Nice case for sio2sd

[SS]

I have done it: 1064s are pretty useless these days.

 

[Roydea6]

 

museum2e.JPG

And the other 99,000 are still available for a Museum. If only a Museum wanted one of two.

[_The Doctor__]

but I likes the 1064's

[+orpheuswaking]

Yet thats the one thing I dont have in my collection. 1064s rarely go for sale and when they do they are stupid expensive

[+Nezgar]

Hey that file transfer protocol on chip and higher xm baud rate rate mated with the 130XE ram disk made this a screamer back in the day! It's a very unique modem..

What? XM301 had built in terminal software? Faster?? it's still 300bps - or are you being sarcastic?

[_The Doctor__]

oh my, you must do a deep deep dive and you will find old timers like us tweaked our settings and our modems.... you will find the speed was adaptive or modifiable on many modems, though line conditioning and how much carbon between you and the remote location could be a major limiting factor....

 

The XM301 was basically a modem on a chip- it was designed to take the load off the Atari, and when used with the XE ramdisk it was one of the fastest 300 baud modems at the time... I was heavily into bbs and telecom, we all compared stats across the systems... DOS boxes, **nix, cpm, what have you... I always got asked how I was getting the throughput I did at that time... I always ranked #1 in the 300 baud category, there were other way to push the baud rate damn near to 360ish 380ish with a few modems at the time... problems with phone systems in the world at the time limited how fast you could really go... but the XM301 was rock solid and with XE-term did a great job and it's included A-protocol worked very well with the time shared system of that fashion....

 

Mind you I bought the thing just to play around with and ended up using it for many years.... I always had the fastest thing I could find running on the BBS....

so the XM was a nice surprise.... but my favorite eventually was Courier HST then DS and X2 v everything ...etc..

 

The only thing that kept 56k from going in both directions towards the end of modem use was the limit placed by the FCC on line voltage and levels...

Edited June 24, 2018 by _The Doctor__

[+Nezgar]

Ok, cool. So the XM301 could get a little faster, kinda like the Supra MPP's could go to 450bps, but required the other end to manually configure the same rate. I still don't think it had a built in terminal program though, you had to load that from disk.. I used bobterm with whatever xm driver bob had. And yes, ramdisk was mandatory for downloads. Wasted idle time waiting for disk writes otherwise... Especially when my paperroute money was getting sucked up by long distance calls at 22c/min at the cheapest rate after 11pm.

 

that's very cool if you could get 360bps or so if you were connecting to other stock modems forcing them to demodulate a bit faster than spec?

 

By the time I tried a friends XM301 it was just for the curiosity of it. I had only ever used a pr connection with a 1200, then 2400bps avatex modem with MNP5, so you would set you computer for 4800 or 9600 to take advantage of the data compression. Worked well for text. And I would tweak the DTMF timing down to about 38ms per digit, and it would blast through the redial list the telco switch wouldn't catch a digit maybe 1 out of 20 tries at that rate. The idea of a self contained modem that required no serial interface, and powered off SIO was intriguing. I didn't like how slow it sent the DTMF tones, but hearing the antic podcast interviews lately of the driver development for the 1030 (from which the XM301 was based) where the tones were sent as audio from the POKEY in amplitude mode using hardcoded tables gave me a new respect for what was happenning in the code!

 

I later had a hand me down Courier HST 16.8 well into the v.32bis era, (HST only, not DS) so most BBS's would only connect at 2400bps+compression, but man it was impressive speed when I connected to a BBS that also had a courier