cyco130

Long time not logging in here (but I do read stuff from time to time). This is Fatih, the original author. The first version was called AspeQt and it's still on SourceForge (0.1 was the first public release). And this is the original announcement post. That's the start of the lineage Obviously it was heavily inspired by everything that came before (Atari 810, AtariSIO, APE, and the original SIO2PC): I did learn a lot from their source code (not sure I've seen SIO2PC's source though) but my implementation was original, it wasn't based on Atari810. I can credit HiassofT for teaching me obscure Linux serial port programming tricks and candle for sending me his USB interface and helping me out supporting it (which enabled us to catch up with APE in terms of raw speed). And the community was extremely responsive and helpful in making it the best open source SIO2PC program at the time. I ended up having to stop working on it due to personal issues and Atari8Warez's volunteered to take over. Unfortunately he turned out to be not a pleasant person and he was banned from here. To my knowledge he didn't have major contributions. In any case, he was more a hardware guy and he was more interested in selling his hardware then writing code. In fact, I remember he tried to violate the terms of GPL to that end (he released a closed source version to go with his hardware). Then he wiped out the SourceForge repo and left. We had to restore it from our own personal copies if I remember correctly. So even if he did implement new features, they're probably gone now. Luckily others forked it to create RespeQt and took over from there (around 2015 or 2016). You can see a detailed picture from that point on in the commit history on GitHub. I'm proud and happy to see it's still the best open source solution after all these years That's all I can gather, hope this helps.

Believe it or not, I was looking for such an option just yesterday! Thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot! It works on real hardware for me (just booted and copied a few files around). Except shift+reset cold start. OS++ probably has something going on with the shift key on warm start. The stock version doesn't boot either until I release it.

Thanks for the great software! A few issues with the sources: The "atari++_1.73.tar.gz" file has two copies of "winmain.cpp" so there were some extraction problems. The newest ld65 requires the -o option to be given before the config file. So I had to manually change the makefile for the OS-Rom sources. I don't have the current directory in my search path (like most people?). So I also had to change checksum command to ./checksum Other than that, awesome as usual! Nevertheless here's a small wish list: I love the built-in DOS and the better mathpack in the OS. I flashed it to my Ultimate 1MB and it works pretty well on the real hardware. But a high speed SIO handler would be a great addition. I wonder if it's possible to patch it with hias's hisio patch. Hmm, let's try... It works well with aoss but built-in ALSA support would be awesome. EDIT: Nope. Hisio gives "incompatible OS". Rats!

Thanks FJC! I thought I've done enough searching in the forums but I couldn't come up with the magic words "vertical banding"

Thanks Rybags. Hmm, the lines are barely noticeable with composite output too. How much would it help if I try one of the SuperVideo type mods? And which one is the "state of the art" for PAL 800XLs currently?

Bump! Sorry to do that but does anyone have any suggestions about my issue in the previous post?

Thanks everyone! I don't know what the problem was but resetting the TV settings to factory defaults brought the color back. (Yes, the TV is from PAL land and I was using the composite output, not separate luma and chroma). By the way the XLF boards do have the chroma output connected (at least the one that I own does). That brings me to my second question: I made a cable that connects the Atari's monitor outputs to audio, composite and s-video (luma + chroma) inputs of my TV. The composite output is fine, it's a bit blurry but I think that's to be expected and I'm not too picky. S-video output seems to be sharper but I'm seeing these jiggly vertical lines with all my Ataris (including the ones with no chroma) as you can see in the attached photo. I've completely disconnected the RF box and later removed the C56 cap hoping for a quick and dirty fix but I didn't notice any improvement. Any ideas?

Hmm, I dug up an old PCI Tuner card and installed it in my computer. Color works as expected. Maybe it's a problem with my TV.

Hi everyone, I've got a PAL 800XL with the (AFAIK) newer XLF board. I can't get any color from the composite output with an LG flat screen. The cable itself that I made seems to work. I tried adjusting the color trim pot but it didn't help (except changing the pattern of the vertical lines I'm seeing). I can't try the RF output because I don't have a cable for it. I would appreciate any ideas on where I should start looking.

A very cool idea to make folder images came from drac030 last year. He e-mailed me about his Dos2Dos protocol, which is an Atari side driver for folder images that he uses for his Sio2Bsd program. Currently only a SDX driver is implemented but writing a Atari Dos/MyDos version seems straight forward. Check this info with Google Translate: http://atariki.krap....dex.php/DOS2DOS Wow! Cool I always wanted to see AspeQt run on Mac OS X. I expect some screen shots after the testing is done. All the major platforms are covered now and AspeQt is the most portable Sio2Pc clone. If someone adds BSD and BeOS support, it'll be unbeatable I think it's a good idea. Many XEX loading screens don't like high speed SIO. Current loader, if no one has changed it yet, uses big transfer chunks (around 1K IIRC) which makes it work very fast when it does work but I can see that it can be a problem with some hardware/software combinations.

Many thanks to atari8warez and others for the updates. I wanted to comment on some recently raised issues. Porting to Mac: AspeQt won't compile on a Mac yet. Someone needs to write a serial port backend for it. The Unix one should be a good start and most things except header file names and setSpeed ought to work. But setSpeed uses a Linux specific method to use non-standard serial port speeds. I would really like to see AspeQt run on a Mac natively. Folder images: Coming up with a folder imaging scheme that is both efficient and compatible with a wide range of DOSes is not an easy task. One needs to analyze sector access patterns of different DOSes, or rebuild everything from scratch when a write occurs. I gave up at the time because I didn't have SpartaDos X. But on the PC side one can use Qt's QFileSystemWatcher to update the imaged folder automatically. That would solve most problems as long is folder images are readonly. Just rebuild the image when the file system reports change. But I really can't comment on write support.

Hi, I want to apologize for my absence and unresponsiveness, which, it seems, will have to continue for a while due to personal stuff and to thank everybody contributing to AspeQt. Today I've granted admin rights to Peter and Ray for the sourceforge project. I've also tried the latest patches and I was pretty impressed (Except the uppercase file names; Linux is case-sensitive and I like CamelCasing my images, ha ha, feels good to criticize from the outside ) Even though hands on coding seems a little far fetched for now, I'll try my best to help with the internals (though I don't really remember that well how they were). I'm very pleased to see the project back from the grave! Regards, Fatih. PS: As with the folder images, it was just a quick hack, a different approach is necessary for more robust operation. Maybe drac030's Dos2Dos can be a good alternative to support. Without Atari-side awareness, anything I can think of is bound to fail in some circumstances.

Glad to hear That's to be expected. It's an experimental feature. Long NMIs in the loader screens and other incompatibilities makes it near impossible to load every conceivable executable in high speed. Even low speed loader has some problems with some files. Will be in the next release. Thanks for your comments!

That's probably because you have a newer Qt than the last AspeQt release. Just search the identically named DLLs in your Qt install folder and replace the older ones with them. If you encounter more than one version of the DLLs in the Qt installation, use the smaller ones, the larger ones are for debugging.