Jeffrey Worley

Well, I solved it. After socketing every glue chip on the board, plus the mmu, I started on the ram. It was either u9 or u10, 4164. One of the chips is bad, and it occupied one of these two positions. So those two chips are socketed now, with the bad chip replaced from my stock. The machine works perfectly as a 64k 800xl again. What an interesting fault that was. Whoever mentioned a stuck bit is probably right. Anyone know why this machine has, from the factory, the trace cut on pin 2 on each dram and a 100ohm resistor substituted for it? ** TNM **

I went to Drac's website and there's no download for the Ant800xl.pol file referenced here in AtariAge. I need this code to run through my USB blaster to update a brand-new but only recently unboxed and installed Antonia. The Antonia is from the first run which will not recognize the Side2 cart. If you have a recent version of this Altera firmware, please link me to it. Thanks, Jeff

An update on the 512k ram boards for the Atari 800. I just got the 74F138 chips in today, got the capacitors the other day. All but the 138's and the ram chips are installed on the boards already. When the rams come in, which might be tomorrow but very likely Monday, they are in Orlando now, I will stick them in the boards and start testing. Cross your fingers everyone. I really want this to work the first try. ?

I've been a computer tech for a few years. ? In the early 90's I saw my first CPU with a Fan on top and I just burst out laughing. I wasn't mocking it, it just came as a surprise and my usual reaction in cases like that is laughter. I'd worked with computers for more than a decade by that time and not one even had a heat sink on it, much less a FAN. I think the processor that got the giggle was a 486dx50, maybe a dx266. Of course for ever and ever there have been various active cooling systems for supercomputers and the like, but on the bench? I was really taken aback. Anyway I thought I'd share.

OMFG I killed the board. I had to hook up my Microscope to fix a couple of traces I'd trashed with my desoldering iron. It's back up now, with a nice little bandaid of a jumper wire. ** TNM **

Now that I try, the socket header it uses is too close to the pins on the rom for me to get my iron onto the pins. I'm gonna bag it. Too much trouble. Unless the rom is really needed for someone. ** TNM **

Gimme a half an hour. I gotta let my desoldering iron heat up. The rom is not socketed. BRB ** TNM **

Says it isn't a happy. Initially, when you load the happy software it does, but when you do diags it barfs and says the drive is not a happy. ** TNM **

I've got a board in a 1050 that isn't a happy but acts like one, has a track buffer. The RPM utilities I have say it is going 800rpm while the disk is stationary. :-))) But I'd like to RPM the drive for real since it has been in storage. The thing is, it isn't an archiver, it isn't a Speedy, I don't think, and it isn't a Happy. What is it? On the Board, in teensy letters it says "ME1050F" and "(c) 1985 HCI" Anyone know what upgrade board this is and what utilities I might use to Unhappy it for a little so I can rpm it properly? Basically I'd like the utility disk that came with the mod. RSVP YHOSvt. ** TNM **

Ah Ha! Thanks guys. I DID lift the rearward legs of the ferrite cores and solder the uav output directly to the pads thus vacated. I'll put those legs back in, lift the ones nearer the uav and solder my wires to those lifted legs of the cores and see if I get improvement. It is pretty good as it is. Best, Jeff

I just got my burner today, and got to try it out. I failed with the 28c16 because 9 out of 10 chips I got were unprogrammable. Not my fault. One of them works always and the others fail always... When I ordered the burner I also ordered some Winbond W27e512-70 eeproms, because the 27e128's basically are unobtainable. I was thinking that I might manipulate them into acting as os roms for my XL. I read the Atari rom into the buffer with the burner set to 27512 and then wrote the resulting data into a 27512 rom. The rom works with no manipulation at all. Since I read the original rom as a 512, it seems it got the layout correct and I have a copy of my Atari rom running in my XL right now. It has been playing demos for the evening. This is good news for us! It means we don't have to use UV erasers and eproms for this, the 512k chips work! My burner setup is a TL866cs USB burner running under Linux in a virtual machine running windows 10 enterprise and the Minipro 6.85 software package. My virtual machine is KVM (qemu) managed by Virtmanager. Fun fun fun! I have adapters for various common flash and eeprom chips on the way. Wish me luck! ** TNM ** /s

It looks like out of my ten 28c16's I got one good one. You are right about it freaking the 800 out. The chip programs and verifies and the Atari boots, but it freaks Pokey out something fierce. Keyboard is wild, and sio is broken. The strange thing is that while trying this out and verifying that my rom was bad (the original), I tried the cart with no math rom installed at all. The machine works fine until you call on the mathpack, which is surprisingly infrequent. It took me a while to find something that wouldn't run, finally I put BasicXL on my cart and loaded that, thinking I'd do a ?sin(x) and test the floating point that way. BXL will bomb at the Ready prompt and not accept any input without the chip installed, so there's a test for you. If you install a good chip it works just fine and of course returns valid output for Sin(X). I just got my burner today. Woot! ** TNM **

Years ago when I ran Cheez Daddy's House of Funk, I had a MUX with a 30 foot (!), yes, it worked, cable connecting my three Ataris. For years afterwards I had the Mux os in my machines and really got used to being able to turn the video dma (screen disable) off and on with the key combination shift+ctrl+8. I miss that and was looking for a copy of the rom and it is nowhere to be found. Is this out there somewhere I missed or is it still a closely held thing? If it is still proprietary, is there a rom that has this function that isn't? Best, Jeff

I occurs to me that I could restore the U1mb to operation, albeit without the updated firmware by pulling the flash rom, installing it in MY U1mb, which is brand new, flashing the chip with the OLD rom, and putting that back in the old U1mb. When the burners get here, I can flash the chips. Best, Jeff

I have a couple of 800 machines of early make which still have CTIA chips aboard. Is this chip rare these days? Back when, first thing we'd do on encountering one is swap it for a GTIA, toss it in the trash, and adjust the vpot for the new GTIA. I plan to do just this, but wonder if there is a need or want for these chips in the field of emulation, collection, or museums. Best, Jeff

The xl with the wierd 48k problem is no chip on the motherboard. I swapped every part on it, after socketizing them, with known-good parts. The only things I have not yet tested are: Basic Rom (:-)) and the ram itself. Maybe I have bad ram. Whodah thunk it could be that intuitive? I'm going to socketize the ram and put some known-good stuff in and see if that fixes the problem. Boy this machine is consuming sockets like crazy. This will make like 18 for this board. I had to modify some 16 pin sockets to make the 20 pinner and to make the 14 pinners. all machine sockets. They cut nicely with a pair of scissors if you are careful. The other Xl, the one which would not recognize the CF slot, is fixed. It had a bad(ish) 74ls08. I swapped it for the one from the "48k 800xl" and it is working nicely. Then I put that surplus genuine ICD Rambo 256k in with the gold-top ceramic Mitsubishi 256kx1 ram chips. Nice. Doing this gave me a spare 74ls158, which I needed to replace one I stole from an 800 ram card. So everyone is happy. ** TNM ** /s

Oh wow, THANK YOU!!!! I am getting the Xilinix programmer too, but it will be nice to get the machine up while I wait for it.

Err., What code do I flash this rom with then? Obviously not the rev I bricked it with? Can I d/l a version that will unbrick it? I suspect I'll have to use a burner to recode the flash rom. That's on the way, but where is firmware that will run on it? And how do I upgrade to the current JED? What is JED? It is not defined. Sorry to have all these questions. Best, Jeff

Yep. How did you guess? I'm encouraged that you know something! Thanks!

You CAN hear, on the 850 and P:R: connection, if you turn the volume up, the data scratching by. In unquiet mode, the beeps are over top of the data scratch. The data is still there and you can hear it. ** TNM **

I bricked a U1M yesterday. I flashed my own with the latest firmware and all went well. The older one had very old firmware and another flash chip brand. On Uflash load, the program said 'unidentified hardware'. I manually selected the U1M and flashed. The machine gives just a dark screen. I have a burner on order that ought to arrive any day now, and I went ahead and ordered the adapter for this chip, which will arrive quite a bit later, but I'd like to know what I did wrong... Why oh why? Is there any way to re-program this outside of pulling the flash rom and burning it the way I'm planning to? Any pitfalls I should look out for? Information is appreciated. Best, ** TNM **

IO noise and the Atari 8-bit are synonymous. I have listened for so long I can tell you what device is talking, what bitrate, more or less, and even, what KIND of data, if the bitrate is slow enough. Even 'quiet' date on the Atari has io noise, like rs232 data. You can TELL it is random stuff like machine code, or if it is all blank or the same blocks... It isn't just beeps, it's the actual data. I suspect that, Tempest-like, you could reconstruct the actual transmission from the io noise channel. ** TNM **

I gotta hand it to Jon for the new firmware for U1M. OMG it does EVERYTHING and is not nearly so obtrusive as the first version I saw on a friend's board. He must have gotten the first revision. This version is feature-packed and basically invisible unless you call on it, like a Black Box but WAY prettier and more functional. I LOVE THE IO NOISE! I LOVE IT!. I thought that was Bob Puff's genius to put that in the Black Box and I missed it with the Side2 cart, but now with U1M I've got hdd io noise. WOOOT! ** TNM **

I swapped the MMU for a known-good MMU and get the same behavior. I'm gonna try the ls138 next I guess. I have to socketized a mess of chips. Not a real problem as my desoldering iron is quick and I've done that like a million times. I'll let you know what the problem turns out to be. Another 800xl has a wierd problem. It works great but for the Side cart's hard disks. It displays some junk instead of the CF card information and won't actually display any directory entries. The side loader gives a 'no media' on refresh, which is actually pretty normal, but several consecutive refreshes does not clear the problem, which is NOT normal. In fact no number of refreshes will result in a mounted CF card and visible drives. This one is socketed so I gotta socketize some more chips. I don't have a stock of 375's ls14's ls08's, gotta get some I 'spose. **TNM **

It seems I have an xl that doesn't properly select the ram under the OS? It acts as though all is well and hangs when programs get to a certain point. An example is the SIDE2 cart's Spartados X gives an error 179 (memory contention) when trying to load the Side.sys driver at boot. This is exactly the error the 48k 800 gives ( not xl ). So I have an XL behaving the same way. I swapped PIA's and swapped cpu's with no change. I re-soldered the socket the PIA is in as it showed signs of having been worked on. There was once something soldered to pin six of the CPU, and there is a 104 capacitor soldered to one side of R97, with a wire leading to pin 5 (Luma) of the video port. Do I have a bad MMU or is one of the 74 series glue logic chips bad? Any leads would be appreciated. I'd hate to have to desolder the whole board chip by chip to find the fault. I'm thinking it isn't ram, most likely, probably something to do with bank selecting ram under the os? Thanks, jeff