E474

Hi @phaeron, Thanks very much for the info. I put the files on a web-server, but the index.html file just contains the intro text, and I couldn't navigate to any other files (there isn't a ToC included). However, if I rename index.html to intro.html, then I can browse a file listing of the directory. The problem with wine appears to be IE8, e.g. the rendering engine for HTML. My point about including a F2=Start as part of the first screen (the one that can be cancelled out of), is that a novice user only really needs to know a few Atari specific keys (inverse video key and Help key would also be nice, but it's SSO that will really help a new user hit the ground running). I didn't realise that you could find out what SSO are mapped to using the UI path described above, unfortunately the Customize option is actually currently greyed out. I wouldn't have attempted this without the online help, so there's a circular argument of needing the online help to figure out that the SSO keys can be defined in, well, you get the idea. The really annoying bit was looking in the Keyboard shortcuts and being able to find every Fn key apart from the ones that I wanted to use, which was why I wrote that I couldn't find the SSO definitions in the UI. Thanks again for uploading the docs as html, it's much appreciated!

Hi @Wrathchild, When I wrote that the help system was broken, I meant it doesn't display any help (to be absolutely crystal clear, this is under wine64).

Hi @phaeron, Thanks very much for your reply. New user feedback, so treat accordingly. Unfortunately, the help system is broken in wine64, so I couldn't access the keyboard layout. It's not available online, as in on a website, so I couldn't Google it. When I looked yesterday via Google, all I could find was the Altirra Basic PDF and the Altirra Hardware PDF. I've just tried again, and found a page on scridb which actually does list the keyboard bindings, see: https://www.scribd.com/document/347085024/Altirra-Keyboard-Reference - but the rest of the online help is, as far as I know, unavailable on the internet. I couldn't find the mappings for Start, Select and Option in the Altirra UI itself. If I went to Tools->Configure Keyboard Shortcuts, the F2, F3 and F4 weren't listed, but all the other F function keys where listed, e.g. F10 - Debug.StepOver. I found this very frustrating to use, as I was only interested in the "special" Atari keys (Select, Option, Start), and I couldn't find anything in the UI to say what they were defined as. My expectation was something along the lines of the MAME key bindings. What would have been appreciated would have been a note saying: F2=Start F3=Select F4=Option On the initial setup dialog, on the first screen when Altirra is initially started. For a new user this would have been really helpful. One other thing I found was that the Menu bar and items are very small under wine, but can be fixed by: $ winecfg Choose the "Graphics" tab, and use the "Screen resolution" horizontal slider to change it to something more legible. I also noticed that whenever I relaunched Altirra, it would boot the previously used ATR (Arcadia.atr in my case), and it wasn't immediately obvious how to turn this behavior off. Also, choosing an Atari XL OS ROM was a bit confusing/busy as there was a large tree of 400/800/XL/etc., images that got displayed. Another thing I noticed was the the handling of Basic On/Off was a bit confusing, I thought I had set it to boot with pressing Option to disable Basic, but I got Altirra Basic regardless. Thinking about this last night, I considered installing the Altirra sources as they would/should include the sources for the online help, but then this morning I remembered I had used a Linux eBook reader a couple of years ago that supported opening .CHM files, so after a bit of digging I could read the online help with "Calibre". This can open some of the online help pages, but on some of them I get a dialog saying "ERROR: Destination does not exist", though you can make out the page behind the dialog, but it's black text on a dark grey background. Hope this helps!

Thanks very much, it's: F2=Start F3=Select F4=Option I checked by loading the XL OS Self test, and verified by doing the same on atari800 (it's not obvious which is which for Start and Select in the Keyboard self-test, but it's in the man page for atari800, so I could work backwards from there, though it's a bit confusing as they don't use the same Function keys).

Hi @ascrnet, OK, no worries, I haven't installed Atollic Studio (or whatever has replaced it) yet, and am a bit stuck with Altirra under Wine in Debian. The pio code handles IO with the UnoCart, and I am (reasonably) sure it would be the same with the PicoCart - you could have a look at the OS code in the PicoCart by booting an ATR with Bug65 or similar, and looking at the OS code the PicoCart is serving.

Quick question. I'm running Altirra under wine, and the online help system is broken (in wine). I can't find the mappings for Start, Select and Option in the UI, what are they mapped to on the keyboard (I literally can't find this info anywhere in the UI!). Thanks!

Hi @ascrnet, I have an ST-Link USB Dongle, so can update the UnoCart (I have before), but I don't have a development environment for it (I think I had the Attolic (?) studio installed, but on my previous machine), so I will need to install that again, but I will try and do that today. Did you include the changes for UnoCart IO, in pio.s (and maybe other files), see: https://github.com/robinhedwards/UnoCart/blob/master/source/Atari/UnoCartOS/pio.s Thanks @DjayBee, I will try and get Altirra up and running under Wine, and give this a go. Hi @tebe , thanks very much for the info. I think using something like the Altirra debugger is the next step, as I believe it can be invoked on writes to memory ranges, and this will probably be the easiest way to catch what's causing the issue. Time wise things are looking a bit limited for today, but I am still curious as to what's causing this behaviour.

Hi, Just as a quick test, I booted Arcadia by @amarok using atariserver on a Raspberry Pi using a stock (real) 800XL, and it loaded (and played) fine. Then I tried doing the same but loading the PAL XL Translator (from Atari) first, then booting Arcadia (so a Soft-OS on real hardware). The result was a corrupted display like the second picture in @ascrnet's post above. I got the same results with the xmas version of Arcadia. When I tried gr9lab.atr and unicode.atr, they both worked fine with either stock XL or Translator. I haven't had time to test anything apart from Arcadia itself on the UnoCart. So, obviously there is something going wrong, but I think the problem is more with the Mad Pascal runtime, or something in Arcadia's code. I will try and narrow it down tomorrow, but maybe @tebe knows what might be causing the problem. I was also wondering if one of the segments in the AUTORUN.SYS is loading somewhere it shouldn't, but I don't know which tool to use to analyze files/see the segments involved. Am attaching Arcadia.atr and arcadia_xmas.atr to this post if anyone else wants to see the problem with a stock XL/XE and a translator disk. arcadia.atr arcadia_xmas.atr

Hi, Just struggling with the formatting of this (my) post, but nevertheless... I can't remember the chapter and verse on this (I think Chapter 3 of the RP2040 datasheet), but if the GPIO pins on the Pico aren't matched to the address lines and data bus sequentially, it makes PIO programming much harder, or impossible. So, for example D0-D7 should be mapped to GPIO 0-7 (or GPIO 10-17, etc.), but whichever GPIO pin D0 is mapped to, the rest of the data lines should be mapped to the sequential pins after it. Same for A0-A12, they need to be mapped to GPIO 0-12, or GPIO 10-22, but it needs to be done sequentially. I'm hoping this is what @electrotrainshas actually done with the PCB, but I'd like to flag this is something to consider (sorry I can't be more specific with the doc reference)/could be an issue. Also, I'm interested in the pin mapping too (PM is fine).

Hi @amarok, Thanks for the detailed reply. I've downloaded your other programs, but I will have to leave testing until tomorrow at the earliest, though unfortunately, more likely the weekend. I did do a quick test with the atari800 emulator (version 4.1.0) under Debian 11, which ran without a hitch. I used: $ atari800 -atari -800-rev altirra arcadia.atr Which should start the emulator in 400/800 mode using the Altirra OS (the commit message was: "Update Altirra OS to version 3.11 included in Altirra-3.20-test4" from https://github.com/atari800/atari800/commit/1df92fe3002514c3dea21d1527931025620e7f96 - so not as recent as your test, but still fairly recent). It might be less of an issue in an emulator as the emulator may set the OS memory as Read-Only, so it might not behave the same as when it's loaded into RAM as a soft OS. I had a quick look on the Mad Pascal thread in the Programming 8-bit forum, but it's 33 pages long. Maybe @tebe can clear up the 400/800 v. XL/XE rules. I saw that you had included a DEFINE BASICOFF directive, but I would expect that if that code got executed on a 400/800, it should only mess up the settings for Joystick 3 or 4, if it did anything at all. I don't have any experience with Mad Pascal, so although it looks like a great development language, I'm just making educated guesses (if that). I don't think the UnoCart is emulated on Altirra, but I will see how much I can figure out. Probably this would be a great situation for an OS with WozMon built in!

Actually, Mad Pascal has a {$DEFINE ROMOFF} compiler directive, but I couldn't find that in a quick scan of the Arcadia sources, though it did use a {$DEFINE BASICOFF}, so I'm not that sure what's going on with the generated code. Arcadia Pascal code looks very clean!

I was curious about this, and dug into the Mad Pascal documentation. In the intro it says it uses 64K of primary memory, there doesn't seem to be a way/command line option to just build for a 48K memory map, so it's more a compiler thing. See: https://mads.atari8.info/doc/en/introduction/ None the less, it might be worth updating the Altirra OS to a newer version.

Hi @electrotrains, Get well soon! I think that with PIO you would be able to support 400/800s as I think it's down to timing issues - I believe it's described here: though 400/800's won't be able to run a soft OS (though you could burn a patched OS to an EPROM/multi-OS board, etc). I've read Chapter 3 on PIO in the RP2040 datasheet and it looks do-able, but not straight forward, and as I don't have a 400/800 or oscilloscope, it's probably too difficult for me to get working. There are also quite a few Youtube videos on the subject, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@rumbledethumps - though I'm not a hardware hacker so I found them a bit tricky to follow in places. Also, is the Altirra OS getting a bit long in the tooth, e.g. has a newer (more compatible?) version been released by @phaeron? Looking forward to the public release!

Hi @ascrnet, I tried loading Arcadia in my UnoCart, but I got a corrupted tape symbol/powerd by amarok, and then the title screen was all messed up, with a brownish colour scheme. I will try loading it via FujiNet-PC, but I have to do that tomorrow at the earliest. This was v1.2 download from the GitLab repo. I don't think Altirra emulates a UnoCart (I pretty much only use Linux, and haven't set up Altirra to run with Wine, though I have seen at least one very detailed howto posted). I might have a copy of VisiCalc somewhere, but I would have to dig it out, and I think there are a few different versions floating round. The Altirra OS is: "Altirra LLE OS used with permision from Avery Lee (phaeron at atariage)", according to https://github.com/robinhedwards/UnoCart Maybe @amarok can shed more light on the matter, I guess you could also try loading Arcadia in an emulator with the OS set to Altirra and see if that works.

Hi @ascrnet, OK, unlikely to be a translator issue, I had a quick look at the (Pascal) sources for Arcadia, but couldn't see anything obvious regarding writing to memory under the OS, though I have no idea what the Pascal run-time might get up to. I will try and test it with my UnoCart, to see if it doesn't work on that too (out of curiosity).

I think the disk images you are having problems with either use the RAM under the XL's OS, or maybe need a translator. The UnoCart uses a soft OS (I think @phaeron's Altirra OS) to handle calls to SIO for disk I/O, and the problem disks probably stomp all over it (I'm assuming the PicoCart uses the same approach as the UnoCart).

Nice project! You might want to consider buying the DB-9 connectors separately instead of cutting off the joystick cord, Mauser sell them for less than 40 eurocents each (over here), AliExpress is probably even cheaper.

Another way of looking at it is that he's managing his inventory so it doesn't get hoovered up by early birds or savvy shoppers:

Hi, The description for keys appears to be a bit mixed up, F-V change the bottom pieces colours. You could let the user choose the colours, and save them as an App Key for next time around, rather than using immutable colours. Not being able to change the background colour is a bit of a pain, maybe this is not the best approach, Antic mode 4 might be better?

Thanks @_The Doctor__ for the tip, @electrotrainsadvised removing the flaps, but I was thinking of just plastic electrical tape/masking tape, but I appreciate the comment. I tried setting up the 130XE - I opened it up, and found that I'd already removed 9 RAM chips (see first photo), but then I remembered you could use the SysCheck II to provide memory in place of the 8-bit's, so I thought I'd give that a go with the 130XE. Unfortunately, it will only boot to self test, and on checking the SysCheck docs, it seems it also over-rides cartridges, so I need to fix the memory properly. Even more unfortunately, I have misplaced the RAM chips (I started this project in 2018, and have moved country since then), so it's off to AliExpress to order some (hopefully) genuine chips. I'm assuming MN41256-12 should be OK?

For future reference: - pins S-A go at the front, pins 1-15 at the back (I had the breakout board in the wrong way around). See figure below:

Thanks very much! I just tested it a minute ago, and I get a black screen with my 800XL, so I think it's a no-go. I tested with the Assembler/Editor cartridge in the XL's cartridge port first (which worked), then in cartridge slot on the SysCheck II (which black screened). I actually have a 130XE, but I was part way through upgrading the RAM, and haven't finished that project off, so maybe this is the spur to get it working!

Hi, Does anyone (or paging @tf_hh) know if I can plug a cartridge into the SysCheck 2 cartridge port on an 800XL, and if so, should the front of the cartridge point up or down (relative to the attached photo)? I want to use the cartridge breakout board from @electrotrains, but the DuPont headers are flush against the flaps on the XL's cartridge port (see second photo), but should fit fine in a SysCheck 2, providing I put the board in the right way around. I appreciate I could replace the DuPonts with pin headers, but if I can plug it into my SysCheck 2 (without any Magic Blue Smoke), that would be a better solution. Any help would be appreciated!

The Table of Contents is in a Side Bar, it's not clickable directly in the document (at least, using Ocular under Linux).

Hi, Has this made its way onto a web site? I can't download the torrent as I block DHT and PeX, and it's not on pigwa.net, or any other sites that I know of?