, and if you want to divert the UART to these other pins, you can. Or you can use some software-based serial scheme on these pins. The advantage to diverting the UART is that the serial communication is handled by hardware; the disadvantage is that you won't be able to send messages out the USB port as you attempt to debug it. The remaining SIO signals can go to other various pins. The 850 almost certainly uses the COMMAND signal, but probably not the CLOCK ones. The others I'm not sure about. Since SIO uses 5V signals and the ESP8266 is a 3.3V device, I plan on using two 74AHCT125s as level shifters, one for incoming signals and one for outgoing ones. Each can handle four signals. These would probably be in: READY, COMMAND, DATA OUT; out: DATA IN, PROCEED, INTERRUPT. Let me know if you think more connections are needed. Also, I did get a cyber1 account and can access it using pterm, but I currently lack the means to load the Atari Plato software. I have a MaxFlash setup on the way.

Another idea I had sort of along the same lines is that it might be useful to abstract away the SIO connector by making an SIO<->Bluetooth device. The device itself wouldn't respond to any SIO commands, but any device (phone, laptop, RPi, etc.) that wanted to monitor and/or respond to SIO traffic could pair with it and do so (one at a time, of course). It would need a protocol (on top of Bluetooth) to communicate changes in the status of the SIO control lines.

Here's some hardware that might work, except for the SIO cable. It's already 5V and has plenty of UARTs. http://robotdyn.com/mega-wifi-r3-atmega2560-esp8266-flash-32mb-usb-ttl-ch340g-micro-usb.html

I'd be interested. I don't have a working Atari terminal yet (working on it), but I'd like to take a look around.