Nick Kennedy

I've been trying out the old Atari 800 after 25+ years in storage. I didn't have a working disk drive and my current PC won't do SIO2PC so I thought I'd give this RespeQt thing a shot. I already had an SIO cable and a USB to serial TTL converter in my junk box so it didn't take very long. I'm pleased that I've been able to boot up an old .ATR disk with minimal studying. I hope to be able to do more after studying the docs a bit. My thanks to the developers. Oh, I'm running Windows 11 and my USB thingy has a CH340 chip. Nick

OK, time to report on the video converter. It's kind of a mixed bag. It was $16.99 from Amazon. First I hooked up the composite video and I was able to see the blue screen with text. A little smudgy with some pink mixed in, but a good start. Next I cut the S-video cable that came with the gadget and connected one end to a DIN plug to go to the Atari, bringing out the chrominance and luminance signals. I also hooked the audio pin to a 3.5 mm jack so I could plug it into a sound system. The S-video hook-up produced a reasonable text screen, but when I plugged in an Asteroids cartridge, it wasn't pretty. Smudgy images and wrong colors. I fooled with buttons on the converter but that didn't seem to have much effect. OKY2000 suggested that the gamma and chroma signals might need to be adjusted. Are there internal adjustments for that? And would I just tweak until I like what I see? I do have several Ataris I could try, so that might be an interesting experiment. Oh, here's the video gizmo I bought: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HH3DPKX?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details Thanks all, Nick

Again, thanks. So much good info and so many resources in both hardware and software available. Long live the Atari! I ordered a S-video/composite converter so we'll see how it does. The SDrive Max looks pretty amazing and I may be giving it a shot. I plan to try that Altirra emulator. Back in the 90s, I was using something called XF3 Xformer by Darek Mihocka that was very faithful. I was actually writing and assembling my Atari code on it. Yes, I should have kept an old DOS compatible 286 or 386. And maybe a monitor too. I'm pleased that someone can still run SIO2PC 4.21. Hard to believe, but until recently, my main PC did have a real serial port on its MB and I wired it out. I doubt if SIO2PC would function under the Console/Terminal screen that executes DOS-like commands under Windows 11. As I recall, SIO2PC made a lot of direct writes to the UART rather than use OS calls. That would likely mean no FTDI either. I'll try to report after I try the video converter, the original basis for this thread. Regards, Nick

Thanks all for the good and informative responses. Yes, I was wrong about RGB, I see in the hardware manual it's Luma and Chroma or Composite. I haven't known much about video standards in the past so now I'm learning that the Luma and Chroma outputs constitute an S-Video signal. (Right?) And that could give me a better display than composite, which makes sense. I expect to pipe the audio signal out separately. I'm dipping my toe into trying one of my old Atari computers which have been boxed up for 25 years or so. I did a tremendous amount of programming on those things. The opening question is: Will one still power up and play? OK, I've verified that I have at least one that works. Thanks to an old Casio "pocket TV" with a 2" screen - I was able to connect the RF cable to it and get the blue screen and barely legible "ATAIR COMPUTER MEMO PAD". Hurrah! Not sure if I have the ability to load a program. I have an old 1050 disk drive which may or may not work. I don't think my old SIO2PC system is going to work on a modern PC. What are people using these days? I'm sure there's something with a USB drive and maybe an Arduino to do an interface similar to the old SIO2PC. Yes? Thanks, Nick

I'm thinking of firing up one of my old Atari computers but don't have an old monitor or TV. Are there converters out there that will convert the Atari video output to VGA? HDMI would be OK I guess, but VGA suits what I have better right now. As I recall, the Atari 800 had both composite video and RGB available. Plus a modulator to convert the composite video to TV channel 2. BTW, I have seen some boards on eBay and AliExpress that look promising, but the product descriptions are hard to follow. I'd like to be reasonably sure the gadget has a chance of working before I buy it. Regards, Nick "the SIO2PC guy"