Who is offering a multicartridge?

[juice2839]

Who in the community sells a multi cart? Does anyone have one similar to the one available for the Colecovision.

 

Thanks

[Intymike]

soon young Padawan...soon

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/228141-lto-flash-intellivision-flash-cartridge-information/

Edited January 14, 2015 by Intymike

[juice2839]

soon young Padawan...soon

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/228141-lto-flash-intellivision-flash-cartridge-information/

Thanks

Edited January 14, 2015 by juice2839

[Intymike]

Not looking for soon Does anyone have one available now? I want to possibly package them with my RGB modded intelivisions.

 

When I say soon it means not now!

[ls650]

eBay..?

 

As far as I know, there hasn't been one available for some time, other than individual used sales.

[+intvnut]

LTO Flash! is coming soon, hopefully sometime in March. However, I'm also notoriously bad at predicting my schedule, especially when work slams me with 60-80 hr weeks. intvsteve can attest to how quickly the firmware pieces are coming together after my Christmas push.

Edited January 14, 2015 by intvnut

[+GroovyBee]

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/214212-hive-multi-cart-its-alive/

[BBWW]

Make a ridiculously high priced offer and I'll sell my Cuttle Cart 3! Available now. I'm saving for the LTO AND The Hive both. I paid a ridiculously high price for it!!! AND I'M STILL HAPPY I DID! Even comes with the Cuttle Cart 3 Box! I can toss in overlays for 90 games or so….

Edited January 15, 2015 by BBWW

[JasonlikesINTV]

LTO Flash! is coming soon, hopefully sometime in March. However, I'm also notoriously bad at predicting my schedule, especially when work slams me with 60-80 hr weeks. intvsteve can attest to how quickly the firmware pieces are coming together after my Christmas push.

 

Soo, probably sometime in Marchvember?

[+intvsteve]

If we'd stop having so many cool ideas, it would help.

 

Seriously, Joe's been cranking out the firmware updates faster than I can keep up. Progress has been stunning! Joe delivered a great software model for the UI to practice talking to so I wouldn't be cought completely flat-footed once he hit the ground running on the firmware. Due to the accuracy of that model, the UI recognized the hardware the very first time LTO Flash! was plugged into my dev machine!

 

I'm focusing on getting the Windows version's rough edges knocked off and shoring up some features. The Mac version will need to incorporate the changes to the core models, and its UI has fallen behind, but it'll happen.

Edited January 15, 2015 by intvsteve

[+intvnut]

Seriously, Joe's been cranking out the firmware updates faster than I can keep up. Progress has been stunning! Joe delivered a great software model for the UI to practice talking to so I wouldn't be caught completely flat-footed once he hit the ground running on the firmware. Due to the accuracy of that model, the UI recognized the hardware the very first time LTO Flash! was plugged into my dev machine!

 

LTO Flash! does have a rather sophisticated software stack, particularly for its flash storage, and I wanted to stress-test all of the logic in it. I wrote a software model of the entire storage and communication stack (low level flash driver up through high level filesystem and communication protocol) and subjected that to significant stress testing on my Linux box. That's the model intvsteve's referring to. That model ran through literally billions of pathologically insane transactions, including random drops in the middle of transactions, and it picked itself up, dusted off, and continued. The low-level flash driver checked for and flagged semantic errors, such as overwriting a byte that's already been programmed to ensure the higher levels of the stack were clean. I consider that stack rock-solid.

 

The actual LTO Flash! firmware is derived from that same codebase, just modified to run on the much less generously equipped MCU that's on the board. The firmware version of that codebase has also been subjected to extensive automated stress testing, with my PC subjecting a test board to all sorts of random and barely reasonable requests non-stop. I just recently concluded a multiday automated stress test on the actual firmware and hardware that ran over 1M commands without incident. It'd still be running now if I hadn't accidentally unplugged the wrong USB connector while testing stuff on a separate board plugged into a different USB port.

 

In any case, the model was so accurate because it shares 80% - 90% of the code with the real firmware.

 

I must admit that I was extremely thrilled that our parallel development efforts met in the middle so seamlessly. It just worked. I'd love to say "I planned it that way," and to some extent it's true that planning made it happen. But it's still thrilling when it actually happens.

 

Now I'm wrapping up all of the remaining details, like what happens when a crackmonkey starts jamming on the power and reset switches while something's trying to talk to the board, for example. I've found and eradicated the vast majority of the cases where the board actually crashes and just goes off in the weeds. Those have been little minor things such as forgetting to initialize this register over here, or forgetting to save/restore that over there—basic codebase integration issues.

 

There's a couple outside cases where, if you're really banging it from both sides (sending an onslaught of commands from the PC and twiddling the reset/power switches on the Intellivision) that a system with an ECS connected will reset to the ECS title screen instead of LTO Flash!. But, the moment you touch anything, it resets to LTO Flash!, so I think that's a reasonable outcome. If I can figure out a way to pop us out of that 1 in a 1000 rut, I will put the fix in. The firmware has plenty of "fail upwards" escapes where it detects that someone's been monkeying with things or the system was temporarily unstable, and so sets about righting itself and the system.

 

Altogether, the firmware is sitting around 20K - 25K lines of code. Not ginormous, but not tiny either.

Edited January 15, 2015 by intvnut

[+cmart604]

So SPSP is almost done then? That last post seemed like a lot of words so I'm just making an educated guess at this point.

[+freewheel]

There's a couple outside cases where, if you're really banging it from both sides (sending an onslaught of commands from the PC and twiddling the reset/power switches on the Intellivision)

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that I can safely and easily leave the cart hooked into my PC and INTV, indefinitely? And pass through infinite load-run cycles without unplugging from either? I think you can imagine why I'd find that... handy.

 

A lot of multicarts don't really allow this (obviously ones with an SD card can't), and it's annoying to some degree.

 

PS to intvsteve: don't forget, the Linux UI can just be command line

 

Edited January 16, 2015 by freeweed

[+intvnut]

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that I can safely and easily leave the cart hooked into my PC and INTV, indefinitely? And pass through infinite load-run cycles without unplugging from either? I think you can imagine why I'd find that... handy.

 

A lot of multicarts don't really allow this (obviously ones with an SD card can't), and it's annoying to some degree.

 

PS to intvsteve: don't forget, the Linux UI can just be command line

 

 

Yes, it is a design goal to allow LTO Flash! to be connected to PC and Intellivision at the same time. I have blocking diodes on the power rails to keep the PC side from trying to power the Intellivision and vice versa, along with a power-switch transistor to fully power-down the USB section when there's no USB connected. Quite a lot of my recent testing has involved having LTO Flash! plugged into my Intellivision while also twiddling it from my PC.

 

Also, I want to enable games/programs running on the Intellivision to make use of the high-speed USB serial link LTO Flash! provides to the PC (complete with hardware flow control). The actual software interface on the Intellivision side is really simple. One location provides read data + read status. Another location, when read, provides a 'clear to send' and when written sends the data.

 

 

Regarding Linux UI: Right now on the Linux side, the main tool I have for manipulating LTO Flash! state is very, very low level. It's basically a very thin wrapper over the wire protocol. My testing scripts communicate with LTO Flash! at the protocol level, abusing the board in all sorts of ways.

 

You'd probably want something a little higher level than that. :-)

 

Edit: Although, the "download and play" API is fairly simple, and that's what you'd most likely use in a tight edit-compile-run-debug cycle. I could definitely provide a very simple commandline script for that. I'm going to write that script for myself, after all.

 

I guess I should probably publish the LTO Flash! wire protocol at some point, so folks can write their own UIs / GUIs to manipulate LTO Flash!. The wire protocol API is just a really simple RPC call mechanism. It's as if you're calling C functions on the remote, and most of the functions just return a single byte response. Some do require you to send a block of data. Some others send a block of data back to you. All of them are wrapped in checksum-y goodness, of course.

Edited January 16, 2015 by intvnut

[+freewheel]

Oooo, I smell INTV online! I am SO not the right person to write a web browser for it, but cool nonetheless.

 

In terms of Linux, quite frankly I'd be happy with a "dump this here ROM file into the cart" command. Doesn't have to do a single thing more. It would be amazing - a single command to compile/assemble/dump, then hit reset on the console, and begin playing (after perhaps selecting from a menu). Emulators are fine for 90% of RAD, but I'm holding back on a few things like really nice controller handling specifically because of this. To be able to test out changes pretty much real-time... droooool. We certainly didn't have this kind of cross-platform development ease back in the day!

[+intvnut]

Oooo, I smell INTV online! I am SO not the right person to write a web browser for it, but cool nonetheless.

 

In terms of Linux, quite frankly I'd be happy with a "dump this here ROM file into the cart" command. Doesn't have to do a single thing more. It would be amazing - a single command to compile/assemble/dump, then hit reset on the console, and begin playing (after perhaps selecting from a menu). Emulators are fine for 90% of RAD, but I'm holding back on a few things like really nice controller handling specifically because of this. To be able to test out changes pretty much real-time... droooool. We certainly didn't have this kind of cross-platform development ease back in the day!

 

Why hit reset? LTO Flash! will do that for you in Download & Play mode.

 

To be clear, D&P mode just downloads the game directly to RAM for immediate play. It doesn't store it on the flash. It's meant for tight "compile-edit-run-debug" cycles, similar to "Dev Mode" on the CC3. Once you decide you want to put the stable ROM in your menu, that is when you use the GUI to name it and anchor it where you want it to appear in the menu.

Edited January 16, 2015 by intvnut

[+freewheel]

 

Why hit reset? LTO Flash! will do that for you in Download & Play mode.

 

To be clear, D&P mode just downloads the game directly to RAM for immediate play. It doesn't store it on the flash. It's meant for tight "compile-edit-run-debug" cycles, similar to "Dev Mode" on the CC3. Once you decide you want to put the stable ROM in your menu, that is when you use the GUI to name it and anchor it where you want it to appear in the menu.

 

*insert "shut up and take my money" GIF here*

[+intvnut]

 

*insert "shut up and take my money" GIF here*

 

SOON! (I can almost taste it myself!)

[+intvsteve]

PS to intvsteve: don't forget, the Linux UI can just be command line

 

 

Hehe... I figured Joe'd have that covered I do have a long-range project that considers a GTK-based UI, but that's *waaay* out there.

[+intvnut]

 

Why hit reset? LTO Flash! will do that for you in Download & Play mode.

 

Ok, one minor inaccuracy: You will have to reset out of your game back to the menu, because the serial port is owned by the game while the game runs. But, once you download the game, LTO Flash! will reset automagically to the game.

 

You can download-and-play any time LTO Flash! is sitting at the menu on the Intellivision. There isn't a separate Dev Mode for that as there was on the CC3.

[BBWW]

All this tech talk, how about some pretty pictures. :-)

Edited January 18, 2015 by BBWW

[slab0meat]

All this tech talk, how about some pretty pictures. :-)

 

 

[BBWW]

I feel better now.

[Jeffrey Bouchard]

Has there been any more developments release date etc of either cartridge? Thank you very much

[Games For Your Intellivision]

There seems to be a lot of progress. INTVNut will have to make an official update.

Edited January 22, 2015 by Games For Your Intellivision