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I've been wondering for a while if I could use a Dallas 12887A RTC from an old motherboard. - Steve Sheppard

I have used my 800 since the day I purchased it (more or less). From 1987 to 2004 it probably saw no more use than 2 or 3 sessions of Star Raiders per year and an even less frequent test booting of the disk drives. Well, I guess you can call that continuous usage. I purchased my 800 new in 1979 (could have been 1980). It was upgraded to OS B and GTIA sometime between the release of the 12000XL and that of the 800XL (1983, perhaps). Around the same time period the keyboard failed and was replaced by a friend. The 800 has been working ever since. In 2004 I discovered A8 emulators, specifically Atari800Win Plus (revision 3.1, I think). Played many games that I had never even seen in the earlier days. This sparked a renewed interest in the real 800. I even did a little programming. Nothing hardcore but it was fun and challenging for me. In 2005 I was given an 800XL by a good friend. Programming took a back seat to modifications, e.g. Super Video XL (2.0), internal and external SIO2PC interfaces, SIO to MIDI (output only), RAM upgrade (Wizztronics kit), homebrew MyIDE (failed), various homebrew cartridge and BASIC ROM emulations, internal and external. Upgrading is something I always wanted to do back in the day but I never wanted to put my sole 800 at risk. I'm having quite a bit of fun upgrading (talking about the 800XL), even with the mods/upgrades that don't work. BTW, I'm terrible at soldering and I seem to be dyslexic, for lack of a better word, with schematics and wiring instructions. I am constantly getting part numbers, items and polarities wrong. Luckily, the 800XL seems to be very tolerant of my mistakes. LOL! - Steve Sheppard

In 1979 my friend (a hardcore TRS-80 owner) kept hounding me, "Have you seen the Atari?", "Did you hear about the 800?", "You gotta buy one of those!". Finally I gave in. At the time the only 48K systems to be had were at retail stores priced at either $999 USD or $1099. I decided to buy from a discount mail-order store. $749 bought me a 800 with 24K of memory, BASIC, and a 410 cassette. The vendor was throwing in the extra 8K (over a base 16K system) for free. I had always assumed the 8K board was recycled from an upgraded 400. Soon afterwards (perhaps a year actually) my friend purchased a Radio Shack Color Computer. He never did buy an Atari. The first soldering I ever did was on that 8K board. Analog Computing had an article which describe how to upgrade a 8K board to 16K. It worked but the soldering was ugly. Sadly, my soldering skills never did improve. I believe the 4116s cost me $18 for the eight chips. At one time a 16K board was over $300 but at the time I did the upgrade I think they were closer to $190. $18 was a bargain but I was sweating bullets when I first flipped the power switch. In 1983 or 1984 I upgraded the 800 with OS Revision B and a GTIA. About the same time the keyboard died and was replaced. Somewhere along the way I picked up another 16K board. Don't remember when or how much it cost. I still use that 800 to this day, though I favor a 800XL which a good friend gave to me in 2005. - Steve Sheppard

Thank you very much! - Steve Sheppard

Off topic: The Holmes collection cuts off around the year 2002, IIRC. What would be the best way to begin an addendum? Make a master database of MD5SUMs for the Holmes collection and compare new candidate files against the list? - Steve Sheppard

I can confirm this, I had a similar problem on my main (PAL) 800XL a few weeks ago. The 800XL still worked fine, but sometimes the color saturation went down to almost B/W. Fiddling around with the power cord then fixed it again. Actually, the power jack was still OK (and contact cleaner didn't have any effect), but the solder joints on the PCB were going bad. So I took out the PCB, re-soldered the connections of the power jack and everything was fine again. so long, Hias I had a similar problem. Just barely bumping the power cord caused the display to go to black and white OR look mostly blue (but faded) OR go out completely. Honestly, I thought the connector was bad but took a chance and re-solder the joints. That's all that was needed. - Steve Sheppard

I had good luck with Hias Reichl's WriteATR but my DD disks were formatted using an ATR8000 with 300 RPM, single sided drives. Not sure if this was an aid or not. Whatever the case, I was able to port better than 90% of my DD disks in this manner. For SD disks, single sided, I didn't have many options. I used an old PC program called Anadisk to make a raw dump and a second program, DEANA (DE-ANAdisk) which I believe flips the data bits and produces a .DCM file. Can't recall what I used to covert these to ATRs. To complicate matters. some of my Atari disks began life as PC disks (double sided). Anadisk did not like data existing on the 2nd side even though I requested single side analysis. What I did to make this method work is I first had to bulk erase a disk, so that side 2 would be blank, and use the Atari to create a copy of the original disk on this new disk. With the latter I could then use the Anadisk/DEANA process. This is all very tedious. I didn't own very many SD disks but I'd say I succesfully ported almost half of them. Eventually, I purchased a SIO2PC cable, which basically ended my need for the Anadisk/DEANA process. I never did find a direct means to port ATRs to single density disks. I no longer have a need to port real disks to ATRs but I still use WriteATR to produce real DD disks from ATRs. I also use it to produce 5.25" HD disks (formatted as 77 track, 1.0 MB capacity). The ATR8000 is old and slow but it was kind of fun getting HD floppies working for it. Also Hias was so great about adding the support for the disk format to WriteATR for me. - Steve Sheppard

Nick Kennedy's page. There you'll find all his SIO2PC information. The layout information for Nick's ATR format is in the Readme.Txt file. - Steve Sheppard

24,800 I no longer have a means to get a good screen capture of 800XL so Atari800 it is.

* cough * 11700

Umm, has anyone tried the opposite, hack a good old Atari type joystick onto the interface of a USB gamepad? [Edit] Disregard. I misread Hias' message. I thought he had adapted the gamepad for use on an Atari. Sorry, Hias! - Steve Sheppard

2 or 3 years ago I built LPT Joystick/ATAJoy [<-- link corrected] and used it with Windows 98SE and the PPJoy driver with Atari800Win Plus (and MAME). Later I used it with Atari800, compiled for DOS, on an old subnotebook. Now I'm using it on a Linux box with Atari800 (SDL). Really makes all the difference for me when using an emulator, though I've slowly returned to real hardware. Now If only I could get it to work with SDLMAME... - Steve Sheppard

http://gury.atari8.info/details_games/715.htm Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! and presumably Thanks to _Fandal

Does there exist a file version of Dark Chambers? -Steve Sheppard

Please run this test program on your Atari to detect all banks and let me know. F. _Fandal, your program reports 83, 8B, 8F, A3, A7, AB, AF, C3, C7, CB, CF, E3, E7, EB, EF, and FF. BTW, my list had a typo. I listed A7 twice. The second one was supposed to be E7. Also I tried Satantronics' XRAM program. It found the same banks minus FF and it found an error in bank 83. I asked a friend to test his Wizztronics and he received the exact same results. 15 banks detected and an error in bank 83. This upgrade is only 256K total. Shouldn't there be 12 extended banks? Thanks for your help, _Fandal! - Steve Sheppard Oh, yes. The old problem with 192kB machines. Please read this thread. There're two versions of Commando for 192kB systems. Hopefully version with no detection or version with improved one will work on your Atari. F. Ah! I did not know you had a revised 192K version. It loads! but no time to play until tonight Thanks, _Fandal! - Steve Sheppard

Very noob-ish question: Why would I/O ports end up being accessible at the $4000-$7FFF window? - Steve Sheppard

Please run this test program on your Atari to detect all banks and let me know. F. _Fandal, your program reports 83, 8B, 8F, A3, A7, AB, AF, C3, C7, CB, CF, E3, E7, EB, EF, and FF. BTW, my list had a typo. I listed A7 twice. The second one was supposed to be E7. Also I tried Satantronics' XRAM program. It found the same banks minus FF and it found an error in bank 83. I asked a friend to test his Wizztronics and he received the exact same results. 15 banks detected and an error in bank 83. This upgrade is only 256K total. Shouldn't there be 12 extended banks? Thanks for your help, _Fandal! - Steve Sheppard

Has anyone tested the 192K version of Commando with the Wizztronics 256K for 800XL? I do see the "now loading: Commando..." screen but then the screen becomes garbled and video is unsynced. I never see the message "> copying data <". FYI, this is a NTSC 800XL and I believe the banks used for the Wizztronics are A3, A7, AB, AF, C3, C7, CB, CF, E3, A7, EB, EF (though I am not 100% certain). - Steve Sheppard

Unfortunately, my ATI All-in-wonder died after 11 years use, so no screen capture. Doesn't matter because my score for my first game is only 33,450. If I improve I'll switch to Atari800 and get some snapshots - SteveS.

It also seems to work fine in Atari800win Plus 4.0 (though I never bothered to upgrade from beta 3 on this machine). - Steve

54,900

Just to get a score posted... Oops, my screen capture was a BMP file. Forgot to convert it to something portable, like a PNG. Sorry about the redundant attachments. Pole_Position_Malibu_NTSC_2.BMP Pole_Position_Malibu_NTSC_2.BMP

I'm using a linux program called FSlint, but also ran a script which identifies duplicates by filesize and MD5 (128-bit) checksums. But are .bin files the same as .com/exe files? MD5SUM should be good enough. It produces a 32-digit hexadecimal hash for each file (if I am not mistaken). The chances of missing a duplicate would be astronomical. - Steve

Poobah does not win a contest! News at 11:00!

Found the screen. LOL. I must have hit the trigger when I put the joystick down earlier. Yay! I got LPTJoy to work with Atari800 for linux. Real Atari joysticks in emulators rock! Last game for tonight. 5017 Another day, another score. 7306 8586 - Steve