Hardware & Issues

- Atari STE 4mb tos 2.06 (re-capped)
- 20240924 : we shalleth clean up the lists later, just gathering info that hopefully one day leads to a fix on the mysterious DMA problem which i havent seen even any of the 4 or 5 stars on the forums give a solid answer to ...
- this thing seems to run everything up to overlanders 1st love without glitching - the machine itself seems to have been well preserved and mainained - i dont know if theres a heavier benchmark but for instance running 1stlove on a misterFPGA on hdmi (havent tested through VGA) when the fullscreen scrolling starts the image starts glitching, this does not happen on the real machine. I dont know of any heavier demo than 1stlove but they might exist its not like we been "on the scene" since the 90s . The more recent coders guide runs flawles xept that it doesnt play sound BUT i bet thats the sidecartridge
- 20240918 : zelfbouwpakket for life, i can think up a few reasons why amiga was more popular lol. The thing is not finding the answer to the universe tho - its getting a setup that runs the preferred programming languge before and while moving on to motorola ASM when brainfog allows and sound applications, which probably means finding "the best tracker for me" since synths seem to cost as much as they did back then , and FPGA synths are for people who can solder up ST2FM drives and sell them for €35 without taking a loss... theres some great looking projects out there tho, sure would be nice to have money , space and a soldering station and ... lots of spare parts to screw up while trying
- for now we have a setup that works as : 3 hard disks on the board on the ACSI port , read/write enabled and a sidecartridge which can serve as a single floppy A: drive (should be possible to write enable too) or hold a blank image to save on. ROMS work too but there's conflicts which seem to be per-case, even the hard-drive emulation on the sidecart is possible with the other card inserted but theres not much point to it other than having a direct usb link for file transfer, which atm isnt needed since all 12-13GB of files available is on the gemdrive sd card already, it just needs Santas Elves and a year or two to sort out probably . Everything i tried runs but the DMA sound is really silent - which seems to be some of a nurture-nature level ongoing debate for teknomages at Atari-engineer level after 30+ years now so thats above my braingrade but ill be reading up on it. I got if for tracking and programming it HAS TO output sound decently ...
- 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
- 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
- 20240916 : if found here https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=34091 something that seems to describe quite well what im experiencing, in which case i have my homework cut out for me as i can change a cable and a lightbulb but have yet to buy my first soldering station ... i see no reason why the guy on ebay would have lied but personally i wouldnt be able to tell the difference anyway and im not one of those american engineer types to take a quick last minute and buy a few more ST's to see and find the difference ... the thing is when i use it on the mister with the same vga cable i get like deepspace black, on the computer itself its as those fuckers describe in the forumpost. Its not REALLY disturbing, ifi stand up and look from a meter away above i dont see it. I noticed something that looks like ripples to the right in a demo too ... at any rate, the state of the sidecartridge (it seems the hd emulator is read only) is a bit of a bigger pickle ... im gonna have to do some digging and ask the sellers i suppose first of all ... its a lifelong commitment, right ? retromachines ... nnnn - since the kid it always wanted to learn some electronics, actually a lot ... build a spaceship you know, leave this place ... this will be an opportunity then, i think i'll start with a vga cable for the c64 and see what that says ... the thing about the screen eating more power causing the voltage ... euhm ... current ? to dip (the voltage is gonna stay the same, right ? no ? yes ?? no?? ) POWER! kinda sounds plausible as its a new 27 inch screen which certainly didnt exist in the 1990s ... omoshiroi ... but i cant save files on noisetracker b/C the sd card is read-only lol ... ZELFBOUWPAKKER NUMBER ONE ... now i understand why most of the Atari-forums seem to be comprised of tinkering gnomes compared to amigian lazy coppercoders ....
- 20240917 :
  https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=469185#p469185 (build-your-own directions and pointers)
- 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?)
- 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
- "BAD DMA" ? a question mark really as i havent opened the case to look at the chips
- 20241004:
  STE DAC fix ... well this sounds (haha punny) like something close to what might be related to what i have but the thing still is, using an amp on OP i can clearly hear the signal is there its not fluctuating and not stuttering, ofcourse, using an amp from when payment was in Francs on full volume (old Technics, must have been shit-expensive) gives "abit" of hum lets say so its kinda hard to make out how much of that would be coming from the machine and how much from the ancient amplifier ... at any rate i got time until the game which is currently at "hello world" since the boy never programmed the Atari is in need of testing DMA sound on real HW, which will probably be a little over 2150 like the commodore game, someone somewhere must have had a similar problem once, and someone somewhere must be selling ONE ste that works without trying to rip off (the latter, talking about humans is ofcourse a stretch and wishful thinking BUT IT COULD BE POSSIBLE)
- 20241002:
  found something called Xcontrol panel which revealed another interesting fact, namely you can have something named .acc in the root of your boot-partition and it will execute, in this case it adds a menu option, which is a memory resident program that can be extended with something .cpx files ... the good part is another thing i didnt know : apparently the YM sound on the STE is stereo as well .. it already worked and worked fine as i found out good from playing plenty of CIV-original on teh real thing but last week also some tracker named sidmon 2 and another one , newer, named maxymizer, it sounds actually pretty good and it talks about "sid" voices which i think is what i think it means more or less : "sid" instruments (?)
  What i dont know is if the sound is stereo all at once or if its possible to have some parts of the YM output go left right while the rest stays middle (for obvious reasons there)
  as for the DMA sound, ... xcontrol just has a volume slider, a left-right stereo slider, a bass and a treble control , i dont see anything distinguishing between YM and DMA so maybe i need to try digging for xcontrol-STE or something ... i mean the boy basically didnt do anything but play games on the st and ste b/c there was no programming language in it and i think i had .. 3(?) disks omikron but no manual so NO CLUE on the syntax and then ofcourse girls happened, pc's happened, a jaguar before that ... now i have this thing back for like two weeks, done a lot of reading and found out my particular problem isnt very well documented ...
  one other thing i could confirm : in the scrap pile we could locate an old technics hifi ... well part of it ... system which probably dates back to belgian francs and must have cost ass and tits back then ... much to my surprise it still turned on without smoke or fire coming out of it, there's like 20+ jacks on the back , its two boxes, one is an amp with 5.1 (go figure what that must have cost back then) and the other is some kind of tuner/dsp combo if i can read it right ... NOW the gud thing on the bad thing is, one of the inputs works loud, its the "phono" input (yea VINYL !!! i actually still have some but no player, even some original doors singles and records among others from back in the collecting days ... it must have been a different universe)
  so slotting the ste to the phono in, and then via that DSP/tuner thing connecting to the speakers that came with it ... running "Bad Apple" (demo) proves it, the signal is not only there (i could hear that faint on the other speakers but wasnt sure if it was stable) but its definitely stable, i can hear no fluctuations or stuttering, the demomusic plays as intended , it just doesnt come out of the jacks at a useable volume. With the amp set SO high it would probably take the ceiling down if this thing played normal through all speakers the hum is unbearable but the fact remains : the music is fully there and without fluctuation or hackling / stuttering. There IS intereference from the drive (it might be an SD drive but it has a real drive led installed so its easy to ssee if interference = the morsecode from the led.)
  SO, as noob and lamer as we are to electronics we are atm leaning to : not capacitor theory b/c what i read is capacitors are there to keep things stable (the flow) on a board, and the signal IS stable, ultra quiet but stable AND on this other tek-document which will take a lot of google to read all the tek-terms, the mention of the mixer chip, WHICH seems to have settings to bring down the DMA sound by -0 , -20 or -40db ... so to my lamers ears and brain this sounds more like the chip is either faulty, or a connection is wired to tone down the DMA somewhere along the last 30 years this machine has been around
  its pointless opening it up as i have no tools or prior experience to reflowing and rewiring but it certainly proved what i suspected : the signal is all there.
- 20241003 : i dont think its this but im gonna log it anyway
  -
  - Fixing STE microwire "mixer" error
  - the guy has actually offered i send back the machine and he'll switch the board for another one he has laying around and then send it back to me ... all for free .. the offer is over-generous but being where i am and having been where i was as good as it sounds, i can simply not do that based on trust - no offense intended, this has all to do with decades of xp with humans in general. I WOULD LOVE TO but i think im going for a second machine so i can use the other for electronics classes.
- 20241001 :
  - STE No sound - some troubleshooting done!
  - i think i found the STE hardware bible here
- 20240930 :
  - still no luck , no answers, the ebay guys all avoid it, and send me over to Exos, i havent seen anything on exos thats particular to my situation tho. My analysis as a total electronics noob (i mean i can do simple shit like assemble a PV or replace a socket, i could probably replace and rewire the fusebox in the house so every circuit has its own fuse (you wont believe the shit they pulled here back in the 1970s really) but putting the cables back in the wall and make it look like nothing happened is not my department ... PCB works, repair or reworks however ... even if i had the 100S of euros worth of gear to do it : I HAVE NEVER DONE THAT ... so just going at it in the wild part by part without an explicit "i had the exact same problem, you have to do THAT" after spending about the same on gear (or more) as i did on the machine seems like a bad idea really
  - so my hypothesis (this is by the laws of Plato, Spock and Holmes) so far : at first i thought there was NO DMA sound but after hearing the codersguide demo on the 120 watt speakers (hey they were the cheapest set back then on discount so i got those instead of 60 or 40W) on 100% volume i KNOW there is. And from what i can hear, even if ever so faint the signal is uninterrupted and also doesnt "wave" or fluctuate or hackle. Its just ULTRA quiet, on the 60w speakers i kinda dont and playing wings of death on "ste-dma" it doesnt get over the YM mixed chiptune so i dont hear it eithre, but on pure DMA stuff like codersguide(demo) badapple (demo) stardust, stoneage and others its DEFINITELY there, an uninterrupted signal. SO
  without knowing too much about electronics (well i know how electrons move through holes in space when whipped from their home and what Volt and Amp and Watt is , how energy gets lost over distance and the diameter (thickness) of your cable is important relative to the distance and amount of current you wanna chase through, i know braided cables "have more holes" than solid ones and all that basic 1st introductory class stuff, i more or less know capacitors are like little pseudo temp-bats that are there to ensure the flow of things and such BUT ...
  this is where it breaks down : by the laws of Plato Spock and Holmes we must assume the signal gets from source to destination "because its there (gotta love plato spock and holmes !) , and on a stretch b/c i cant hear fluctuations i would gamble and guess "its not a capacitor" b/c its steady and uninterrupted tho i cant say that for sure ofcourse since i dont really know how all that works and connects in microelectronics on a 30+ year old motherboard. We also entertain the possibility that plenty of people potentially have assumed there was no DMA sound in similar cases simply b/C its inaudible (to me, probably not to your dog or my cat) unless 120watt speakers play it at 100% volume. but thats about it .. what to do with that ? I WOULDNT KNOW ... all i know is "testing on real HW" becomes a naught like this if and when we get to writing the first or other first game on the STE, rewiring it so the volume gets mixed differently (even if i could) would make it into a hacked mobo thats no longer representative of real HW so to me thats not a solution either ... as Bob the build might say , "Can we fix it Bob ? " "NO ITS FUCKED" ... but i bet someone can , IF they wanna
  see its like , euh ... a combustion engine for instance, i KNOW how it works : rapidly expanding air from exploding GAS_oline in a closed cylinder pushing and pulling pistons which in turn make a crooked metal bar rotate with wheels attached to it. But that doesnt mean you can just aks me to repair one lol, even if i have the tools i wouldnt touch it b/c i would probably break something or end up with a dangerously explosive car (or a mobo that sets the house on fire in this case) b/c i have no xp and also not really someone around here i can go to and say "SHOW ME" ..:)
  that said, I NEED THIS THING TO WORK ... tracking and programming is the main thing here, games work PERFECTLY on a mister fpga and without wear or tear, simply use the ftp or the CIFS script to connect to this scrap-NAS i assembled from spare parts and i have a whole computer and console museum thats kinda accurate towards its games, but 100% accuracy in games is not really a breaker for this one. In most cases you wouldnt notice ... ofcourse stuff like no easyflash I/O on the c64 core, i think they could at least put in some kind of hack to make it work, right ? i would but im too stupid to do cores, i said that before. anyway, this is Atari , the mister is the door next door, the C64 is the door to the left ... someone somewhere can fix this, im sure of that, they're not just not necessarily living in belgium and ... sending my machine to the UK or USA to have it fixed, including work hours, parts, VAT, duties, excise and the mysterious santa tax (2 times because to and fro) probably would pay for a small second hand car already ... even if i could afford it, thats just TOO crazy even for us.
  so ... "we'll see?"
- 20240927 :
  what are the options by now ... kleine "kosten/baten/risk/reward summ?"
  1. Get a second machine :
    - tested one full works : price - 400-600 without VAT p&p,duties, import and santa tax ,risk : low except another "oversight"
    - untested on DMA and other but stated as "works" (usually 520 without upgrades): €100-200 (without all bru-ha and santa tax), risk : high b/c unknown, otherwise switching up boards and chips would probably be the easiest solution
    - board or parts only : havent located for this specific issue
  2. Get soldering/repair tools and components and start repairing in the wild on guesses
    - cost : estimated anywhere between €200-500 costs included since we dont have any tools for pcb works
      so, roughly...
      - well i have the multimeter at least
      - Yihua 995d+ iron : €174 without p&p , inside europe (i assume lithuania is) so no santa tax, not too complicated and good for longterm use and more borg cube future goodness ... make that 200-250 then ... well these things seem to be sold out in most euro-places and ordering from UK or US is once more ... well im better off getting a second STE on ebay then already
      - ... hot air needed or does hot air on that thing mean hot air (for melting solder) included ?
      - or
      - , found one in stock, which i have to pay for in "PhP" ... it says Manilla there, is that the Philippines ? i dont even wanna know what the santa tax is on items to europe from the filippines ... so the supply lines are clearly gud, right ? everything's fixed since "after the war" and inflation had ended two years ago ... ? isee should i bother converting to check ? oh, thats €61 ... if i knew someone overthere who would happen to take a trip to belgium i could get a real good thing for real cheap money ... add vat, santa tax p&p , hope it doesnt break, no one steals it on the way and now also something called "excise duties" ? lets scrap this one (looks like the one lamers like us would want to start tho ...) NOT AVAILABLE IN THE GREAT EUROPEAN EMPIRE THEN
      - looks like you can get playmobil for €50 too but i only have one STE here and never in my life handled something like this ... so lets stick to 200-300 as we already thought, without suction , wick , or components, which, Horatio, doth indeed come pretty close to "buying a second machine on ebay" once more ... (thing is : replacing parts on the mobo one for the other if one board has working DMA is something WE (the lamer) can definitely handle without breaking stuff, i mean replacing that psu wasnt rocket science either ... replacing micro components on the other hand ... WELL I HAVE NO IDEA SINCE NEVER DONE IT, whats the chance of damaging something on a 30+ year old motherboard lol ... SCARY RIGHT ? SCARY ...
      - suction tube ...
      - components ...
    - risk : high as we have never actually done any work on pcbs or that small and complicated on hardware, VERY high since there is no "practice machine" (which would double the cost to "more than an untested falcon")
  3. Find retro-repairman (or woman : woke but unlikely ahem) in "vicinity" b/c sending it to the uk or usa is probably better spent on a trip to Venice :
    - cost : havent located so unknown
    - risk : probably the lowest possible
- 20240924 :
  - ( https://forums.atariage.com/topic/307438-sound-volume-out-is-way-low-on-external/ ) "Some STs have problems with the electrolytic capacitors located in the audio output path (22 uF each). After exchanging them (only a few cents item) the volume and loud again." *sigh* but the soldering station is more than a few $$ ... okay okay ... it looks like capacitory theory still holds
  - woaw - well i guess we are now officially Atari ST psu replace man and the screen is blacker , the stripes are a lot less and for actually like a minute i swear it was pitch, like what i get on the mister ... the ym sound from the video seems louder on the speakers which i had to set to max, at 60Wrms that would normally be earbusting in a small room. And if i put the sound on 100% on the others i can actually discern the music as what it sounds like, i can hear bad apple actually what the music is but its still REAALLLLLY quiet .... same for coders guide - so if that means : replace capacitors on board (?) ... thats a longterm project, not having small details available like a heatgun or a soldering station or even iron ... obviously no flux or tin since what would we do with that ... a fresh polish psu wont hurt for longevity tho and the black is blacker ... at this point hard to say if its the vga converter or still the mobo BEM ...
  - actually , typing this is in another room next to the one with the Atari atm and i can still hear the music from coders guide (even if it needs speakers at 100%) so there's definitely a change and I SWEAR i had pitch black screen for only a minute on both desktop and sidecartridge dark-config screen ... we now are 99% convinced Atari actually DID have a soul-contract with Ctulhu ...
- 20240923 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsession_(video_game)
- 20240922 : its getting weirder and weirder, TODAY as we ran something from emulated floppy on the sidecartridge, pressing the select button (i think thats akin to "unload from flash memory" had the DMA sound get ever so slightly more audible for just a sec there, like it got (like a few decibels) better while it was unloading the data from flash ... however removing the sidecart and trying again didnt do anything at all ... and still, the speakers give interference, like "poltergeist sounds" WHEN THE AUDIO INPUT is set to the connected laptop, now also apparently when the ACSI drive is powered on via usb cable while the computer is still off (but also with the computer on doing stuff it gives sounds when the input is on the laptop but NOT when its on the Atari, when its on the Atari it plays YM sound and psd(?) digital fine (and loud btw) but DMA has to be turned up 100% to hear it very silently. After definitely now 50000+ copy/move of files and folders on the acsi port , and some deleting AND moving between sidecart, floppy and all three interchanged i still cant see any sign of data corruption (doesnt mean its not there), its just the DMA sound and now this one game that claims there's not enough memory (actually the wings of death HD-ready game also states theres 512kb but the TOS test on boot test for 4096 OK ...) weirdness upon weirdness
- the quest for DMA sound has us testing games we wouldnt since the mister does those just fine ... Stone Age (hd-ready i havent found something that can do floppies and hotswap them during run and buying a gotek atm isnt really an option (and overkill too probably and actually i want the case to keep its original look) , SO Stone Age : no sound at all, Stardust even weirder : it claims zu wenig speicher (on a 4megabyte machine) so i'll have to check the floppy version and try to copy the .st files to real floppies to check the sound but it will very likely just do the same as with the others
- .... systop hm ... https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=35543 ... that should be the HD driver then ???
- all the more confusers : rebooting without ACSI cards gives 3838kb in sysinfo, running stardust says no mem (in german ofcourse) and then sysinfo (after RESET) shows 400something again, turning on off its back to 3863 then running stardust.ecr (another hd-ready folder) DOES work but not the DMA sound ... this is almost as much fun as trying to get duke nukem to run on DOS hurr hurr, ... i have strange ghosting too after some tracker programs i reset and it boots to a blocked screen that still shows the tracker but whatever it is , everything tos2.06-patible seems to run, i seem to have no HD corruption after 10s of 1000s of copies and moves (the mahcine was on for 48 hours too so that part is also checked) BUT THE DMA SOUND (altho sysinfo says nothing) is inaudible and somehow it sounds like when i use a jack to plug into the din2vga adapted and 2.1 speakers it sounds BETTER than when connected to the red/white (rca?) outputs (neither give any sign of this "hi quality" dma sound xept the 5.1 set on 100% volume (dangerous in an old house like this) and i actually dont even know if that DMA sound would play throught the video port and i dont even know if the video port is stereo output or not ... zelfbouwpakket , well i knew what i was getting into but some consistency would be expected, even after 40+ years of computers, not counting the VCS we STILL demand consistency in machinery ... not "spooky action" ... well its gotta be SOME THING which means THAT thing can be fixed ... process of elimination as an electronics lamer might take some time
- 20240921 : we have by now come to the conclusion, that its a mystery of the univers as th more posts and answers by 4 or 5 star freaks of nature we read the more we encounter the words "maybe" and "perhaps" (...you could try ...) , leading us to believe that even the teknomages havent figured it out and like the Jag its a product of Ctulhu , only more hidden (it already had jagpad ports after all that might have given it away) . On this side ... By now we must have AT LEAST 30-40k mabye around 50thousand file operations move/copy/delete (didnt know how to "move" at first but i guess testing all is never bad) on the ACSI port alone, leaving out transfers between emulated floppy or emulated hard drive on the sidecartridge as well as transfers to and from real floppies to the gem and acsi drives ... but no errors and i havent noticed any corruption but i'll have to find a tool to deep scan ... SO ... the "dma-sound" IS there, i just have to turn the speakers up 100% (very unhealthy if YM sound happens to come through as well then) Coders guide to the Demoscene, Wings of Death on STE DMA setting, a game called Stone Age i read about yesterday, all the same ... we simply get more confused over time here lol. See : we HAD a mister, that thing runs (so far) all ST games just fine xept that it doesnt have 9pin support to the Atari ST core WHICH SUCKS ASS (as well as monkey dick) ... we got the ST b/c its "something we had" and old people grasp at old stuff after all (heh heh ... im not sure if that is exactly the same for geekstuff like this but bem) but the idea is to use it for programming ... AND MUSIC ... which ...ITS AN STE ... if only standard trackers can be used ... is like where "a bummer" becomes an understatement ... somehow this will have to be fixed, we got time but probably not 60 years anymore and i doubt this brainfog and sleeping disease will solve itself as well as the slowly crippling artrose body 30 years before time and the chronic pain (which they seem to attribute to "just that" but we are not so sure of that) - so it would be nice if we could fix it before christmas :)
- 20240918 : i thought "coders guide to the demoscene as well as wings of death on "STE DMA" sound setting gave none but it turns out on coders guide that if i turn the speakers up to absolute max i can actually hear the music ... if i played something other through it at that volume setting the ceiling might come down tho so i dont know, the "YM" sound is loud - or standard but anything "DMA" seems DAM silent , is this bad dma or not ? still on the lookup
- i cant really remember anything like this from the old STE back then but its been quite a while and i dont even know it was monitor sound or other, i dont think i had an amp yet
- i'll have to go through the scrap pile and see if i can dig up some elder amp with red/white audio jacks, plug it in and see if that gives noiseless sound output when used with "DMA"
- Dont know anything about microwires but https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Atari_STE_and_Mega_STE_sound_fixes#The_YM_sound_is_much_louder_than_the_DMA_audio_sounds this (section 2) seems to be whats going on here, at least thats what it sounds like
- 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?

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

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Hardware & Issues

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

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Hardware & Issues

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