Nezgar

Great find there! "Richard used a DBA (doing business as) fictitious name for the company called "Plateau Digital Technology" This was a fictitious name for the Happy Computers Inc. corporation, that Richard started in 1983. The DBA was a simpler approach than forming a subsidiary." This man is definitely a technical wizard, beginning way before the Atari 8-Bits, and continuing way beyond. There's a paragraph there that shows how he got so familiar so familiar with the inner workings of the common WDC disk controllers every floppy drive used to use! "This expansion of the IMP16 computer was in part facilitated by using circuits Richard was given for hobbyist use while involved in a joint venture between National Semiconductor and Western Digital. The venture concerned inventive disk controller chips. Richard was one of the engineers involved in that disk controller chip project. Richard later applied the skills he learned of disk controller chips to his own inventions that he sold through a company he started called Happy Computers." Looks like the current venture is "The Sixteen Nine Time Company", with contact info I spent 3 hours one night last week reading through the Archiver manual and trying to figure out how to create a custom sector track layout last week, as its all new to me since I only recently found software that will convert a Happy 1050 to a CHIP/Archiver ROM and convert the drive to work with the Archiver tools. Would be nice to hear a bit of an overview from someone with experience, or at least what they can remember haha.

Boot this disk and choose option B to convert a happy drive to a stock 1050 ROM until poweroff. Then you can use the Atari 1050 diagnostics disk with full functionality. https://archive.org/details/a8b_Happy_Utility_Menu_v1.0_1987_Pirate_Software

I'm with you there!! Richard Adams, Bob Puff, and Michael Gustafson would be like the holy grail of interviews for Antic. Anyone who was involved in creating hardware 'backup' mods were definitely considered as something akin to dark magic voodoo masters to the rest of us back then.

I dream of the day when CHIP/[super]Archiver/Happy has been reverse engineered and it can be directly emulated by RespeQT/AspeQT etc with VAPI compatible with the Happy/Archiver software on a real Atari. Or maybe a PC utility that reads the ATX and writes to a real Happy via 10502PC. Yes pipe dream i know haha. I guess realistically and technically with Kryoflux et all, reasonably attainable means already exist to make perfect copies of everything....

The computer is still reading in a track from Drive 1, and then transmitting it back out to D2 D3 D4 with the special 'broadcast' SIO commands. I guess a full antonymous mode would be theoretically possible. Nothing saying a 1050 can't transmit SIO commands as if they were from a computer? Or maybe not, since there's probably an electrical reason the 10502PC and SIO2PC are different products... Full autonomous copy (like Mega Speedy?) was probably still rocket science in 1982-1986 haha. But even i think only something like Mega Speedy can do a full buffered disk copy only within the same drive because it has a huge RAM buffer, and maybe not copy protected stuff? Oh? I just assumed it would reset back to the menu as pretty much all the programs after the first menu are reset proof. That would make a lot of sense to help people out quickly set their drive to unhappy mode before booting a disk without a power cycle of the computer. I'll have to try that!

Well now you can I realized I now had 4 (mostly) functioning happy drives so decided to try out a 4-drive multi-drive copy with the max 4 drives, and make a video of it! You can see 1 Drive reading, and see the proprietary SIO commands to 'broadcast' the writes to the other three drives at the same time at work, and the software would look for the confirmations back from each drive, retrying a track on a specific drive if necessary. Would love to hear any first-hand accounts of 'copy parties' back in the day where this might have been employed.

I would try to stick with a direct connection from the Atari to the RCA jacks on the monitors for Composite/Luma/Chroma/Audio. A cable like this breaks out those 4 signals from an Atari 8-bit or Commodore 64. I think both the commodore 1084 and 1902 monitors have direct RCA jacks for that. All this converting youre doing between Composite/SVideo>Scart>RGB seems too complicated to me...

I'm from Canada and we don't use SCART, but from what I know it's just a passive connector. It has pins for all kinds of types of video, but any particular device may use one or some subset of them. If your monitor does only RGB, you'll still need something to convert another type of video source to that...

The 800XL at least (or any atari 8-bit computer) does not natively output direct RGB, only Composite, Luma and Chroma. I don't think Bryan's UAV board does RGB, just better Composite, Luma and Chroma, but the VBXE ugprade board definitely will, but thats a significant mod...

No, your two links are for NULL MODEM adapters, which swap the RTS/CTS and RX/TX pins. You want something like this on amazon, or this on ebay.

ebay search for "db9 gender changer" finds lots of cheap results edit: they will work for serial or video, as the pinout is not changed by a gender changer...

So I guess we would need much more than a 21Mhz 65816 to emulate an ST on an 8-bit....

You mean like 1K ATASCII blaster? 45 seconds load time! http://www.phobotron.de/1KAtasciiBlaster.html

In short no, no CAR or XEX version because really S.A.M. really is just a machine language module with an API that you can control from your own programs. The original S.A.M. disk just contains example programs in BASIC that do just that... Of course you could always include it in a program of your own and put THAT on a cart or executable file...

Yep my bad, don't know what I was thinking... mixing up the two types in my head or something Do you have both a UK and NA 410 to compare? If you crack open the US one, you should be able to see where the 110v transformer output connects to - disconnect that and solder on a direct 6v DC connection or to a new external socket. I don't have a 410 so may be worth someone else confirming that is the correct internal voltage. If you have a UK one to compare, you might be able to see where that 6v DC plug connects to the board, maybe the Same place.

Ah, no I'm Pretty sure there's no way to do that without a Stepdown transformer. They are pretty cheap on ebay too.. but I think that adds unnecessary complication.. and probably not worth trying to self make. If you really want to keep it able to go back to the original power supply, you could use detachable connectors where you make the cable cut..

Hey me too! Near Regina? Would be cool to find some more local Atari 8-bitters.

How about something cheap like this? £1.54 - , you can cut the 2 cords, and solder them together. DC power supplies are easy to find, its the AC ones beyond 1A that are tricky. Maybe check out your local thrift shops too. "1pcs Hot DC UK 6V 1A Universal External Switching Power Adapter Charger Supply" http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1pcs-Hot-DC-UK-6V-1A-Universal-External-Switching-Power-Adapter-Charger-Supply-/161483227479?hash=item2599268157:g:bZMAAOSw7PBTqNOD

I would like two fully assembled, with shipping to Canada.

Is the MegaSpeedy actually still available to order somewhere? I'd like to get one too... Another good solderless option is the 'Happy' 1050 Upgrade Board at AtariMax - Bottom of this page http://www.atarimax.com/sio2pc/documentation/

Some of the RAM upgrade options currently available: Antonia 4MB - replaces CPU and MMU, 8 flashable OS's - http://atariage.com/forums/topic/249405-new-4mb-ram-expansion/ Ultimate 1MB - 1MB, 4 Flashable OS, SpartaDOS X, Realtime clock - http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=67 Rambo XL 256KB Reimaged - the classic ICD upgrade, manually accept site cert error - https://www.bitsofthepast.com/?product=reimaged-rambo-xl-adapter Wizztronics 256KB - I presume Rambo XL compatible - http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/wizztronics%202_256.htm

Now we have to re-do all the software preservation initiative to capture track -1 and 40 of all commercial disks! Do you know what the specific protection scheme was that was used that temporarily foiled happy?

I would also lovingly accept a bunch! Even up to 50? Or more?, depending on interest from others I don't want an unfair share. I would pay for your shipping to Canada. I can check/archive your disk contents to ATR first too, as I'm doing that for my own collection currently. Testing my own after with a format, most will fail. I like still copying ATR's to real disks so would be nice to have spares I go along.

On a somewhat related topic... I got very intrigued when someone was describing a new online programming language from MIT to me that was great for teaching programming to kids... Started describing its syntax... Boy that sounds familiar....... And had an epiphany - it was LOGO reincarnated! ie: move 10 steps turn 15 degrees point in direction 90 set pen color to ■ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=home Next time their kids visit, definitely have to boot up LOGO on the Atari

First, use Isopropyl Alcohol and a Q-Tip and make sure your read head in the drive is crystal clean (Should reflect like glass when shining a light) Second, with the drive cover off, try applying a little pressure on the pressure pad with your finger when trying to read the disk, sometimes this helps the drive catch the sector. Especially since you have that physical indentation on the disk, this may help 'flatten it out' as the affected parts pass over the read head. If there are any blemishes or 'gunk' on the surface of the floppy, you can try using isopropyl alcohol/qtip GENTLY directly on the disk surface to clean those off. It will evaporate quickly, especially if you blow on it as well. Use dry end of QTip to take care of any remaining drops.I had some disks that the dirt was basically blocking the signal from reaching the read head. Be super careful though, too much pressure while wiping/swabbing of one spot will take the magnetic coating right off, down to the plastic- then your data is definitely gone. Couple strategies for recovery... First use a sector copier such as MYCopyR or Happy Sector copier that will Copy all the GOOD sectors and continue when it encounters bad sectors. This way you can quickly get all of the 'good' sectors to a new disk or ATR. You can quickly restart MyCopier from the beginning with the Option/Start keys. Then, you can try working on recovering the bad sectors one at a time using a program that allows retries, and entering specific sector ranges. I've found the Happy Sector copier is good for this, it will work with non-happy drives as well. You can specify sector ranges to copy, and set the destination NOT to format, so once you get a good read, you can write just those updated sectors to your destination copy. If the problem sectors are not on the directory (Sectors 360-368) (sounds like yours is though) It might only corrupt one file... DOS 2 disk files use sector links in the last 3 bytes of each sector, so the remainder of the file after a bad sector will be lost unless you re-insert the sequence bytes with a sector editor, etc.. Anyhow - Hopefully you can get make some progress with the cleaning/pressure ideas.