StickJock

You could do this to preserve the flags: PHP LDA #$00 PLP

Nicely done!

I have to apologize. I cannot find either of my drive inserts. I know I had them when I unpacked my A8 stuff, but have no idea what happened to them. I looked in both of my 1050 boxes, as well as my 800 & 130XE boxes. I even looked in my boxes of floppies. I cannot find them. I'm a bit miffed at the whole situation. I kept track of them for 37 years, and now they seem to have vanished. Grrrr.

Looks like an early 800 for sale there @ $189.99. SN 949-4627

At least he didn't give the following (really bad) advice: Take a microfiber cloth and dip it in 99% alcohol, and then wrap it around a neodymium magnet. Use this to wipe the disk media. The magnet will draw the loose bits off of the disk surface into the microfiber cloth, keeping them from damaging your drive's read/write head or embedding themselves into the fabric liner of the disk jacket. This is analogous to having a magnetic drain plug on your car's oil pan to keep the metal bits from damaging your engine. Do this over the entire disk surface (turning the disk media inside the plastic jacket to expose more of the media). If the microfiber cloth wrapped around the magnet dries out, dip it back into the alcohol. If the microfiber cloth gets dirty, move the magnet to a clean patch and dip it back into the alcohol. Keep it damp as the alcohol lubricates as well as cleans, and prevents the cloth from scratching the disk media. This method is guaranteed to wipe your disk completely clean! ?

If you like, I can photocopy one with graph paper in the background. I should be able to scan it into a file as well.

10 FOR A=1 TO 100 20 PRINT "Yes, do it now" 30 NEXT A

Maybe make Lumbricus Terrestris James instead? ?

Good point. I recently got some new-old-stock A800 rubber feet, and 25% of them had hardened and were no longer grippy.

Maybe Brad at Best Electronics?

I lube everywhere that two things rub on each other. Basically, all of the moving parts. The rails are the obvious thing, but if you move the front lever, you will see several other places along the lever shaft that also rub on other pieces. Those won't do anything to quiet the drive during operation, but they will help to reduce wear when opening/closing the drive lever.

Not a screensaver, but I got a kick out of Rockford the ant impatiently tapping his foot when you stopped moving him for too long in Boulderdash.

About your CR/LF conversions: If you are converting EOL to CR/LF, you are incrementing the buffer length. What if the buffer length is $FFFF? This would increment to $0000. Going the other way, converting CR/LF by replacing the CR with a space - what if the line is at the max length for the device (say, 80 for an 80 column printer, or 40/80 for the display, and then instead of doing the CR, you do a space? This would cause the printer or screen to advance to the next line, and then you would do the new EOL which would then advance to the next line, which would end up "double spacing" the text. I don't have answers for you, but I wanted to make sure that you considered these corner cases.

First computer I used: Wang 2200T in 1979. I learned BASIC on it. First computer I owned: Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. I ordered the kit version for $99.99 out of a magazine. The assembled version was $149.99. I later got the 16K RAM Pack for it. I still remember the pain of having the RAM Pack come loose and losing all of my work. Second Computer I owned: Atari 800 in 1983. It took me a while to save up enough money to buy the 800 & a 1050 floppy drive. I used it with the 12" B&W TV I got for the ZX81 until I could buy a 17" color TV. For a long time, I kept the B&W TV stacked on top of the color TV. I programmed mostly in BASIC, but also learned 6502 assembly and did a lot in that as well. Third Computer I owned: Atari 130XE. I had both Ataris hooked up to the same TV using RF and could switch between them. Fourth Computer I owned: Poquet PC, an 8088 clamshell portable that ran on 2 AA batteries, monochrome LCD CGA display, had MSDOS 3.3 and used PCMCIA cards as "floppies". I got this one since I worked at the company in the early 90s working on the BIOS. I had never used x86 assembly before, and was not familiar with the PC BIOS, so I was "clean". When I started there, my manager had me first write a "Hello World" program in assembly using the microsoft assembler, then a TSR to do something simple. After that, I wrote a simple character-based Pac-Man game (I used the solid & hollow smiley characters for the ghosts, and the <V>^ characters (they alternated with another character to eat, maybe the line characters - |, or maybe an O, I don't remember?) and showed it to my manager. He said something like, "OK, you've got the hang of it. Now on to some real work." Fifth computer I owned: AMD 486 DX4 PC that I put together around '93 or '94. I didn't really do much with this one, and had packed away all of my Ataris by then. I used computers at work all day and wasn't interested in using them at home, and had developed some other hobbies by then. I still have the first 4 computers. I'm retired now, after a career programming almost entirely in assembly language starting with the 8088, 486 & Pentium, and then on various common (Microchip, Zilog, Cypress) and proprietary microcontrollers. It is not an exaggeration to say that my fw is in billions of devices. ? Now that I have some free time, I have dug back out my Ataris and am getting back into them. I do miss having a paycheck, though....

Hmm. Missing the ¡... Must pre-date XL OS....

How about Shift+Control up & down for the Page Up & Page Down? So Control+Up moves the cursor up, Shifted does Page Up. Similar for Control+Down moves cursor down, Shifted does Page Up.

That makes sense. I would think that if it were the ¡ then they would also have the ¿ to match it, so it maybe it is the İ character. But then again, why didn't they draw it like the regular I but shorter? Why is it missing the bars on the top & bottom of it?

Odd that they have the inverted exclamation point, but not the inverted question mark. ¿Why not?

Lotharek sells a combo device. https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=157 It is a 10502PC SIO2PC USB I've got one and have used it. I have the older rev1 version, so it didn't work as a 10502PC until I did the modification on it that the Rev2 has (needed power on the Ready line, IIRC, for the 1050 to work). I mainly used it in the SIO2PC USB mode to back up all of my floppies to ATRs. I did try it out eventually in the 10502PC mode, and copied a single disk with it using the KAFAR tool from his site, and it did work. I don't know if it would work plugged into a 1020. I suppose it would depend on what tool you are running on the PC. I still use it from time to time as a SIO2PC USB with RespeQt.

The one on the left looks like an upside-down exclamation point. ¡Wow!

Wise King Porit saves the universe by marrying his son Ragnar, Prince of the Eastern Realm to Zenov of the Automatons, thus creating a mighty alliance between man and machine. The end.

Yeah, I forgot about that, but when I first got my SIO2SD, it didn't work on my 800 either. I found the "fixed" version of the loader somewhere online. I don't remember at the moment what the difference was - I think the loader called some OS routine directly instead of through the vector, and as luck would have it, the routine changed addresses between the 800 OS and the XL/XE OS (and it was written for the newer OS). I let him know about it, so I am glad that he added the fixed version to his site to help other 400/800 users.

Maybe some ram went bad? I had a similar issue on an 800 with a bad ram chip.

Yes, it very much matters which way the diode is facing. Diodes let current flow in only one direction. You want to install it so that power can flow from the 800 to the SDMax. This will prevent power flowing from the USB/barrel power into the Atari. If you put it in the wrong way, it will 1) not power the SDMax from the Atari, and 2) will not protect the Atari from being backpowered.

The power switch is wired to either connect the SIO power or not. It does not switch off external power. You can still hurt yourself if you have it plugged into the Atari with a USB (or barrel power) plugged in and you move the switch to SIO. I suppose you could put a diode on the SIO +5 line so that you don't backfeed the external power into the SIO +5 pin?