skeezix

Order is in, woot!

Nice read; pretty interesting .. if you had free time (hahaha!), make all those application names links to where they might be found I suppose mostly what we'd all expect, or perhaps you accomplished more real world stuff than I would have expected; but yeah, the browser is where it really hurts I think jeff Its a tough niche -- for demos and games, you have emus or old hardware; for newer activities you have Unix or linux (ie: mint etc is aspiring to be them, so you coudl cut to the case.) The question is what modern real world computing tasks can you do (besides running gcc which is everywhere) ... and for those tasks, you could probably use ARanyM for the Atari feel over using somethign native on a modern machine; so its pretty hard core to do real world computation on a TOS machine. But we love you for it

Wrong place for a flamewar Linux (and simialrly, the BSDs etc) cmoe with all that stuff for your convenience; not much of that is mandatory install. You an install a unix or linux system into a couple hundred megabytes (yes MB). The rest is just stuff they might as well throw on the DVD since many people will want it. Bloatware is when all of the kruft is required. Anyway... jeff

Well, I'll just mention games and "retro" (I'm assuming you mean retro as in playing with vintage stuff from our misbegotten youths?) to get them out of the way. I'd much rather play ST games on original hardware than on emulators - it just feels better. I use my Mega ST4 to run my BBS - its a champ at that job. (I use the CDRW from this setup to backup a lot of my software). I use my Mega STe for those cool STe games and Euro-style demos. My STacy is for portable games (I know, but its a different aspect of ST gaming since its...well...portable). I'm also learning some GFA Basic on it. My highly modded Falcon is for lots of stuff, CD burning, audio CDs, games, super cool demos (especially the 060 ones!), better 'Net stuff, etc,... There are various apps I routinely use on all of them - from word processors, text editors and PageStream, to disk archivers, CD software, frivalous stuff and more. AND there are probably lots of other things I'm forgetting to mention! See, most of that has to stay on older machines, so you can't justify the firebee for that stuff (Demos, etc) Do you really still use Pagestream and random word procs and such? I know you're a sick sick man, but still Given OpenOffice etc I just find it hard to come up with good reasons to nab a FireBee .. but I want one pretty damn bad anyway I keep meaning to get a full mint setup and gcc etc going again and start porting some of my modern code back to TOS and such, just for a lark; hell, FireBee should run some of my games really nicely! (I have done a lot for mobiles/PDAs/etc for the last 10 years .. stuff like that would run on a moderately fast TOS machine okay..) Hoping to get an ultrasatan and get my STacy onto some newer stuff, and see about doing some more mods and repairs to my ST Book, maybe I can get into the TOS routine again, for more than just gaming jeff

Colour on a STacy would be simply amazing, since the STacy is essentially a full ST; using a STacy and jacking in a colour monitor just seems wrong jeff

hey guys, I'm tempted to get in on the Firebee pre-order, but its a pricey beast; I'm wondering what sorts of modern day to day things you do on your TOS machines? (ST, TT, Falcon, whatever.) What sort of thigns might you want to do on a Firebee? (Besides my tempted use of leaving one around as a shell server akin to a typical unix shell Webserver on TOS for the win! What sort of awesome things do you do on your TOS machines besides running games and retro? jeff

This is actually for a laptop, without touchscreen; only mentioned PDAs for reference. You think a LED could project light evenly across a surface? I should think it would be very .. bright one side, not at the other, and 'pooly' nearest the LED. But interesting idea.. maybe if the LED is along a thin piece of plastic/glass, it'd carry more evenly.. jeff

hey guys -- Frontlight technology was pretty common not that long ago (on PDAs for instance), and now is pretty much totally dead I think. The concept was often just adding some 'stage lights' at the top or bottom of the LCD panel, or using a frontlight panel that would just sit in front of the LCD panel (and behind any touchscreen.) I think, hardware is less my thing It woudl be pretty awesome to add a frontlight to an old LCD system that has just a unlit LCD .. ie: The LCD is useful in high ambient light situations only. Adding frontlight coudl make it awesome. Harder to get a frontlight that size perhaps, but more to point .. I know nothign about FL wire-ups, and it seems FL are hard to come by these days. Anyone know _anything_ about this sort of tech? Would it be even possible to bolt-on a FL to an old system? jeff

is MagiC still around? Can't seem to find any live links for it .. Can it handle normal singletasking TOS/GEM apps, or just apps tuned for MagiC? Shareware or now freeware? jeff

hey DL I've been tracking down arcade and Atari gear a long long time. (I actually used to work for a computer store as a kid, as their Atari salesman; I worked that connection like hell at the time .. got some rare oddities I'm sure Thanks for the links, will check out a few for sure; getting the ST/STacy/etc onto the network would rule, of course (Which leads into a topic I opened on A-F .. what 'current' OS/desktop/kernel options are most feasible .. I lost track of it all over the years, with Thing, Jinnee, MagiC, MiNT vs MultiTOS, etc etc .. so many things are old and dead, versus the current and usable. When it comes to modenr driver support, and support of the widest set of apps, its impenetrable to find the right info http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=20253&p=177591 Cart based networking would be great, no mods needed! Switching the hdd to CF has been on my mind lately; also for the STBook (where I ended up getting a 80GB laptop IDE drive working, but with only a fraction of the space available.) (The trick with the STB is it has no floppy or other communicaton method really, and the serial/parallel options stink. I'm tempted to write a USB->serial file transfer thing for it, but I'm already committed to dozens of projects) Adding CF to the STacy would be sweet, make transfer a lot of a lot easier (especially if its dual slot, so one can be ejected while the machine is live?) Will look into it. Is it externally visible? (ie: In the STB, my mods are internal .. I can open/close it fast these days, but really.. its fragile and best avoided. I need to cut a slot in the case in the battery compartment one of these days.....) (opefully MiNT has ssh support somewhere .. scp to/from an ST would make my heart happy) -- You using a browser on there? IRC client? Any tips to good apps that way? Really, a good list of modern-ish apps.. theres got to be one; over th eyears I keep running into the problem of this app only works with this environment, or this verison of an environment; really painful -- Many thanks for the tips, I'll get to digging! (and yes, I know, my BBS is neglected, I'm too overcommitted to things jeff

hey guys, been awhile since I've posted here (and so glad to see A-F back up as well, woot!) Hoping you can help me out with some fun ideas! I've spent way too much time being productive, help me waste time well! Random babble/preamble: I've spent far too much time on other projects the last few years so not had too much time for ST related hacking. (Some of you may recall I wrote an ST emu, a 3/4 of a Time Bandits remake that I am thinking of finishing, maintain many ST emu ports to many handheld devices, and still keep up an 'museum' version of my old BBS, among other crazy hacks.) If you used an ST emu on Palm, GP32, GP2x, Pandora you've probably seen my hand I've repaired a ST Book but find its mostly just an awesome piece to have, but not something you use too much -- the monitors on them go with age, so its not really great to use, and is a fragile beast; I've got a TT030 that I need to play with more and see what I can do on it nowadays, but it takes up a lot of space. So I'm thinking of working on the STacy some more I'd like to score a Falcon, but just seems like its going to hit me for $1000, so hard to budget.. My STacy 4 is pretty stock and in mint condition - I break it out for Empire and text adventures on occasion (I'm an arcade machine collector too .. I prefer 'the real thing' to emu versions when I can; odd stance given how many emulators I've hacked on over the decades ); without getting into real wiring changes, what sort of little upgrades can I do with it? I've spent a huge amount of time with retro-ST (doing the emu projects and whatnot) and done some hacking with ARanyM (ported it to the Open Pandora device that I've spent the last year or to fo spare time hacking on), but I'm not really on top of MagiC or MiNT or Easy etc .. generally had pretty poor luck whenever I've tried to get into them. - Ethernet (or better yet, Wifi 802.11b/g?) an option for a STacy expansion cart or something? - Converting the drive to SD would be interesting, but probably a pit; doing it on the TT or Falcon is a piece of cake I imagine, given the IDE interfaces - OS -- what do people run on an ST, TT, Falcon, these days? Are folks still using original GEM/TOS, or is everyone using Mint or MagiC or something else? (sure, you eat up RAM, but RAM can be upped..) - need to look into ppera's cool hacks, such as his floppy emulator so can load floppy images right on an ST machine and use them .. may be a lot easier than writing out floppies anymore - what else? I've spent so much time hacking on emu code to make trick games and demos work, the retro stuff, that I'm not on top of the 'current' OSes, great apps and demos, and such. Any word on great stuff to try? (the coolest project ever would be to put a nice new LCD onto an ST Book, and hook up an SD instead of floopy interface, but so few ST Books around I doubt it'll happen, and so few remember anythign about how the STB even works jeff

I think The Grove is the longest running Atari ST telnet bbs (no real evidence, perhaps the Wayback MAchine/Archive.org can help.. I searched for awhile and found none, which is what inspired me to make the telnet version I did. Few were into ST emulation other than games, so I had to write something from scratch. I wasn't as smart as Dark Lord who figured out a hardware solution , though the BBS itself went offline about 1994 until what, 200x when I put up the telnet version (much stripped down, as I didn't think people would actually zmodem over telnet, nor actually want the stuff there when I could hsot it on a website.) (For awhile I did host a ST "BBS software" and later "application software" repository online, since almost everywhere else focuses on games.. but there were so few hits (only bots for months on end) I took that stuff down. doctorclu .. if you wanted to do anything with my BBS, you could, but I (like most sysops) am at a bit of a loss for what to make draws of it. (It is tempting to set up a Space Empire network again, say, though.) For me, as a chronic producer (I dev pretty much constantly, rarely sitting back to enjoy anything am pretty busy, but if you wanted to take the reins, fine by me I'm trying to learn how to settle down, now that my kid ahs beaten the productivity out of me (bless her soul jeff

Yep, I remember you.. the memory goes deep for fellow geeks I recall you were using some crazy set of scripts instead of an actuall BBS s/w, on a TT030, or somesuch? Cool that you're running Express. (I ran it back in the day so its close to my hear, but I was also a support BBS for Canada for it, and after having hacked on the code.. *swoon*) Its been a few years so no idea what I sent you.. if it was my hacked up and recompiled one, or one of the originals, etc. You still using that little hardware box (I forget its ID, I watched ebay for a year or two for it but decided to take a pass) to do the telnet/serial mapping? I suppose thats not the issue if you don't ge the problem now, but did with some version. (I _do_ remember a problem with characters coming in at certain point.. though I don't recall if it was a reslut of a hack, or something I had to fix, etc. Sorry.. I was smart once, but since we had a baby two years ago and the sleep dep struck, my memory is no good jeff

hey, Sorry guys I don't check into AA much the last couple years. Too many projects (currently working on the Open Pandora handheld OS, woowoo..) The Grove's "lack of y2k compliance" is pretty awesome IMHO; I built a TOS emu so I coudl run the BBS on one of my boxes, and hacked the BBS Express binary a tad to run in the emu. (It does some goofy OS tricks and timer loops that screwed up my not-so-accurate emulation).. but got things running. Later I got ahold of the BBS Express current author (a fine lad) who let me have a snapshot of the source, so I could fix the issues I had and rebuild it proper, without hacks, so it runs pretty nicely in my emu. I did briefly entertain the idea of trying to make it handheld multiple telnet users at once at a basic level, and fixing y2k issues.. but figured it best left alone. In the time to fix those issues, I could rewrite the whole BBS several times over as a perl script (no joke The single user limit was always an annoyance imho, with the telnet nature of things; if each person uses the sysyem for 10 or 20 mins a day (say, if were popular again), you're necessarily limited ot how many people could use the system (just like dial congestion back in the day, but worse since the 'net makes things so easy..) Anyway, the y2k issues in BBS Express are not show stoppers; theres a lot of date math which is then added to number characters, and thus goes higher than it was expected to and turns into things like 2009 being "20:9" or "09" being ":9" .. but its readable 'enough', and doesn't seem to break much. The 'scan for new' generally works, but can be weird, etc. Gives it charm, no? Anyway, for BBS chatter.. feel free to ping me here so it emails me to pay attention; too many projects at once right now. ASCII forever. jeff

Someone fired over a few emails to me at A-F; my backups of floppies are offline right now (drive blew up), but I hopefulyl will get time to bring the backups back online in a few days. New baby around the house, so my time is limited and my brain shot But bug me in a few days.. I know back int he day I did have the source and had hacked around a bit on it. Perhaps the 'compacted disk' groups have archived it? jeff

I've got a TT030 (I forget the specs). Toronto Ontario Canada (Among piles of other cool stuff, naturally.) Anyone happen to need a TT030 monitor? I've got one, but need to free up space, so let me know! jeff

Just stumbled across this post via google .. how timely I acquired an Atari Pill cart a little while ago from a most-esteemed lad; I only just recently figured out what the heck it was I've got the cart, but I don't think I have the software for it. Google also locates stories about Pill sequal devices. Some questions o Where can I nab a copy of the software o Any walkthrough's? ie: How to dump a cart ROM using the Pill (so as to use the cart in an emu) ie: How to use a ROM file and load it into the Pill My Atari 8-bit DOS skills are limited jeff

That'd take your BBS down I guess the real question is.. does the Pascal used (Personal Pascal? I forget which it is) have the necessary hooks to talk to STing and do TCP/IP; if it does, we could be in bidniz. jeff

I thought about it a bit, and the EtherNEC costs a fair amount (I'd need the external one likely, so some $80USD or so). I do a lot of this sort of ad-hoc development (porting emus and games to GP32, PSP, Palm OS, Pocket PCs, etc) and I can't keep up with all the new gadgets coming out that I'm interested in. One community just pooled together and is buying me a new gadget (sequal to the GP32) so I can continue development there. (I have been through a lot of gadgets, but gotta tighten the belt these days a touch). So I think my shot at modding Express to talk direct to STing/etc for TCP is low since no way for me to test :/ (or wait, can the emulators like STeem support STing? That might make it doable!) If I need the hardware to test, perhaps folks can pool to help out buying the card? Or loan me one for awhile? I was pretty tempted there, but with my BBS modded to run in telnet via emulation already, its sort of .. too much extra cost for no gain for me, though being an ST nerd means I'll help out anyway I can afford jeff

Hey, check this out: http://www.quantum-link.org/ Specifically this link: http://www.jbrain.com/pub/xplatform/serial...er4j-2.0rc6.zip Thats a java based serial<->tcp proxy; I didn't run it, nor am I sure if its made specifrically for this Quantum Link application or not.. but it could be what you need.. a simple serial to TCP redirector. (Theres also a linux build) Thats essentially what I do in emulation. jeff

That modified Express isn't for telnet oper se; it just has a fwe fixes and changes that make it better for telnet, but it still doesn't natively do telnet in and of itself. Maybe I'll get an ST ethernet card and work on it, but time is always tight (I work some 50-80 hours a week The modded one I made just has no delays in writing out to serial.. so it doesn't care if your 2400bps or 19200bps, it writes at full speed.. which is good for telnet usually I'm running the BBS inside of an ST emulator I crafted, that maps serial to TCP/IP for telnet usage. If theres sufficient interest, perhaps I'll modify Express itself to work with TCP/IP directly, with STing, and then it'd be a snap. jeff

I've uploaded my hacked bbs express runtime here: http://shadow.skeleton.org/~skeezix/misc/b...ress-hacked.zip Give it a shot and let me know if it works at all; I did most of the mods to it years ago and never expected anyone to need them, so no idea what they are anymore Hopefully it works.. it at least isn't dangerous. (I've also got versions 1.70 and 1.98 kicking around if you need them) If you've got zip/lzh/arc etc of all those games.. could you email them over to [email protected]? Thanks mate! Maybe we can bring back the ST BBS scene jeff

That was I referred to earlier -- I've modified the BBS to have no delay between characters. (ie: If the BBS is talking to a 2400 bps modem, versus a 19200 modem, it delays between characters so as to not flood over the limit.. rather than depend on XON/XOFF or RTS/CTS.) Since mine is running via telnet, I hacked it to not have such a delay and just spew full tilt. I can zip up and send over the modded Express version if you like; I don't recall what else I did to it, but made it a little happier with y2k and some other minor things. If you've got any online BBS games, I'd love to have them for both my archive and my setup. ie: I'll post up all the files I've got soon, now that that machine is back in order. jeff

There. After much hacking and system modifying, I've got the bbs back up I think. (New host OS for the main server, needed to modify the heck out of things to support it.. things've changed over the years in unix-land..) Try telnet to shadow.skeleton.org and it should prompt you; login is 'bbs' with no password. It should send you right into the BBS. Let me know how it goes jeff

We had a pile of damage .. garage door opener, all our telephones (and the wirign in the walls), router, wireless, PCs .. everything hooked up to the phone lines (like ADSL.. argh!) was toast, along with some things on the power lines etc. My acrtual BBS went down sometime int the 90s (I was a 'support bbs' for BBS Express, not to mention developer of a bunch of junk), but I brought it up back around 2000 or 2001 online as the worlds only.. but its new menus and much more limited than my original BBS as the hard drive fried and most of my floppies have gone bad over the years.. so its mostly a museum and 'hang about', and I've been trying to collect BBS software online so it doesn't get forgotten. (Sent some over to Jason Scott of course If you've got _any_ BBS software for the ST, from games to utilities to BBS software itself, you want to send it over? I'll put my archive back online (just need to break it down into subdirectories again, since the lightning toasted the original ) and if you've got anything.. it'd be that much better. If you need any basic hacks done to BBS Express, let me know.. Rich kindly gave me a copy of the source, so I could modify it a little to be better for my telnet needs. My version doesn't have 'slow pauses' between characaters since no modem is involved.. it just spits out full speed, for instance. You're running on an actual modem, so you'd still need that, so maybe no need for changes for you Let me know if you've got any files (I could make you an ftp section and let you push over whatever you like, or somesuch) and I'll get my bbs back up in a bit and you can have anythign you see there if you need.. though doubt you need much from the looks of it jeff