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Mazzspeed

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Posts posted by Mazzspeed

  1. Posted

    14 minutes ago, MrFSL said:

    Well... in terms of compatibility the same author of Sophia is the author of Antonia (Simius.) He also makes a device called IDE+ which is a PBI IDE interface (HDD) with RTC, SDX, HDD, etc, etc, etc.

     

    But there is no wrong answer here.

     

    And I believed this installation a bit cleaner, easier, and more able to be reversed with my skillsets:

     

    681912810_Screenshotat2021-01-1323-38-25.png.6c5901865ea37c3086311f39be376392.png

     

    Than what this would have been for me:

     

    2129361004_Screenshotat2021-01-1323-37-48.thumb.png.ec1e7280bc8c1be0ac2465b6eb024c28.png

     

     

    Well that's a valid point. If you're worried about soldering than the best solution is the one that's plug and play. The only real concern is compatibility issues due to the use of the W65C816 CPU

  3. Posted

    36 minutes ago, MrFSL said:

    So far I would say not many. I might get some improved IDE+ speeds in SDX but aside from that I have read only about the possibility of rare compatibility problems in 6502 mode.

    For what it's worth, I've been watching countless video's on the Ultimate 1MB and that's the device I'd be going for. It's got all the memory you're ever likely to need on an 8bit machine, it has a RTC and IMO built in SpartaDOS is a real selling point - Not to mention the Ultimate 1MB's compatibility with other devices like Side 2/3 and Sophia.

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    8 minutes ago, bob1200xl said:

    Welcome to The Atari Side!

     

    What part of the world are you in?

     

    Bob

     

    Hey Bob!

     

    Currently living Down Under in Australia, just got out of about three months of forced Coronavirus lockdown - Wasn't so bad when I had my retro machine's to play with and so many people to communicate with via BBS's. Thanks for the welcome.

  6. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    Just thought I'd create a quick post introducing myself.

     

    Possibly like many here I'm a 'middle aged' retro computing enthusiast that grew up in the 8bit era. Right now I mainly own Commodore machines, with my pristine C64 Breadbin taking pride of place with a 1541 Ultimate II+ connected to a 500GB hard drive for 1541 emulation (yes, I had it in the drawer and filled up my 16GB USB thumb drive so I thought why not), I have the 16MB REU enabled, I run a modified version of JiffyDOS 6.01, I have an SD2IEC that I use as a mass storage device with everything organized into separate partitions and directories, I use the emulated SID's on the 1541 Ultimate II+ as they're simply easier to configure (and TBH I can't notice any difference in sound quality).

     

    The machine connects to a 1084S via separate chroma and luma with a brand new flyback and HOT replaced by myself (I'm also right into electronics), while I was at it I replaced any suspect caps. I have a matching 1541, also in pristine condition and also running JiffyDOS - Although I hardly ever use floppies anymore. I also have a 1351 mouse for the odd GEOS session.

     

    I love connecting to BBS's via the Ethernet interface on the 1541 UII+, there's some great communities out there! One of the BBS's I frequent is crazy busy. I like games, but games are just one thing you can do with a computer - Even an 8bit one.

     

    I used to own an Atari 600XL in the 80s, it was brand new sealed in the box and I only ever turned it on once - My uncle used to work as a salesperson at an electronics retailer and when they couldn't sell it he gave it to me. Sadly (yes, shoot me), back then there wasn't much you could do on a 16KB 600XL so it literally lived under my bed until I moved out of my parents place and my Father threw it out...Brand new...In the box...

     

    [Sob]

     

    I hope to get another 600XL soon and upgrade the memory, fit an Ultimate 1MB and perhaps a Sophia 2 - But prices are crazy in this part of the world. I'm in no rush, I'll take my time and wait for the right A8 to appear...

     

    I love Flash Jazz Cat's video's, not only is he talented, but he's hilarious! I really enjoy his cussing and dry sense of humor.

     

    I'm in no way biased, I believe all 8bit machines have their pro's and con's and if I had my way I'd own them all! Sadly, with the price of retro hardware now I can't see that happening.

    • Like 4

  7. Posted

    1 hour ago, invisible kid said:

    Yeah, I think a lot of times in general(not atari800 specifically) when I just grab the master which is usually the latest sources, there will be a missing configure script. If there are no instructions or I feel like NRTFM I follow these, and no big deal if I don't like how things went I can just clean everything and try something else:

     

    if there is an autogen.sh run that
    ls autogen.sh
    ./autogen.sh

     

    If not do this:

    autoreconf


    If errors
    autoreconf -i

     

    Good tips!

     

    Cheers my Friend.

  8. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    16 minutes ago, MrFSL said:

    Um... 

     

    Here you are:

    https://github.com/atari800/atari800/blob/master/DOC/INSTALL

     

    Start with line 12 this time.

     

    I usually don't like answers that say read the manual but... seriously, read the manual.

    I was planning on reading the manual in relation to the ROMs, I missed the part regarding the ./configure script in the docs where the script isn't present as I was just expecting it to be there. As soon as I've finished my work for the day I'll read the manual in relation to the ROMs.

     

    It was no more than a comment in passing.

  9. Posted

    1 hour ago, zzip said:

    I just downloaded it, and I see a configure script (see below)  Did you download atari800-4.2.0-src.tgz or something else?

      

    /atari800-4.2.0$ ls
COPYING      Makefile.in  act            config.guess  configure.ac  depcomp     missing
DOC          README.TXT   atari800.spec  config.sub    data          install-sh  src
Makefile.am  aclocal.m4   compile        configure     debian        m4          util

     

    Hell, now I don't know what I downloaded, I just know it was off the GitHub page.

     

    Having said that, I updated autoconf, ran autogen.sh, then ran ./configure > make > make install and I believe the software is installed as when I enter atari800 in a terminal window the window goes blank - So something is running. If I hit ctrl+c I get a number of errors in the window, it looks like the emulator is looking for ROM's.

     

    I'll see if I can find the needed ROMS, place them where needed and see if I can get this running...

  10. Posted

    4 hours ago, zzip said:

    I believe atari800 uses a configure script.   It's usually a straightforward compilation for me.

     

    There's a chance if you downloaded the latest code out of git rather than downloading the 4.2.0.tar.gz that you will have to generate a configure script with autoconf,  but if you downloaded the the 4.2.0.tar.gz, it should be there.

    I downloaded the tarball, there wasn't a configure script there. I'll try autoconf.

  12. Posted

    5 hours ago, tschak909 said:

    Oh well, I guess this turned into an Atari/Commodore piss-fight, like it always does...

     

    I love you guys, but damn it, sometimes you guys really miss when there is an ability to inject new things into a conversation by people with knowledge OUTSIDE of the Atari/Amiga sphere.

     

    -Thom

    I don't see any piss fight. I actually thought discussion was quite civil and engaging.

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    Also, the BIOS of the original IBM PC was no more than a boot loader and associated libraries. I'm not too sure about the ST, but the Amiga's Kickstart was essentially the same thing. Furthermore, big box Amiga's had expansion buses and Zorro slots (even ISA and PCI slots in some instances) just like the PC.

     

    The PC won by virtue of its open archatecture and the fact that Commodore and Atari's management simply made poor decisions. If it wasn't for the clones, chances are the PC would have died out like everything else.

  14. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    6 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

     

    If they could have made 128K and the 80-column RGB video available to C64 mode, a C128 with Geos would have been an absolute killer.

    Wheels came along later and there was a GEOS 128 build. Honestly? I always preferred the CLI, especially with JiffyDOS. Having said that, I sort of moved away from tech in the early 90s - I was too busy partying. ;)

     

    EDIT: Try repairing a 128...Oh my Gawd it's complicated compared to the A8 and C64 designs.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    Just now, _The Doctor__ said:

    I kind of liked what they did with the 128... but since everyone already had hundreds of titles laying about from their 64, it was rare to see the 128 mode used to any great affect... in that respect I felt sad for the 128... which imho was indeed a good step above the c64

    I honestly don't think there was a lot of 128 native software released. I was always intrigued by the Z80 compatibility, but the floppy drive issues and the need for 'Commodore' CP/M sort of stuffed that up. Having said that, I do like the 128 and love 'native' 80 columns.

  16. Posted

    40 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

    Really?  In 1981, the 5150 had a 4mhz 8088, 8-bit ISA expansions, and a base architecture that abstracted the CPU and memory behind a BIOS, making them modular and upgradeable.  Atari and Commodore 8-bits were running at half that.  Then, the PC AT 286 was released in 1984, a year ahead of the Amiga 1000 and Atari 520ST.  It was a 16-bit system that ran at 8mhz and was 99.9% backward compatible at the instruction set.  IBM had proven that their architecture would be extensible and upgradable for multiple generations.  Meanwhile, Atari and Commodore had left their 8-bit generations behind to go 16-bit and were staring down the barrel of having to develop yet another generation of proprietary systems.  You can argue that their custom copper drove a more impressive user experience, but they could not have possibly believed at that point that they could win an arms race against IBM and Intel.  They had already lost.

     

    Once the 386 came out and the combination of VGA and SoundBlaster were ubiquitous, anyone fool enough not to have seen the writing on the wall was laying beneath the bricks that once held it up.

    It's all about clock cycles needed to perform an instruction, it's why the Z80 at 3mhz wasn't necessarily faster than a 6502 at 1 - 1.7mhz. Really, the PC was a remarkably simple design with little innovation, probably a mild step up from the S100 bus design - It was the tech involved in the cards that made it powerful in the end, and that was well after CGA, CGA sucked. Also, don't forget, many 8 bit machines were hobbyist machines and not really 'locked down' designs, the Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Manual came with a complete schematic of the machine.

     

    24 minutes ago, drac030 said:

    It is not always that simple: in 8088 CALL/RET is 43 clock cycles, JSR/RTS on 6502 only 12. So still the 6502 could probably outperform 8088 in many cases (and be outperformed in others). But yes, the modular and abstracted architecture was certainly superior, although it was already present in CP/M in 70s.

    My dream machine is an IMSAI 8080...Talk about $$.

     

    23 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    Amiga was it's own company, Atari loaned them half a million dollars and Loraine was going to be the 1850XLD, and a game console based on it as well... Everything about the Loraines design built apon the lessons of the venerable 800 right down to the copper lists, since it was basically the former Atari engineers making the machine that all stands to reason.  Tramiel was busy taking all of the commodore engineers over to Atari and Commodore didn't have a machine or engineers, Tramiel wasn't paying any of it no mind at all and went about things in the same way that was killing commodore before he left commodore... what Commodore did was repay the loan for Amiga, then pulled shenanigans until they could subsequently buy the licensing and/or finally the Amiga rights (outright) while Tramiel was too busy with his old commodore pals he was bringing over to Atari leaving them to play catch up and make as inexpensive a 16 bit machine as possible using off the shelf chips for the most part with a little glue to hold it all together. The ST(sam tramiel)/Sixteen Thirty Two was their answer... but that wasn't exactly a great machine, it got better with the ST (E)nhanced (better pallete blitting etc.) But only started to be Atari like in any sense with the TT030 and Falcon030 machines..

      The Amiga is as Atari as any successor machine ever could be... The original ST was more like a C64/128 progression in many respects...

    Because the same engineers built the Amiga. It's all about the engineers, not Atari themselves. Commodore had some great engineers after Tramiel left, designing the C128 and the ill fated C65 - Which should have been the replacement for the C64 like the IIGS should have been the replacement for the IIe as opposed to the Macintosh.

     

    The IIGS was, IMO, vastly better than the locked down Macintosh and the 128 wasn't really a C64 successor - Everyone I know that owned a C128 used it in C64 mode, literally 'everyone'.

  17. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    42 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

    Agreed, but DOOM came out in 1993.  By then, both Atari and Commodore had not only failed to predict the market, but had willfully ignored what was right in front of them through several industry milestones.

     

    The time for Atari and Commodore to see the oncoming train was in 1981, when IBM released the 5150.  The Atari 800 and Commodore 64 machines were still pretty strong, but both companies had a decision to make about how to move to 16-bits.  Each could either make another closed architecture with bespoke co-processor hardware onboard and another proprietary expansion architecture or adopt IBMs open standard and use its 8-bit ISA slots to implement their copper.  I can almost forgive them for having the balls to go proprietary at that time, but by 1984 the market for PC clones and compliant ISA adapters was growing at a geometric rate.  They should have seen that between IBM, Intel, and third-party hardware developers, the PC architecture had excellent compiler support, a long roadmap being delivered by two of the biggest companies on the planet, and a growing pool of hardware providers that could empower the ISA bus to do what the PBI bus and User Ports had largely failed to.  This was the las chance for both companies to realize that the track their trains were on was going to run out, and transfer at that last station.  They didn't.  And it did.

    The irony is, at the time of the IBM PC's release the Atari and Commodore 8 bit machines were actually technically superior.

  18. Posted

    3 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

    My summary post-mortem of Atari and Commodore is that they lacked the capital, leadership, and research prowess to predict the transition of the desktop computer from novelty to ubiquity and commit to a sufficiently forward-looking development practice.  They got caught in the "no-man's-land" of  taking themselves too seriously while not taking their industry seriously enough.  And while they were busy doing parlor tricks with their onboard copper, boring old IBM created the same modular and extensible hardware architecture that we STILL use today.  It was truly "The Tortoise and the Hare".  Atari and Commodore might have taken an early lead off the starting line, but didn't have enough juice in them to finish the race.  I wish they would would have transitioned their custom co-processor tech onto ISA cards and moved to branded PC's that booted into BASIC.  An Atari 5150 with a Pokey/Antic/SIO card would have been freaking awesome.

    It's easy to look back in hindsight and state what went wrong. The fact is that at the time computers were niche devices, few people really knew what to do with them in a mainstream consumerized sense beyond BASIC and games, meaning the tech companies that made them certainly struggled in relation to marketing. The only reason the IBM PC evolved and became the platform of choice was due to the fact that with the exception of the BIOS the IBM PC was open architecture, once the BIOS was clean room reverse engineered the open platform naturally became the platform of choice.

     

    Then we have DOOM. Once DOOM was released m68k's days as the dominant gaming platform were numbered, all it took was Gabe Newell to push for Windows as a gaming platform via D3D and Intel/3dfx had their market.

  19. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    2 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    It was the good 'ole Tramiels that screwed Atari and Commodore. Turning everything to junk at both companies, the Amiga would have done much better at either company if they and their pals would have all left much much sooner.

    If the trammy train went away, the two companies could have considered a merger... The Amiga most certainly was the next Atari in most ways that mattered. The guts are screaming next generation of Atari 8 bit architecture and chipsets and you think all they did was provide a loan? You might consider watching some of the video and documents of the folks involved and you might also consider that tramiel scrapped the Atari version of what was later named the Amiga. It's an interesting read for any retro enthusiast. It's kind of common knowledge and settled down quite a while ago.

    Both companies were using custom chipsets offloading graphics and sound duties from their 6502 (based) CPU's, in fact it's quite obvious Commodore looked at the Atari A8 line and literally cloned it while improving on the graphics and sound capabilities to suit the new era of gaming heading into the 80s - Even the color scheme of the CLI was similar. If the Amiga was in any way related to Atari, it was a third cousin, as any computing device not being marketed mainly for business use was running custom graphics and sound chipsets as opposed to tying up the CPU to perform such tasks and the Motorola 68k processor was at that time the CPU of choice regarding such devices.

     

    At the time, the engineers were working for Amiga Inc. and not Atari, let's consider the merits of the engineers themselves for their foresight that most likely lead to the dedicated GPU's and sound chipsets we utilize today. It wasn't Jack Tramel that destroyed Commodore, Jack Tramel was the one that made Commodore a billion dollar company, it was Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali that stripped Commodore clean and ran the company into the ground.

     

    Perhaps if Jack had have secured a bid for Amiga Inc the world would be better today as he was the one man of the era besides Steve Jobs that could make it happen, but sadly history states this didn't happen. Furthermore it wouldn't have made any difference as for better or worse the world moved on to DOOM and accelerated 3D graphics chipsets, leaving the graphics chipsets fitted to the ST and the A1200 in the dust. Bear in mind Commodore had their own chip fab to make the custom chipset for the Amiga, possibly why Commodore were able to secure the company.

  20. Posted · Edited by Mazzspeed

    11 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    Commodore had no Idea what to do with the Amiga because it was an Atari in every aspect :), they bought more than they could chew off, luckily many realized this and as third party folks swooped in to fill the voids. They managed to hire people with a clue eventually

    I think this is a bit steep.

     

    I admit, Commodore's management wasn't the best, but neither was Atari's - Hence the reason Jay Miner and a handful of others left Atari to become Hi Toro, later to become Amiga Inc. and develop the Amiga chipset. Atari did not have any input in relation to the chipset, Atari provided Amiga Inc. with the bridging loan they needed to finish development.

     

    Even considering the marketing issues on behalf of both Commodore and Atari in the early days of personal computing (bearing in mind that hindsight is a distortion considering the reality of the time), I think Commodore had enough experience with multimedia computing and custom chipsets to market the Amiga as well as anyone else 'at the time' - Commodore's biggest problem was the greed of their CEO.

     

    Even Xerox had no idea how to market the Sparc or the even better Star, it took Steve Jobs to have the vision to push the idea of a GUI into the future, and even then AmigaOS was the better operating system with preemptive multitasking, something Apple didn't get until OSX from memory. The day's of Atari vs Commodore vs Apple vs Tandy and whomever else are over, we're all retro enthusiasts, let's not let our own biases turn every thread into a flame war.

     

    I am not an Atari, Commodore, Tandy or Apple enthusiast - I am a retro computing enthusiast and respect a time when such devices had soul. I love all 8bit machines, as well as some 16/32 bit machines.

    • Like 3
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