Phlod

Oh, right! Good point. I'm located in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities suburbs. --Phlod

Greetings fellow Atarians! Recently my father passed away, leaving me a ton of Atari computers, and in particular his Atari Falcon. The ol' bird works just fine, and I've replaced the non-functioning IDE drive with a CF Card. I gotta say, I love it a lot. However, shortly after purchasing it in the late '90s, he installed a BlowUp FX CPU accelerator, which never really worked quite right. Since starting my Falcon experimentation, I realized that at least one reason it never worked quite right was because the SIMMs he had installed were flakey. I found this out when I replaced them with different SIMMs and suddenly the system was more or less rock solid. But, as a result of the install never really being finished, the DSP has at least one cut pin, and sound doesn't seem to be playing all channels. Aside from wanting the BlowUp FX install finished (or the DSP repaired if the pin was cut unnecessarily), I was hoping to get some of the more modern QoL upgrades installed (Clock buffer patch, RTC Replacement, possibly a recap, maybe a new PSU). Problem is, the last person I knew who was handy enough with a soldering iron and oscilloscope that I would let them near the Falcon, was my dad. Is there anyone in the US (preferrably) who can be trusted to do the work, and to ship it back to me without it getting destroyed? I'm suuuuper paranoid about shipping this thing. Because it was my father's, as far as I'm concerned, it's not replaceable. If there's no one in the US, then I guess I'm game to ship overseas. Again, just really paranoid about shipping my baby. Thank you very much in advance! --Phlod

On one hand, I see where you're coming from when you say you're a purist, and I don't really want to discourage your approach. But to put forth an alternate point of view, my family's first computer was an Atari 400 in (IIRC) 1980. The first thing my dad did was to replace the membrane keyboard with something with actual buttons. And the second was to upgrade the RAM to 48K. (Actually it might have been in the opposite order, I just know that I barely have memories of using the membrane keyboard, and to me it always had 48K.) The first 800XL of my very own had been upgraded with a 256K Rambo expansion. As the years went along eventually our family 130XE had 320K, an MIO, and a 20MB HDD. I played fewer games and called more BBSes, but I digress. Now admittedly, my dad was an electronics technician, hence handy with solder and an oscilloscope, and I realize that that doesn't describe everyone's experience. However, to me modding and upgrading is both period-accurate, and a real strength of the Atari 8-bit line even today.

Ah! Right! Pictures!

Greets all! A couple of months ago I won a local auction for a pile of random computer things, and in that pile was one of the nicest looking 1200XLs I had ever seen. Got it home, hooked it up and turned it on, and lo! Not only did it work, but the keyboard is beautiful, and fully functional! Now, reasonable people might disagree on whether or not I spent too much on this lot knowing what it contained, but I'm happy with it. There was also an 800, and a 130XE, plus 2 850 interfaces with one actual 850 serial cable, and a few SIO cables to boot. It seems that the S/N is not currently on the list, so I wanted to add it. 72R DA 15434 213 - Roger Mier --Phlod

In 1986-ish my dad gave me my very first 800XL. He had already installed a 256K Rambo expansion in it. However, I've spent most of my life waiting for games which actually support it. I guess all I'm saying is, even BITD there were a decent amount of people with memory-expanded machines. Today if you can read this forum you probably have the ability to run whatever you want on an emulator even if you don't physically own an upgraded Atari. So you're really only excluding the few who insist on only running everything on unmodified original HW, no exceptions.

I hope this is the right place for this question. Is there any way to set the speed of the Warp Speed pulse when hitting F1? Running at max speed is rarely what I want to do, but running at like 1.5x for a few seconds would be nice when playing certain games which are a bit taxing on the A8 hardware.

I feel late to the party. Where can I find the background context on this? I don't understand what is going on here, though I know what Forem XE is, I don't get what this does, nor what MIDI files have to do with it. So confused. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

I realized I should DM this to him.

I noticed that during the Initializing screen, when the game normally enumerates the disk drives it detects, it doesn't show 128K as I'm used to seeing when playing on hardware with 128k or more. Is that normal or is there something I need to do to make the game see my extra RAM when playing off the Cart? Or is that not possible for some reason on the Cartridge version? Thanks for the conversion! I've been playing it for hours now, and it's so nice to not need to flip disks! Even on an emulator it was annoying. Now I'm thinking of strats for speedrunning the game.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I had to shelve my Falcon project for the moment and almost forgot about this post. Anyway, I'm glad this will get archived for posterity. I had to ZIP the LZH archive because for some reason it wouldn't let me upload a .lzh file. fx_1_90.zip

Greetings Atarians, Recently I've been playing with my favorite Atari, the Falcon. I've inherited it from my dad, who in the mid 90's was a big Atari fan, and also an electronics technician. He installed a BlowUP FX in the falcon and 4MB of RAM which I'm sure at the time was all he had handy. The BlowUP FX always was a little flaky, and would crash or cause strange artifacts when the Accelerator was on. Because of that I mostly stopped using it. Recently I've spent some time re-learning how to set up an Atari properly, and have started playing around with the BlowUP. I installed the 1.7 drivers which are easy to find online, and lo! The Falcon is rock-steady at up to 36MHz! Anyway, long story short, in my investigations online into the BlowUP FX and the software, I learned that there was a rumor of a newer driver which would allow the Falcon to use RAM over 14MB as TT FastRAM, but no one knew for sure. Well, in my dad's stash of floppies I found the 1.9 drivers! The README file says it was a pre-2.0 release, and that it allows using RAM over 14MB as TT FastRAM, as well as a few other upgrades. My dad was in contact with the engineers who made the BlowUP when his install didn't go as planned, and they sent him the more recent driver for testing. I would like to release this so it can be preserved, but I don't want to get in any trouble either. In testing on my Falcon it seems one of my SIMMs is likely bad, and that might be what was causing the issues I saw before, so I can't really comment on how stable the 1.9 drivers are quite yet, but I've got them. Would posting them here be appropriate?

Just wanted to let Minnesota people know that SPACE, the St. Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts still meet on the second Friday of each month at the Falcon Heights Community Center. Last time I was there, it was about 5 people including myself, and 3 were officers. However, they still have an 8-bit Disk of the Month every month and the core are very devoted. They could use some new blood for sure.