Any Success Stories with Rapidus?

[+Larry]

Mostly what has been posted is about incompatibilities and other issues. And to me this is mostly about installations with "this and this and that, and it has problems."

 

Are there any success stories? Anyone with it installed in an XE or maybe an 800XL without extra mods, and it works great? If you report success, what is your setup, and PAL or NTSC system.

 

Have you done anything using it that makes a case that it is a useful addition to your hardware?

 

-Larry

[flashjazzcat]

Installed Rapidus (temporarily) in a stock PAL 130XE with no other upgrades whatsoever some weeks ago and it appeared to work without problems until a SIDE2 cart was attached, at which point the machine began to reboot on system reset. So the only recommendation I can truthfully offer based on personal experience at the moment is a bone-stock 130XE with nothing else attached.

[drac030]

I guess I probably do not count but here a 320k 65XE with IDE+ attached, working well.

[MEtalGuy66]

130XE + RAPIDUS + HIAS/MEGA-HZ 1MEG SRAM + STEREO POKEY + VBXE + IDE Plus 2.0, working perfectly.

 

Have not experienced any of the issues that have been reported with installations involving the Ultimate 1meg or SIde.

 

 

 

 

I am installing Ultimate 1meg into Dmitry's 800XL along with Rapidus. We'll see how that pans out..

[drac030]

It will not allow me to edit my post above, but I have to add something. Namely:

 

I will now define 'well'. I am a coder, I write programs. As everyone probably well realises, it is hardly possible to write programs on an unstable machine, because there is always a risk of losing the sources: instabilities may corrupt the source code in memory or during saving.

 

So on my Rapidus, just to mention a few programs, I wrote the Rapidus menu (60k source) and the rotozoomer.pl (50k source), and I am maintaining and developing on it, among others, the DracOS (100k source), and the ZX Spectrum emulator Let's Emu! (250k source). No single byte of the source code has ever been corrupted so I consider the machine 100% stable and reliable.

[voy]

Atari 800XE with Rapidus, Ultimate 1MB, SimpleStereo, VBXE 2.1 and SIDE1 with 8 GB CF card - working really great.

 

Here is the proof:

 

 

[Beetle]

My 1200XL with Rapidus, U1MB, VBXE and Side2 works reliable, too. In 65816 mode, ATR mounting is not always working as expected

and some other programs have compatibility issues, but the majority of stuff just works.

 

Working with SDX is new to me, but the more I learn, the more I love it.

 

Success Story? For me a clear YES.

[Dmitry]

MetalGuy installed my VBXE and that has worked beautifully for a while now. However, I have not previously expanded the memory on this 800XL, and I did not configure the VBXE to emulate extra RAM, although I understand that is a possibility.

 

Being on a stock 64k, I could never use the side 2 carts sdx fdisk to format an sd card, and consequently never used my Side 2 cart at all. I have no interest in side loaders.

 

Maybe someday I can participate in a conversation about what works or not

 

Truth be told very little of my collection works...I buy junk and then make that junk even worse with futile attempts to learn soldering or install upgrades.

 

I have a non-working 1200XL where I was simply going to fix the keyboard. The keyboard fix was attempted - but the keyboard remains broken. I bought an XE GS with non-working color - the color remains non-working. I destroyed an Atari 800 in an attempt to install an incognito a while back. An 800xl where I was going to socket the chips....well it's still theoretically going to get a socket for the removed CPU....but let's face it, destroyed.

 

This is just a confession, I have no point

 

My Atari habit has progressed, not by getting better at hardware, but gaining that valuable insight that I could not possibly attempt to install a vbxe or rapidus

[jvas]

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/246802-rapidus-accelerator/page-4?do=findComment&comment=3475987

[Marius]

Although the topic is quite new I am surprised that this thread is not so long yet...

 

Does this mean that there is not so much luck yet with the rapidus?

[flashjazzcat]

Although the topic is quite new I am surprised that this thread is not so long yet...

 

Does this mean that there is not so much luck yet with the rapidus?

In fairness, there may not be so many out in the field yet, and if that is the case then the number of success stories exceeds my expectations. Drac030 makes a good point about methods of observing stability, and of course just as much pragmatism is involved in observing instability. Like Voy, I can take photographs of the Rapidus setup menu and run software: in itself, this simply proves the Rapidus machine boots and basically works. I'm sure Voy and others have conclusively established the stability of their machines using other methods, of course, which is great news.

 

Beetle mentioned U1MB compatibility issues - which are empirical, depending on what you actually do with the Ultimate (i.e. if you don't use the XEX loader or mount ATRs, things sort of work after a fashion), but hopefully fixable on one side of the fence or another - and I spoke to one user whose IDE Plus would not work stably with Rapidus, and was replaced with a SIDE cartridge working in PBI mode with Ultimate 1MB, and this has apparently proved perfectly stable.

 

Implicit in one or two cases is the swapping of CPUs and other components in order to attain some level of stability, although this is common to many upgrade scenarios (and typically leads to complaints that things are not as "plug and play" as expected). In any case, if Rapidus "just works" for many users with upgraded machines, there must be a reason for this, and a reason for my inability to achieve a stable system (unless completely isolated from peripherals) after trying four different machines (three XEs and one 1200XL). Variance in the Rapidus board should have been eliminated by the testing of a second board, shortcomings in power supply eliminated by three different PSUs, etc, etc.

 

Of course the most likely explanation is that the "1200XL from Hell" left a curse on my house, and plenty of other things aside from Rapidus suggest that this is absolutely the case.

Edited June 14, 2016 by flashjazzcat

[Timothy Kline]

My Atari habit has progressed, not by getting better at hardware, but gaining that valuable insight that I could not possibly attempt to install a vbxe or rapidus

 

This is probably why I still have my own VBXE, stereo POKEY mod, and U1MB still sitting up in my hutch... and not installed in any of my 1200XLs.

 

I haven't destroyed any of the systems I've already repaired, including 1200XL keyboard repairs, but considering the price as well as the long wait for deliveries of the mods, I'm VERY reluctant to give any of them a go at this point, only to finally muck up something. O.o

 

--Tim

[drac030]

So it seems there are actually several success stories and just one failure story.

 

Flashjazzcat, maybe it is time to send one of your "failure" machines with the board installed to Lotharek or Pasiu for inspection? As I understand, it is useless for you in its present state anyways. Maybe it is a matter of a simple mistake or ambiguity in installation instructions or such a problem.

 

PS. voy's photo on the right does not just present "running software": if I guess correctly, the stuff on the screen is "Silkworm", a ZX Spectrum 48k game running under the emulator. And the emulator uses the machine pretty intensively, not only sitting over about 500k of RAM, but also bombarding the VBXE with the display data and color attributes. So, if the machine would not run reliably... you know...

Edited June 14, 2016 by drac030

[576XE]

Is there are some problema with F1

 

Or it's only marketing step?

 

I beleive in your honest opinion!

 

I just make a hole in my belowed atari when I make my internal SIO2PC Now I exclude this way!

[flashjazzcat]

So it seems there are actually several success stories and just one failure story.

Heh... but the failure story is extremely long, with many chapters.

 

Flashjazzcat, maybe it is time to send one of your "failure" machines with the board installed to Lotharek or Pasiu for inspection? As I understand, it is useless for you in its present state anyways.

Well, the stock machines see little use when Rapidus isn't inside of them, but the other two (those with VBXE and U1MB) are perfectly fine without Rapidus and see regular use. For sure neither of them are going overseas.

 

Maybe it is a matter of a simple mistake or ambiguity in installation instructions or such a problem.

Probably: I'm sure I've somehow misunderstood what's involved in pushing the board into the CPU socket and connecting up three wires.

 

PS. voy's photo on the right does not just present "running software": if I guess correctly, the stuff on the screen is "Silkworm", a ZX Spectrum 48k game running under the emulator. And the emulator uses the machine pretty intensively, not only sitting over about 500k of RAM, but also bombarding the VBXE with the display data and color attributes. So, if the machine would not run reliably... you know...

And? He could press reset and have the machine spontaneously reboot. The photo doesn't show this.

 

My experience may be highly inconvenient, but it isn't discredited by some screenshots of things appearing to work. I am quite sure the photographs depict a working setup, but as I say: I can probably re-stage those using one of the machines which keeps rebooting.

 

Tell you what I'll do: change my electricity provider. Clearly the mains supply is so dirty that it's causing instability with Rapidus... maybe Scottish Power on N-Power would be better.

Edited June 14, 2016 by flashjazzcat

[Marius]

Probably: I'm sure I've somehow misunderstood what's involved in pushing the board into the CPU socket and connecting up three wires.

 

Believe me... when you had to defuse a bomb, and you had to chose which of the three wires you had to cut, you would be amazed what a stress that gives.

 

[voy]

@FJC: my machine was running for almost two days continuously at Pixel Heaven 2016 in Warsaw. Both photos were taken there on the second day. Believe me, my system is really stable and works reliably without spontaneous rebooting.

[flashjazzcat]

@FJC: my machine was running for almost two days continuously at Pixel Heaven 2016 in Warsaw. Both photos were taken there on the second day. Believe me, my system is really stable and works reliably without spontaneous rebooting.

 

That's great news - and I didn't doubt it. My point was merely that a photograph in itself does not provide the crucial information which you have just given us.

[+bob1200xl]

On a 1200XL with a 14MHZ 65816 I have seen that:

 

RESET is not de-bounced. The system reacts to RESET going down (active) immediately. This can result in multiple RESETS in a few milliseconds, which may be caused by dirty keyboard contacts or a bad timing capacitor.

 

Multiple RESETs on a 65816 running at high speed in its own SRAM will sometimes produce a cold start, rather than a warm start. I can normally force a cold start on an XL14 by pressing RESET rapidly.

 

During the first few cycles of a RESET, the system counts down for 1/10th of a second to allow things to settle down after a power-on. If you are running at high clock speeds, this 0.1 second delay ends up somewhere south of .01 second. This is probably the source of the warm/cold 'race'.

 

The 65816 should perhaps be held off - kill the 02 clock, hold HALT active, whatever - for 0.1 seconds or more by the hardware.

 

Does RAPIDUS come up at 20MHZ? You might try a different keyboard or replacing the timing capacitor in the RESET circuit. (this is for 1200XLs - I don't know about anything else)

 

Bob

[flashjazzcat]

1200XLs definitely have noisy reset Bob. That's how Hias fixed Ultimate 1MB (suppressing jitter on RST). Unfortunately the Rapidus coldstart issue happens on XEs as well, and only once the board is warm. Who knows, though: same symptom may have multiple causes.

Edited June 16, 2016 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

@FJC: my machine was running for almost two days continuously at Pixel Heaven 2016 in Warsaw. Both photos were taken there on the second day. Believe me, my system is really stable and works reliably without spontaneous rebooting.

 

BTW, I need to ask you: when you say the machine was running almost continuously for two days and was immune to spontaneous reboots on reset the entire time, was this in 65C816 mode or 6502 mode? It's an important question, since I'm testing a machine right now which resets OK in accelerated mode but reboots half the time in 6502 mode.

Edited June 16, 2016 by flashjazzcat

[voy]

It was running in 65c816 mode.

[flashjazzcat]

Deleted.

Edited June 16, 2016 by flashjazzcat

[drac030]

So you are experiencing reboots in 6502 mode, but you also believe that voy would experience a random reboot when hitting the reset key in 65c816 mode (running the Silkworm)?

 

Very interesting.

Edited June 16, 2016 by drac030

[flashjazzcat]

So you are experiencing reboots in 6502 mode, but you also believe that voy would experience a random reboot when hitting the reset key in 65c816 mode (running the Silkworm)?

Why not? I experienced reboots on reset in the past when running 65C816 mode. I may not have made it sufficiently clear that I've been working on a 130XE this evening (resoldering, shortening wires, checking sockets, etc), and managed to find something which appears stable in 65C816 mode. Voy says his system is stable in 65C816 mode too, so we have some common ground at last, right? Progress has been made? So I asked Voy if he has run the machine in 6502 mode for prolonged periods of time and observed any issues, just as I have (after ten minutes, in fact).

 

Is there a problem with this line of inquiry? I feel the answer to the same question from others would be helpful, unless the 'Classic' mode setting is for decorative purposes only.

Edited June 16, 2016 by flashjazzcat