exxosuk

Thanks Ron Hopefully these will start to fund the next-gen booster series

These boosters are starting to appear in stock finally! STORE LINK. https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/#0059 Don't forget you will also need the Fast-ROM board such as this one.. STORE LINK. https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/#0048

There seems to be a few people dotted about who want them. So I will get a small batch done up. Probably a batch of 15 will be more than enough for what people want.

I use this one a lot, I convert Atari to PC formats with it mostly. Not tried the other way around though but assume it can be done. http://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/

I may do a PCB to aid in the install if there is enough demand.

Actually the DSP clock looks pretty good on my test falcon (just quickly wired it up). So could be you just need the clock patch doing.

I don't think there is any guides or image or anything of it being done. I did it on my Falcon some 20 years ago, but later took them out as it was part of nemesis upgrade. Though I found a image here.. http://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2008/post-6701-1209333214.jpg bottom right, looks like a track being cut.. I would cut that track and fix a small SMT resistor there. Something like 47R. The DMA IC (U36) has a black wire.. thats the clock to the DMA. some guides say solder a resistor to GND, but I didn't like that as it loaded the clock line to much. Though that goes back to the "clock patch" IC where that mod should be done aswell. I assume the clock patch solves the DMA clock issue.. I will have to try and scope it out next time I have my test Falcon connected up.. Really the clock patch should have some resistors in series with the clock lines, but I haven't ever seen that done yet. http://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/falcpatch/index.htm

The clock patch solves noise and glitches in the clocks which can cause things like the DSP to "skip" a clock cycle which causes audio artifacts. Mostly there should be a resistor in series with the DSP clock which might be enough to solve DSP audio problems without the patch. This is a pure hardware fault and has nothing to do with any software used.

Does the tracker use the DSP ? Does your Falcon have the clock patches done ?

If you don't want speed the use Monster.. The booster will work with the DualTOS board or maybe include it on the booster, not decided yet. Though my alt-ram isn't the same as monster's.. my alt-ram is "fast-ram" so the ram will also run at 32mhz with the CPU. This is for the STE.. I'm yet to solve 32mhz on the STFM.

I'm working on building up the 32MHz STE kits this week. There is another small STE kit in the pipeline somewhere.. I'm trying to get though all this stuff as fast as possible, though its hard going. Probably take 2 more days to assemble the SMT parts on the boosters, then I need to check joints, the I also test the PCB's to make sure what I have soldered works.. then theres programming the GALs.. testing the CPUs.. bagging up various parts.. So its pretty much a weeks worth of work right there. Next on my to do list is likely the RSO For the Falcon as I need to check some 060 CPUs so be a good time to try the RSO's out at the same time. So thats pretty much next week and possibly the week afters time taken up.. After thats done, likely need to look into my IDE prototype.. So if anyone can clone me about 30 times that be great!

I think keeping games in a floppy capable format is a must, why .. because new people who buy Atari computers will first look for games to play, floppy images, and copy them onto real floppy to play. They are not going to buy HxC or flux or anything at first. If they like the games and the machine, then likely first upgrade will be a hard drive. So they look for HD adapted games, and run from drive. So both floppy and hard drive adapted games are vert important IMHO. There is no use having images in some odd format if new people have no idea what they are or how to use them. Floppy is a solid technology, will HxC still be going in 20 years time ? Format capable for Steem and emulation is also good. Some people may try emulation for games before buy real hardware. In regards to copying originals, I think mostly with so many versions of games, so many bad cracks, or broken images, or not working games, people are imaging the originals to be on the safe side. then should all cracks for some game be bad. At least someone would have a original copy somewhere to start again. I did have a thread over on AF about "future of retro machines" if anyone is interested in that thread..http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=29027

If your looking for hard drives then ultrasatan or some other drives are "SD to ST" type. I was working on a ST drive myself, but its got put on hold as seems to be to many problems to solve easily. With various other storage solutions about, theres no real need to rush out another one right now Now my store is back up, I can catch up more on other items, theres around 15 projects awaiting attention.. so going to try and get some finished before xmas.

Finally after over a month of chaos, my store went live again last night powered without crappy paypal! https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/ There is a few small bugs to iron out, but several people have already made purchases and all the orders and payments have gone though fine. Though if anyone does see any errors on checkout then send me a email. Mostly the shipping address box doesn't work with anything but English letters, Will try and do a fix for that with some other small fixes in due time. If the store goes offline, it likely be that I am doing updates to the store scripts (I will post a message on the store saying its offline). I will try and keep downtime to a minimum, though its a bit of a bump moving away from paypal after 15 years! For those who have no idea whats going on, theres a huge thread over on AF about it all. http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=30287 Sorry to those who have been waiting for ages to order items. A huge epic lasting 3 weeks or so to sign up with another payment service, then I've had to rush out a new store framework, learn a new payment system and get the store back online in basically under 2 weeks! So time wise its been lightning fast the work I have done. Granted will be some bugs to iron out along the way, but rather than keep people waiting on longer, the store is live and about 95% working

In the beginning Rodolphe helped with the 68000 designs but later gave up due to some issues then started to work with someone else on a 020 VHDL based design. I am still working on the 68000 based design and still doing much debugging on that. Though with my time so limited even though it is only really a few days work to complete the STE V2 series booster, its time I don't have. The IDE prototype is designed and I have the PCB here, I posted some images on FB a couple weeks ago in fact. I've updated the design by PP, everyone uses that design, but I wanted to make it simpler and all in one GAL IC. Then the code would be a direct copy to the larger PLDs. The booster itself will be the same as the previous booster with exception to the IDE port and Fast-RAM expansion port. The Fast-Ram board has also been designed. The hold up with the whole project is because someone got my paypal account shut down and I am having to spend all my free time on getting my store back online. So no progress with the booster for over a month. When my store goes back online theres a lot of people wanting stuff, so likely I will run out of stock of items like the PSU's.. Then I will spend the next month building up more stock on those.. So I don't know when I will get time to work on the boosters. I also designed a RTC board and CTCM type board for the falcon and ST, But I just don't have time to test anymore designs, so been sending these projects out to people willing to test and debug them for me. There are also projects where I have the PCB's here and parts, from several months ago which I haven't had time to work on either. There seems to be a lot of people working on boosters lately, So I am not sure if its even worth continuing my booster work for much longer. Its a huge amount of work to design a new product, mostly people seem to be re-inventing older designs rather than design something new. I'm not in the market for "taking shortcuts" like that and would rather build,test,debug myself before producing items for sale. Then I can build on and expand the projects. Thats why I had a V1, V1.5, V2 booster for the STFM. I do stuff in stages and make sure each stage is fully tested and proven to work before I build something else onto it. Of course is great that others are taking up the soldering iron and producing hardware for our old machines, but there is no use in everyone working on similar projects. All my free time goes on Atari related work and I could do with reducing my workload by at least 50% as its all to much for just one person to keep up with. Of course this depends on the community, if people want to support other developers, thats fine, but then there is little point in myself developing similar hardware. This type of thing was exactly what happened with PeST. Myself and alison produced PeST and we sold a lot of them, it funded more developments, then some guys copied some "freeware" design and produced that at half the price then our sales stopped pretty much overnight. All our work wasted because of some guys who took a freeware design and sold it. We developed PeST from the ground up, it was a lot of work. So we stopped producing PeST and that was the end of it. Its why I started working on boosters, as nobody was working on them. So I feel that this is getting into a bad situation again for me now. I don't want to spend huge amounts of my time and money developing items where nobody will want it. So will just see how things go over the next year or so. If I can drop the booster development it gives me more time to work on other designs with as my PSU's and RAM/ROM type upgrades.

My next gen of STE booster will have a expansion port so things like alt-ram, IDE etc can be added. I've not done a IDE circuit before, got the prototype here just no time to test. Once thats sorted, then things will really start to happen! Alt-ram will become "fast-ram" Will offer 10MB of likely 32mhz speed RAM, so that combined with 32mhz TOS, anything which runs in fast-ram will gain a huge speed boost. Its actually already all been designed, but I have so many things that people want I am mostly working on the smaller/quicker projects currently. Though with my store getting shut down im having to deal with all that, so hardware dev had to take a back seat for now.

You draw animations with the sprite editor normally. Or you can do them in a program like neochrome and extract the sequences and import them into the sprite editor. You should really look at the STOS manual, it explains everything and gives lots of useful examples.

I don't think anyones got up and running with one yet, so you could be the first!

Don't need luck, just dont yank on the CPU socket to hard and you be fine

UK ROM's start in 50hz. There was a 60hz program somewhere for the auto folder, but I regret I don't remember where I got it from, maybe someone else here knows of the program ?

Keep the 4MB one. You may want to run a hard drive in the future, so 1MB games will need some more RAM to run the hard drive drivers. You can always add a switch to 1MB, or there are software to fool the machine into thinking its got 1MB.

I brought several of those picopsu's in the past, none of them worked. Tried from various sellers, gave up in the end. Everyone else seems to get on with them fine, but I never got any of them to work right. Its why I designed my own PSU

The "T board" 4MB SIMM kit would fit on that style board. http://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/4mb/index.htm

I get "The server refused the connection." if I go past anything past the main page.