1200XL M.U.L.E.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! I went to a local thrift store last Sunday and what did I happen to find? A wired Logitech F310 controller for $2.99 recommended by @WhataKowinkydink! It works very well with RetroArch.

No idea. There's a couple of them in the VR room. In fact, one of them is hooked up to a SC1224 monitor.

The ST hasn't been completely forgotten by Atari. You can't interact with it but there it is on the shelf.

Do a quick search on archive.org. Search for "atari magazine" or whatever. Plenty of results. Is anything missing? I agree with @jhd. Keep a personal copy on your personal machine. Download everything. Storage is cheap nowadays and well worth it.

I just downloaded Higan after stumbling onto a SNES ROM repository. What is a good controller that works well with it? I found a generic SNES clone on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Controller-Gamepad-Joystick-Gamestick-Raspberry/dp/B01MYUDDCV/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3GX839ZU7YDX9&keywords=snes%2Busb%2Bcontroller&qid=1665804619&qu=eyJxc2MiOiI0LjA4IiwicXNhIjoiMy40MCIsInFzcCI6IjMuMzMifQ%3D%3D&refinements=p_85%3A2470955011%2Cp_72%3A1248885011&rnid=1248883011&rps=1&s=videogames&sprefix=snes%2Busb%2Bcontrolle%2Caps%2C155&sr=1-3&th=1 Thanks for your help and guidance!

Hmmm ... open source. Ubuntu is open source and "free", right? Is it because there's a consortium guiding the development? Maybe we could make an Atari development consortium to set a standard for development and code management. Just thinking out loud. Shoot me down here.

I tried Duet but was unsuccessful. I ordered a set of MIDI cables from Amazon and used them to connect the two machines together. OUT->IN and IN->OUT. You get the idea. The driver loaded just fine on both my STe and Mega 4. I used drive letter P. When I double click on drive P on the STe I get an error that the drive is not responding. When I double click on drive P on the Mega 4 I get the same error and four bombs. Just for kicks, I swapped the cables just in case I got them plugged in wrong. Then I get the error that the drive is not responding on both machines. No bombs. Any clues as to why this isn't working?

😪

I put together a sort of triptych of my Mega 4 benchmark results . The picture is 2400x600 so it may appear small embedded in the post. Click on it to see it better. I benchmarked my Mega 4 without any acceleration or NVDI5 installed, followed by enabling hardware acceleration alone, and concluded with hardware acceleration plus NVDI5 loaded. I am still interested in getting a copy of the Atari SFP004 disk. Today I found another auction on eBay for this card. The pictures show the seller running GEMBench and some utilities. Their version of GEMBench seems to recognize the FPU card. Mine won't. The utilities seem to test the FPU card. I asked the seller if he could make a copy of the disk and archive it or post it somewhere. Hopefully they respond in the positive! The auction is here : eBay #155192152540 Some images showing the disk and maybe the utilities on the disk. I'd really like to run these utilities on my Mega 4. If my card is dead then I want to remove it. Does anyone have a copy of the disk? Thanks!

Forking off of my original topic, I would like to start a new topic dedicated to the HBS 640 accelerator board inside my Mega 4. Original topic : I mentioned that I found a PDF of the original manual on archive.org: Using Google Translate, I created an English version of the manual. The English manual may not be grammatically correct in some cases because the OCR generated German text embedded in the original PDF was not always properly recognized. Words were misspelled in some cases and letters were mixed up. Sometimes there was a stream of gibberish and I had to manually type the German text into Google Translate. I left the English as close to what Google Translate created as possible because I did not want to inadvertently insert my own bias or interpretation of the original text. Perhaps a native German speaker can compare the texts and suggest changes. A PDF and MS-Word version are attached to this post. HBS640EN.DOCX HBS640EN.PDF

I see user rankings or title like "Chopper Commander". Is this based on the number of posts? Likes? Just curious to know where they come from. Thanks!

@Tillek Oh, you're right! EmuTOS does support drive letters beyond P. I should try booting EmuTOS on both machines and play with Duet that way. Nice! Thanks for the tip and reminder here!

Is that a microphone stand on top of the 800 machine? Ouch! 😖

@Chri O. Thanks for the recommendation! I read the README on Atarimania and it look like it can do the trick. One problem on my end - I don't have any free drive letters! I created 14 partitions of 512MB on both machines. 😏 Now I must repartition my storage and leave drive P as my mapped drive. I ordered a set of MIDI cables from Amazon that should arrive this Friday. My drives should be repartitioned by then.

What is the best way to connect two ST machines together so they can share files between each other? I'm picturing a cross-over serial cable and a common application on both machines. Is the printer port bidirectional? Could that be used in this scenario? Thanks!

I used ICD Tools v6.5.5 to create multiple 512 MB partitions and the system seems to work on my accelerated Mega 4. No problems with loss of data. The only downside is the partitions are not both TOS and DOS compatible.

Is there anything similar to open-source Python or commercial Matlab available for ST machines? I am thinking of a system that has some file access, plotting, and math libraries available. Thanks!

A couple of interesting updates to my exploration of the performance gains achievable with the HBS 640! You may have noticed that I am running my Mega 4 with a monochrome display (i.e., VGA monitor). I have a color SC1224 monitor connected to my 1040 STE but it is very inconvenient to move the connection to my Mega 4. A few days ago, I decided to move the connection temporarily just to see the Mega 4 run in color. Cables were dangling every which way. It only had to last for a few minutes. I was shocked to hear what sounded like a stuck key! The sound was probably there the whole I have been playing with my Mega 4. Since my monochrome display doesn't have a built-in speaker, I would never have heard it. The first thought that jumped into my head was the Mega 4 is wasting precious clock cycles, interrupts, and CPU power to do this. Would this have any effect on the benchmark scores I am seeing? The next day I received an Eiffel kit from @snarkdluG (thank you, thank you!) and got it working with an IBM Model M keyboard + cheapie PS/2 mouse. The stuck key clicking sound was gone and the first thing I did was run GEM Bench. All the numbers are a bit higher than my previous run using my NetUSBee. (should link to a message above). I also reran Coremark and saw a jump compared to running it without a keyboard connected. I'm very happy with this jump in performance and the increased stability of the Eiffel. The NetUSBee is probably very stable by itself and maybe with other accelerators. It just doesn't seem to play well with my Mega and its accelerator. 🤷‍♂️ I haven't focused any attention in this thread on the FPU board inside my Mega 4 and it is probably time I do! Yesterday I found a seller on eBay who posted what looks like a complete Atari FPU kit. The kit seems to include a floppy disk! Here's a crop from a picture in their auction listing. The auction # is 115538365001. That disk looks pretty official. Does anyone have a copy of the contents? Is it anything useful like drivers or diagnostics? Thanks!

@Tillek No, I am not using any hard drive device on my Mega 4. I am using a floppy drive with EmuTOS as a PRG and I didn't load EmuTOS correctly. 😇 I should have copied the AUTO folder to the EmuTOS floppy. For some reason I thought the drivers from my initial boot into the German TOS would carry over. They don't. Loading EmuTOS as a PRG is like resetting the computer, isn't it? With the AUTO folder on the EmuTOS floppy, it all worked. Lesson learned. I've swapped ROMs before but am always hesitant to do so. Believe it or not, my biggest fear is losing a screw and fatiguing the plastic threads of the case. 😉 Thanks for the links, @Bee ! I may get those ROMs and call it good since I don't have an EPROM programmer. Plus, I don't like losing a chunk of RAM when loading TOS from a floppy.

@Tillek I tried testing my Mega 4 with the NetUSBee and a keyboard. Emphasis is placed on tried because I wasn't very successful. My Mega 4 crashed a lot and showing those beautiful TOS bombs. Sometimes the machine would reset and I couldn't count how many. Other times it would simply freeze and I could see the total. I saw anywhere from 2 to 8+ bombs. I would load bigger applications like the LDW spreadsheet program and try creating a dummy sheet with silly compounding calculations and also try simple things like customizing the desktop. One time the machine froze so hard that pressing the reset button did nothing. The screen was dark and the floppy drive wouldn't spin. I thought I must have overloaded the cartridge circuit with the NetUSBee + USB mouse and keyboard. The solution was to turn off the power supply and let the computer sit for a while. Some voltage needed to discharge, I suppose. No graphical glitches while it worked. It just didn't work for very long at any given time. Sorry for the poor results. I was hoping to give a happier report.

I did not notice any graphical glitches in my limited testing. My hope is to play around with this package more over the weekend. I'll let you know what I find. One of my concerns would be how well these drivers play on my specific Mega 4 with all the acceleration boards. I will be sure to experiment at 8 MHz.

Thanks for the reply, @masteries ! I will try SELTOS this weekend. The README file says the overall RAM will be decreased. It looks like both versions of TOS will be mapped inside the memory space. I wonder ... is there a ROM that does nothing but boot an OS (TOS, EMUTOS, etc) from a disk? That would be most efficient it seems. I did try EMUTOS on disk. It was kind of cool, kind of weird, kind of interesting! I thought it looked like it takes the best of TOS 1.4, 1.6, and 2.06 and puts it all together. My hope was to use it with my German Mega 4 and get English language OS displays. Unfortunately, it cleared out all the USB drivers and I couldn't control the machine anymore.

@Paul Westphal Very cool! Thanks for posting this! I noticed you have a Blitter in your system. Mine doesn't and that probably hurts my performance metric.

My Mega 4 machine has German TOS 1.04 installed. I'd rather not crack open the machine to swap out the German TOS for a US TOS. Would it be practical to load a US TOS from a solid-state hard drive device like UltraSatan or ACSI2STM? I thought I read somewhere a long time ago that TOS is copied from ROM to RAM upon bootup and it is possible to overwrite that area of RAM with another TOS. Is that correct? Or would I end up with two copies of TOS in RAM with one dormant and one active? I would rather not lose the memory space. Thanks!

I tried the USB4TOS drivers you mentioned above, and it mostly works! Here is the complete order of my drivers. Everything. TOS14FX92 POOLFX92 CACHE90 FOLDER400 JAR40 KEYB_INJ USB KEYBOARD MOUSE NETUSB000 This sequence boots >90% of the time. Sometimes I get two bombs when loading the USB driver. Other times the computer resets and reboots itself. Once or twice I think everything will load successfully but when I get to the desktop I see a string of bombs. After a successful boot I loaded STENO and tested the keys. I seem to have basic keyboard functionality! It seems pressing the Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause keys sometimes locks up my machine. I was surprised to see these drivers are almost identical to the NetUSBee drivers. I was posting some Coremark performance figures in another thread of mine where I ask about two add-on boards in my Mega 4. I ran the Coremark test again with all this stack of drivers and I see another performance hit. No drivers of any kind give a score of 6.07 and these drivers lower the score to 5.76. Thanks for referencing that USB package! I wish I knew what the other drivers in that package are for, like Blitz and all. Is there any documentation on this package? It's about 10:30pm here and I'm thinking this is a great way to end the day.