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Looking for 850 Diagnostic Cartridge or ROM Dump...


DavidMil

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Hello All!

I'm new to this site (and most all others). Since I retired and got a little board, I discovered all my Atari stuff in the attic. I've repaired most of it but I'm having problems with my 850 interface. % volt power is good up to the chips and the 9 volts is good too. The power light lights up and the first time I booted the PC it loaded the drivers, but the second time (and all times since) I rebooted the 800 it doesn't load the drivers. I think that one of the 7805's is not stable or one of the caps is going bad, but I'm not sure. I'm going to replace all the electrolytic caps and the 5 volt regulators, then I'll fire up my old 40MHz Kikusui scope to look at the chips. But in the mean time I'm also looking for either an 850 Diagnostic Cartridge (CB102384) or the ROM dump. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

DavidMil

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Hello All!

I'm new to this site (and most all others). Since I retired and got a little board, I discovered all my Atari stuff in the attic. I've repaired most of it but I'm having problems with my 850 interface. % volt power is good up to the chips and the 9 volts is good too. The power light lights up and the first time I booted the PC it loaded the drivers, but the second time (and all times since) I rebooted the 800 it doesn't load the drivers. I think that one of the 7805's is not stable or one of the caps is going bad, but I'm not sure. I'm going to replace all the electrolytic caps and the 5 volt regulators, then I'll fire up my old 40MHz Kikusui scope to look at the chips. But in the mean time I'm also looking for either an 850 Diagnostic Cartridge (CB102384) or the ROM dump. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

DavidMil

 

Here's a 850 R: handler. Make it an AUTORUN.SYS at boot time, I think.

RS850.zip

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Testing (and some mild cussing) went on over several days. I tried several R: handlers that I found around the internet too. I've downloaded the RS850.zip file too and I'll give it a try tommorow. Is this the Basic file that starts with three lines of rem statements (10, 15, 17)? Thanks for the suggestions. Please keep 'em coming! I'll let you know if I have any success with this handler. My parts from Mouser should get here tomorrow. If this handler does work, I'm going to fire up the old soldering Iron and start replacing caps and voltage regulators.

 

Thanks again!

David

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Well, I unzipped and tried the R: handler that russg was kind enough to give me but it made no difference; so... Out comes the soldering iron and I'm going to make sure that the power components are all new and working before I start testing and replacing chips. A little expensive but I have plenty of time now (and I enjoy working on electronic devices). I guess that comes from the dark ages when I had to ride my bike up to the drug store to test the TV and/or radio tubes for my Dad! I'll let you all know when I find the problem and how it turns out.

 

Thanks all,

.David

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I unzipped and tried the R: handler that russg was kind enough to give me but it made no difference; so... Out comes the soldering iron and I'm going to make sure that the power components are all new and working before I start testing and replacing chips. A little expensive but I have plenty of time now (and I enjoy working on electronic devices). I guess that comes from the dark ages when I had to ride my bike up to the drug store to test the TV and/or radio tubes for my Dad! I'll let you all know when I find the problem and how it turns out.

 

Thanks all,

.David

Ahh, yes I remember those days! For me, it was the corner store (7-11 type). Rode my Spyder bike.

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  • 2 months later...

Hello All!

I'm new to this site (and most all others). Since I retired and got a little board, I discovered all my Atari stuff in the attic. I've repaired most of it but I'm having problems with my 850 interface. % volt power is good up to the chips and the 9 volts is good too. The power light lights up and the first time I booted the PC it loaded the drivers, but the second time (and all times since) I rebooted the 800 it doesn't load the drivers. I think that one of the 7805's is not stable or one of the caps is going bad, but I'm not sure. I'm going to replace all the electrolytic caps and the 5 volt regulators, then I'll fire up my old 40MHz Kikusui scope to look at the chips. But in the mean time I'm also looking for either an 850 Diagnostic Cartridge (CB102384) or the ROM dump. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

DavidMil

 

I'm not familiar with a 850 Diagnostic Cartridge (CB102384), I don't show it listed, or existed, anywhere.

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Well, I replaced one bad cap, one diode, the 7805 voltage reg. (which I think was what damaged several of the chips). I happy to report that all the RS232 ports are working fine.

Now I need to find a printer that I can use to test the parallel port.

 

DavidMil

 

You don't mention where you're located. I have a parallel printer and, very hard to find, Atari parallel cable.

Somehow, I think you won't actually be using the 850 for a modem or printer. Maybe for the modem.

How did you test the R: port?

 

It's a centronics port printer. Works with my 15 pin parallel Atari cable, I think.

Edited by russg
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What brought all this on... I have four (well, three now, I think) non-working 850 interfaces. I was going to sell three of them once I was sure that they worked.

I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to sell something unless I'm sure it's really working. I have all three manuals that Atari put out for the 850; Users Manual,

Field Service Manual, and the 850 Technical Manual. I was thinking about hooking up a Lantronix UDS100 to the 850 when a I found an actual Atari BBS run

over the internet by a gentleman in Tenn. I finally gave up on anyone having the cartridge when Brad at Best Electronics said he hadn't seen one in years and

I built my own loopback testers. I've been in the process of writing my own software and I'm down to working with some of the control lines (to get them to test

both on and off automatically). I used Appendix C (I think it was from the tech manual) to make my loopback testers. Then I found a program in the field service

manual to test the send/receive portion for a port and modified it to test all four ports without any user input other than pressing a key to start the test.

Believe it or not, I still have my Atari 15 pin to Centronics cable! Only the good Lord knows what happened to my old Epson dot matrix printer. Are you selling

yours? I'm afraid I'm a long way from Cleveland (although I was born in Youngstown). I'm in Kingwood Texas now, just northeast of Houston.

 

DavidMil

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(snip)

 

what happened to my old Epson dot matrix printer. Are you selling

yours? I'm afraid I'm a long way from Cleveland (although I was born in Youngstown). I'm in Kingwood Texas now, just northeast of Houston.

 

DavidMil

 

Mine is a HP Deskjet 690C inkjet centronics, run from 15 pin plug on PRC ICD interface..

I was thinking you could test your 850s here if you were near Cleveland.

I'm not selling it, I don't know why, just something to test 850/PRC with.

I'm sure the ink carts are gone by now.

Modern PC printers use a USB port.

Edited by russg
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Well, I'm happy to report that the loopback testers and the software for the four RS232C Ports is now finished. I had to modify the Port 4 loopback tester

because the computer can't control the DTR and RTS lines and they are always on at 10 volts. So I added a few resistors and two LEDs to test the two

Port 4 control lines. Now I have to build a parallel port tester. I've ordered a few electronic parts and now I have to sit down with the schematics to see

how to write the software. I'm glad I'm retired and don't have a lot to do. This type of thing can cause serious hair loss! But it's still fun and helps to keep

my mind from turning to mush (something I've seen happen to several of my retired friends).

 

DavidMil

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Thank you for the source code , Pack007. I can see I'll be burning some late night oil again. It has really be awhile. I really miss the old days

when you had to design and program anything that you wanted. When Basic came out I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I had

learned on Machine Language (load a,bla bla). Then when I found out that you could incorporate USR calls into Basic, the world was right

again. Anyway thanks for the source code. I do agree that trying to put two 850's on at the same time is a waste without some reprograming

of the computer and the 850's and most likely would require some additional wiring/rewiring of the 850's.

 

DavidMil

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I'll second those thanks for the pointer to the source, it answers a lot of questions I've had

about the 850. Never could get one to work either, thought it was me. Now I see the disks

used for it are NOT meant to be run in an autorun fashion, they must boot before DOS since

they are both landing at 0x0700 the same as DOS. So maybe that's why handler issues seemed

to be vapor ware back in the day when I was playing with one of these. The handler promised

was an empty promise from the start? Some work will be required to even found out to my

satisfaction or make real use of these files, but at least it's a start.

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I'll second those thanks for the pointer .........

 

 

The way I understand it, the 850 handler software is in ROM in the 850. The Autorun.sys file will load the handler from the 850 to the RAM in the computer; an early form of "plug n play". The 850 must be powered when booting. At one time the DOS checked for the 850 but at some point it lost that feature, hence the Autorun.sys file was created.

 

I had a problem with the a memory conflict while programing the RTC. Seems the Clock routine and the handler required the same memory at LOMEM.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/572/entry-12795-atari-clock-rtc-pt2/

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Interesting. Thanks, from what I can gather your issue with memory conflict was a bit inaccurate

as to the assessment of what is going on where. The RS loader does load to address you found, but

it does it's thing and can be overwritten in true autorun.sys file methodology with no harm, no foul.

 

From what I see the RS loader sends out '?' command and the result are placed at 0x0500 and then code

is run at 0x0506 which then must do the installing of the R: device into HATABS table. The R: driver

code is then at 0x0500 and not the area you rewrote code to avoid. Once the RS loader file code had

returned to DOS from the DOSINI jump, that area of code is no longer needed not even the RTS following

the DOSINI jump. It returned to DOS autoloading system from that run thru DOSINI.

 

Just a cursory look at it as of yet, question in my mind still is how the 850 responds to '?' command

with no entry in HATABS for it yet. Chicken and egg kind of deal will certainly need more than

a quick look before I can make sense of it to my satisfaction.

 

Nice article you linked to, deep into it too. Wish I had the time this deserves, I always wanted

to know why it didn't work out for me way back when. Today having a handler at

0x0500 could be dangerous, so many new toys need ram locations not often used so

some might be wanting to use page 5 too.

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  • 6 months later...

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