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Sorry Dan, can't help you there but if you don't mind I have a question. What combination of ORG and STACK addresses should I use? I seem to be able to compile the sample program fine but on my 800 XL I need to use an ORG value of $4100 or higher otherwise the program will never run. I have not been successful at all using my 800, yet the precompiled sample does run on that machine. I mean I can compile the program without errors but it won't run. - Steve

Great news! Thanks! - Steve Sheppard

Atari800Win Plus 4.0 seems to have bug. This works for me. - Select Atari menu-->Tape Recorder and choose a CAS file from there. - Return to emulation mode and press Shift+F5 for normal Coldstart or Shift+F2+F5 to boot from tape. - Enable SIO Patch for instant loading. (Some images images not work). - Steve

That is showing 2 frames, blended together. Every adjacent character is offset vertically as the card is assuming it's a normal interlaced display. That's using VIVO on a normal AGP card I assume? Capture cards, especially ones integrated into AGP cards, are very prone to interference. I find the best results usually come by using S-Video on a dedicated capture card - try to have it in a PCI slot well away from any other devices. You might want to see if there's a "Spread spectrum" option in your PC's BIOS - it can help, it slightly skews the system clocks and supposedly smooths the waveforms of the clock output, which can cut down the effects of RFI generated in the computer. Just wanted to point out that the offset appears to be a single scan line. Hias explained this to my satisfaction . It's just that this videocard seems to handle it differently than some scan converters. The video card is a PCI card. It's a first generation ATI All-in-Wonder. Does Video/tv tuning/vivo, all of that but it is only PCI. The color issue was surprising because it is not what I see when looking at the screen. The explanation is kind of long. This old video card did not include a tool that would let me capture the output of Flickerterm properly. My first image shows you what I did get, just one field of the frame. I was going to include a video clip that would show what I actually see however, again the tools supplied with the videocard were old and limited. Most of the video format in which it can capture are apparently no longer in use today, at least not by any players/codecs I have installed on my machines The only formats that were usable were uncompressed video and "Indeo". The latter file, the smaller of the two, was too big to include here (at 38 MB). The old PC, in which the All-in-Wonder resides, does not have any tools to re-encode the video so I copied the video file to another machine. I didn't have much success on there either but I discovered that I at least I now had the ability to do a still image capture of the video playback and this is the point where the color of the image changed. So you see, that color shift was not due to any interference in the original PC. The point I wanted to make by including the images are were twofold. 1) A single field did not seem to be repeated twice each. (I may have been wrong there). 2) The vertical offset (as you called it) indicated to me that both even and odd scanlines are represented. My two scan converters (the AIW and an outboard device) both present the image in the same manor, that which you see in my 2nd image. Other people with other equipment see something different, namely no offset That is all. I didn't (and still don't) have enough understanding to make a conclusion from what I thought I was seeing. I was hoping someone else would. I just wanted to show what I, myself, see.

Beetle I won't pretend to understand what goes on with A8 video but perhaps showing you what I see will help someone else explain it. My video card (an original PCI ATI All-in-Wonder) can do still capture single fields of an NTSC frame. Video captures are only done on whole frames (both fields). I believe both types of captures (of Flickerterm 80) demonstrate what the A8s are outputing. [update] The video was too big and I don't have the tools to re-encode at the moment.. With some trickery I did manage to get a screen capture of just what I see on the All-in-Wonder. I can't explain the color variation. Single Field Capture A8_Still_Capture.bmp Capture of Interlaced Video Snapshot - Steve Sheppard

The room appears to be empty. Guess no one wants to catch my cold.

Hi Steve- Well, how cool is that! I've been procrastinating (as usual!) thinking that I'll have to dig out a cassette deck to do this. I also had never heard of ATART. How did you happen to run across this? Pretty slick tool! -Larry I don't believe I found ATART information. A couple of years ago I was asking for information about WAV2CAS. Vladimir Tichy (sp?) reponded and provided information for his ATART. I think he was under the impression that I still owned an Atari cassette player. I didn't own enough tapes to justify replacing my 410 and building ATART and when I finally made a working CAS files for Epyx Crush, Crumble and Chomp and Analog Software Shooting Gallery then I didn't have any need for ATART at all. BTW, Atari Frog actually beat me to the punch with his own conversion of C, C and C, the one posted at Atarimania.com. I later realized my version is slightly different and older so I sent him a copy. - Steve Sheppard

Hey Larry, I completely missed the fact that you actually have an Atari cassette. This gives you more options fro producing CAS files. A program could read from the cassette and produce CAS files, though I'm not aware of a such program. The reading of raw data would not be difficult. I'm not sure what's included in the CAS data format. Another option is the ATART interface. Part of this build appears to be similar to a 1050-2-PC interface. It's intended to connect an Atari cassette to to a PC for direct conversion of tapes to CAS files. No intermediate WAV recording is required. ATART doubles as a single-chip MAX232 SIO2PC. There is another component which can be added to the Atari Cassette player which turns it into part of two way interface with your PC. Together ATART and the modified cassette player allow you to use your PC as full cassette emulator. Why would you want this? Well, the CAS format is nice but the CAS playback programs (for use on real Ataris) don't emulate starting and stoping of a tape under Atari control. Hence, some programs will not work. - Steve Sheppard

- Just my opinion but I think MagoTrans made better .CAS files than WAV2CAS for me. - CAS2CAS was helpful for recovering files with bad blocks. You need more than one sample for this to work. You can get two samples by recording left and right channels seperately. If you are lucky the any dropouts on the tape don't occur at the same point on both channels. Strangely, the program requires two .CAS files + one .HEX file OR 3 .HEX files. Two of the files can repesent the same sample if that's all you have. - Don't recall if any games had a duplicate copy of the program on side B of the casette but if so that would give you two more samples. You could record both channels blended as mono to give you a third sample. Don't know if this will gain you anything, though. CAS2CAS allowed me to finally convert one really troublesome commerical program and a few of my own personal tapes. - Earnest Shreurs, author of WAV2CAS, recommended to stick to 8 bit sampling when recording as 16 bit sampling only produces more bytes and does not aid in WAV2CAS' performance. - Supposedly .WAV recording levels don't affect WAV2CAS (or MagoTrans) but I'm convinced using a preamp to tweak helped, a little. BTW, I used my sound-card's line-in and software that was included with the sound card, a tape deck, and a receiver (as the preamp). - Steve Sheppard

I was there briefly around 3:00 EST but the JAVA app was seriously misbehavin'...

Hi Beetle, may I ask the purpose of the 1F "goldcap"? Does this suffice in place of a battery? If so then how long does it last in this role? And if not for backup purposes is it there so that the RAMdisk will survive a cold boot? I've done a couple of projects with SRAM but I've always used an NV memory controller and a battery if I wanted a power backup. - Steve Sheppard

I believe the Analog Computing Pocket Reference Card is what you want. Unfortunately I don't have a scanner and I can't find the Pocket Reference Card on the net. The closest thing I can find is this page which the author claims was inspired by the same document. - Steve Sheppard

Do you have socketed ICs? If so try reseating the BASIC ROM, MMU, and any other ICs for good measure, and also your DRAMs on your memory expansion - Steve

Well it looks like this one.

Great information! Thanks!

hmm, unfortunately it won't run on this old clunky PC. "Can't create overlay surface.."

Newport Design Prostick for movement (pac-man, donkey kong, etc). Competition Pro for games that require shooting.

I have had a video problem which I lived with for quite a while, but it's still annoying. It occurs with both my 800 (unmodified) and 800XL (Supervideo XL 2.0 upgrade but without the composite video on/off switch). Both computers are NTSC models. The problem is more pronounced with the 800XL but both machines have it all the same. If I can't easily solve the problem, that's OK. However, it would be nice to at least have an understanding of what is happening. The display devices are two VGA CRTs. One is driven by an ATI All-in-Wonder video card. The other by an outboard TV tuner for VGA, a Viewsonic VB50HRTV. The input is Atari Chroma+Luminence to S-Video. I have no other display options at the moment. Any insights would be appreciated Please look below to see my issue. Thanks. Regards, Steve Sheppard

I'm looking for the Rotberg Synthesizer described in issue #34, vol.6 no.1. Has anyone seen or heard of this program? The article states that the program is on side B of the accompanying disk XL Search led me to a demo of the program but I'm looking for a working copy. Wow! These old SoftSide articles feel like a gift! TIA - Steve Sheppard I have an .exe file around here somewhere called Rotberg. Could that be what you are looking for? Don't know. I'm aware of a Rotberg Marquee program and the synthesizer. There are probably others. Please email it to me at stephensheppard <at> hotmail D0T com and I will take a look. Thanks! - Steve Sheppard

I'm looking for the Rotberg Synthesizer described in issue #34, vol.6 no.1. Has anyone seen or heard of this program? The article states that the program is on side B of the accompanying disk XL Search led me to a demo of the program but I'm looking for a working copy. Wow! These old SoftSide articles feel like a gift! TIA - Steve Sheppard

Sidenote: I purchased a 1489 two-chip SIO2PC and built a single chip 14C89 interface. Neither of these are compatible with my SWP ATR8000 (interface box with serial port, parallel port, floppy controller, and can run CP/M). I wanted to build the MAX232 based SIO2PC but came across and article or two (not SIO2PC articles) which used the MAX233 chip for communications. I would have used the MAX232CPE, BTW. However, being mostly inept with the soldering iron I wanted to build the simplest circuit possible. The MAX233 (DIP-20) is functionally equivalent to the MAX232 but has the capacitors built-in. I thought I would be eliminating 16 solder joints so that's what I chose to build. The chip I did use is the MAX233CPP. It's relatively expensive but I got a couple free samples. As it turned out I only eliminated 8-10 solder joints (can't remember) because some interconnections are still required. My build is ugly but in the end it all worked and the interface is fully compatible with my ATR8000. Incidentally, I was told in Europe you have equivalent parts for the MAX232. I think ICL232 was the one mentioned to me but a search shows HIN232 and ST232 as well. I don't see any equivalents for the MAX233. I have an impromptu schematic (EDIT: for the MAX233 circuit). PM me if you'd like to have it. - Steve Sheppard

The one we're after is the ultra rare registered version of Donald R. Lebeau's Gauntlet, not the common freeware release. It hasn't been dumped yet. -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Oops. Sorry.

Guys, please, PLEASE, PLEASE check the various websites and archive any rare stuff that you don't find on the Internet. This is the sort of program that is IMPOSSIBLE to find nowadays and REALLY needs to be preserved. I know I have it somewhere!!! When I get everything unpacked I will find it. Has anyone found it? Was wondering if I could get a copy on a 5.25" floppy for the original Atari Hardware? I'll pay for shipping/handling and floppy ofcouse, or would someone be interested in selling the original? thanks! You can find an ATR here: http://vjetnam.hopto.org/index.php?frame=l...ir=g&page=0 Go to the 2nd page, the first occurence of Gauntlet is the one. Homepage is of course http://vjetnam.hopto.org - Steve Sheppard

Looks like I've been lax regarding notices for Eurochat. I can't remember. I guess it's supposed to be scheduled for 10:00 AM Central Time (16:00 GMT) Come join me! Telnet www.atarinews.org Username:BBS Password:BBS use your userid or create a new one. T for Talk C for chat Choose a nickname for chat. - Steve Sheppard

My internally mounted SIO2PC for my 800XL uses telephone cord (RJ11 connectors). 25 feet has been no problem using that configuration. - Steve Sheppard