October 23 2024 16:52:15. filemtime on any index page = the time the page ITSELF was last edited, not necessarily the included content on it

@therealAtari, 3 years after getting a c64, 1 year after getting a mister, there was a thing that looked acceptable. (and affordable)

The Machine | The Game(s) | The Tune(s and stuff)

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Hardware & Issues

20241017, lets see, when was the first entry ? 20240916 ... like "one month" ?
okay : so we have eventually
  1. Atari STE 4mb TOS 1.62 , sidecartridge, acsi2stm, din2vga color/mono, dell 27" vga to lcd, db9pin to usb mouse adapter + logitech mouse, rewirable to one or two button joystick retro-look but microswitches
  2. The machine has perfect sound now and the hard drive works
  3. Running 1st love still has some kind of visible scanline when the thing goes into full 50fps syncscrollmode but i bet thats the vga adapted and the screen, its "outside the drawn screen" its almost like "where it starts injecting the screendata"
  4. The first board after comparison didnt have just inaudible (almost) DMA sound, the YM sound is MUCH more quiet we heard now after leaving the volume on the speakers but switching boards (machines) the chiptune sound was a lot louder too, the DMA sound crisp clear however,
  5. The acsi emulator didnt seem to wanna so we assumed TOS 1.06 b/c it didnt list that on the github page, and for once lucky, we got our hands on a cheap set of 28pin TOS1.62 chips (*heavenly trumpets*) so there was nothing to it but open up the case, gently (GENTLY!!!!) remove the chips (i must say the boards from the ebay guy look like they come fresh from the factory there's not a speck , even the chips look polished and gleaming, then slot in the TOS1.62 (apparently lo-hi can be distinguished by the number 179 on one chip and 180 on the other , needed to put on glasses to see that tho. After which WE STILL GOT TWO BOMBS (lawl ?) ... the thing is, after a few resets it suddenly booted into drive C : , ONCE !, then not anymore, hence if it worked once, it COULD work twice !, so after much searching we put it back into the other one and there it got "drive c not found (in german)" so we had to assume the partition was corrupted on the sd card and what dya think. Rewriting it with pi-imager ... it worked !
  6. The gemdrive wont work tho, BUT thats a 128gb card with one partition so its possible thats to do with TOS 1.62 we havent tried all combos and due to the fact that we accidentally wrote an image with a different driver now we actually dont know if it was TOS1.06 or the card was already corrupted, but not maso enough to reopen the case just for that. Maybe try when we slot the more powerful psu into the current working machine, just to check and know - understanding is key, right
  7. But this is the STE the boy would have wanted, definitely ... add that 27" screen i dont think he woulda believed it back then.
So we have left
    • Atari STE 4mb tos 2.06 with currently a polishpsu (its called differently today) which we will put in the other one later but the original psu worked fine, we just HAD to try, after all its a machine for life and i doubt we'll live another 100
    • one set of TOS 1.06, three sets of TOS 1.62 (willing to part with two if any alien reading ever thinks I CAN USE THAT ! 28 pins so you dont have to rewire the (! of all things) zero-ohm resistor to solder to the other point you can just reslot the chips
    • the sidecartridge is a question mark we havent tested it with the acsi in it for now but will since its a floppy emulator and GOTEKS cost money too
    • will very likely keep the TOS2.06 machine, after all it RUNS the sound you just can simply barely hear it
    • Sidecartridge
    • 20240930 : more and more now : this thing is probably a good diagnostic tool for bicycle repair man and anyone who's happy just running scene menudisks as long as its single floppies but since we have a mister FPGA we dont really use the machine for gaming that part doesnt make a difference. AU contraire, the mister has ofcourse working DMA sound as the core represents a flawless machine under optimal conditions (or at least tries to as much as possible) ... i havent been able to boot a different TOS from .img files on this either, i now use it to copy .st disks from planet and the rest , utils, tools, to the gemdrive or acsi drives emulated on the other thing. Rooting for the guys to do some work on the firmware so at least the hard drive emu somewhat works, i usually get errors even just trying to copy from the emulated drive to acsiport pcb , ... well "machine" i guess thats not just a pcb is it.
    • this thing is clearly a work in progress with some serious issues even if show great promise. The guys on the site state it directly tho that "if you want a seamless apple-like experience this might not be for you. Its a bit like having csdb via wi-fi to your c64 but it will only run single prgs, wont do games that span multiple floppies. The button combos to reset are a bit ... euhm - inconsistent? i havent found the rtfm part that says and theres different models used in the tutorial videos i seem to have a newer one. The downloads works fine, single games seem to run .. most of them .. which might or might not be a TOS 2.06 issue .. but for instance coders guide demo has no sound and civilization refuses flat out to run when using installto HD from floppies. If the drive is set to C: it like bombs out back to the desktop. When the drive is set to D: it gives "TOS fehler#35" which i have no idea ... since this is a recapped machine unlike the c64 which is afaik original hence SCARY to turn on .. its no problem to unscrew it we are not that much of a virgin but you need parts and money to test and replace ofcourse if you wanna do that. Using one of the hd-ready games civilization still wont, when copying the disks to the emulated gemdrive its the same thing : the intro doesnt show, but the music plays and when typing on the keyboard characters appear on screen. It says on the site the emulated drive "does not support piping" so maybe its that BUT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS (la wl..) other stuff runs or runs not fine. Actually the mister is fine for ST games but the point was tracking and programming on the real thing (took 3 years before we decided the deal was acceptable and got this one - there goes the scrapped copper) I have , for instance, never seen Populous 2 run that smooth back in the day on the old machines (an stfm and a 1040 ste) so i got ... 2 hd imges in total about 4gb loaded them in hatari copied them to the gemdos folder and that to the sd card but in reality i'll only be testing "production" shit like trackers, gfa/stos/omikron (have to pick one yet) and if we can manage to get hold of affordable FPGA-box synths (perhaps something likethe mister with an sd-card with 200+ cores of different synths) and midi ports THAT WOULD OFCOURSE BE SUPER AWESOME
    • 20240917 :
      -i noticed when connecting usb to the pico on top and use it for file transfer (with computer Atari turned off) i get noise through the speakers connected to the stereo out jacks
      -im gonna try to be complete but i cant overstretch my cycles : i seem to only get the interference sound during mass-storage mode when the (load a dis : ) INPUT is set to the other connected pc (a laptop) ... ('bout dem apples? i knew electrons were hard to follow weirdos but im gonna start losing hair i already dont have like this) .. okay - well so far any tracker trying to load modules seems to crash, the few that get loaded look like garble and the ones that play have question marks where the notes would be and crash when it hits the first sample. ON TOP OF THAT, when i press reset the machine stays stuck in the frozen crash state showing the tracker until i actually use the power knob ... experimental seems to be the right word here. The protracker FLOPPY from the online database gets stuck on a white screen unless i DISABLE the boot sector, then it gets to the medway boys menu but theres no modfiles on the disk (lol) and obviously the thing can only emulate one device at once and my six floppies are five in use for Civilization I ...
    • 20240918 :
      - more wip discovered ... a lot of stuff wont run from the emulated hd, its really mostly mass storage like a readonly optical medium (128gb in size here) you use to copy to your ohter drives with a direct usb link to another pc if needed, so easy transfer. Trackers for instance give weirdness or just load bombs instead of files when used from emulated hd
      - the floppies in the repository arent sorted or checked, noisetracker wouldnt work either
      - however, using .st images we already had and using those as emulated A:/ floppies seems to have the trackers work, protracker STE gives very low sound with lots of interference tho, while noisetracker doesnt on the same stereo jack out on the back of the machine so all of that is still a mystery. For now we'll go with capacitor theory.
    • 9pin to usb mouse adapter https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133558840462
    • plug -> play cant see any issues
    • 20241017 : running 1st love and sea of colours it seems to show that the adapter (which is kinda normal i guess) has a very little lag but it seems to do se BEFORE the drawn screen so the actual screendata is complete, otherwise there's some ghosting to the right but i wonder if "justgamers" would even notice it, the vertical stripes are barely visible. Since we have no comparison but the mister direct vga its impossible to say unless we get our hands on an original Atari + C64 monitor which for the time being will seriously have to wait - soldering station + rework or ITX Lama is more likely to be on the letter to Santa (but he hasnt answered in decades)
    • ATARI ST Din13 TO VGA Adaptor LOW-MEDIUM/HIGH Switchable with Audio Out https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/355970029601
    • 20240925 : since there is much files to copy we use mono for that now (WELL THERES A SWITCH ON IT AND THE MONITOR HANDLES IT PERFECT) for extra pixels. What i noticed today is that after installing the superpsu (50wat ? i think) the monoscreen actually is as good as deepspace black if there's any striping in the background (vertical) its IN THE WHITE in this case but really almost not, not even with mah glasses on. There's definitely something to do with the power and as lamers so far the only thing we can come up with remains : a capacitor somewhere on the mobo
    • works fine but the thing is the box has interference in both audio and video and its not clear where that comes from ... if we put the vga cable in the mister all cores that support the monitor (so far everything xept the Alice mc-10 but we only tried a few) it doesnt. But on the real ST there's some kind of ghosting as well as something that moves in the shadows when for instance the floppy is loading
    • Dell SE2722H - Full HD VA Monitor - AMD FreeSync - Antiglans - 27 inch https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1713976/dell-se2722h-zwart.html
    • This thing is a gem - we gave it mucho thought but an actual real (recapped) original curved Atari/cbm CRT goes between 300 and 400 and is 14 inch, it would be AWESOME to have one but we is not upper middle class, this ranges everything from 15khz up to 75something apparently with a real vga port AND a real hdmi port it works perfect on the mister, slots into the ST via adapter and should do the same for the c64 - while also providing FULLHD/1080p via hdmi to other stuff - using the adapter its possible to use both lo/med res AND mono on the ST it all works fine on this thing : €99 ... (4 packs of fags?)
    • 20241017 : we messed around with a jumper cable a bit to check different settings as it wouldnt work on the TOS 1.06 machine but now we have a C drive, a D (which i think is 256mb) and when added E F and G partitions (which i think should be 512mb each) thats plenty but a working gemdrive would be handy so we need to further look for config tools and partition or card sizes, the 128gb card worked as a gemdrive on the TOS 2.06 machine without hassle
    • 16-32bit.eu , as always we have NO sponsored links on the main or subsites anywhere. If there's a link to a store it usually means we bought something and are happy with it.
    • 20240921 : between #stuff, i slotted around a bit and now have a 1gb card with the ICD driver, which for now still has the 16 (or 32?) megabyte partition, which is actually plenty since i dont know any program that uses more other than "coders guide to the demoscene" which is more like a demo for a virtual Atari CD32 (in that option its a real nice example of what you could do game-wise with full soundtracks) AND i got the 3gb.vhd from i dunno TOSEC or whatever as an image written to a 4GB sd card which now is in the second acsi slot and has like ten ton 512megabyte partitions full of all that stuff i manually copied to a gemdrive folder and ofcourse the slot 0 has the 128gb card with all 13gb of files i found on teh weps ... as i'll mostly stick to mister fpga for gaming ease (just THAT JOYSTICK MAN i cant believe no one has fixed up the c64, ST and amiga with 9 pin joystick port support, the thing just sits there on my mister box and is useless) so if i can now just repartition the "c-drive" to use 512mb as well (it needs some partition space fora boot partition i think so 2x512 wont be possible on a 1gb card) i should be set until dead or demented or one of the sd cards gives out for hard drive space and emulation ... what the sidecartridge does is up to the sidecartridge people, for now its handy to quickly transfer files or emulate floppies that only need one b/C i dont know how to "hotswap" images and ofcourse theres plenty that use more than one
    • 20240918 : clear the sidecart delivers what it promises : "not a seamless apple-like experience" , this thing , after quite a bit of webpages b/c it's all pretty fresh since we never had 4mb TOS2.06 or a hard drive with the ST and STE back then, got it up to a C: drive booting, acsi (or ahdi? still on the lookup) another ACSI and a gemdrive at the last letter (here L) . It needs repartitioning but it should work out ,civilization runs from the gemdrive (where it wouldnt from the sidecart emulated drive) and the trackers load modules, not bombs.
    • just took the 128 gb sd card from the sidecartridge, plugged it in slot 0,then dug up a 1gb and a 4gb card from beyond and wrote images to it directly with rpi-imager (http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=332 and one from the solderguy himself https://www.16-32bit.eu/acsi2smt section 3B.2)
    • its hard to find smaller sd cards and usually they cost MORE than the current norm so these 128gb ones are littered all over the security cams ... ("littered? ...") there's a total of about 12-13GB of files which got collected from the interweps , unsorted and likely a lot of double but also containing a lot of demoscene and mod stuff so i shouldnt run out of samples
    • 20241017 :
    • "BAD DMA" ? i dont think so on either boards , certainly not the first one where it must have done almost 400000 file transfers which is probably more than a 90s machine would have had over its whole time, too early to say on the other board (but i dont think so)
    • the audio problem on the first board is a question mark but since we now heard the YM volume is ALSO a lot more quiet with the volume knob on the speaker on the same level compared to the other board we doubt its the chips ... we know what a capacitor and a resistor is - but not really EXACTLY how they would influence any of it, xept that "capacitor" would stand for "fluency" more or less and the signal is unbroken and doesnt oscillate if we put a mega-amp on it the sounds is overblown and buzzzzzzy but the actual music is , even if ever so silent, not oscillating in volume or phase or anything so as lamers guess we would guess "that doesnt reek of capacitor" but we dont know nearly enough of electronics to actually dare draw conclusions or even speculation
    • eeeehm ... well for gaming we just use the Mister really THO IT WOULD BE NICE IF WE COULD USE THAT 9 PIN JOYSTICK but since we mostly play mousegames on the ST thats not much of an issue either
    • the trackers, DBE (its ademo i think) and Pro Tracker STE 2.1 ... never knew an ST could sound like that :)
    • So we can start thinking about what game we wanna do - and here : if TBS is our alltime fav, its likely that we would be able to put more soul into one when programming one. RPG is the other option , i mean 1ST love shows 50fps fullscreen fast smooth scrolling cando (on a 4mb machine at least), but i doubt we'll ever do platformers and THE (the!) shmup will be for the jag, that thing is a hardware sprite so it just feels like its built for (vertical due to the limited Y size) shmups for now
    • 20240924 : the short version :
      click to enlarge
      again, no links here are sponsored but if you're into longevity and not really the person to build your own pcb, print it and put the components on it, i dont think you'll find better psu's for the respective computers than these ... got one for the c64 too, top-notch shit. I think the Polish are trying to grab the german-quality label off of the jerries.
    • Polishpsu i think was the original site, they did the c64 psu too, its REALLY hi-q ... the thing that was in it IS recapped i literally saw it now as i replaced it but this thing is like "overpowered" and has all kinds of protections, its basically a 2020 neo-retro new hardware block completely ... WELL I HAD TO TRY RIGHT? ITS AN ST ... im supposed to screw it open and do all kinds of stuff inthere, right ? basic lesson in electronics #1 then, but there was not much to this tho, just that the cables on the original one were soldered and i dont have a heat gun but mcgyver makes do ... if its replacing caps on the mobo thats gonna be longterm, soldering stations + heatguns dont come for beermoney and its not like we have plenty left after this ... IT ALL WORKS, its just that its an STE and the DMA doesnt work RIGHT, how would that make YOU feel?
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if prices mentioned it would be at time of buying or last googling ofcourse...
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