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THE!CART... New 128MB FLASH Cartridge


mega-hz

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Out of curiosity, has anyone made a The!Cart workbook with all the known Atari 8-bit cartridges that they can share? Lots of them are available in .bin or .rom format, but some I only see in .xex or .com format. Ideally it would be nice to have all of these in .car format, but AtariMania doesn't seem to have them. I figured I'd check before going through all the trouble of making my own.

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Out of curiosity, has anyone made a The!Cart workbook with all the known Atari 8-bit cartridges that they can share? Lots of them are available in .bin or .rom format, but some I only see in .xex or .com format. Ideally it would be nice to have all of these in .car format, but AtariMania doesn't seem to have them. I figured I'd check before going through all the trouble of making my own.

 

Is there a reason you want to stick to all known atari 8bit cartridges? A lot of good games do exist, but those are disk, tape or other files.

 

If you miss certain games could you tell us which games you are looking for, that's easier for me to check what I have ;) since I don't know if I have all :D

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Is there a reason you want to stick to all known atari 8bit cartridges? A lot of good games do exist, but those are disk, tape or other files.

Because I'm mostly familiar with cartridge games since I had a 400 growing up (no disk drive, just a tape drive). I know there are good disk games, but I thought I'd stick with what I know first (plus I have an SIO2PC cable for disk stuff). If you have a nice workbook setup with cart and disk games, by all means share it.

 

Do .cas files work on The!Cart? I can't image they would.

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  • 1 month later...

Ok I tried to flash my The!Cart tonight by exporting my workbook to a ATR image and transferring it over using ASPEQT. The cart seemed to flash ok (took about 3 hours), but when I try to run it I'm only getting the Atari Self-Test. Is there anything special I need to set in that menu to make it come up with the game selection menu? I set the mode to The!Cart and tried stuff like Auto run, but nothing worked. Everything eventually went back to the self-test.

 

This is the ATR image I was using: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.atr

This is the workbook: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.tcw

These are the roms: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.zip

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Ok I tried to flash my The!Cart tonight by exporting my workbook to a ATR image and transferring it over using ASPEQT. The cart seemed to flash ok (took about 3 hours), but when I try to run it I'm only getting the Atari Self-Test. Is there anything special I need to set in that menu to make it come up with the game selection menu? I set the mode to The!Cart and tried stuff like Auto run, but nothing worked. Everything eventually went back to the self-test.

 

This is the ATR image I was using: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.atr

This is the workbook: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.tcw

These are the roms: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.zip

Your allcarts.atr file is to small it should be 128MB. Even though the actual usable content is less.

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. . . The cart seemed to flash ok (took about 3 hours). . .

 

This is the ATR image I was using: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.atr

This is the workbook: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.tcw

These are the roms: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/AllCarts.zip

Are you using 19.2K SIO? It would greatly reduce the amount of time to flash if you use one of the many Ultra (or High) Speed solutions. If you already have a flashable or switchable OS ROM, then it's easy. The Hias patched OS works well, as does QMeg.

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Are you using 19.2K SIO? It would greatly reduce the amount of time to flash if you use one of the many Ultra (or High) Speed solutions. If you already have a flashable or switchable OS ROM, then it's easy. The Hias patched OS works well, as does QMeg.

Yes I think that's what it defaulted to. I'm using ASPEQT for Linux through my serial port. On the Atari end I have a 1200XL with a SIO2PC style cable. I do have the 32-in-1 OS mod, which one should I pick?

 

Under ASPEQT I tried various options, but I could only get it to work with RI handshaking and it always seems to default to 19K no matter what pokey divisor or other options I select.

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Yes I think that's what it defaulted to. I'm using ASPEQT for Linux through my serial port. On the Atari end I have a 1200XL with a SIO2PC style cable. I do have the 32-in-1 OS mod, which one should I pick?

 

Under ASPEQT I tried various options, but I could only get it to work with RI handshaking and it always seems to default to 19K no matter what pokey divisor or other options I select.

Sorry I can't help you there, I don't use AspeQt. I use APE Pro. I don't remember what all the 32 in 1 has, but I'm sure one of them must be a high speed one. I removed my 32 in 1 some time ago because of strange timing issues that caused lock ups. Now that I have the U1M, everything is fine. Four instantly available OSs, and unlimited number of OSs in seconds with UFLASH.

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Yep: I think SIO routines are built in... Although I could be wrong too. :)

Yes the built-in flasher on the cart has an option that says something like Highspeed SIO: On/Off. I have it set to On, but it still defaulted to 19K during the transfer so I'm guessing it's on the ASPEQT end.

 

Just to be clear this is what I did:

 

1. Created a workbook based on the one posted earlier in this thread (the All Carts one with a few additions and subtractions)

2. Exported the workbook to a ASPEQT disk file

3. Started ASPEQT and mounted the disk file

4. Turned on The!Cart in the simple menu mode and selected Flasher program
At this point The!Cart said it was reading the header file and asked if I wanted to flash the cart to which I replied Yes. That started the process but it took a bit since it was doing 19K at most.

I removed my 32 in 1 some time ago because of strange timing issues that caused lock ups.

Really? I've never noticed anything. Got any examples?

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There are no examples because it crashed on everything. Sometimes even before I got the DOS prompt. A lot of the time, the screen would stay dark red or green on power up.

 

Edit: I'm sure yours works fine. Some computers have timing issues with it, and some don't.

Edited by Kyle22
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Yes the built-in flasher on the cart has an option that says something like Highspeed SIO: On/Off. I have it set to On, but it still defaulted to 19K during the transfer so I'm guessing it's on the ASPEQT end.

Maybe transmission errors at the higher baud rates are causing the SIO to default to 19Kb/s. I haven't tried higher custom baud rates across USB but I will do so tonight since I'm working on something using Hias' High-speed SIO code. If I find anything out I'll report back.

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Ok I tried to flash my The!Cart tonight by exporting my workbook to a ATR image and transferring it over using ASPEQT. The cart seemed to flash ok (took about 3 hours), but when I try to run it I'm only getting the Atari Self-Test. Is there anything special I need to set in that menu to make it come up with the game selection menu? I set the mode to The!Cart and tried stuff like Auto run, but nothing worked. Everything eventually went back to the self-test.

You have to change the menu type from "Simple Menu" to "Extended Menu" in Edit->Workbook Options. Then re-export the AspeQT programming image and reflash. After that you'll have a nice, colorful menu with a list of all your carts and just need to select the one you want.

 

The created ATR should be some 128MB, but don't worry about that, reflashing shouldn't take too long if you do an incremental update as you already flashed the cart data. The flasher only needs to program a few k for the menu and erase a lot of empty banks. That should be finished within some 10 minutes or so.

 

The confusing menu naming of "simple" and "extended" is our fault and I guess we should change that. At some point when Peter was developing his user-friendly, extended menu I called the black screen menu "simple", not because it's easy to use, but because it offered not too much additional functionality. I think we'd better call it expert or developers menu or something like that.

 

As for highspeed:

 

With a "real" serial port (16550 compatible, onboard or PCI/PCIe) you can only use 19200, 38400 and 57600 bit/sec. So you have to disable the "use non-standard speeds" option in AspeQt - this only works with a (FTDI) USB-serial converter or when using the AtariSIO backend with a 16C950 card.

 

If you start the flasher from the black "simple" menu it'll automatically have highspeed enabled, no need to use some special highspeed OS in your Atari.

 

so long,

 

Hias

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