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Showing results for tags 'Disks'.
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Hey everyone! Been a long-time lurker, but finally decided to create an account because I've taken on a personal project I'm hoping some fine folks here might be able to help with. I'm from Ottawa, Canada and grew up here. Back in the 80s and 90s, there was a local organization called the National Capital Atari Users Group. It was primarily focused around the earlier Atari home computers, such as the 400/800XL, 130XE and to a lesser extent, the Atari ST line. Growing up with a 130XE in the house, one of the things I loved about this organization was the monthly disks they put together for members, consisting mostly of community developed games and utilities, many of which were as good or better than anything you could buy off the shelf. These were made for a number of years and I think I had at least a couple dozen of them once. Sadly, these have long since been lost. I've been looking for a retro project to take on and this came to mind. I'm looking to build an online archive of all these monthly disks that will be free to everyone. I have spent many hours researching and cannot find any such archive online, or even images of the disks on Archive.org. I'm wondering if there are any former members of this organization out there who have some or all of these disks, either in imaged or physical form that they'd be willing to give or lend me. For physical disks, I will make 1:1 images of them using 1050 drive with an interface to connect it to PC. I'll then build a web site to host the archive and upload the collection to Archive.org for posterity. Of course, full credit will be given if desired. I have a lot of great memories of my early computing life thanks to the NCAUG and these monthly disks and I'm excited about building this tribute to them for other Atari enthusiasts. If anyone can help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it. Cheers! -
I don't know if this is something that the world needs, or if it is even going to work, but I just finished the schematics and PCB design for my own take on the "mini/nano/whatever/quark" version of PEB. Since it's my version, I decided to call it simply Erik's Tiny PEB, as this is supposed to be small(ish). I attach the schematics and current PCB layout. The schematics and the board are a bit of a mess, since the design is based on my existing and working "SD processor board", I just added a few things. I didn't want to layout everything again, so at places the board is dense and I haven't cleaned up the schematics. Since the design is partially based on my existing work, theoretically this should work. The additions are: 512K SRAM 4MB SPI FLASH TI-99/4A side port connector (created an Eagle symbol for it, hopefully that went ok) Once I've verified the PCB and schematic design I'm going to send this off to China for PCB production. This should enable me to build a working prototype (hopefully). The board is supposed to enable the following once it works (the way I imagine it - there are programmable components here and I don't know how much stuff will fit in, and it is hard to test without a prototype): SD card storage support, with support for FAT, FAT32, SD and SDHC cards 256K of paged RAM memory (and of course the standard 32K as a subset). I'm not sure if the standard paging will fit into the CPLD, but I think it will as I am not planning to store the page entries on the CPLD, but actually on external SRAM. 256K of additional RAM which needs to provide support for DSR routines, potentially also for ROM cartridges and maybe even GROM. ARM coprocessor for SD card support and other stuff. The CPLD is supposed to provide a simple transparent DMA engine, allowing the ARM to inject stuff from SD card to the TI-99/4A's memory expansion, on the fly. I have something like this working on my FPGA system, although that is a much more complex setup than can be done with these parts. USB device interface (virtual serial port, running at 12 Mbps or something like that - this piece already works) Serial port (3.3V level) I2C port The design is a weird derivative of my current FPGA system. I have connected my previous SD processor board to my FPGA TI-99/4A clone and it already allows me to load ROMs and GROMs from SD cards, my plan is to take that to the point that it would support TI's file system via a DSR. I have already a fair amount of firmware and other bits scattered in my various TI-related projects, so this is one attempt to hopefully gather some of those into a meaningful setup. That, and the fact that I don't have a 32K memory expansion for my real TI-99/4A, so I wanted to get one and this seems to be what came out... Erik sd_proc3.pdf ET-PEB-Schematics.pdf
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I was having some intermittent read errors on one of my disk drives (specifically, DSK2 which is a 3.5", 720K drive). I spent several hours swapping out drives, etc. I found that my fingers are too fat to easily manipulate the mounting screws which led to some "X rated" language. I finally came to the conclusion that it wasn't the disk drive but rather the disk itself. It seems that, some time ago, I had purchased a lot of DSDD 3.5" disks off of eBay. Hidden among that lot were a couple of HD disks and they were the ones causing the read errors. So, make certain you examine any eBay purchases thoroughly - it might save you some grief (and colorful language).
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So I was trying to install Word UP! on my 1040STe last night, and it would start installing just fine to the UltraSatan drive (I tried both C the system folder, and F an empty partition), but on the second disk would crash and go to the screen below, frozen and in need of a reset. So I am wondering, is it even possible to install discs right from the floppy to the ultrasatan? Or is it a more complex process. I actually tried to install the program without the Ultrasatan turned on, creating a program disk and a data disk, but then couldn't fire up the program because I hadn't started gdos (which is on the other disc! Could they make it any more complicated to start a freaking word processor?) but that is a story for another day. I think I just need to read the manual and figure out how to load it step by step. As to the above, If not this might be just another reason to get the internal HD installed.
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Hello, I just looking for some info about copy files .atr or other files can be copied to real Disk on Indus GT Disk Drive. Is this possible?. If it is possible, how is the process? Comments, suggests i will apreciate. Thanks.
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Hi, I'm not really an expert on multi-disk games on the Atari and I would like to know a little bit more. I've seen some multi-disk games, but they always seem to want you to put your disk into disk drive 1. Now if I'm correct, can't the Atari daisy chain up to 8 drives? I appreciate that most people don't have more than 1 drive, but was there any software that really used D2: upwards? It seems like that the games that I've tried have always wanted you to put disk 2 into drive 1 after removing disk 1. This seems wasteful if you have the extra drives. I appreciate that this is down to how the programmer coded their game, but what games did actually allow seamless disk reading by find disk 2 in drive 2 and just reading it? Ta! Steve
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This question is more of a general computer question than just an 8-Bit question, but since I've experienced it the most there, I thought I would ask it here. Do CRC errors always equal damaged/corrupted/unusable data? I've been imaging a lot of old disks I've accumulated and got a lot of CRC errors in ProSystem. The disks weren't kept very well. All the games on the disk still seem to work though, and I don't get any load errors, and everything works on the image file too. I can also write the image back to a disk without a problem. I only vaguely understand what CRC is used for (other than the fact that it is a method of checking for errors) but it isn't clear to me if CRC errors always mean bad data. Also, does copying/imaging disks actually copy the bad CRC properties?
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This may be a silly question, but is there any harm in scanning my 5.25" disks on my flatbed scanner? Will the laser cause any damage to the data? I'd like to scan some of my commercial disks to contribute to Atarimania, MobyGames, etc.
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Hello, Cleaning up the Radio\Commodore room and have for sale the following items: I'm in Ohio and sales only to the US, sorry no international shipping. #1 Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy drive with 10 formatted disks. #2 Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy drive with 10 formatted disks. I have tested both drives by formatting 20 disks, then doing random copying. Both work fine. Cosmetacially they are good, they do have a few scuffs but not bad for their age. Asking $100.00 plus shipping for each drive. #3 130+ misc. Commodore formatted 5.25" floppy dsks. Asking $22 shipped. SOLD #4 Suncom Joystick. Works fine and looks good. Asking $25 shipped. #5 Unopened box of Maxell HD 5.25" floppy disks. $10 shipped.
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