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Connect 1050 to Altirra


toddtmw

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Okay. I bought a 1050 and I want to use it as a disk drive for Altirra. There are all kinds of posts on the forums and otherwhere talking about how to do this, but many of them are several years old and point to sites thaat are no longer there or that are out of stock or that are fairly expensive.

 

Can someone please tell me the May 2017 options I have here?

 

It sounds like SIO2PC ( work because it goes the wrong way? Is that right?

The 10502PC from that same site is out of stock.

 

Where can I get a reasonbly priced solution that is in stock that will do what I am trying to do?

 

Thanks all!

 

-Todd

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maybe creative use of the usb as a networked drive or pseudo drive could automate things, some script writing pro could make it happen yeah that's the ticket, but it won't be me....

 

the only way to fly is real hardware and ape respeqt..... and the original sio2pc flavors

Edited by _The Doctor__
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There used to be a product line named "Catweasel ". They were PCI cards that provided plug in connectivity to both Atari & Amiga disk drives & other peripherals, directly to a PC. I would say that a Catweasel board would likely do the trick.

 

I remember that Catweasels were kind of expensive, and they had limited availability, but they looked pretty awesome, spec-wise. The few times that I looked for them, a few years ago, they had become collectible, and were more pricey, & more scarce.

 

Maybe some hardware people here could create a new, similar device, for less money, via FPGA technology.

 

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I know nothing technical about the hardware but wouldn't it be really hard to have the emulation running in conjunction with the hardware and meet timing requirements?

 

It's weird, I've been reading threads here for a while and with all the talk about Altirra emulating different drives, it sounded to me like it was actually working with the hardware.

 

Just looking at the changes for the latest release of Altirra it has this line:

 

  • Added a power-on delay setting to deal with slow disk drives. This gives the disk drives more time to init before the computer powers on. "Auto" automatically applies a delay for the 1050 Duplicator, ATR8000, and Percom drives.

This really makes it sound like it is waiting for a physical drive, not a virtual one.

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I think it more shows the problem with drive emulation, the delay is to give the emulated drive time to sync properly where in a real drive it I presume have ran as expected. Just imagine how much having an emulated Atari trying to communicate and sync with another piece of software connecting the real drive...

 

But, like I say I don't have a clue about the hardware but timing always seems to be a critical piece of emulation.

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The old MSDOS based Xformer emulator had the ability to read and write to 810s and 1050s. I used it back in the late 80s to create XFD images from my floppies. You could actually boot off the 810 on Xformer. It worked on an intel 486. I remember timings on the motherboard were critical and when motherboards left the base 60/66Mhz frequency, I could no longer get it to work. It worked well. Maybe Avery could incorporate that into Altirra?

Edited by ACML
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Emulation of video and sound is generally done as fast as the PC allows. The video is constructed and displayed as a single frame and the sound goes to a buffer. Turbo mode demonstrates how fast it actually is happening as the emulation doesn't pause to wait for the next frame worth, it just goes continuously.

 

Potentially you could communicate to a drive either by running the emulation such that it's near to realtime cycle exactness which would be a real tedious process.

Or cut corners a bit and just run the emulation to the timing of a landmark event, such as the bitrate of the drive.

 

Or, probably the best way, just have a seperate task deal with talking to the real drive at the command/block level which would present no greater timing challenge than you'd already get by running an instance of Altirra and APE or other SIO2PC type program, which most of us have probably already done.

 

But really, it's just a novelty. For me a big part of the point of emulation is convenience. Convenience of not having all the old hardware sprawled across the desk and convenience of not having to do media changes every couple of minutes.

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Potentially you could communicate to a drive either by running the emulation such that it's near to realtime cycle exactness which would be a real tedious process.

 

Xformer used a delay constant you typed in before it ran which was I guess the speed calibration for realtime floppy operation. It was trial and error. You kept trying a different constant until you could achieve reliable 810 operation.

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There used to be a product line named "Catweasel ". They were PCI cards that provided plug in connectivity to both Atari & Amiga disk drives & other peripherals, directly to a PC.

Not exactly. The Catweasel can be considered a predecessor of the Kryoflux and the Super Card Pro. It is designed for accessing foreign disks (not drives), such as Atari, Apple, C64 or Amiga directly with a standard PC disk drive. Some models, I believe, let you connect an Amiga drive directly, but this is mostly because Amiga and PC drives are basically equivalent. You can't connect an Atari 8-bit disk drive directly to any Catweasel. Btw, the latest model was FPGA based.

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The old MSDOS based Xformer emulator had the ability to read and write to 810s and 1050s. I used it back in the late 80s to create XFD images from my floppies. You could actually boot off the 810 on Xformer. It worked on an intel 486. I remember timings on the motherboard were critical and when motherboards left the base 60/66Mhz frequency, I could no longer get it to work. It worked well. Maybe Avery could incorporate that into Altirra?

Sure, but this was in MSDOS where you could take over the hardware at the lowest level, and achieve the timing you needed. It was also using a real serial port, where you had genuine hardware interrupts working to help you, and the timing didn't suck (as it is totally unreliable with USB to serial converters). It's a miracle any 10502PC-USB work at all in my opinion :).

 

 

 

AFAIK, you can't.

Here's some information about the Catweasel device. Maybe a similar device can be created?

 

Individual Computers Catweasel

 

Just to be clear, I meant that the software doesn't support it, not that it's impossible. You also don't need a Catweasel to read and write A8 disks on the PC, just a floppy controller that supports FM mode (which are a bit rare, unfortunately).

Does that catweasel write disks? I always thought of it as an archival tool.

 

 

Wait. What is the 1050 2 PC, then?

http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=198

 

I guess this is just to copy disks to ATX files or copy ATX file to disk?

Yep.

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It looks like most of the SIO2PC devices only support one SIO connection, so how do you go from physical disk to physical drive to atari to SIO2PC adapter to PC to ATR (or vice versa) when you cannot have both the disk drive and the PC plugged in at the same time?

 

Thanks,

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One trick you may be able to employ is have one or more physical drives

connected to the Atari via SIO in various drive number settings and

have power shut off to those you don't want active as in the case

of an active SIO2PC emulated drive #1 on a PC. Copy files to your ramdisk,

disable PC program, turn on physical drive, press RESET on Atari and

have the physical #1 drive working. I have a four drive stack, two #1

and two #2, sometimes only one is powered up, only two can be powered

else there are issues with too many devices operating under the same

drive number.

 

1050 drive has two SIO ports, one goes to computer and the other goes

to SIO2PC if you are not fluent in the way the SIO daisy chain works.

If you need more SIO connections you can have that with two SIO cables

wired and soldered together, but it's a grand project all it's own. You

also need more (up to 3 in total) double SIO socket drives/devices to

gain empty and useful SIO sockets with.

 

Other methods exist but are getting very rare to obtain such as

CSS Quintopus.

http://nleaudio.com/css/products/quintopus.htm

 

I don't recall any other alternatives since I built my own 'quad' SIO

cable (the above grand project) when I was first starting out and was

suffering the SIO jack pinch where you just don't have enough of them.

 

It's important you hear this at least once. NEVER hot plug any SIO

device EVER, powered down or up is not the issue -- DON'T is the

issue. You can get away with it 100 times and then you'll have a

defective drive/device to try and find a replacement for. Thems the

breaks, take that road and suffer. Only system wide power down entirely can

changes be done safely in the SIO daisy chain.

 

Not sure if very much of this applies to your Altirra mode set up

anyway but there it is for what's it's worth.

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