Rybags
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Posts posted by Rybags
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My first 1010 had the button break after a few weeks. Luckily warrantee covered it because I paid $160 for it.
The problem is that the springs are sometimes too strong.
Just pulled mine apart... it seems they "fixed" it by putting screws in place of the plastic tabs that actuate the arms on the tape mechanism.
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The 1010 was a badly designed unit. The buttons have to exert too much force for the short amount of leverage they have.
Try pressing record, then press the play button until both engage.
Any half decent tapes should be fine, it might be worth giving it a head clean with VCR fluid and a cotton bud.
I've read elsewhere that dental floss can replace drive bands but have never tried it myself.
In any case, it's stone-age technology which would be well replaced with a simple $5 APE interface.
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That monitor pinout is of a C-128. I checked my C64, it has the same plug as the Atari (although obviously, the pinout is slightly different).
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S-Video mod among others is covered here:
http://www.geocities.com/atarimods/index.html
The C64 monitor output is slightly different. I'm fairly sure that the audio output is on a different pin and that the C64 doesn't have chroma output.
The easiest option is to build a cable yourself, with a 3.5 mm audio plug and an RCA plug for composite video.
I did that initially, then built an internal S-Video plug into my 130XE.
An APE interface is a must-have as well. It's covered on the site in the link.
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Having the debugger commands actually adhere to that used by the ASMEdit cartridge would be nice.
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Encounter.
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Make your own, and use the Save sound in A800Win+ to record them.
Cassette load sound for minor warning, save sound for critical errors.
Rip the sounds out of some games for others.
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Both naming systems they've used are rediculous.
A better way would be to just name it 0511a, 0511b, 0512a, etc.
At least then you know how out of date you are (although I now have a 40 gig virtually complete set).
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I knew that Sears had their own version of the 2600 VCS, but this system is new to me (Hi-Score Mk II):
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/HI-SCORE-MK2-ATARI-...1QQcmdZViewItem
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But aren't those characters always over water? In which case, just keep the different copies of such characters and move them into the character set. No AND/OR/store ops needed, just a simple loop to move data.
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After contemplating for weeks, I bit the bullet yesterday. Build time was about 6 hours but I was doing other stuff as well.
I based my work on the 7x7 breadboard plan shown here:
http://www.fonck.nl/atari/#sio2pc600xl
I didn't buy a breadboard, as I had previously pulled apart an ancient serial PC mouse and found the board in that to be near perfect for the job.
All that was involved in preparing it was desoldering the IC and other components on the board, and cutting some of the traces.
The board even had the capacitor and diode that the project requires, so I used them. All I had to supply was the IC, socket, resistor and lengths of wire.
The board has a little 6-pin header which is the same style as a PC floppy power inlet so I used it as the connector to the RS232 9-pin female plug, which I mounted in the Atari 130XE above the SIO port.
The board also has a hole in near perfect position so that I could sit it in the Atari, held in place by the plastic post in the upper case piece (I had to shave a bit of the plastic off the post.)
There's plenty of free space left on the PCB. Initially I was going to trim it down to a minimal size but then decided to leave it as is. I only had to remove about 5mm off the side which is adjacent to the joystick ports. It sits firmly held into place by the plastic post, and I used a heat-glue gun to insulate the solder joints and the RS232 connections.
I soldered the wires directly to the base pins of the SIO port, at the back of the motherboard.
At the right of the first photo you can see my first mod, which was adding an S-Video and 3.5mm output.
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Can't you just move the alternate character data into the character set for each animation phase? Assuming 12 different cells, that's only 96 bytes to be moved.
Looking at the program, it looks like you are using type 11 (COLPF2/3) pixels for the dark water as well as the light sand, which makes things a bit harder.
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Nice. I've played around with the CPEGVIEW programs a bit, but only on the emulator with emulated HDD.
Even running at a virtual 750% + speed, it's still painfully slow.
But I remember playing with JPEG on the Amiga 500 years ago. It wasn't much quicker. Just goes to show what a good FPU can do for graphics.
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Tupperware type container?
I was going to build one into a small food container, but have instead decided to build my #2 interface into the machine.
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This page has some of the best walkthroughs for doing SIO2PC and other common mods:
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The 1 chip version (1489 IC). Only a dozen or so solder connections, and it fits easily into a small project box + breadboard.
I did it that way, and using a section of ribbon cable for the DB9 plug speeds things up a bit. I only have wires which are pushed into the SIO plug holes though.
My next one will be a built-in job for the 130XE though. I'm going to use an old circuit board from an ancient serial mouse. It has the holes required for the IC, and even has the 10uF capacitor already soldered in, as well as a diode! Plus it has a little header plug (like a PC floppy power connector) which I am going to use to interface to the DB9, which will allow the motherboard to be easily removed from the XE. Only thing left to do is sever most of the tracers and trim the board down to size.
I would suggest: 1. use an IC socket. 2. get yourself a cheap hot glue-gun.
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Off topic slightly, WSYNC is kind of the wrong name for the register.
It only actually halts the 6502 until the beam reaches the start of the right hand border on a standard display.
I never really thought about it before, but my capture card revealed that fact. My card (as probably most do) displays the full overscan area, you can even see wide playfields and some of the glitches that scrolling with them brings on.
I dug out the Hardware Manual, and it confirms the WSYNC thing. It's logical, since most TVs only display about 1/2 a character beyond the right border anyway.
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http://www.atarimagazines.com - but they only have the table of contents for that issue.
In any case, there are people here who could help with any facet of DLI programming.
Multiple DLIs? Depending on what you want them to do, there are various techniques you could use.
For simple color changes, using a table is usually the way to go. But you usually need a VBI routine to initialize the pointer each time.
For more complex operations, you could:
- read the VCOUNT value and act accordingly.
- have a counter which is incremented from 0, by 2 each DLI. Then use it as an index into a jump table.
- just reload different values into the DLI vector at the conclusion of each DLI routine.
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Location $3F8 (1016) BASICEN - 0=enable BASIC, $FF=disable BASIC (processed on warmstart).
Location $3FA (1018) GINTLK - Cartridge interlock. 0=no cartridge. 1=there is a cartridge loaded, so RAM can't be enabled in the BASIC address space.
$D301 (54017) - PORTB - Memory select on XL/XE. bit 1=1 disables BASIC ROM.
So, in your boot loader:
LDA $D301 ORA #2 STA $D301; disable BASIC LDA #0 STA $3F8; switch out BASIC next RESET
Note that if BASIC is enabled that the top of memory pointer (and screen memory) will be around the 40K mark.
All of this only applies to XL/XE machines. It's probably best do a test for RAM around $BF00 after running that code (just store and test 2 different values at that location).
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So, this bloke on EBay wants 7 quid "Buy it now" for 4x1 meg SIMMs.
I only have about 50 of them in my cupboard.
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The Shift keys (as a group) and the function buttons (as individuals) have their own dedicated lines.
Check the ribbon cable for the keyboard. A wipe with some video head cleaner might help.
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The FM has both modulator and floppy drive built in, as well as an internal power supply.
It's fair to assume that the motherboard would be quite different to the initial STs.
If you're looking to buy, at the very least go for an STe.
Extra features include 4096 colours instead of 512, fine-scrolling and graphics blitter and a better version of TOS. Plus, better sound capabilities than the joke YM "synthesizer".
They also (not 100% on this) use the old 30-pin SIMM slots, so upgrading to 4 Meg is cheap and easy.
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No idea. There are various prototypes that saw limited release, like the Arabian XE (backwards text).
All it does is test the RAM that's normally overlayed by ROM, and you could write your own utility to do that.
In any case, the self-test and international character set was a waste of 3K ROM space that could have been devoted to much better causes.
They could have just about included a half decent resident DOS in little more space than that.
Doesn't the XEGS have a slightly different OS anyway, due to having no keyboard by default, and a built-in game.
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I was going to buy a conductive pen. But $35 was too much for the small amount of work I wanted to do.
So, I got a small vial of conductive laquer instead for $10.
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1010 help! (1050 too - read bottom)
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted · Edited by Rybags
It won't work. The SIO port has audio in capability but the sound is just mixed with what POKEY generates, and the computer has no way to monitor or control it.
The tape signals are converted from tones to TTL 0's and 1's by the 1010. The computer has no built in means to process these tones, or any other external audio.
Best bet would be to invest $5 in parts and a few hours build time for an SIO2PC/APE interface.
Forget tapes, if you want to remeniss the old load times, running APE in standard 1050 speed mode should be more than enough.