sideburn

The local ATT number my modem repeatedly dialed to hack out calling card numbers was a .10c toll call I wasn’t aware of. I came home from school one day to my dad staring at a BOOK sized $300.00 phone bill. We were both very confused (while I was keeping my illegal activity a secret). I said “ahh it’s my modem, I’ll pay for it” and he scoffed at me like how am I gonna pay for it. Unaware i was making $5 a pop selling floppies with games not available in the USA yet that I downloaded from Europe with my calling card #’s 😂

That’s awesome atascii on the c64! Nice one.

Yep funny how the music reminds you of those times. I was calling all over the world pirating with my war dialed calling card numbers. Also I remember the first online service I called was Prodigy.

Wow I never heard anything happening to anyone in my circle. The sketchiest thing i had was someone or something called my modem landline and made weird clicking sounds when I answered. It freaked me out. And I went outside and cops were driving around my street. I was panicked.

Oh wow. A spoiled “friend” of mine when I was about 13 was running a major pirate BBS called “The gecko BBS”. He had racks of Ataris including a 1200xl all hooked up somehow to a bunch of 8” floppy drives. What always boggled my mind is I was way more tech savvy than him with electronics and computers. There was obviously someone on the side helping him out but he kept that all hush hush when I would pry. he had everything on the pirated software side of things. I think his rules were upload one / download 3. he was a typical snarky “SysSop” with a power complex. always wondered what happened to him… and his bbs…

I opened it up to check the capacitors and they are fine. Only two tiny electrolytics. The rest is all chips and a transformer and relay. This was NOS sealed i the box so never used. It’s totally randomly clicking the relay and / or completely disapearing we’re the software can’t see it anymore. seams like it will be a tough fix. Especially without a schematic.

😂 what luck and bad timing haha. I had a 1030 also as a kid. Never heard of the XM til now. The 1030 launched my small criminal underground business as a neighborhood software pirate and phone phreaker back then 😆. A funny story was I though I was being clever by war dialing calling card numbers so I could spend hours downloading games from a European bbs without then going on dads phone bill and I came home one day to him freaking out over his 200 page $300.00 phone bill. We were both very confused lol. After I got a chance to secretly look at the bill I saw it was hundreds of pages of .10c toll call charges to the calling card phone number! 🤦‍♂️

I think its the modem crapping out on me... I got it the other day new sealed in the box and it worked but i kept getting garbage characters while online. I was blaming the 2600 network but now th modem is just randomly hanging up and picking up. i can hear the relay clicking on and off... its failing in XE term too now.

No idea. It turns out that disk image just had games on it and I couldn’t get the exe to see the modem. i got 2.1 instead and it works but something is flaking. Modem keeps hanging up randomly. Trying to isolated down to if it’s the modem or the software. Back to xe term.

Thank you! (8 years later lol)

ATASCII!

Just got a modem from Brad at Best Electronics! Heres a little video of my experience lol

Wow it’s been a year already since I discovered and posted 😭

The us is on 1 and 2 connected to my Stacy. It’s not the ID that is the issue it’s the connectors. There’s no way to daisy chain them.

inwanted to do that but I couldn’t find a way to get both the US and the SH204 mounted at the same time to do a backup.

Hey all, I’ve got a working SH204 but it’s got 4 5MB partitions and drove c,d,e, and f. I’d like to delete e and f and combine them into a single 10MB partition. Is this possible and what software would I need? I also have and UltraSatan with the PP driver software that I used to setup and partition that drive but not sure if it would be compatible. the reason I have the SH204 physical hard drive is for my 520ST because it has minimal ram and the ultrasatan doesn’t work with it because it consumes some ram itself to run software. it seems the HDUTILS might be able to do it but I do t really want to spend $55.00 just to redo the partitions. If there’s an alternate method I would love to get some info. thanks -Tavis

The drive wasn’t spinning up. Took it apart and cleaned the connections and now it’s good to go

Hi all, I just got an SH204 drive and using the ADHI 3.02 driver disk, I am able to format the drive and as it is formatting the dialog has a progress bar and bad sector checks and no bad sectors appear but once the format completes and it goes to do the partitioning an error pops up saying that the drive was formatted with another version of HDX and I am hosed. When i try to run the partitioner myself, I get the same error. Any idea what the issue may be? Everything else seems ok. -Tavis

I want to try making a dedicated cartridge for this. I have some 27c32 EPROMs as well as some 28c64’s. can someone tell me where I can get a cartridge PCB and what type of eprom I can use? And any other things I need to know in order to make a cartridge ? thanks

I just asked him if he sells it. $175.00 per roll. Original factory OEM 12” rolls.

But I can successfully program the 27C64’s

But I can do a “C” type without issue always? 27C32 for example?

Woh that’s cool.I want one.

I got the AM2732's in today but my programmer will only READ and BLANK check the chip. it fails to program it. I had the same problem with the 2764's but I was able to program 27c64's Any ideas what the problem might be? I have several chips and they all have the same issue. Programmer is the TL866 II Plus.

Wow. I would not know where to begin without some visuals. Did you edit then binary in an editor and did you have to change settings on the programmer?