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Muzz73

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Posts posted by Muzz73

    1040 STE on Ebay

    in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers

    Posted

    On 11/10/2023 at 7:39 PM, bfollowell said:

    It seems like I see many more of them across the pond. Not so much here in the U.S. They seem to be pretty rare, definitely much more so than the much more common STFs, and like @Tillek said, when we do see them, they're almost insanely priced.

     

    Seriously! It took me decades to get my hands on one! I finally had to bring one over from the UK, which I believe was your suggestion... wasn't it?

     

    Anyhow, fun machine for sure!  👍

    • Like 1

    If you could change one thing about the 520ST/STM/STFM......

    in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers

    Posted · Edited by Muzz73

    18 hours ago, Keatah said:

    Being stuck in the 80's is a good thing!

     

    I recognized this sometime in the 286/386 era. And solidified it to where I was done and done with Atari/Amiga when word of the 486 hit the public consciousness.

     

    Absolutely. This applied equally with hardware, software, services, add-ons, and more.

     

    The promise of what the Amiga was supposed to do and never did is what royally disappointed me. I was used to expansion and growth from the Apple II line. And I expected that from the Amiga, because that's what they told me it would be. (sorry to all of you that keep hearing me complain about that.)

     

    I got more and more interested in the PC when I observed that there were multiple (big name) packages that would do the same or similar things. And that gave me choices to pick from. No fear of getting pigeonholed into something.

     

    Technical superiority is only one aspect of a package. The stuff has to be affordable, realistic, durable, versatile, and most importantly available.

     

    IDK. When I looked at an Amiga I saw a one-trick-pony, toys and games. When I looked at a PC I saw business possibilities, mathematical studies, celestial computations and astronomical simulations. Serious word processing with solid WYSIWYG features. In retrospect I may have at home, too, because my Apple II had a Microsoft 16K RAMCARD and "Microsoft" printed on some of the ROM chips. I had a good experience with it in the late 70's and very early 80's. And I figured I'd have a good experience with a Microsoft branded OS. And I did. An ineffable continuity was taking place.

     

    I don't know about that. It was like building up your system. It is the essence of the system. Equipping it to fit your needs.

     

    I didn't need resolutions much beyond 1024x768. But I wanted billions of colors. And I could have that for about $200 in the early 1990's. (yes I had to wait till 1992 when the price/performance and personal funds aligned)

     

    Computers like the C64/IIgs/ST/Amiga/Mac/400/800 could not change out their graphics or sound chips or allow you to pick one that had the features you most wanted. You were stuck with what originally came with the machine.

     

    And that's what the slots were for, to give you that all-godlike customization. And in 1992 that consumed 3 slots. Sound. Graphics. And a Multi-IO board (2-serial, 1-parallel, 1-game, 2-HDD, 2-floppy).. Progress! And you still had 5 slots for more stuff yet.

     

    Sounds like a typical starter system. I had cassette, RF modulator, and family TV, as peripherals for my Apple II.

     

    Apple II had slots because the industry was so young and new. No one knew how home computers would develop or what as-of-yet undeveloped peripherals would be needed. Slots were a solution to a future undefined problem. But unlike today where pointless solutions are in search of a problem, it was clearly known there would be a some need to expand a system.

    Oh yeah, you're totally right... I was just sighting early examples in the industry when no particular platform was "industry standard" yet.

     

    I didn't mention multi I/O cards on the PC because I was focusing on the machines that were available when the early Macs, ST's, etc. had hit the market at large. When I built my first XT back in the 80's, that was what I had to deal with; eight slots, most of them full just to get basic functionality out of the thing. When I built my first 286, that was a different story... "You mean I can have two serial, a parallel, a game port, high density floppy control AND RLL hard disks off of one 16-bit card?! Whoa!!!" LOL

    • Like 1

    If you could change one thing about the 520ST/STM/STFM......

    in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers

    Posted

    9 hours ago, oky2000 said:

    The Mac multiplexes a single DAC at 3 points on the vertical blank I think, the engineers wanted more DACs but Steve Jobs didn't even want sound in the first place so that was the compromise. Read it in some engineer/designer's blog about Mac audio. 

     

    You can't decide the lifespan of a machine, nobody designed the C64 to last a decade, that only really happened because so many pioneers from 1982 to 1987 sort of time frame constantly pushed the machine to its limits. The ST was rarely pushed to its limits outside the demoscene. Ultimately though the ST suffered from a double knock-out punch of Atari having to raise ST prices due to the DRAM price hikes of early-mid 1988 when Commodore didn't and just as the prices were about to come back down the £525 Amiga 500+modulator turned into the identically priced £400 A500 RRP. It never really recovered from that. 

     

    The ST was better than the crapfest IBM PC EGA spec of home machine yanks kept buying in the mid 80s for a hell of a lot more money. Everything about the ST is superior to the EGA PC XT spec those idiots went ga-ga for. Leonard Tramiel talks about this 'sickness' affecting the US consumers in that time frame post video games crash of USA. 

     

    If this crap is what I had to play in 1987 I would have slit my wrists lol

    Don't have a heart attack laughing at this pathetic machine that conquered mid 80s USA for home consumers.

    Absolutely. A whole lot of people went PC crazy over here when there were far better choices available that did a lot more for a lot less (basically anything that wasn't a DOS PC). Almost as if we (in the USA) were the only ones who didn't "get it." It reminds me of the war between VHS and Betamax - Betamax was superior in practically every way, but VHS is what caught on. There are a few parallels there if you look for them.

     

    I used to have the argument with my PC user friends wherein they would scoff at whatever computer I had at the time and tell me that theirs had all these expansion slots. It used to burn their backsides when I would point out that you would have to fill all of them to do what my my C=64/IIgs/ST/Amiga/Mac (not necessarily in that order) did right out of the box. Back then, the PC was kind of a silly concept...

     

    "OK, here's this bus. Oh, you want to hook up a monitor? That'll take one card slot. You want a floppy drive controller? Another card slot. Serial? Parallel? Game ports? There go three more." That still doesn't even consider a hard disk controller, a trashy sound card or anything auxiliary.

     

    I didn't include any of my ][+ or //e machines from back in the day above because some of the basic functionality did have to come from bus slots, but at least you could hook up a monitor, a cassette recorder and a joystick to get started.

    • Like 1

    San Jose Computer 810

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    3 hours ago, Nezgar said:

    I believe one of the ANTIC interviews with maybe Rob Zdybel? had a story where Atari had surplus inventory of 810's mechanisms and boards but no cases, and potentially functional issues due to the high return rate, that employees and some resellers were able to purchase the parts for cheap, repair them and built their own cases and were resold for profit. I know B&C Computervisions was another supplier of these 810's as well.

     

    Honestly, I'd say these are better looking than the original cases... More durable that's for sure!!

    Yep... I came across an odd 810 in a wooden case a few years back, which I gave to a friend who had no FDD. I was buying something from Bruce and mentioned this drive in an e-mail. He confirmed that he had built 810's to order in whatever cases he could find that would fit and that it definitely sounded like one of his. I kind of wish I still had it... 🤔

    If you could change one thing about the 520ST/STM/STFM......

    in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers

    Posted

    On 12/18/2022 at 11:55 AM, Chri O. said:

    SCSI Its standardization started as a single ended 8-bit bus in 1986. Atari ACSI was developed in 1984 data may be transfered at a maximum rate of 2 MegaBytes/sec with short cables.

    Atari Hard Disk Controller is off board and is sent commands using an ANSI X3T9.2 SCSI-like (Small Computer Systems Interface) command descriptor block protocol.

    The Atari Hard Disk Interface (AHDI) supports a minimal subset of SCSI commands (Class 0 OpCodes).

    Yikes! I thought SCSI was around commercially a year or two before that. My mistake. At that time I had a C=64 w/datasette, so even a cruddy 1541 was a dream.

    How did you get your first Atari computer?

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    My first Atari computer was a gently used 1040STf w/SC1224 that I picked up for $350 circa 1992. That's about it.

     

    My second Atari computer is a much more interesting story - a used 1200XL that I found at a computer thrift shop in Santa Cruz, CA (USA), circa 1996.

     

    The shop in question had a penchant for screwing people over and had done so to several people I knew (myself included). I saw the 1200XL sitting on a shelf with a sticker on it marked $50. I peeled the sticker off and went up to the counter. I showed the machine to the derelict-of-the-week and told him I'd give him $25 for it. He looked at it for a second and replied "Uhhhmm... sure, I guess." I gave him the $25 and walked out with it quite happily. I had fun with it until I found out how few of them there were in existence, so I bought a used 800XL to put the mileage on and gave the 1200XL to a friend who had never seen one in person before (a VERY serious French Atari collector).

    XE prototype in this Tramel interview.

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    7 hours ago, Hawkeye68 said:

    It was unfortunate!  Probably Tramiel trying to squeeze every last nickel off of the MSRP.

     

    I bought a second 354 somewhere along the line.  I think it was for Alice Personal Pascal (for fewer disk swaps), but not 100% sure.

    I always figured it was a way to offer a cheaper option. Lower costs means lower prices... unless you are Apple, but that's another story. LOL🤣

    Atari 800 has the blue screen of nothing.

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    On 9/13/2022 at 10:12 AM, mimo said:

    They are used in arcade cabs sometimes 4 in one machine, plus 7800 owners use them for multicarts and homebrew carts.

    7800 ballblazer carts were a good source, but are now scarce and expensive. People building 576nuc and 1088 xels etc use them too, and stereo pokey upgrades.

    Everyone wants a POKEY. I'm hanging on to all my spare ones 

    Yeah, I have a friend who has always been a Commodore/Amiga guy, but has generally respected Atari and its place in the world. He has recently gotten an 800XL and is getting some sort of SD device for it, if memory serves. He has also recently gotten a similar device for his Atari 7800 that requires a PoKey chip to be installed into it for some things (like the forementioned Ballblazer). He hadn't been able to get his knuckles around a PoKey chip and was almost going to bite the bullet, plunk down a bunch of money for an FPGA-based replacement to put into the 800XL and taking the 800XL's original  PoKey for the 7800. I sent him one of my last spares for which he was very grateful, but that takes me down to only two spares left (one very used, one brand new). Yikes.

     

    The unfortunate thing about many of the arcade games that used multiple PoKeys is that AFAIK, many of them used a variant that didn't have the I/O capability built-in. They were literally just PoKey sound chips. I say it's unfortunate because now that restoring old arcade boards is a big thing, you might have to cannibalize 3 or 4 Atari 8-bit computers that legitimately need full PoKeys to operate in order to pull it off.

     

    Ah... I remember the days when PoKeys were $10 from Best Electronics, no limit. Those were the days... ☹️

    XE prototype in this Tramel interview.

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    On 8/30/2022 at 8:41 AM, Vyvyan B. said:

    It also said in one of the articles I read (from wikipedia) that he was quite the micro-manager and also tried to shoehorn all three of his sons onto the board of directors right before his departure from commodore, he seems to have been a very difficult man to say the least. He did make them a buttload of money though, I'll give him that.

    He was a total micro-manager for sure, but I don't believe that he was trying to shoehorn his three sons into running the company. Leonard Tramiel has spoken against this on numerous occasions and has pointed out that while he was in HS and college, he had worked for Jack during the summers but was not even an employee of Commodore when all of the stuff between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould came to a head. At that time, Sam was running Commodore Japan and continued to do so for a few months after Jack had left. Garry was working for a big-time Commodore dealer of some sort on the East Coast, U.S. at that time (I can't remember which, to be honest) and was also not directly employed by Commodore.

     

    According to Leonard Tramiel and several Commodore people from back in the day (Bil Herd comes to mind), the "My Three Sons" story was one of several rumors that Commodore spread about the employees to attempt to justify their ousting of Jack Tramiel as president. While all three of them did work at Atari when Jack took it over, the situation was different. Garry and Sam had probably wanted to distance themselves from Commodore since their father left on not-so-great terms and Leonard was actually on his honeymoon when Jack told him that he was starting a new company from the ruins of Atari and needed his help in software development.

     

    I don't really know if all of this is true and am just going on what I have heard in person from both Leonard Tramiel and Bil Herd on more than one occasion. I was not quite 12 years old when Jack left Commodore and have no first-hand experience (no flame wars, please).

     

    I will say this... be careful what you read in Wikipedia; though much of it is good information, anyone with an IP address can edit an article for all the world to see. Not even an e-mail address is required anymore, if I understand it correctly. Take for example the fact that almost everyone involved with Commodore in the late 1970's to early 1980's knows that the VIC-20 was based on the Commodore Japan VIC-1001 machine, yet Michael Tomczyk claims that it was all his idea. Sheesh.

     

    Again, I wasn't there and don't know for sure, just going on what I have heard (personally) from people who were involved in one fashion or another.

     

    Something I think that we can all agree on, though; Jack Tramiel saved Atari as Irving Gould saved Commodore. You have to take the good with the bad. After all, without Jack there would have been no ST. 🤔

    • Like 3

    Craigslist haul of a lifetime

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Havok69 said:

    Correct! I had never seen one back in the day. I had a 1050 and a couple of Indus GTs. The Happy mod speeds up this drive considerably. Which is good, as I have about 400 disks to go through. Maybe 100 are OEM disks, and the rest appear to be backups and\or game saves, etc. Will be fun. If I come across anything that isn't available online as an image, I'll be sure to create an ATR of it. It's kind of cool to see all the different brands of blanks; most of which I have used back in the day. The disks were all kept in a plastic bin - they all look new. I'll definitely be formatting a batch to use for data. They were even kind enough to leave a bunch of unused labels and write protect stickers. Anything I really care about will get backed up on my TNFS with FujiNet.

     

    I've had a little bit of time looking over some of the computers... The 800XL needs a new keyboard mylar (cleaning only got another 7 keys working), and both 130XEs boot to the self test and show bad RAM. Surprise surprise, the chips are MT. That's going to be fun desoldering all those. Glad I just got a desoldering station - I will put it to good use. Of course the 410 even though it looks brand new needs new belts.

     

    I had to clean this guy up - the trackball didn't even move before I took it apart. It's all clean now and a spot of oil in the bearings make it spin like new. I kinda like the yellowed trackball, it goes well with brown.

     

     

    IMG_1779.JPG

    I had one, once...

     

    Funny thing is that I had a dialogue with Bruce about 6 or 7 years ago when I was ordering something via e-mail and I described an odd, wooden 810 that I had in my stuff. I told him that it appeared to have been built into a wooden 5.25" floppy disk storage case with a sliding top. He said that it was probably one of his because he had plenty of boards, drive mechanisms and power supplies but no housings to put them in. I showed him a pic and he confirmed that he had built it to order for someone in the late 1980's or early 1990's.

     

    One of the many times that I have needed to downsize, I ended up donating it to a friend for his classic computer museum that he was trying to start. The museum never ended up happening and he just griped up street and down alley that it wasn't stock and perfect-looking. I should've kept it... 😢

    • Like 1

    Sold my Atari 800 XL and regret it

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    Hey, there...

     

    My 800XL is here in NTSC land. I replaced the keyboard & motherboard about 10 years ago (future proofing) with NOS from Best Electronics. It has had minimal use put on it since; my grandsons and I play a few games once in a while. The motherboard is fully socketed, if memory serves me.

     

    Unfortunately, it is completely stock and would need to have a UAV or VBXE installed to do what you need it to do. My soldering skills are in need of an overhaul, so you can imagine that I would not be comfortable doing that.

     

    Too bad... that Ultimate 64 board sounded good.

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