a8isa1
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Posts posted by a8isa1
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My soldering needs work but I have one of the XL boards built (minus the reset switch which arrives tomorrow).
I found Wrathchild's Quad Infocom ATRs work well in this medium. Game saves are lengthy, about a minute, because of the slow flash memory but the feature does seem to work.
Jindroush's Z-machine generated ATRs don't work. Is a workaround possible?
I've enclosed a generated ATR of Zork III as an example. The ATR works in emulators and on my 800XL via SIO based drive emulators, FujiNet and AVGCart
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On 11/20/2023 at 12:27 PM, mozzwald said:
I'll announce on the FujiNet Discord and see if anyone wants to join. Will set a reminder and try to be there myself
I was checking out _lobby.xex, and 5 card stud, an hour or so ago. now, _lobby.xex keeps looping back to the FujiNet config.
[EDIT]
User error was pressing F5 in Altirra thinking I was pressing Atari OPTION. It's F4!
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On 10/8/2023 at 5:54 AM, Bratwurst said:
As a general advisement to those who might not know: Bevel your card edges for your PCB to reduce wear and tear on your cartridge port, especially considering this is something you'll be apt to pull and insert several times to load different software via the USB port. The ideal time to do this would be before you solder anything to the board but you can probably ground a steel handfile to mitigate ESD.
Once again guilty of not RTFM (this thread). At least not fully. Too late. PCBWay is already fabricating my order.
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The image needed an NTSC conversion (because there aren't enough of those).
Unfortunately, I forgot to scale to less than 240 lines. My own TV (CRT circa 2006) can only display about 227 lines.
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5 hours ago, MrFish said:
Came up with a decent board layout for Stratego (as mentioned in a non-related thread).
Some measure of color could be added too.
For what it's worth I like the 2-tone gray
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Hi pcrow!
I've used your ATR2Unix for many years. Thanks for writing it and thanks for the update!
-SteveS
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On 9/9/2022 at 8:47 AM, Ricky Spanish said:
Went to the site; supports "Xbox360(wired+wireless dongle)". Works for me. Thanks.
Sorry for the bump, Ricky. Did you find a solution? Was the solution the Xbox360 controller + MouSTer?
-SteveS
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14 hours ago, Gunstar said:
Here is an image from several years ago that I made dozens of attempts at converting to my liking, both vertically and horizontally oriented. Something happened though, like an .xex of my final image was lost, IIRC. I spent so much time on this image that I even invented a short story about it that I did post, along with the horizontally oriented .png image, again, IIRC, with the possibility of revisiting it later. I will be doing that soon. However, I've decided to post one of my earlier vertically oriented attempts that I passed on posting as I felt it lacked much of the atmospheric color of the original image. But having come across it again recently, I've decided I like this low color count version more than I once did.
Sometimes my perfectionism gets the better of me and I hold back conversions that I find are actually quite good with the new perspective from time passed. I keep some as a "back-up plan" if I fail to make a better conversion, but they sometimes are forgotten and I stumble across them later. But if I'm not satisfied with a conversion at the time they usually get discarded for better or worse, so I don't have a huge "stash" of unposted conversions, but there are a few that get "lost" amongst hundreds of files "stashed" that I have posted and they catch my eye while scrolling through them all.
The one caveat this time is that I've no idea the exact color count because with this conversion (and a few others at the time) somehow my default setting to save as a .png file somehow was changed to save as a .jpg file with me unaware of the situation until later. So the image below is a .jpg and not a one-for-one, .png vs. xex. color image.
Peculiar Illuminations.
GS_PeculiarIlluminations.xex 22.12 kB · 8 downloads
More of Bonestell's Sci-fi art and art of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series to come...
Stunning!
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9 hours ago, gnusto said:
Trying to stick with making NTSC palettes work...here is a colorful eye.
Original has 34,736 colors:
Output is 87 colors:
It still makes me smile thinking of how much this would have completely flipped our lids in the 80s. The hardware was capable, we just didn't know it yet!
gn_eye.xexInputName: colorful-eye.png
CmdLine: colorful-eye.png /pal=Palettes/Altirra_Default_NTSC_XL.pal /dither_val=.6 /init=less /s=10000 /threads=6 /distance=cie94 /dither=knoll /predistance=ciede /save=100000000
Evaluations: 26270199412 (I left it running on my server with 6 cores for a long time)
Score: 0.201025This is next level!
Thanks for doing NTSC conversions!
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1 hour ago, Gunstar said:
Auto Way. 77 colors.
GS_AutoWay.xex 21.98 kB · 1 download
City Lights. 95 colors.
GS_CityLights.xex 21.97 kB · 1 download
Future...1960's style. 74 colors.
Stunned once again by this current set of conversions. As always I wish I had at least one PAL A8.
-SteveS
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Caverns of Mars for sure! There are times you need precise control on diagonal movement and I just struggled when using the CX40s
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6 hours ago, tmp said:
afaik APT is full of absolute sector numbers so there's no easy way to just copy it to another card at a different position
Thanks, tmp.
-SteveS
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I have some SD cards that I got a while back. NOS even then so only class 1. I didn't think I'd ever need speed for A8 related media. That was until I started moving AVF files to my AVGCart's SD card. Since AVF files need to be contiguous I have to reorganize (or more often recreate) the configuration from time to time. I need more speed. I'm no longer the patient guy who used to load games from a 410
Before I copy data off of each and every APT partition I just wanted to know there is an easier way to migrate to the new, larger, faster, SD card.
-SteveS
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52 minutes ago, tmp said:
all SIO cables have the same length (cca 30cm), the only dual length was ECI cable to accommodate different connector position on older carts
i got some of these and soldered a pair together to make an (ugly) extension for @a8isa1, i wanted to put some on eshop but as with million other things, i never got to that (i even forgot about them)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002332868366.html
i'm not aware of any standard sio extension cables, there are splitters but i'm not sure if they'd help since i don't own 800
lol!
tmp, I managed to break that one too
I bought the parts to make my own but I am dangerous with a soldering iron. End result is even uglier than you could ever imagine. See below.
No mesh sheath. Had not yet purchased shrink tubing. As you can see, I'm not very good with a hot glue gun either.
-SteveS
P.S. The extension cable does work, in case anyone was wondering
P.P.S. I'm also not great with adding attachments. Here it is now:
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On 7/3/2018 at 3:20 PM, tf_hh said:
Charlie Chaplin reported me this behaviour some days ago. I´ve analyzed "Tapper" and locate a subroutine at the beginning of the game which writes zeros to the I/O area (the XL OS does it the same during coldstart HW initialization) - the machine language routine writes these zero backwards, it starts at $D3FF down to $D300. Because it´s backwards, the following things will happen:
- $00 is written to PBCTL. Which enables the setting of the DDR (Data Direction Register) for Port-B. Next write access to PORTB selects output (1) or input (0) of each pin
- $00 is written to PORTB. All eight bits of Port B are now inputs.
This is done after the game is loaded. For the most important signals (Portbit B0 for OS/RAM selection, PB1 for BASIC on/off and PB7 for Selftest-Mirror on/off) are pull-up resistors at every XL/XE mainboard. Even when Port B is set as inputs completely and they´re floating - PB0, PB1 and PB7 will be hold at high-level through these resistors. So OS will run further, BASIC is further switched off and also Selftest...
... but not the memory expansions made by me (this includes Sys-Check). All these solutions grab any write access to $D301 everytime and store the result in a latch. I made this, because no six wires must be soldered to the PIA like with older expansions - and Sys-Check can´t work another way. But this kind of the game´s programming is one thing where the old expansions are more safe: They have also pull-up resistors for the PB4 and PB5 inputs, so a PIA configured as input won´t select any banking pages either. In this special case less is more
Sad to say, but there´s nothing I can do. The Ultimate 1 MB is not affected, also the Turbo Freezer 2011 not. Simple reason: They use CPLDs for complete emulation of the PIA - such intelligence in a simple GAL is not possible.
As far I know only Tapper (and now the second one) affected. When you run (for my internal expansion) the MOFF.COM to disable the memory expansion, then also Tapper etc. works fine. Using Sys-Check just switch the memory expansion off.
Best regards, Jurgen
I did not know about this problem until now. Neither MOFF.COM nor SETMEM.XEX allow my 800XL with version 4.5 of the upgrade to play this game.
I have an 800 always setup . If this is the only game that has a problem then the issue is not a big deal.
-SteveS
p.s. Since I already posted in this topic I must have known about the issue. I just didn't remember
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Pressing on the touchscreen when powering up SDrive max should bring up the calibration screen, assuming the correct screen driver is installed
-SteveS
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2 hours ago, Rybags said:
APAC doesn't work real well on NTSC.
I'm trying to keep on topic (at least a little) but I have a question regarding this.
When I once again owned a CRT TV (NTSC) I discovered APAC pictures, movies (in Phaeron's format), and TIP animations looked terrible. For APAC and the movies the only colors to appear were shades of blue and faded pinks. Just hints of other colors. Green is completely absent. For TIP animations all colors are nearly muted to grey.
I understand the TV exploit used in TIP does not exist on NTSC TVs/monitors.
Here's the odd thing. I previously used a consumer grade scan converter (Viewsonic VB50HRTV, model number may be wrong). APAC pictures and the movies worked with all 128 colors, slightly low saturation, but still quite colorful. TIP animations kind of worked. Lines of color alternating with lines of greyscale but my eyes saw the images in all the colors.
Can anyone theorize why all three formats work as well as they do on my scan converter?
Thanks.
-SteveS
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Hi Oliver!
No worries. mouSTer is actually flexible regarding mouse CPI. I just happen to have my mouSTer fine-tuned for my favorite game hack , Missile Command Plus
If one needs to lower mouse sensitivity one just increases the microstep value in a file called mouse.ini. I believe whatever that value is is the number of native pulses on your USB mouse that must pass before one pulse is passed, via quadrature, to the Atari.
MouSTer is capable of emulating either an ST Mouse or an Amiga 1351 Mouse. mouSTER also emulates an Atari joystick if a USB joystick or gamepad is connected.
I discovered I like playing Break It extended with a mouse. Unfortunately, I use two different microstep values for Missile Command Plus and Break it, 2 and 8, respectively. Since mouSTer can only have one mouster.ini implemented at a time it's a little awkward to change for each game. I need one SD card for each game. MouSTer loads / saves configurations via a USB flash drive or a bootable media reader
Best regards,
-SteveS
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Great game! Well done!
I have a couple of observations.
- On my NTSC CRT TV (circa 2006) less than half of the status line is visible. Using a utility call Screen Height I see only 228 scanlines. The top 8 and the bottom 4 or 5 lines being lost. This TV is actually better than others of my past. The worst was probably in the 200 line range
- Using mouSTer, with default setting, microstep=5, Break It! Extended is playable but mouse control is too sensitive. My USB mouse's lowest sensitivity is 400 CPI.
- Thanks for the flexibility of controllers, joystick, paddles, mouse, and keyboard
-SteveS
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10 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:
Not sure re a Bluetooth dongle/keyboard. Certainly works with a USB dongle wireless 2.4g setup though.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B098K1T46C?ref_=pe_27063361_487360311_302_E_DDE_di_1
Thanks, Beeblebrox!
In the time since I posted my note I've discovered there exist multi-mode keyboards, wired, 2.4g wireless, and bluetooth.
I hope to install the dongle (like yours) inside my 800XL (so no cutting needed). If I desire the keyboard would still be usable, in wired or bluetooth mode, to connect to other devices.
-SteveS
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Would this interface work with a USB bluetooth dongle and a bluetooth keyboard? Has anyone tried?
It would be great if A) I didn't have to cut a hole in my 800XL's case for a cable and B) didn't have to commit a keyboard to only the Atari.
Thanks.
-SteveS
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