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Farb

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Posts posted by Farb

    SDrive-MAX ATX support

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by Farb

    On 2/6/2022 at 4:59 PM, Mr Robot said:

    SDrive MAX is the device Fujinet and AVGCART measure their ATX support against, I expect all the other disk loading devices do the same.

    Part of the challenge is with the timing changes that each update to the SDrive Max firmware makes. When I wrote the ATX support originally, I based the timing constants on whatever version of the firmware was current at the time and compared them with a real 810 that @DjayBee kindly loaned me at Fujiama. As the SDrive Max firmware code was updated, the timings also seem to have changed slightly and those constants need to be tweaked. I also found what I believe was a bug in the firmware which seemed to ignore very small changes to the timing constants. I reported the situation to the main author but I don't know if it was ever resolved nor if anyone has tweaked those timing constants since.

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    18 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

    did 1.1 come with a side b or didn't it? was it copied over with v2.0 from a user group copy party? is there an original disk for both and did they both have a side b or were they single sided? Be great to know for sure.

    This would indeed. Hopefully someone will contribute additional original disks or dumps of v1.1 and v2.0 sometime soon ?

    • Like 1

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    On 1/7/2022 at 5:46 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

    Is this ready for the torrent release now and can the missing bits be in the torrent?... I held off because of the different inconsistencies and the zip incompatibility mentions.

    Here is the Computereyes v1.1 ZIP with the missing side B: Computereyes v1.1 (1985)(Digital Vision)(US)[disk].zip

     

    I was under the impression that the ZIP incompatibility mentions were related to the mirrors that were created and not the ZIPs in the original Mega link. The process to create the official ZIP files is the same as it always was.

     

    I would say it is ready for a torrent with the updated ZIP posted here. Thank you for doing it.

    • Thanks 2

    Introduction and archiving

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    On 1/2/2022 at 11:46 PM, DjayBee said:

    Never heard of Syn-Tax before. 

    Bring on the dump. ;)

     

    @Farb did you?

    It is mentioned in the December 1983 issue of Antic but I had assumed it was vaporware since I've never seen it surface until now:

     

    https://archive.org/details/1983-12-anticmagazine/page/n95/mode/2up

     

    Thanks for contributing it @burkhart87. Please let me know if you need someone to assist in flux dumping your original disks so they can be preserved.

    • Like 4

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    1 hour ago, leech said:

    Ha ha, nope.  It was a random early morning thought. 

     

    German language is just awesome! 

    Completely off topic but, being a U.S. expat living in Germany, I can amusingly suggest that such a phrase may not be well-received. My wife has been going through "dog withdrawl" for a while now and it was not at all uncommon for her asking Americans to pet their dog being met with enthusiastic permission. Seeing peoples' reactions to that question here can be pretty funny (at least to me). I've seen it range from very hesitant permission to quickly moving away with cute dog in tow ?

     

    It could be a cultural thing or could be we're just getting more shifty looking as we get older.

    • Haha 3

    BELLCOM PD Catalog Disk

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    FYI, the "dir" command in a8diskutil will calculate CRC for each file on an Atari DOS 2 disk. This could be helpful in identifying identical files between disks. You can also use the "compare" command to compare if two ATR files are identical, and if not, how they differ.

     

    http://www.a8preservation.com/downloads/a8diskutil-darwin-amd64-0.8.6.zip (Mac)

    http://www.a8preservation.com/downloads/a8diskutil-win-amd64-0.8.6.zip (Windows 64-bit)

    http://www.a8preservation.com/downloads/a8diskutil-win-i386-0.8.6.zip (Windows 32-bit)

    • Like 1

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    9 hours ago, Kyle22 said:

    What about those who do not have ATX compatible hardware? Many things can only handle .ATR format.

    When we started doing the preservation work, there were very few options for ATX so it made sense to do the extra work to also catalog the ATR versions. However, today there is now ATX support in many hardware devices and emulators.

     

    A non copy-protected ATX can always be reliably converted into an ATR (but the reverse is not true). For those that want to continue using older hardware or emulators and need ATRs, there are at least two utilities that can very easily perform this conversion: a8rawconv and a8diskutil.

     

    Sorry, but given the shortage of time and the many other things that need to be done, spending time on producing, cataloging and distributing ATRs simply doesn't make sense anymore. Wherever possible, the ATRs that we have currently cataloged will eventually be replaced by proper ATXs that preserve the track sector ordering that ATRs do not.

    • Like 1

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    23 hours ago, Mr Robot said:

    Any idea when all the contributed scanned artwork, manuals, and media is going to be released?

    They have already slowly been making their way onto the website. When it will all be finished, I cannot say. I interleave that work along with all the other things that need to be done.

     

    5 hours ago, rcamp48 said:

    Here is alist of the 8 tunes on this disk:

    We don't catalog homebrews but this is a nice blast from the past. Thanks for posting it!

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    Hi all. I figured I'd post this to the larger thread so others can see it as well...

     

    TL;DR

     

    We can definitely use the Atari community's help to improve the preservation project and you don't need to be highly technical to contribute. Even just a knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet and a willingness to scour through the existing public website, magazine PDFs, etc. would be extremely valuable. See the items highlighted in red bold-italics below for specific areas we could use some help and please PM me if you'd like to get involved.

     

    The longer version

     

    We have a very small group of people assisting with the core preservation project work and the bulk of what we do is the actual dumping of media, scanning, performing time-consuming analysis, scouring old publications and doing other research to identify release dates, similar titles from a time period, similar protection types, etc. This information not only helps in cataloging everything but can also be valuable when we encounter rare disks or tapes with data corruption and need to manually attempt to fix them. For example, a non-trivial number of ATX and CAS files do not come from a single raw dump but are actually manual reconstructions from several raw dumps that all have data corruption in different parts of the disk or tape. We've created and maintain various tools to help us in these endeavors.

     

    I wrote the a8preservation.com site itself completely from scratch and I have been slowly enhancing it to expose the results of our research and experimenting with new capabilities that don't exist (at least to my knowledge) in the Atari community today. For example...

     

    1. Rather than simply creating a single category for a title, the site uses a tagging system which allows multiple tag associations per title. The site's search feature can filter based on the presence of one or more tags and even the absence of tags. This is how the Browse Software page is driven. For example, clicking the Text Adventures - Fantasy category is really a search for all titles that have the "Game", "Adventure", "Text", "Fantasy" and "NOT Graphics" tags. These tags are also used to generate the "You may also be interested in..." section at the bottom of each title page. There are even tags for all the different vendor disk protection variants we have identified so far.

     

    We can use help identifying and fixing gaps in the tagging of our titles and releases.

     

    2. Our Publications section has entries for most major Atari magazines. If you click into a particular issue, you will get a list of articles. Some articles also have the article text itself available.

     

    Software review articles are of particular significance because we can discover information such as details of a particular release, how many disks were included, etc. The database currently has the ability to establish a relationship between a title and its software reviews. If this relationship exists, and we have the text of the article in the database, the site performs AI-based sentiment analysis of the review texts and generates an aggregate "critics' score" for the title. An example of this can be seen on the page for Jumpman.

     

    We also have the ability to establish a relationship between titles and magazine ads (as also seen on the Jumpman page). This is another data point we use to identify release dates for a title if we don't have other indicators or if the other indicators are misleading (e.g. copyright dates that come from the release of the title on another platform rather than the actual Atari release date).

     

    We can use help identifying missing article entries from each magazine issue, identifying missing ads, creating formatted article text from magazine PDFs, etc.

     

    3. We still have gaps in our release metadata such as number of players, memory requirements, supported controllers, BASIC, etc. These are not only displayed on the website but also drive the generation of the filenames that we distribute.

     

    We can use help identifying and resolving gaps in our release metadata.

     

    Why is the above work useful to the community?

     

    Well, there are two main reasons I have right now...

     

    1. I've been slowly working on a public REST API for the site. It's still being actively refined but is already driving portions of the website today. This API could be used by the community in various ways. An obvious example would be an emulator getting the data it needs to configure itself accurately from the file CRC/MD5 when a disk, cassette or cartridge is loaded.

     

    2. I am not currently aware of a data-driven estimation of title rarity. Others have made a great effort to estimate this manually based on their impressive knowledge of the Atari scene, but I'd like to try something more deterministic. We've been accumulating dumps for 7-8 years now. I think we have a number of data points that could go into a rarity calculation including how many dumps of that title we've seen, whether the media was mass produced, how many magazine reviews exist, how many publication ads exist, etc.

     

    Summary

     

    Sorry for the long post but it's been a while since I've shared what we've been doing in the background besides releasing a new collection of media dumps every few months. If you have read up to this point, thanks for your attention and please consider donating some time ?

     

    • Like 3

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by Farb

    Hi Russ,

     

    Thank you for the offer of help.

     

    We don't sort the file directories in the preservation archive using the TOSEC standard since it is more important for processing purposes that we track the raw dumps by their specific release, the contributor & date of the contribution, etc.

     

    However, the a8preservation.com website uses an extensive tagging system that can be used to categorize titles in many different ways for searching and other purposes. This is still very much work in progress as it is a failry recent addition to the site. If you have the free time, and are interested to help us improve our organization/categorization at the website level, please PM me and we can chat further.

    • Like 1

    Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    2 hours ago, SoulBuster said:

    FYI.  The Archive has Jaw Breaker as a single word.  All disk labels and documentation show it as two words.

    Yes, there was not a lot of consistency around this. On-Line Systems magazine ads and reviews for the title showed it as one word. And it is one word on the labels for Jawbreaker II (which were confusingly named just "Jawbreaker"). But you are right, the media labels and manuals I have seen so far show it as two words so I have changed it in the database. I probably need to implement an alias feature so both can be captured for search purposes ?

    • Thanks 1
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