Mechanicjay

I print regularly with the LQ drivers to both the Print Shop and The Print Shop Companion. There are now three driver disks mentioned in this thread: 1) The LQ driver for The Printshop 2) The LQ driver for The Printshop Companion 3) The 1020 plotter driver for The Printshop. I would just double check that you're loading the right driver.

I would also check the head alignment. The quick daig method would be, With the cover off, when it zeros and you get the one beep, put some light pressure forward on the head to see if it can pick up the track. Adjusting is a bigger trick. Out of the 4 (5?) 810's I have, I've never had to touch the spindle RPM, but have had to adjust the head on the Tandon drive a couple times. But yeah, if you can get that 810 diag cart, that's the real key, otherwise you're just stabbing in the dark.

Thanks for looking into these things candle. Is the SynCalc issue the same as the SynFile+ issue? And will I be able to update my original Incognito with the fix?

Gary, Thanks for sharing those videos! I was wondering if you had the sheet music for the AR theme and would be willing to share it /sell a copy?

I'm running into this same issue. The two images provided seem to run fine in an emulator, but lock up on an Incognito equipped 800. The Incognito 800 is my only Atari, so it's hard to test other hardware combos. When loading the Disk images through Side, I experience the lockup as soon as I select "open" in the program. I've dumped both versions to a physical disk and tried to boot them. They both boot, the Synapse_Synfile+ 1.02 image, locks up the same way -- select Open, and it locks. The Synfile+ -800b.atr, will boot and get further, as long as I have 48k of Ram and the Colleen / OSB machine type selected. But, I can get it to consistently lock up, when trying to create a new file, it at least attempts lets me select *create* from the file menu, then it load the File Creation program....then locks up.

Because running a weird MS-DOS on an Atari with a Brainslug is a near irresistible level of wtf.

This is interesting to me as well. I've wanted an ATR8000 years, but they seem to be going to bigger bucks than I care to spend in recent years. I'd be super interested in a version with the Co-Power 88 as well, because why not?

Just a note: this is wonderful! I had been stuck at v 1.20 on my Incognito because for whatever reason it just wouldn't flash right, but as things were working well enough, I just left it alone. I was really looking for the latest update to SDX though and I don't know what changes you might have made to uflash,running it from the mounted ATR and flashing the entire 512k image worked perfectly last night!

I know this is an older thread, but I just finished fixing this issue on mine. The issue as follows: The ribbon feed motor is an AC motor and runs whenever the print head moves off it's park position. As it's an AC motor, it will spin in EITHER direction when power is applied. To overcome this, there is a cam on the back of the motor, and nylon ring, which will prevent it from spinning in the wrong direction. The nylon ring, after so many years basically just disintegrates. I dissembled the ribbon feed motor and we 3-D printed a new backspin ring, and after some minor tweaks with file, I have mine working A-OK again. This happened for 2 825's I have, I assume this part is just aging out in these printers at this time. I'll try to post some pictures later of what we did and see if I can make the 3D printer file available. --Jason

This drives me nuts on my 850.....

Yep, exactly that. I imagine any similar type ribbon would do.

I solved the ribbon issue and the printer was running and active for VCF. I bought a ribbon for an Epson LQ-590. The ribbon cartridge is about the same size as the ribbon holder area on the 825 and the ribbon height looked right. I cracked open the ribbon cart for the Espon, and carefully transferred the ribbon over the 825...done. Perfect. Total cost $0.25 at a surplus shop

Surprisingly, the new cable I just got solved the issue I was having, so that's kind of amazing. It all just works. Have a couple inquiries out for new ribbons nothing yet. 10 days till VCF....tick tock

Sadly from the 3-04-2019 Addendum: Atari 825 Zip Ribbon pack CB101737 Sold Out

Hi All, I have 2 non-functional 825 printers, which I'm about to combine into one working unit, however, I don't have a ribbon. I've been searching around, but I can't find a source for these, apparently loose-in-a-bag mobius strip ribbons? Anyone have a source, or measurements for a possible substitution? Thanks, Jason

ptsh. I telnet into my linux box with BOBTERM and xmodem stuff over Or just load up an ATR via Side2. But what the folks above say is the overall better solution.

As you're talking with Comp Sci students, definitely get them laying hands on the machine. Come up with a couple fairly trivial programming exercises and let them hack at it with Atari Basic. Maybe have a couple programming demos ready for how easy it was to access the hardware and all the feature. Also something demonstrating how primitive things were, like build a multi-dimensional string array in Atari BASIC.

I'd talk about the system in the context of it's time and what made it unique among its competitors. I'd talk about the really advanced stuff that was going on with the system, like the SIO bus, System handlers, and the dedicated Sound and Graphics chips. I'd demo a couple a Contemporary Games, stuff that was pretty ground breaking at the time: Star Raiders: Free fly-around "3d" space battle sim! Alternate Reality: Grandfather of the Walk-about RPG -- also the Intro to that game is still damned impressive. That's just general stuff off the top of my head. I'll let this percolate and post if I come up with anything else.

Some will. I have a bunch of retro tech in my office and it can be an amazing conversation starter with some Undergrads and Grads. Not all, but some definitely get it. There's even one undergrad who's put together a Computing History Seminar for next quarter. This in a in National Top 5 CompSci program. There are definitely young folks out there who care.

I'm curious where you see these go for $70 "normally"? If I could have found one for under $250 anytime in the last 3 years, I would have nabbed it.

Yes Newsroom is super duper sensitive to disk timings. I can only get it to work on real hardware with a real 1050 -- (Somehow I still don't have an Sio2pc device). I just grabbed all the XLEnt atr's I could find and will totally be messing around with that tonight, thanks for the tip Gunstar!

Agreed. The 800/810 I had in the early 80's was a pleasing tan color. The color coordinates VERY nicely with the dark brown face plate of the 810 and dark brown keys of the 800. The 800/810/850 setup I have now is the same pleasing tan color (with some variance, but not much). The contrast to the very clearly BEIGE 1050 Drive sandwiched between the 810 and 850 is pronounced; the color difference is significant. Earthy tones were big in the late 70's/ early 80's.

Wow, it sounds like this program is exactly what I'm looking for right now. It turns out I can't get any copy of PicPrint I find around to load or work at all

This kinda ties into the whole idea that the 800 had these great user accessible slots for which there were only a criminally small number of products ever released, but they weren't really an expansion bus like an Apple II or an S100 system. But we have the totally forward thinking and probably too ahead of it's time SIO Bus -- things like the ART8000 show how far you could take that idea -- basically slaving the Atari to the ATR8000 while it ran CP/M. This is basically what happens with an Apple II CP/M card as well.

Lol, can you write something that compiles my PHP to a 6502 binary? I only sort of jest -- I write primarily in PHP for my day job, so it's the language my brain thinks in these days.