UNIXcoffee928

There are several other things that we can go into, with regard to troubleshooting, but something about this reminds me of the weirdest & most annoying troubleshooting instance that I had ever had, a while back. I have a red 1986 Limited Edition Marshall full-stack that I used to lug all over the place, then it sat in my studio for a year. One day I moved it, and when I plugged it back in & set it up, it was acting out & sounded like a trebley whisper, and I was like, oh man, the tubes are screwed, and I went through all kinds of bullshit, checking cables, cleaning jacks, cleaning the connections for the tubes, looking up replacement parts, calling Marshall for part numbers, and doing all of the normal trouble-shooting that you would do. ...& after loads of annoying nonsense, you know what it turned out to be? Take a guess. If you guessed this, then good for you, but, it got my teeth gnashing... as it had turned out, the internal contact points of the jacks had been spread, ever so slightly, in the Effects Loop jacks. This happened because I had left the same cables in them for a year. Sooo when I had set it up after moving it, I had used other cables, and apparently there was a RCH (Red Cunt Hair... Technical Term, lol.) difference in the barrel size of the connectors on the cables. I was fuming... But, after adjusting the internal contacts of the jack, it came right back to life, and was loud enough to take the paint off of the neighbors' walls again, so, I was happy. ha. Aside from the long-winded story, and the explanation of Technical Terms, the point that I'm getting at is this... take a micrometer to the edges of the known working cards, note the measurement of the card edge, and then measure width of the card-edge of the Bit-3 card. If the pins in the slot's female socket have been spread, it could be the answer to your problem. I know that this is a very weird, and usually unlikely thing, but it's worth ruling out, because those Atari RAM cards are pretty thick, and they have been sitting there for decades... if the contracts have spread, you would have no electrical contact, and it would fit your problem (nothing, not even garbage on your screen)... it sounds like there is no power going to the board, and a spread slot contact could be the culprit. Who knows if Bit-3 made their boards a RCH thinner than Atari and other manufacturers. Worth ruling out, anyway, before we go any further with the troubleshooting. Good luck.

- Have you read the manual? It is pretty thorough. - Is the card in the correct slot? - Are there any other mods in both of your 800s? - Have you cleaned the oxidation on the card-edge with a fresh #2 pencil's eraser? Sometimes the oxidation is on these cards is heavy, and that will do the trick.

I like to read a lot of 19th & early 20th century literature, and I recently stumbled upon the author, Orison Swett Marden, completely by chance. After listening to the audiobook entitled, "An Iron Will", I felt that not only did it change my lifelong perspective on a lot of things, I felt a strange feeling that the book had altered the course of my future. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, particularly for those with careers in the Information Technology field, those who have experienced extreme ups & downs in their career-path. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=put0hzeiQl4

Joe Decuir and Ron Nicholson give an in-depth talk about their work with Jay Miner, and discuss how the system architecture from the Atari 2600 was further developed to form the system architecture of the Atari 400/800 series, and how the Atari 400/800 design evolved into the Amiga. This lecture series, given last year for the IEEE, celebrates the Amiga system architecture, on it's 30th anniversary, and is a must watch for any serious Atari & Amiga computer enthusiast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKcMFoRsN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo1HA66BWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRNsKvGwKOM

Lyrics explain it all... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jVoroHx3IU

I've never seen a titlebar do this before, so I figured that you might like to see it. This is a demo, but the scrolling text might be useful for presenting information, so it's worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU0vflFqEso&feature=youtu.be&t=51s

Whatever, dude. You are likely a mechanic, judging from your username... I drove a jet black 1984 Porsche 928S across the entire North American continent... twice. I felt confident doing so, because I know how to work on them. Would I recommend anyone else to do so? Hell no! Did you ever just stop to think that maybe you were just... lucky? ha. Am I ever sorry that I de-railed my own damned thread, with some tangential observations on a news story... lol. Airplanes... they should never have killed the B-58! Fu*k, there I go again... can somebody please post 20 replies about Packet Radio, and let this subplot be a distant memory... haha.

Thank you for being there for us. Particularly, during the time-period when the professionalism was top notch, and especially so if you were in during the Cold War. I presume that you retired more than eight or nine years ago. I am actually very sorry to have to tell you that there has been one scandal after another, for quite some time now. Drug-rings at multiple bases, widely reported cheating on proficiency tests, failure to demonstrate proficiencies, Internet surfing on the internal, supposedly secure networks, commanding officers turning a blind eye to what's going on around them. It's sickening. I guess if you just do a web search for Air Force Missile Scandal, you should get up to date, fast, as a lot will come up. This quick quote, from Wikipedia, should give you an inkling of how bad things have gotten: "On 5 June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accepted the resignations of both the Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, and the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General T. Michael Moseley. Gates in effect fired both men for "systemic issues associated with declining Air Force nuclear mission focus and performance." This followed an investigation into two embarrassing incidents involving mishandling of nuclear weapons" Here's a new update on that last article. "The amount of damage to the missile — $1.8 million, according to the Air Force — suggests that the airmen's errors might have caused physical damage, Kristensen said. If so, he said, it could have been categorized by the Air Force as a "Bent Spear" event, which is an official reporting code word for a significant nuclear weapon incident. The Air Force refused to reveal how it categorized the Juliet-07 accident." In any case, as part of the point that I was initially trying to make, we should have the best of the best available, both in terms of people, and in terms of equipment. The current infrastructure is aging, and needs attention paid to it. Aside from that, discipline & professionalism need to return, as well as a clear Mission.Temporarily patching the problem with duct tape (literally or figuratively) is not the answer.That is all.

I know enough about defense technology, both past & present, to be qualified to work in a high-level position at RAND... and I would do just that, if I lived close enough to Santa Monica, CA. I could easily write a fifty-page report, as a reply, but I'll refrain. I'll just suggest that you re-read what you have written, and that you should buy a carton of Electrical Tape.

I had just written up something about a news article that I had read, and figured that I'd share it, due to it's relevance to this thread: Duct Tape... Old Habits Die Hard As a Technologist, I've always gotten a good laugh from the classic 1964 US Navy Polaris SLBM Missile promotional photo (magnify to see the lower portion of the nose-cone with three strips of Duct Tape). Not to be outdone, the Air Force has found Duct Tape to be a necessity, with our contemporary land-based Minuteman ICBM defense systems, perhaps as a result of a long string of defense budget cuts, treaties, or perhaps out of sheer willfulness to Tempt Fate. The Minuteman missile, first developed in 1962, then refined until 1970 has become our ONLY land-based ICBM, after 46 years of budget cuts and the discontinuance of all other land-based ICBM types. Only our submarine launched Trident II (SLBM) ICBMs are more modern... designed in 1971, and refined until 1990, that's twenty-six years ago. When we talk about our "Modern Nuclear Deterrence Force" we are talking about 46 year old and 26 year old technology. Can you imagine running a business with 26-46 year old equipment, or relying on a 26-46 year old car to get you to work reliably everyday? Clearly, it is time to fully implement new systems before something bad happens. Today's article (or When the World's Fate is in Your Hands, Slap Some Duct Tape on it and Hope for the Best)... "At times the Air Force has been slow to acknowledge its nuclear missteps. In 2014 then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed worry that personnel failures were squandering public trust in the nuclear force..." "The most recent previous Air Force investigation of an accident at an ICBM launch silo was in 2008. That investigation, which was publicly released, found that a fire in a launcher equipment room went undetected for five days. It uncovered the remarkable fact that the Air Force was using duct tape on cables linked to the missile. The fire was caused by a loose electrical connection on a battery charger that was activated when a storm knocked out the main power source. The fire ignited a shotgun storage case, incinerated shotgun shells, ignited and melted duct tape at the opening of the launch tube, charred an umbilical cable in several places, and burned through wires in a pressure monitoring cable." Wow. Just wow.

Well, I sold both STs and Amigas between 1986-1988, so I'm very familiar with the hardware of both systems, as well as the accessories, & software for both systems, because I set them up, demoed them, and had to sell them. Call it bias, or call it experience. I was a die-hard Atari 800 user, and hated anything to do with Commodore. The Amiga, however, was not like the other Commodore systems. I initially wanted an ST until I read about the Amiga, in the first issue of Amigaworld. Once I was in an environment with both systems, I chose the Amiga 1000 system. The only people who tend to refer to the Amiga as a "Commodore Amiga" are people who weren't Amiga owners... It was almost incidental that Commodore owned the Amiga, because we referred to it only as "The Amiga". The word Commodore still had many bad past associations with the Atari 8-Bit users who had moved to the Amiga. Ultimately, both companies failed because of mismanagement. I would have been a lot happier if one company had bought the other, and had shared technology & succeeded, rather than both companies failing. The Amiga should never have died at the hands of Commodore's utterly useless mis-management. It is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of technology. It left many, many people very, very heartbroken & bitter, and it snuffed out Jay Miner's entire legacy of system architecture (in a comercial sense), & many years of innovative products & ideas. Really sucks. I moved on to SGIs, Suns, & Linux, but truthfully, as far as I'm concerned, computing was never as fun and interesting as it had been with the Atari 8-Bits, and the Amiga systems. A lot of people only think of the Amiga 500, but there was a very rich product line that include many very powerful systems. I still own the Amiga 4000T with a 68060, and it is still a very remarkable machine. I am happy that the AROS open source Amiga OS project exists, and hope that, one day, open source hardware picks up where the Amiga 4000T left off. I was on the Natami Team (an FPGA-based high-end Amiga), but because it was a closed source project, it failed when the two chief designers had a falling out. There is still a very active community of Amiga technical people, but the technology has diverged in so many directions, that it makes it difficult to see how all of the different camps could ever come to consensus on what they really want from a "New" community-based Amiga. It does make me happy that the original vision of Jay Miner lives on, at least at a community level, though.

I can't quickly find the pin-out for the physical drive, you would need to find the spec-sheet for the drive. The full external connector cable pin-out is here: http://amiga.serveftp.net/HardwareBook/connector/storage/extdiskamiga.html

The standard Amiga 1010 3.5" floppy used a Matsushita drive mechanism, was double sided, and held 880K per disk.

All I have to say is !WOW! that is more than a reverse engineering, that is a thing of beauty! Your source code should be released as a textbook on how to properly document code! Unbelievably impressive. I can't say that I have ever seen code, in any language, as well-documented, and as precisely formatted. This work of yours should be a semester long class in how to properly prepare a technical document! I am utterly astonished, to the point of being completely flabbergasted, at the great pains that you took to achieve this... this... piece of art. If you aren't working for NASA, you darn-right should be! Thank you for all of your efforts! I will always keep this code and use it to show people what a properly documented piece of software should look like.

The Amiga 1010 3.5" drive has no Commode Logo. Neither does the Amiga 1000 system. Only the original Amiga Double Checkmark logo is present on the early equipment. The 1020 5.25" drive has both logos. As I'm sure you know, the Amiga 1000 was the brainchild of Jay Miner, as was the Atari 800. Atari was Atari in name only at this point, with the Evil Commodore himself, Jack Tramiel, busy steering Atari fleet into the Abyss. So, I wouldn't worry so much about it. Another thing to consider is that Amiga equipment was very high-quality, much like the original Atari 800 system, in build quality. Atari ST era Atari stuff was Cost Reduced (CR) Equipment (more like a VIC or C64). The Amiga 500 & 600 were the only real attempts at cost cutting... and they're still built really well... to the point that Atari's "Power Without the Price" could have easily been countered by Amiga with "Price without the Dice". lol.

Can you clarify what you are trying to do? You can run multiple instances of the emulators as is... That is a fairly inelegant solution, though.

For that matter, could you program two to four MPP 1000E modems to be used with the four joystick ports on the 800? They were not meant to be used this way, but who knows? The MPP 1000E is 300 bps, but can do 450 bps if another MPP is calling it. I don't know if the POKEY and 6502 are fast enough to handle more than one, however, if you are programming only for an emulator, maybe you can use all four joystick ports effectively with virtual modems hooked into them.

Well, then, can you, or can you not use an MPP 1000E modem attached to the joystick port while using a Hayes modem attached to the Atari 850, provided that the appropriate R: handler is in HATABS?

- So, that was the only instance of an Atari multi-user BBS? - What about multi-user BBSs on other (non-Atari-based) 8-bit platforms... how did they do it? Clearly, you first need the hardware... does the Atari 850 interface support more than one modem attached, and does it support simultaneous usage? I know that the four serial ports were very specific in their functionality. Also, If you can hook up more than one modem, will it still support all transmission speeds reliably? - Has anyone ever used an MPP modem plugged into the joystick port & a modem plugged into the Atari 850, simultaneously? After that, it comes to driver support. Once you know that you can use more than one modem with the physical hardware, then all of this could be eased, if you have an OS that multitasks, which is why I suggested making a special, stripped-down version of LUnix or GeckOS that's only purpose is to run such a multi-user BBS. I'm interested in learning more about this.

No, as far as I know, only the special high-density drives for the 3000T, 4000, & 4000T used a multi-speed solution. The standard Amiga external 1010 drive was completely programmable, as it relied on the computer that it was attached to to provide it's disk controller info, via a software driver. This is what made it a very special, & flexible drive to program for (from a copy-protection programming standpoint). Also, I remember that the Macintosh hardware emulator boards stipulated having both Apple ROMs AND a Macintosh floppy drive, if you wanted to read actual Mac disks, and If I recall, this was because Mac drives had the variable speed characteristics that you mention. So, in theory, as long as a driver were written for the Atari, you should be able to use the Amiga 1010 3.5" & Amiga 1020 5.25" disk drives. Probably via the parallel port or the PBI. I'll look around and see if I can find the technical info that would be needed for creating such a driver.

Has anyone ever tried to interface an external Amiga external 3.5" Disk Drive to an Atari 8-Bit? They were very versatile drives, and I would think that it would be a very do-able project. I remember that the (less common) external Amiga 5.25" drives could read & write Atari 8-Bit disks without modification, when connected to an Amiga.

Did multi-user BBSs exist for the Atari, at all? I don't remember. I do remember some Apple II BBSs had that functionality. Maybe take a look at some Apple BBS code. I don't remember if C64 BBSs had it either. What was the history of multi-user BBSs, on 8-Bit systems? - How well does the Atari 850 handle multiple modems? - Did you consider attempting to make it work on top of a modified variant of LUnix or GeckOS? (to take advantage of a multitasking OS)? Interested in hearing more about this, thanks!

I'd like a single space 1U rackmount chasis, much like the Roland MKS-50, with a cartridge port on the right, like the Roland MKS-70 / MKS-80.

No, no, no, It has to be a 1st person Driving Simulator! Now that would be an awesome game! Mass carnage! Something like the music from Hover Bouvver would be ideal, to make it as surreal as possible! Should have an overhead map, like Crush, Crumble and Chomp available, to see your "progress". Ha, that would be great!

Holy Fkn' Sh1t, that is the funniest fkn' thing that I've seen in years!