sup8pdct

Thank you! Bump How is this going? James

You need 9V Ac to power the 850. An atari floppy power supply will do the job nicely. All you need is a terminal type program (bobterm is one example) and a small program to load it's built in driver. Most doses come with said program to load the driver. The built in driver will also load when the consol is powered on, 850 connected and no drives turned on. It is a good way to check to see if the 850 has any sort of life. Port 1 on the 850 supports all the main rs232 signals but it is not pin compatiable with 9pin pc rs232 cables that are around. Ports 2 and 3 support only 5 or 6 of the rs232 signals. port 4 can support a current loop type device like a teletype writer. The printer port requires no software. Just a cable that you may need to make your self A little known fact is that all atari direct connect printers respond to P1 and to a 2nd unique number. I think the 850 is P2. James

It is, however a lot work will be required, cutting traces and/or bending pins out on PIA. Also a eprom burner and some knowlage of the xl/xe operating system so it can be patched or a lightly patched 400/800 OS and a 4pole double throw switch for a normal xl. A bigger switch or extra circuitry required for extra ram. By far it would be better to pick up a 400/800 to play those games. james

dis 8038 i think. something i found on the internet. the code in question appears to start in $700 page then gois over the $800 border. will have to dig it up and look. james

Has anyone dissembled and commented the orignal xf551 code? I started to but discovered a real strange part where code crosses the 2K boundry, but every spec I find for the 4050 says code cannot cross this boundry with out first selecting the bank select bit and doing a jump instruction. James

Dos XE treats 128 byte sector disks as 2 sector clusters, so it is reasonable to assume that maybe 2 or more 256 byte sectors could be treated as cluster, but finding out how may never happen. I came up with dos xe formatter but once I found out about the vtoc issue, I gave up. James

Can do what I did and modify the games to load with sparta X tho only when use banked ram. I modded draconus, zybex and a couple of others as they use 64K ram. James

Sparta dos construction set command OFF_LOAD Can do that as well as give an option of loading parts with an optional offset. Very handy for when I rehacked some of the zepplin 64k games to load from HDD and SDX. James

1 PAL XL for me please. James

what is that black box thingy on the lower right in the pic with the 400/800/xegs ? James

can you scan the parts list (section 8 ) I haven't found that anywhere yet. I also have a 3-page hand drawn schematic that is somewhat low-res , it is in GIF format I believe, is that the one you scanned a while ago? Ahhmmmm. There is no section 8. Yes, They would be the ones. The orignal papersize is somewhere between A3 and A4 James

Last 2 pages of section 6. Not much in way of info but makes manual complete. James 6-24.bmp 6-25.bmp

Section 5. the final one..... This completes the scan of the field service manual. The Schematics that came with the manual, I scanned and uploaded some 15 odd years ago and are on the net in several places. James [edit] Opps, just discovered 2 pages missing from section 6. will do tomorrow sectiont5.pdf

Table of contents. James table of contents.pdf

Front cover of field service manual James front cover.bmp

Here is section 2 If you are woundering where i got the book, Disk and schematics from. I bought them from best electronics. James section2-1.pdf section2-2.pdf

here is 1st part of section 3 James section 3-1.pdf

Here is section 1 James section1.zip

It would seam to me that the AUTORUN file on one of the disks is the real Writers tool and the cart is used as a form of copy protection. Being on an orange OSS cart, i believe that the whole cart can be disabled to use the ram under it. James

I think its Great.. owning 2 GT's myself im sure one or both will eventually need some servicing.. Reading the beginning of section 4, its written there is a Diagnostic Disk and its features.. Do you or anyone have this diskette? Thanks I don't have it that I know of but definately want a copy of the program. Check out : http://ftp.pigwa.net...ford/index.html And get the ATR. It can be booted from any drive (basic off). Don't forget the internal diagnositcs that can be invoked with a shorting plug. Will try and get some more of the manual scanned as time will allow. James

Since my RT-8 died a while ago I opened a similar topic (it's gone now as it seems). I think an RT-8 has to be 100% compatible with the original, hardware wise (emulated), so all existing software works with it. The manufacturer of the original RT-8 chip sent me the data sheet of the M3002-16PI and when looking at it, it doesn't seem to be a problem to put everything in programmable logic. At least for someone who's familiar with programming such thing. It doesn't have to be a physical cartridge. As long as it's small it can be build into any A8. edit: typo I did a search for the chip number and found this page http://www.hkinventory.com/public/OfferInventResult.asp?Order=1&pnums=M3002-16PI&crit1=&crit2=&category=&product=&keywords=&words=3&country=&postdate=&brand=&crit3=&crit4=0&datecode= IF it is the same chip and they can be had easily, maybe someone could whip up several RT-8 boards. No compatiability problems then.. James

I would be if my IndusGT is compatible. How would I ascertain compatibility? They all have the header pins required, so hardware wise, all is well. If your Indus can read and write enhanced density properly, you have the latest indus rom which is ver 1.2. There are some sites that list a ver 1.4 rom, but this is bogus. Ver 1.2 is required for the indus cpm to work. James

please ignore

The first 3 sectors on A8 DD ATR images are 128 bytes, the rest of the image has 256 byte sectors. Atari drives do format 256 byte sectors but the firmware in the drive is programed to only send/recieve 128 bytes for sectors 1,2 and 3, ignore/pad out the 2nd half and read/write 256 byte from/to the disk . All CPM DD disks are 256 bytes for every sector and are read/written and used as such. Person X who created those CPM ATR images forgot or didn't take into account this fact, so the cpm images are broken due to 384 bytes are not what they should be. However, if you check out http://trub.atari8.i...ef=indus_cpm_en , You will find info about how to recreate the CPM disk in full. You will need to add 64K to your indusGT to be able to use them. The indus can then be used as a CPM computer using the atari as a terminal. James gee , some people are quick with the replies.....

To date, All XE carts known will work on the XL. 99% of the black carts will workl. Those marked 400/800, 99% will work as well. Only some real old ones that don't. There is a small hardware mod that replaces the os rom with a switchable one that can select the early OS (rev B) that will run those older carts and the XL OS. The 32 in one os mod is a place to start if you require it. James