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Two Versions of Translator disk?


Allan

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Have to back peddle some on Witold Trenkler.xex file, I made the mistake of comparing it to a modified pal a rom so port b EA grouping was the same and then not different so didn't show up. It WILL work on XL/XE after all - my bad there. Bound to be some more like this one too. I'm tired !!

 

D5EB9732 crc32 double check on custom atr - good AND good luck finding an atr match there !!!

0C913DFC crc32 double check on raw 800 pal b rom good

051B9758 crc32 value for pal b rom with triple EA patch substitution included which is the part that had me worried some as I didn't note that previously.

 

-------- this just in

 

atariosa_NTSC.rom crc32 C1B3BB02 good raw rom file
atariosa_PAL.rom crc32 72B3FED4 good raw rom file
atariosb_NTSC.rom crc32 0E86D61D good raw rom file
atariosb_PAL_JAC!.rom - houston we have a problem !! This one is partially modified with two out of the three EA groups and has

FFF8 values for NTSC b rom anyway - NOT pal as the file name would lead one to believe. Sorry JAC!

Tried to add third EA and crc32 still didn't match anything so did compare with NTSC b rom and it's different in 26 places so it's been stepped on as well. Just for grins I tried it with pal b rom patched and it's 26 wrong there too. So no clue just what happened here.

atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom crc32 0C913DFC good raw rom file

 

You have them ALL, bravo !!

 

B7187CD6 crc32 for patched A_NTSC.rom file ready for translator.atr and possibly emulators too? Both here

 

Atari _a_NTSC_Translator.zip

 

I'm going to bed, let me know how it all works out.

 

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Thanks again 1050!

 

 

Maybe, I am too stupid, but Translator disks for OS A & B for NTSC we already have. OS A PAL, too.

 

The main goal would be to create a "Atari PAL Translator Diskette OS B" © by 1050(?) with the file:

 

atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom crc32 0C913DFC good raw rom file

 

mentioned above.

 

It is not for me, it's for all mankind...

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Pretty sure it's not you or any of your team for that matter, more like me being too tired and dense, but I thought we already did that with post #46 and Part Deux.zip.

 

So I just verified it's contents

 

FFF8 & FFF9 - 22 and 58 = OS is pal rev b

 

It's patched for use with XE/XL as shown in post #48, although I do go right on talking about Os A Pal which could be taken to be the file compare snippet posted there might be for os a pal - it isn't. Maybe I should have said, 'on another topic,' afterwards, sorry about that. It's a compare of the atr made with the raw os b pal rom (my first attempt) and then the final XL/XE patched results with the single changed B in the file name to suggest it's the B version of the pal A version ATR you posted way back in post #39

 

also in post #48 ---

 

atari_os_b_pal.rom crc32 0C913DFC luckybuck custom made atr crc32 D5EB9732

actual file name is a doosey -

Atari PAL Translator Diskette Rev. 0-Side B, Serial #4, 1984 Atari.atr

^

no longer A, - thought we covered two different PAL OS on same disk, side A, side B - some don't do flippies, some do. This would be the flip side of a real floppy with B version Pal OS.

 

and then post #52

 

atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom crc32 0C913DFC good raw rom file

 

we have a match for raw rom file crc32 before I knew of 'atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom crc32 0C913DFC good raw rom file' existence.

Your only mistake here might have been not showing your full hand of cards up front. But what kind of a card game does that make? Not saying it's your fault, you've been posting in other threads all along about what's out there and available, it's all on me for not following along back when that was happening. Way back too, which is where a large part of my confusion is coming from, I wasn't on the same page when we started this, not by a long shot.

 

As best I can check in Atari800Win, the Part Deux.zip atr loads the replacement b OS PAL rom properly. So should work in a real machine too. I don't have one up and running or I would KNOW for certain. Oddly there is a green translator screen and a yellow translator screen both in the same file, yellow shows up after cold starting green screen and not sure at all what that means or indicates. I suppose I'll have to RTFM eventually !!

 

My mistake is not knowing about NTSC A translator existence in ANY form, ANYWHERE or a rom file - so I made one with emulator rom to match - Maybe, not sure at all if that's how it's done or not. Jury still out on that one for the moment, post #52 for those two files. Also news to me is that Freddy Offenga has most of these roms for download !! I really need to keep up.

 

Seems like the FFF8 pair of bytes used to ID 800 roms is a 16 bit checksum of some sort - I just can't figure out how they get there exactly. I would imagine it's something silly such as folding in the year or Colleen's birthday and/or bra size yet excluding the last six bytes perhaps, but the generation of those ID bytes appears to be undocumented up to this point? Give Part Deux.zip a try, hoping it works out great too, meanwhile back to bed for me...

 

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Hi 1050!

 

First, no one has made a mistake. When do the western world start to realize, that there are only silly answers, but no silly questions? There is no need for someone to blame guilty. Asian people are more advanced in that.

 

Atari had started in 70's and had gone up to the 90's. So you have to take into account 2 decades and more! Not many people have that knowledge, so don't worry.

 

Because of your answer, I assumed you have deep knowledge of all that, so if, it was my mistake.

 

Freddy is an outstanding person in the Atari scene. He is right, we still need proof of an original OS B PAL ROM. Up to now, we still don't have.

 

"atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom" is known for best available OS B PAL ROM, but we need to compare with an original ROM. Anyway, a giga-thanks goes to Kr0tki.

 

You wrote: "So should work in a real machine too." Be careful with that! If it runs in an emulator, there is no proof it will do so on a real machine! Because of that, the Abbuc software contest has this a major rule. We do know why.

 

Yes, I can test that and will do so, but first I am worry about digitizing the remaining Atari software. After decades, we all can be glad, to even read in the old software. Very soon, I will publish the Artifact List #2. And that brings me directly to my "cards":

 

I have a dream, that there will be a time, where all Atari software is available to everyone.

I have that dream, who else? (Knowing for sure, that this dream can only be realized with all the help from the people here and worldwide)

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So you have a translator disk and you want to know what version of rom it contains? Load it into a drive and use a disk editor on it to compare the ID bytes with this list.

 

DD 57 = NTSC rev A

F3 E6 = NTSC rev B

D6 57 = PAL rev A

22 58 = PAL rev B

 

The ID bytes are to be found at offset 78h of the last sector of rom data in the translator disk. Part Deux.zip has it at sector C4h but others are quite variable so expect your mileage to vary a LOT. No other data follows the rom block so one could start looking at sector E0h and go down until you hit data and then look at the last data sector that way. Or start in the rom block at sector A0h and go up until you hit full sectors with either 00 or 1A in them. The sector you want to look is the last data sector. A minor point is that there is data at sector 168 and 169, the traditional VTOC and first directory sectors - it's there to tell you what kind of disk it is and to boot it in order to use it, if you happened to insert it into a drive wondering what it was, and tried to pull a directory on it, you would see this message.

 

Another way to find the ID bytes is to search for 40 FF FF FF FF FF FF series of bytes, the ID bytes follow these immediately in every rom I've seen so far. And this tip would work on ATR images loaded by a hex editor too.

 

Might make a note as to the rom version it contains right on the label since there seems to be literally hundreds of translator disks in the wild and the rom version info seems to be MIA on them to a large extent. Or even flat out wrong or misleading at best.

 

----------------- this just in as I type

 

In total agreement with every word, luckybuck. With this bit above perhaps some one can find the missing version among a translator disk? Long shot, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick as they used to say a long, long time ago. Glad to have been of any service in your most noble quest - continued best of luck with that too.

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There is no need to find out the ID in the disk. Indeed, we just need 2 disks. One for NTSC (OS A & B on side 1 and 2) and one for PAL (OS A & B on side 1 and 2). All of this is already done, except OS B for PAL. With: "atariosb_PAL_Kr0tki.rom" we have a chance in 2014 to create such a disk. That is all. :-)

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It's quite possible it doesn't exist in that form just like it seems to be missing in ROM form too. But until I saw your pages upon pages of translator disk listings I didn't realize that there were so many out there. With the guidelines at least it wouldn't be impossible to search for the file bytes in a complete archive. A headache yes, but not impossible. And not really the most pressing issue to begin with.

 

You are easily forgiven for not trying it yet, I can see no problems where it wouldn't work perfect. Although emulator platform is NOT the same as a real Atari and a good rule of thumb to follow always, this isn't rocket science and the original translator disk was flawless in operation so I'm quite confident it's good code now that port B has been killed for joysticks 3 and 4 and left alone to control the XL/XE hardware as it should.

 

Really a bit silly to have 400 translator disks when there are only four Atari Roms, they should be grouped by the Rom they load and most left to bit rot on some hard drive somewhere. Maybe now we can at least stop the proliferation of these disks to outrageous and even useless numbers. This project might also ferret out the ones that have been hacked for better or worse, running stepped on code thinking it's good stuff is NOT fun, unless a true master did the stepping this is usually a disaster just waiting to happen.

 

Was not aware the Fix XL was a translator disk in the first place, my only exposure was to the ROM version offered by CSS in the US+ offering known as Fix XL. I don't have much use for 800 OS on XL/XE so even in that form, it didn't get used much. Such a disk version probably wouldn't have any bearing on this issue that I can think of - so just another tool to be used when needed. It may be that high speed SIO works in that one by default where it's not in these other versions coming from Atari? Unless Fix XL disk is just a play on words cashing in on fame earned elsewhere. And there is always the possibility that the two aren't related at all, in which case I know nothing of it other than the same name, one a ROM, the other a disk. I have the ROM code somewhere, but it's exact location eludes my memory just at the moment, but if I had the ATR of the disk, a content compare could be done at that time when I can come across the ROM code again.

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@1050:

"It's quite possible it doesn't exist in that form just like it seems to be missing in ROM form too. "

You did read my post #19?

"..., this isn't rocket science..."

I am a rocket scientist...

If the Apollo program would have been run by Atari managers, America would never had made it to the moon...

Many people keep an eye on an original OS B PAL ROM here in Europe.

 

@_The Doctor__

You are easy, for NTSC, there are the 2 versions available, for PAL just 1. Even now...

 

Maybe, there will come a time...

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http://atariage.com/forums/topic/149566-xlxe-translator-questions/?p=1824600

 

two more translators you might want to check out in the above link!

 

 

some quick notes about the difference between ver 3 and 4 of the translator and a combination of the 2 that solved some problems(NMI-reset)

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/149566-xlxe-translator-questions/?p=1824732

Edited by _The Doctor__
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Here you go....

 

DOS2.5 disk with The FIXXL translator and doc as well as an ATARI BASIC utility to copy whatever OS that is in memory to an AUTORUN.SYS file to make your very own translator disks...

 

Enjoy!

 

TRNZL8KT.ATR

 

 

using the above utility I made a translator disk from the fixxl... I boot it... I press select screen turns dark blue... I then hot plugged Gorf cartridge into my 800xl..... i pressed option select start....

bamn the Gorf Cartridge is running with no problems at all....

Edited by _The Doctor__
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@1050:

Found the official Atari statement for "Reset" from the Translator manual from 1983:

post-32599-0-28749800-1415371775_thumb.jpg

 

@The Doctor:

Wow! You are a real doctor!

You inspired me to suggest the ultimate, platinum Translator Disk. The "knock outer".

Content:

Because a disk can take 92K and an Atari OS 400-800 is 10K, it should be easy to insert the 4 different types of ROMs as a file each.

Then, the floating point version (from Charles W. Marslett?) and other version of any kind.

For example a version, where the user makes a POKE xxx,4 in BASIC for calculation precision of 4 digits after the separator...

 

Wow! That would be incredible cool! :-) 31 years after Atari has published the disk...

 

Below is a short of your latest disk:

post-32599-0-87651600-1415371782_thumb.jpg

post-32599-0-47425800-1415371787_thumb.jpg

post-32599-0-71380000-1415371792_thumb.jpg

post-32599-0-60748400-1415371799_thumb.jpg

 

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  • 8 years later...
On 9/19/2014 at 6:28 PM, Allan said:

I scan and posted the four page manual that came with the translator below.

 

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-translator-_29943.html

 

Allan

 

So what are the OS differences between the two sides of this disk?  5% require the back side according to these notes.  I know the B side doesn’t catch reset,  but I must have missed what is different with the OS.  Is it NTSC REV A?

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4 hours ago, kheller2 said:

So what are the OS differences between the two sides of this disk?  5% require the back side according to these notes.  I know the B side doesn’t catch reset,  but I must have missed what is different with the OS.  Is it NTSC REV A?

I put the information in the filenames for each disk / disk side here: Serious Computerist - Atari Translator

 

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6 hours ago, MrFish said:

I put the information in the filenames for each disk / disk side here: Serious Computerist - Atari Translator

 

So, yes Karl, The NTSC Translator disk side 2 is OS A w/o a reset capture routine.

For some reason I thought that contradicted earlier analysis: 

 

And an official OS PAL B on that other disk!

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8 hours ago, kheller2 said:

And an official OS PAL B on that other disk!

Not at all. The files on MrFish's webpage are a mess.

"Translator (NTSC) Side A (OS-B)" and "Translator (NTSC) Side B (OS-A)" are verbatim copies of the original "Atari Translator DX5063" disk as posted by bandit in this post above, but they are mislabelled. As stated numerous times in this thread, that disk contains OS-B on both sides, the difference being side A has the reset-proof version and side B the non-reset-proof one.

"Translator (PAL) Side A (OS-A)" is indeed a dump of the original "PAL Translator rev # 0" disk as posted by luckybuck in this post, but "Translator (PAL) Side B (OS-B)" is not side B of that disk, but an attempt by 1050 at creating a translator disk with PAL OS B, originally posted here. @MrFish please fix your webpage.

 

@luckybuck Have you ever managed to dump Side B of your "PAL Translator rev # 0 serial # 4" diskette, or verified that it is empty?

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