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1050 happy drive chips?


rockdoc2010

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I pulled a happy out of storage and it did not do the power on sequence.

I pulled the drive mechanism and tried it in a known good drive and the mech worked.

I pulled the two chips from a known good board and installed the happy in it.

No Joy!

Your not gonna believe this.....

I then installed the two chips that i removed from the drive when i installed it back in 1984. I still had the chips!!!!!!!!

Now I have a working 1050 drive but the happy is dead.

 

I am in need of and where do I find the following..

 

UM6502

 

94p64b-2583

HART-ECMT-R2

BIG GI ON PRINT

8638 CMA

 

THANKS

 Douglas

 

 

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2 hours ago, rockdoc2010 said:

I then installed the two chips that i removed from the drive when i installed it back in 1984. I still had the chips!!!!!!!!

Now I have a working 1050 drive but the happy is dead.

Good troubleshooting! So with your work you have determined that the original 6810 SRAM, WDC controller, and 6532 RIOT are all still good. (Along with the original 2 chips you swapped back in--the 6507 CPU and Atari ROM.)

 

Now, as for the Happy board. The primary IC's are a 6502 CPU, a proprietary 8KB mask ROM, and either three 2KB 6116 SRAM's (earlier boards), or 1 8K 6164 SRAM (later boards). Since your mask ROM date code is 8638 (38th week of 1986) I suspect you have the newer 8KB single SRAM chip board.

 

I'd start by replacing the SRAM chips. I've revived two dead or flaky happy boards by only replacing these.

 

Example eBay listings:

6116 2Kx8 SRAM: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254004576632

6264 8Kx8 SRAM: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223327507834

 

2 hours ago, rockdoc2010 said:

UM6502

This is the 6502. It is a common part, and highly unlikely to have a problem from my experience. However, they are cheap if you want to get one to have on hand, eg: https://www.ebay.com/itm/112533588620

 

2 hours ago, rockdoc2010 said:

94p64b-2583

HART-ECMT-R2

BIG GI ON PRINT

8638 CMA

This is the Happy's proprietary mask ROM. It has internal logic to switch between two 4KB banks when accessing specific memory locations in the ROM. This part is not easily replaced without possibly creating an extra 'adapter' board that adds the extra bank switching logic to an EPROM, or unless you can find someone to cannibalize one from an otherwise dead donor board...

 

PS: Did you know that "HART" stands for "Happy Atari Rotating Thing" ? ?

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LOL re the HART acronym.....Excellent....Scotts brother had a sense of humour...

 

I loved all the rumours re Mr Happy, that he was brought out by Atari back then when he did the ST cart (Discovery??)

 

All rumours and Mr Happy himself has never commented on it (that I know of, I asked Scott when he was on here but him and his brother didn't discuss business other than what Mr Happy was doing for Scott)

Edited by Mclaneinc
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11 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

All rumours and Mr Happy himself has never commented on it (that I know of, I asked Scott when he was on here but him and his brother didn't discuss business other than what Mr Happy was doing for Scott)

I'd love to hear an interview with Richard Adams... But in the mean time, we have this:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/257578-happy-810-resources/?do=findComment&comment=3935538

 

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28 minutes ago, xrbrevin said:

The Indus GT drive has a "WART" board - acronym for Wonderful Atari Rotating Thing

Oh yeah! I forgot about that. I wonder if it was coincidence, or a nod to inspiration from the Happy enhancement.

 

Here's the passage from Page 1-3 of the Indus GT Field Service Manual: (Which doesn't appear to be on Archive.org yet, I'm going to correct that.)

Quote

The digital board will be referred to throughout this manual as the ‘WART’ board. The name is derived from the original project title for the development of the disk drive. ‘WART’ is an acronym for ‘Wonderful Atari Rotating Thing’. The WART board contains the Z80-­‐A CPU, it’s controlling ROM/EPROM, a 2K RAM buffer and a Western Digital 2797 floppy disk controller (FDC) among other things. In later sections, we will discuss each of the major components on both of the boards.

Edit: Done: https://archive.org/details/indusgtfsmanual

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WART...Lol...Great stuff...Love to hear the history of these items although the Happy board has a special side because of the brothers role in Atari history. I had a friend who brought a Happy (810 one) for his machine here in the UK, needless to say he was using it for nefarious purposes and was on the phone to Mr Happy almost every day for about a month after getting it ask how things work and how to do a disk that was giving him issues.

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  • 3 weeks later...
8 minutes ago, rockdoc2010 said:

Anyone have the chips?

I provided you eBay links to all the potential off-the shelf main ICs in post #2 of this thread. There's 1 HD74LSxx chip that should be commonly available as well. An original mask ROM can probably only be sourced from a donor board. Hopefully if you replace the other parts, it will be OK. Can you check if your board is 3 2Kx8, or 1 8Kx8 SRAM?

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23 minutes ago, rockdoc2010 said:

As it turns out when i opened up my happy drive J6 was in fact off of its plug my one pin. I am unaware as to what J6 does due to a loss of all my tech data. The plug was towards the front of the drive by one pin.

J6 feeds the read/write signals to the drive head. With that misconnected, it would not be able to read or write any data - although it may initially appear to seek and spinup/down for the poweron self test, and when closing the lever etc...

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/22/2019 at 9:25 PM, Nezgar said:

Yes, that looks correct. Here is a picture of my board (with 6x2K ROM chips) for comparison:

 

Happy_6K.jpg

Both boards appear to be the same(HE1050D REV C), there are pads for 3-24 pin chips or 1-28 pin chip on both. This would allow the builder to install sockets for whichever type of RAM was available.

Edited by BillC
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  • 7 months later...
  • 11 months later...
On 9/22/2019 at 9:25 PM, Nezgar said:

Yes, that looks correct. Here is a picture of my board (with 3x2K ROM chips) for comparison:

 

Happy_6K.jpg

Sorry to make an old thread new... but your happy has a connection to the header and then goes to what is probably a toggle?  What is it's function.  My happy numbered 7977 is not wired this way and has a wire directly to the SIO, I am thinking this is a similar function, or perhaps just an led indicator... :D

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Happy 1050 Controller:

 

https://archive.org/details/Happy1050ControllerInstallationAndUsageInstructions
 

The LED on the CONTROLLER turns on and glows yellow whenever disk writing is enabled. This is a cautionary signal. It is suggested that you enable writing only when you actually intend to write.

 

The following information is for CONTROLLERS that have the original factory jumpers installed. The lower three position switch on the CONTROLLER provides manual control of the disk drive write protect system. The normal disk drive write protect sensing system works as usual with this switch in the NORMAL lower position. Disk writing is inhibited whether or not there is a notch in the disk when this switch is in the center PROTECT position Disk writing is enabled regardless of disk notch when the switch is in the upper WRITE position This allows formatting and writing to the disk back side without punching holes in the disk. Please note that some lower quality disks may not work on the backside, especially in medium or true double density It is necessary that you manually turn the disk over to use the back side. If a software command is issued to protect or unprotect, this command overrides the switch position and the diskette notch sensing system. The technical section of the software instructions rev 7 or later describes these commands These features are also available on the DRIVE PROGRAM OPTIONS MENU when you boot the WARP SPEED SOFTWARE and select item 1.

 

The upper two position switch of the CONTROLLER is the SLOW/FAST switch. With the two position switch in the lower position the ENHANCEMENT is in the normal fast buffered reading mode. With the two position switch in the upper position non-buffered (slow) operation is selected. Normally except as described below to enable fast writing, the only time you need to select slow mode is to boot a copy protected disk that will not boot in the fast reading mode that the HAPPY is in when you first turn the drive on. Please note that SLOW mode is not the same as UNHAPPY mode. In slow mode selected by the switch the HAPPY is still programable by the computer; slow mode has no effect on the HAPPY backup program The only way to completely lock out the HAPPY features is through the UNHAPPY mode selection of the WARP SPEED SOFTWARE, and this is usually not necessary.

Edited by ratwell
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11 hours ago, topogio said:

Sorry to make an old thread new... but your happy has a connection to the header and then goes to what is probably a toggle?  What is it's function.  My happy numbered 7977 is not wired this way and has a wire directly to the SIO, I am thinking this is a similar function, or perhaps just an led indicator...

The header is indeed normally "intended" for a happy controller as @ratwell indicated. In the particular drive pictured above, there is a small modification: The controller header is used as a source of +5V, which is used to switch power to either the ROM on the happy board, or the original 1050 ROM on the 1050 motherboard. Both have pin 28 lifted and connected to the wire from the switch.

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Hi, I have a board here in my 1050 that may or may not be a happy add on... The thing is it does not have any marking and the chips have been scrub off so you can not know what they are. It looked like a happy but as I read this and saw the pictures I find it does not look like a normal Happy drive board. Does anyone requnizes this board or what ever it is??. Yes it was in a 1050 mod date probably in the 1980's. Could be a clone..No other wires and it plug in to the main board. As you can see the "eprom" is rev 3.00???

image.thumb.jpeg.353ebbe3e617d3b7e00a57f773741bbc.jpeg

image.thumb.jpeg.d1d4e5a8d986d15afae3009514d4dce4.jpeg

The marking on the bottom side is 82135, I think...

 

Peter

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If so how do you tell the difference. Is there soft/firmware out there to upgrade and use it??? Is there a manual (lol). Just got back into Atari and am trying to remember all of this from the 1980's when I was a Atarian... Been to long in the MS Windows world to long...

Thanks for the reply...

 

Peter

 

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