THE!CART... New 128MB FLASH Cartridge

[FULS]

10 hours ago, JAC! said:

Additional Update
As requested by several users, I've changed the handling of the cursor keys to require "CONTROL".Hence, you can now enter "+-=*" as characters in the search field.

Thank You JAC!, that made my day!!!

[FULS]

On 8/31/2023 at 8:55 AM, JAC! said:

Additional Update
As requested by several users, I've changed the handling of the cursor keys to require "CONTROL".Hence, you can now enter "+-=*" as characters in the search field.

JAC!,

Is there a way to get these EA ATR's to work?

I know there are other cracks of these programs that do work, but these ATR's are the closest to the original programs, the way they load.

Thanks,

 

24 Diff_ Titles of EA Programs.zip

Edited November 23, 2023 by FULS

[+JAC!]

On 11/23/2023 at 3:34 PM, FULS said:

JAC!,

Is there a way to get these EA ATR's to work?

I know there are other cracks of these programs that do work, but these ATR's are the closest to the original programs, the way they load.

Thanks,

 

24 Diff_ Titles of EA Programs.zip 2.24 MB · 13 downloads

Hmmm, there are 57 ATRs in the ZIP, not 24 as the title suggests. Some of them are multi-disk releases ("Cut and Paste _ side B.atr") which are not even boot disks. The!Cart can only emulate cartridges and boot ATRs. But Mega Cart Studio supports disk wrapping by patching the OS and providing hotkeys. So you can create a "Mega Cart" ROM with that and add the result to The!Cart Studio. From the documentation:

 

"Archon (1984)(Ariolasoft)(GB[cr CM1.61].atr" and many others crash while loading on XL/Atari 800 (Altirra, booted directly). Some others boot up to a certain point when you set the base address for the ATR emulation to another area, e.g. $500 but then the boot loader comes with status requests, etc. as a kind of copy protection and that cannot work with The!Cart.

 

To sum it up: "closest to the original programs, the way they load." will only be the case when you load them on a disk drive. Alternative cracks or ROM versions have to be user for The!Cart here. I recommend Homesoft's site for that.

 

Edited November 29, 2023 by JAC!

[stevelanc]

Hi all

 

I've owned a The! Cart for a number of years but frankly did very little with it. However, I have just got hold of an Atarimax Flash Programmer, so I thought I'd have a bit of a play around with it.

 

I downloaded the latest software and got hold of some test workbooks. I seem to be struggling to get the workbook images (in car. and .bin form) onto the cartridge itself despite following the instructions as best I can.

 

I have a 48k Atari 400, plus an 800 which I've not yet tried it on.

 

When trying to program it in the 400 and following the simple black menu, I get a message stating Disk 1 not operating. I don't have a SIO cable or anything like that.

 

Am I doing something wrong here, or have I overlooked something plainly obvious? 

 

If someone could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

 

Thanks

Steve 

[Marius]

33 minutes ago, stevelanc said:

Hi all

 

I've owned a The! Cart for a number of years but frankly did very little with it. However, I have just got hold of an Atarimax Flash Programmer, so I thought I'd have a bit of a play around with it.

 

I downloaded the latest software and got hold of some test workbooks. I seem to be struggling to get the workbook images (in car. and .bin form) onto the cartridge itself despite following the instructions as best I can.

 

I have a 48k Atari 400, plus an 800 which I've not yet tried it on.

 

When trying to program it in the 400 and following the simple black menu, I get a message stating Disk 1 not operating. I don't have a SIO cable or anything like that.

 

Am I doing something wrong here, or have I overlooked something plainly obvious? 

 

If someone could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

 

Thanks

Steve 

But... how are you trying to program the cart when you do have a SIO cable? How do you expect to get the data on The!Cart?

 

[stevelanc]

Just to clarify, the only thing I have is the USB Atarimax programmer. I don't have a physical link between the Atari and the laptop.

 

I was thinking The! Cart would work in a similar way to a USB memory stick, but it needs to be flashed in the Atari itself. The bit I'm struggling with is getting the content onto the cartridge before flashing it.

[_The Doctor__]

https://www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/tools/thecartstudio

 

[+Stephen]

Still hoping for a PC based way of getting content onto this cart.

[tep392]

On 9/25/2024 at 2:59 PM, stevelanc said:

Hi all

 

I've owned a The! Cart for a number of years but frankly did very little with it. However, I have just got hold of an Atarimax Flash Programmer, so I thought I'd have a bit of a play around with it.

 

I downloaded the latest software and got hold of some test workbooks. I seem to be struggling to get the workbook images (in car. and .bin form) onto the cartridge itself despite following the instructions as best I can.

 

I have a 48k Atari 400, plus an 800 which I've not yet tried it on.

 

When trying to program it in the 400 and following the simple black menu, I get a message stating Disk 1 not operating. I don't have a SIO cable or anything like that.

 

Am I doing something wrong here, or have I overlooked something plainly obvious? 

 

If someone could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

 

Thanks

Steve 

The Atarimax Progammer is for programming Atarimax Maxflash carts.  I have not seen any documentation saying that the Atarimax programmer can directly program The!Cart.

[+JAC!]

On 9/25/2024 at 9:59 PM, stevelanc said:

Hi all

Am I doing something wrong here, or have I overlooked something plainly obvious? 

If someone could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

 

Thanks

Steve 

Hello Steve,

when The!Cart was designed in 2011, we decided to not require people to buy two devices. This would have been meant a too high price tag. Like for AtariMax, it should be sufficient if you have an existing SIO connection / SIO mass-storage device to hold the cartridge image. The actual flashing is then done by the Atari itself inplace, which the cartrdige is plugged in. It is the when you export AtariMax workbooks as "Programming ATR", just that in case of The!Cart there is not one 1 MB ATR, but up to nine 16B ATRs.

 

Over the course of time, we had several ideas and attempts to also create also an additional PC driven flasher (like the AtariMax Flasher). But creating something that can be consumed a proper USB device under Linux/Window/macOS that can do 5V logic and does not most more than The!Cart itself always turned out to be closed to impossible with reasonable effort. It's a small nice in terms of customers and if then the device only works under Windows, there would be hard any customer's left.

 

I still have my eyes on other related hardware development (e.g. what pancio does), to see if maybe someday something popups up that can be connected to The!Cart Studio directly.

 

Until then: You need a SIO2SUB, SIO2SD, Fujinet ... or similar.

[_The Doctor__]

4 hours ago, JAC! said:

Hello Steve,

when The!Cart was designed in 2011, we decided to not require people to buy two devices. This would have been meant a too high price tag. Like for AtariMax, it should be sufficient if you have an existing SIO connection / SIO mass-storage device to hold the cartridge image. The actual flashing is then done by the Atari itself inplace, which the cartrdige is plugged in. It is the when you export AtariMax workbooks as "Programming ATR", just that in case of The!Cart there is not one 1 MB ATR, but up to nine 16B ATRs.

 

Over the course of time, we had several ideas and attempts to also create also an additional PC driven flasher (like the AtariMax Flasher). But creating something that can be consumed a proper USB device under Linux/Window/macOS that can do 5V logic and does not most more than The!Cart itself always turned out to be closed to impossible with reasonable effort. It's a small nice in terms of customers and if then the device only works under Windows, there would be hard any customer's left.

 

I still have my eyes on other related hardware development (e.g. what pancio does), to see if maybe someday something popups up that can be connected to The!Cart Studio directly.

 

Until then: You need a SIO2SUB, SIO2SD, Fujinet ... or similar.

Would hard drive work or is avgcart subavg cart the way to go? Am I incorrect to think using the PBI would mess with cart comms so once you start flashing, it's SIO all the way? I know you allow sectioned incremental flashing, if PBI devices interfered for data reading to then flash, could that sectioned incremental method be modified to allow such transfers? Theorizing without information or a testing method atm. The idea is to get the PC completely out of the picture once images are created, have them on your atari hard drives MIO/BB/AVG/SubAVG/IDE+/mass storage etc without too much trouble. Send those via BBS, DragonCart, FujiNet etc. Would incremental used in that fashion eat up a lot of cart storage cycles or make voids in the data space?

Edited September 29 by _The Doctor__

[+JAC!]

4 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Would hard drive work or is avgcart subavg cart the way to go?

The flasher is design to use direct high-speed (divisior 0 = 128 kb/s) SIO access with block size up to 8k and direct sector acces. In it's heart it works like a sector copier that only copies sectors that are different/have changed (using an index of checksum block). The latter is the basis for the incremental flashing. Transfer speed is not really an issue in that setup, so PBI vs. Divisor 0 SIO would not really make a difference.

 

And the request from the users was to get the Atari out of the game for the flashing. This means to have a device that plugs directly into the PC and can flash the cart. 

[_The Doctor__]

Funny that,  it's all Atari or as much PC as possible (probably for speed)

but with the add on cards/PBI devices, that speed gap narrows quite a bit.

I always think the PC version of anything should have an Atari only companion and vice versa.

Preference and convenience. Some things still take a while even on a PC, so now people want to farm the work out to a distributed multi server group or 'cloud'

I used your cartridge studio and other software when putting stitch files together when provided for AtariBlast. So I cheated and used a PC and then used the atarimax flasher to put it on the atarimax cartridge years back. It's the opposite workflow in a way, as to the one you posted     I remain a fan of you work.

 

[stevelanc]

On 9/29/2024 at 10:33 AM, JAC! said:

Hello Steve,

when The!Cart was designed in 2011, we decided to not require people to buy two devices. This would have been meant a too high price tag. Like for AtariMax, it should be sufficient if you have an existing SIO connection / SIO mass-storage device to hold the cartridge image. The actual flashing is then done by the Atari itself inplace, which the cartrdige is plugged in. It is the when you export AtariMax workbooks as "Programming ATR", just that in case of The!Cart there is not one 1 MB ATR, but up to nine 16B ATRs.

 

Over the course of time, we had several ideas and attempts to also create also an additional PC driven flasher (like the AtariMax Flasher). But creating something that can be consumed a proper USB device under Linux/Window/macOS that can do 5V logic and does not most more than The!Cart itself always turned out to be closed to impossible with reasonable effort. It's a small nice in terms of customers and if then the device only works under Windows, there would be hard any customer's left.

 

I still have my eyes on other related hardware development (e.g. what pancio does), to see if maybe someday something popups up that can be connected to The!Cart Studio directly.

 

Until then: You need a SIO2SUB, SIO2SD, Fujinet ... or similar.

Thanks JAC!

 

I have ordered a SIO2USB so hopefully that does the trick. 

[+Larry]

9 hours ago, stevelanc said:

Thanks JAC!

 

I have ordered a SIO2USB so hopefully that does the trick. 

Curious -- which one did you order?