Nezgar

Next to try swapping is the 6810 RAM chip

If the drive power light doesn't come on at all, maybe the electrolytic capacitors have gone bad. I would use those drives to try taking the ROM's out of and putting into the ones that do power on. If they are EPROMS and not original mask ROM's you may have to muck with the 4 jumpers above the ROM socket to select ROM/EPROM

Probably, I remember him mentioning his time at Apple in Antic Podcast Interview Episode 113 http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-113-russ-wetmore-preppie-sea-dragon-homepak

Around 88 or 89 I went on a road trip with my family to California for the usual vacation stops like Disney and Universal, but I requested we visit that Atari HQ office. I was pretty excited to visit 'mecca' and they gave us a few bits of paraphernalia, can't remember what, but I remember a baseball hat and a 'atari player on board' window cling... can't expect too much more for just showing up I guess. went back years later and the building was now Proxim - the atari sign out front on the street was just covered up with a cover with the new logo..

Ah right, good catch! I remember reading that before...

Oh I missed that you said the chip was 24 pins not 28. The 1200XL used 2 24 pin OS ROM chips in 28 pin sockets, but XL/XE's used a single 28 pin ROM. Maybe someone else knows better if that is expected to work directly in XL/XE. Found this which describes the Omniview 256: http://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/05/09/0019.php Mine is an eprom, and shows "omniview xl" with basic disabled, or typing bye from basic. Not sure if that's the same as OmniView 256? If it includes a ramdisk feature I'm not sure if I've ever seen that, unless maybe my XE Newell 320K ram upgrade was not compatible.

The stacked 6810's sounds like standard fare for a homebrew USDoubler upgrade for a 1050 to get the 256bytes of RAM needed for double density. (They're 128 bytes each) usually along with an EPROM to replace the stock 1050 ROM. http://www.realdos.net/US%20Doubler.html

Omnimon can directly replace the stock ROM chip on XL/XE. The RAMROD board was only a mechanism to switch between 3 different OS ROM's. In my own XE, back in the 90's I made a 4 selectable OS by stacking 4 ROM chips, and wiring in switches to the power pins so I could select which one was 'active'. If you have an XL or XE with a socketed ROM, you can test the chip by popping out the original, and putting that one in. You'll get 80 column support (hold control-a on powerup or reset) and better 800 OS-B support for Games. I think it reverses the basic select too, so basic is OFF by default unless you hold option on poweron.

With Sparta's ability to random access locations within a file, why does it need to load the whole file into RAM? (or extended RAM in the case of xless) Could it not just stream from file to the screen? Maybe for other features I'm ignorant of at the moment...

I think SpartaDOS 1.1 will work for you. It's the only disk based sparta that works on a 400/800.

Do you see any places where said resistors or other components were removed? Can you post a clear picture of the motherboard?

You can connect 3 SIO single ended SIO devices with that APE link on BEST http://best-electronics-ca.com/8-bit_.htm Historically, there was also the no longer available CSS Quintopus, http://www.realdos.net/SIO_Quintopus.html

Congrats technically you only need the one .DOS file, everything else is optional if you want to maximize space for other things. You can also make a STARTUP.BAT with 1 line: BASIC OFF so you don't need to hold option. Other optional things can be added to it like a binary fine to run after boot I always thought it was nice that disk Sparta used startup.bat and SDX used autoexec.bat, as I could share the same boot hard drive and have different bootup environments specific to each.

Correct... there's nothing in SDX you can put on a disk to make it boot to something like a DOS. You'll need the disk based Sparta files first. I guess ICD assumed everyone would have a copy of the disk based DOS's already haha

Copy one of the disk based SpartaDOS/RealDOS .DOS files to a freshly formatted SDFS disk. (or even an existing disk with files already on it, doesn't matter - its just nicer for the file to be at the beginning of the disk for quicker boot on a real drive) You'll still need to copy the .DOS files from a SpartaDOS 3.2/3.3/RealDOS etc disk in the first place. I keep a copy of those disks in a directory on my SIDE2 for quick access. then use the BOOT command on the file to set the boot sectors to load that file. COPY X32F.DOS D1: BOOT D1:X32F.DOS Some simple binary games and menu loaders can be made bootable this way too. Thats the absolute minimum to get the system to boot. obviously to do anything useful with the dos, you might want to copy some other utilities onto the new disk, unless you're just using it to load games or something.

I just listened to this a week or two ago - You would probably find ANTIC Interview 222 with Richard Watts interesting, who "was a programmer at Macrotronics, a company that was primarily focused on the RM-1000 radio modem" http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-222-richard-watts-macrotronics

Personally I've never had a 1030 (I started with an Avatex 1200bps and a P:R: connection) I would think the XM301 is pretty much the exact same deal as the 1030, and I did borrow one from a friend back in the day just to try on my 130XE, and it sure seems like that trick was in use, hearing the DTMF tones and phone line sounds coming out of the TV speaker. So based on that I would presume the 1030 would work just fine on a 130XE or other newer machines. Funny that the software DTMF was basically a hardware cost savings measure... and the 'apparently better' audio separation on the 400 burned them haha.

My favourite/most memorable use of 16-bit frequencies was the high-pitched engine rev-up whine right before launch in Rescue on Fractalus, and I believe throughout all engine sounds while flying around on the planet.

I think kookey's quest is one of very few big ANTIC programs that I was excited enough about to manually all type in!! I was so happy later on to acquire many other ANTIC type-in programs on disk, or download or something. Looking forward to trying out your other games!

In ANTIC interview #10 with Mark Rustad, he explains they did exactly that - amplifying pokey leakage. The R: routine has tables of digitized 4-Bit DTMF sine waves which would the POKEY would play back, and the 1030 would amplify off the AUDIO IN line, to get a wave 'close enough' to pass Bell certification. He also mentioned there was something about a slightly different table needed for the 1200XL due the non-linear amplitudes associated with the POKEY. A total hack haha. After all that effort for Bell certification for USA, no wonder they never released modems in other countries outside north america - where they'd have to repeat the certification process all over again. Maybe the POKEY leakage hack just didn't work on 400's? http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-10-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-mark-rustad

Maybe Best and B&C would be interested in a bunch to help sell their stock.

Came across this in the March 1989 issue of ANTIC: "The IC Chip is a replacement ROM for the Happy 1050 Board (original or clone). You'll no longer have to configure it for the U.S. Emulation Mode to read or write to SpartaDOS skewed disks. This "chip" does it automatically -- and all other Happy functions are still available. Installation is just a matter of unplugging the old ROM and plugging in this new one. For only $32.95 you get the IC Chip plus two double-sided disks packed full of utilities." http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n11/newproducts.html Looks like someone else was annoyed with the extra step to enable fast writes and did something about it. I wonder what specifically was done. Maybe just a quick mod of the ROM to enable fast writes by default. Edit: Also found on the A8 FAQ http://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/05/09/0017.phplooks like Innovative Concepts made a disk based USDoubler emulator. It's likely similar to Steven J. Carden's HAPPY.COM where it uploads the actual USD ROM code to Happy RAM and executes it. Would be nice to find this disk from Innovative Concepts. Edit2: And even more info on the realdos page, i presume from IC's catalog http://www.realdos.net/Disk%20Drive%20Review.html"Happy Doubler - Allows you to program your Happy 1050 drives to fully emulate ICD's U.S. Doubler, including formatting disks in the U.S. sector skew (which is not normally possible!). Also allows you to reprogram your drive numbers up to D8:, without touching the switches in back! This way, up to 8 - Happy 1050s can be used at once! (4 - programmed as Doublers 5-8 and another 4 - as normal). Completely software based, no installation required! Price: $19.95 (+ S&H)."

One idea... If one doesn't already exist, I think it would be cool to have a utility to scan a disk for bad sectors, and map them out. Working through archiving my disk collection lately, I've inevitably run across some disks that have bad sectors. At least Happy 1050 and USDoubler will format the disk track 0-39 before doing the verify. So... when the verify fails, can use SDX formatter to 'build directory'. I've been able to manually mark the bad sectors as 'allocated' using EDDY, and SpartaDOS will happily avoid them, without even creating dummy files that 'live' on those sectors. In theory this could be useful for DOS2 format disks as well, just by setting the allocated bits in the VTOC. The program could do unbuffered reads for each sector, and flag either on an error, or even on a longer then usual response time to the sector read. Might be nice to extend the life of some floppies that are otherwise good save for a few specific 'bad spots' on them.

Good to see you got it working. All atari 8-bit cartridges are always front facing. You mentioned you tested with other cartridges, you must have been putting those in front facing... With the switch in the DOWN position, you get SpartaDOS X, nothing wrong there! Use the manual link provided by BillC and read up how to create APT hard disk partitions for use with SpartaDOS. Then you can copy files off your floppies or ATR's to the large virtual disks in the SIDE2 from SDX. 4.46a is also a bit old, i think there's 4.49 now in beta. 4.48 is current main version: http://sdx.atari8.info/index.php?show=en_download_special Watch these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5lqlkmTvG hah, that must be you commenting on the last one where you saw the right way to plug it in Cheers from Saskatchewan

Very interesting information I've not considered! I'm curious drac030, I would presume you have used optimizations like this in various functions of your custom OS? If so, it's further incentive for me to get it up and running on my system.