cwilbar

I recently aquired an Atari 1050 drive with a Happy Upgrade (genuine). I tried to run 1050 diagnostic software against it, but that doesn't work. I don't have any Happy software for this, and I'm 'green' when it comes to the Happy drive enhancements. If someone could point me to an .atr, .atx, or .scp of 1050 happy diagnostic software, I want to check RPM, track zero sensor, etc.... as out of my stack of test floppies, it has a problem with a few of them that other drives don't. I have other questions as well: Are there different versions of the firmware ? If so, can I upgrade by burning an EPROM and replacing the existing ROM on the Happy board ? If so, which ROM should I use and where can it be found ? What version of the software should I use, and where is a good place to get .atr, .atx, .scp, etc of the software for this drive ? Thanks.

The 400 board with all the chips you put in.... did it come with the power board, or you moved that from the old board to the replacement board ? Was the replacement board bought as tested/working ? or unknown/as is ? What other parts did you move over from your old configuration ? CPU board and RAM board ? Presuming it was ok when you assembled it, and that it is not ok now, then the only thing is power is damaging something. And in this case, I don't think the extra .5V could do this, I woudl then suspect the power board in the 400. I presume even approaching it a day later and you turn it on, the symptoms are consistent ? It doesn't display a screen with a cursor that then fades away again ? If you have it hooked up with sound, with no cartridge it would go into memo pad, and you should hear 'beeps' when you type. If you start it up while holding the start button, do you get an audible sound ? If I recall correctly you will get a cassette loading tone. If you get sound out of it, that would indicate a video issue. Unfortunately a failure in ANTIC/GTIA, or POKEY can wedge the whole system. So, a non responsive system could have any chip be the failure points. I'd suggest opening it up, and running it caseless. Find the schematic and/or service manual on-line and check the voltages from the PSU to the mainboard. Use a DVM to check them, and check AC power on the leads too to find out if there is any excessive ripple voltage on those DC lines. If all the DC voltages measure fine and there is zero or close to zero AC volts on those outputs, then the AC adapter through the power supply is good, and the issue is on the mainboard, the cpu board, or the ram board.

Was that a 9.5V AC or 9.5V DC supply ? I wouldn't think .5 volts would damage it (as that is is only 5.6% off), as the rectification, regulation, and filtering are on the inside of the Atari. However, if you use a DC supply.... well, something bad could very well happen. If you are unsure, post a pic of the power supplies input/output data from it's label/case. If you are lucky, any damage would be restricted to the 400's power board which is not difficult to replace (no soldering required unless you have some internal upgrades that have wires soldered to it).

that is very nice. For my 600XL, I used an 'L' shaped piece of plastic and bonded with Acetone it to the inside back of the lower case and screwed the U1MB to it with 2 self tapping screws. It is quite strong and I preferred that to drilling my PCB..... but the above 3D print is awesome. There is some nice stuff out there.... someday I'll have to look into a 3D printer.... though knowing me, I'd design/print a few parts a year and it would just sit there otherwise 🙂

@Simius, How did you solve that problem ? There isn't much technical information on that web site ? Have you released any of this info, updated firmware ? Or do you sell upgrades for this ?

bump.... still looking for an 820 printer.

Bumping again..... still looking for an Atari 800 top/bottom case..... or alternately a dead 800 with good case.

Its possible all but P24 is to protect the product.... hard to say.... but there is some similar wiring to another XF upgrade that doesn't do dual drives..... so hard to say. I think reverse engineering the firmware could confirm that.

I'd imagine the extra logic is around how it picks up from the modified firmware which drive should be being accessed, and does the appropriate things with the drive select lines to the drives, and anything that might be needed by the FDC. I haven't looked at the XF design... but the pins this ties in to on the cpu is Vcc, P10, P11, P13, P15, P16, and P24. On the FDC pins 14 and 20 are GND and MO. MO is the motor signal. So, the logic seems to detect when the FDC starts the motor, and ties into the CPU pins in order to determine from the firmware which drive to select. P24 is unused normally in the XF551. This may be what is used to drive the drive select logic. P10 and P11 connect to A0 and A1 of the FDC. P13 is the DD signal to the FDC. P15 is R/W to the FDC. P16 is inverted on the XF and sent out direct to the SIDE signal on the FDC cable. It would appear that all the signals on port 1 could have been wired to the FDC chip with that upgrade, and that leaves P24 as the drive select. If there is a dump/disassemble of the CSS Dual drive firmware, then drive selection is being handled this way. I'm unsure why the DD, R/W, A0, and A1 connections are needed, but I'm wondering if this is because something needs to be latched/unlatched (via flip flop ?) in that blob. Though the MCS-48 holds the port (p24) at whatever state is programmed to, unless changed or cpu is reset (so far from what I can find). It would be really cool to see a HyperXF version and a bit of hardware to make a new 'super css dual' upgrade for XF551. Something that supports a dual drive mechanism, with firmware smart enough to double step or single step depending on setup from dos would be cool. You could still boot SSSD games, but you could do up to 720K on 5.25" DD media, and do 720K DD 3.5s. All in the original XF551 form factor. Another interesting option would be to stack an XF551 and a PC551 and put a 3.5" drive in one, a 360K 5.25" (probably simply retain original XF mech), and have a cable out of the XF that connects to the PC551 and it looks like a stack of 2 XFs but controlled by one controlller and one SIO connection. Possibilities 🙂

The 82S##... chip(s) are bipolar proms. These are like EPROMs but much smaller in capacity and IIRC they are usually faster (at least faster than EPROMs of the same era). Hopefully non of the 82S## chips are bad. If they are, you'll need to source a blank chip, someone who can program it, and a copy of the contents of a good chip.

Looks like additional logic is required..... see: http://www.nleaudio.com/css/products/xfduald.htm There is a 'module' and you tie into some pins on the FDC and on the CPU. With a bit of studying, the workings of this may be able to be deduced. It ties into the 8040/8050 on 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, and 40. It ties into the FDC on pins 14 and 20. I think it would be cool to have a moodified XF dual that uses a combo 3.5" and 5.25" drive. Running both at 80 tracks double density. Wouldn't be too useful as a boot drive, but good for a data drive.

Who owns the rights to the CSS ROMs ? There can't be much money to be made on these anymore. Would be great to see some of these older modifications released into the public domain.... and if not that, transferred to a 3rd party that still makes/sells/etc stuff for them. I can't imagine that there would be significant changes required to an XF551 on the hardware side. I don't know how (i.e. in a PC) drive selection is handled on the hardware side. If the logic that drives the drive select lines on the drive cable are handled by the controller chip, or additional (separate) logic.

@Max_Chatsworth, this is @Paul Westphal's listing. If he doesn't have any left, you can PM me, I should have one available (though I don't know if it is all socketed like Paul's).

There are multiple upgrades out there as you are finding. As you've already selected the SDrive Max, I'd start there. As @Fred_M pointed out, most cartridge games were 'ripped' to disk and are available as .atr, .xex, etc. With time and experience you will have more experience with your Atari to better decied what, if any, upgrade you want to do next. For more memory, the Ultimate 1MB is very popular, and even more powerful when coupled with SIDE2 (or soon, SIDE3) cart. But it is not solderless (especially if you have an 800XL that doesn't have the necessary chips socketed to begin with. There are a few wires to solder, and if your system is not socketed then even more desoldering. There are members here who do installs. There may be (or have been) a memory upgrade via PBI which the 800XL has. Maybe someone else can common if there is a PBI solution for memory expansion that is compatible with modern demos/etc.

The Atari XL series run on 5V. So a modern power supply option is a power cable with a USB plug on one end and the DIN connector on the other (for the Atari). Then you use a 5V USB power adapter with appropriate amount of amps on the output, and you have a modern 5V supply for your Atari XL.

Speaking of broken cartridge door opening tabs.... what do you do when one is broken off of a 65XE or 130XE ? I have a 130XE that is like new minus that one of those tabs is broken off. I was thinking of finding some close matching plastic (maybe from a 3.5" floppy disk shell) and epoxy it in ?

I prefer to write 40 track Atari disks with a 40 track drive (with Supercard Pro). Atari doesn't have to worry about half tracks, so I'd rather write a full width track. For writing half track disks (C64, Apple ][), I'd use an 80 track drive and bulk erase the destination diskette first. And for writing 720K onto 1.44M media, the only way I'd think this would be safe is w/o blocking the HD hole, and the controller being able to write 720K density while the drive uses HD media write currents. I'm still not sure what drives can do that (if it is most, or just some) as I've only read about it here.

One solution to an enclosure when building a drive, is an old SCSI external tape drive or SCSI cdrom drive. A long time ago these were common and plentiful both in 5.25 FH (full height), and 5.25 HH (half height). I am using an old Andatco open face drive enclosure for a 5.25" FH SCSI hard drive to house a 5.25" 360K floppy drive and a 1.44M 3.5" floppy drive for use with my Supercard Pro. For some reason this one already had the SCSI cabling stripped out of it (hence choosing it since I wouldn't need that stuff). There is an improved XF551 PCB out there (Atari's AF551 PCBs were the product of significant cost cutting, and if you stare at them cross eyed the traces will leap off of the PCB 🙂 ). There is also a board called an SF551 which is intended for putting in an Atari ST 3.5" external drive enclosure turning into an 'XE' style 3.5" disk drive. It is the XF551 circuitry in a different format PCB.

historically MyIDE would do IDE drives. Don't know that is available anymore. Popular these days are upgrades like sio2sd, Ultimate Cart, Uno Cart, MaxFlash cart, side2 (and soon to be side3) (usually coupled with the Ultimate 1MB upgrade), Sdrive Max, and more. These solutions have different capabilities that allow you to load software in different formats (atr (disk image), atx (disk image with protection intact), xex (executable file), bin/car (cartridge dumps), bas (basic programs), etc). There are a lot of different modern upgrades for the old Ataris now. Which one is best depends on what features you want and what formats you want.

drive to drive copies with dos will only work on dos format diskettes. Most game disks are in 'boot' format. Also, the Sdrive Max can do .atx which will have protection schemes intact.... so if you have any .atx files you won't be able to copy them to a stock Atari disk drive. I'm not sure how you would copy them to a happy or archiver/chip drive, I'm guessing you'd have to use aspeqt/respeqt ? (I've never done that as I use my Supercard Pro to write .atx files to diskettes using a PC). As long as your source is .atr if you use a sector copier program, it should copy from the Sdrive Max to the Atari drive fine (as long as the .atr is of a single density disk).

@Nezgar , Did you mean C77 and C78 for 800XL ? That is what the picture looks to show, but your text says C77 and C88. Do the 600XL or 1200XL requires these mods for 'super' speed too ?

I wouldn't ever do this. The HD media uses a higher coercivity and requires stronger write pulses to properly write data to the media. Someone in this thread mentioned that many? (or is it some?) 3.5" drives will automatically step up the write current when the HD hole is detected, but that (at least in an XF551) you can format them to 720K. I had never heard of this, but this would be the only safe way to do 720K on HD media if you want to be sure the higher coercivity media is properly magnetizing the media when writing. This sounds valid, although I've not personally tried this myself.

It was my understanding that if you use 720K media, then any PC 1.44 that you can reconfigure to drive 0 would work ? I didn't even know you could do 720K to HD media at HD write current. If that were to be done, the drive would have to set the write current for the media and not rely on a signal from the computer (in our case, the XF551 mainboard). Though if it is a logic low or high signal, I presume you could remove that conductor and tie it high (with appropriate pull up resistor), or low ?

Not tube sockets. They appear to be panel mount DIN5 to me. (same as Atari 8 bit monitor port)

Received the Megadrive X-7 promptly. Thanks.