Michtron v3.0 BBS Software?

[Techman]

Ok. I have a Mega ST4 (I think), it’d hasn't been out of the box in maybe 20 years (so long I don’t remember), it was my main dev/ops machine (before it was called dev/ops), what is the groups recommendation before I power it on? I am sure it has all the source and development tools I used back in the day. But I have no idea what is on it.

 

Thoughts?

 

[Techman]

from what I can tell from the schematic, on the STE, the primary serial is on the MFP, and two channels are on the Z85C30, with one channel for the modem port and the other on the lan port. If I remember it was on page 10 of the schematic I posted above.

[Techman]

3 hours ago, Techman said:

Ok. I have a Mega ST4 (I think), it’d hasn't been out of the box in maybe 20 years (so long I don’t remember), it was my main dev/ops machine (before it was called dev/ops), what is the groups recommendation before I power it on? I am sure it has all the source and development tools I used back in the day. But I have no idea what is on it.

 

Thoughts?

 

Well, no happy sounds when I plug it in. Opened the top and the power supply is bad (fuse is good), no 5V no 12V

 

I also could not find the monitor cable, so off to eBay.

 

it has rainbow TOS and a 16MHZ 68K

 

 

 

[+DarkLord]

3 hours ago, Techman said:

Ok. I have a Mega ST4 (I think), it’d hasn't been out of the box in maybe 20 years (so long I don’t remember), it was my main dev/ops machine (before it was called dev/ops), what is the groups recommendation before I power it on? I am sure it has all the source and development tools I used back in the day. But I have no idea what is on it.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

There are those that would tell you to recap the P/S at least, before powering it on after all that time. Personally, I've had no problems with powering my ST's on, even after extended storage. Perhaps I was just lucky <shrugs>.

 

At the least, I'd probably take it apart, clean everything up and re-seat any socketed chips.

 

[+DarkLord]

23 minutes ago, Techman said:

Well, no happy sounds when I plug it in. Opened the top and the power supply is bad (fuse is good), no 5V no 12V

 

I also could not find the monitor cable, so off to eBay.

 

it has rainbow TOS and a 16MHZ 68K

 

 

That's TOS v1.4. That "16mhz 68K" you're talking about is an AdSpeed accelerator board - one of the best, IMHO.

 

I've got one in my Mega ST4 that runs DarkForce! and it's just great hardware. It has a ton of configurable features,

including the ability to (software or hardware) switch between 8mhz and 16mhz, as well as the built-in cache. If you

don't have the manual make sure to grab it - you can find it online in multiple places. Let me know if you need it, I've

got it in PDF format.

 

I know that here, after getting used to the AdSpeed board, going back to a stock 8mhz Mega ST felt like I was bogged

down in molasses. 

 

[+DarkLord]

7 hours ago, Lastic said:

Just for my own understanding are we talking about the 3rd serial port that sits on a card on the VME BUS or the second (SCC) onboard Serial port ?

 

The one that Tillek and I are talking about, that we believe doesn't have all the lines of a regular serial port on the ST, is the 3rd one that sits on a card

in the VME bus.

 

[+DarkLord]

I was looking at that picture you took of your Mega ST. Just below the Adspeed board, and the TOS 1.4 chips,

is that an internal hard drive? I couldn't quite make out what that is from the picture where it's cut off...

 

Just curious. 

 

[Techman]

23 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

I was looking at that picture you took of your Mega ST. Just below the Adspeed board, and the TOS 1.4 chips,

is that an internal hard drive? I couldn't quite make out what that is from the picture where it's cut off...

 

Just curious. 

 

yes it is, I have no idea how big it is, probably 40GB

 

I took out the stock power supply and powered it from an ATX power supply, have about 30 seconds it boots and makes happy sounds. I just need to find a monitor cable.

 

-tim

 

 

[+DarkLord]

11 minutes ago, Techman said:

yes it is, I have no idea how big it is, probably 40GB

 

I took out the stock power supply and powered it from an ATX power supply, have about 30 seconds it boots and makes happy sounds. I just need to find a monitor cable.

 

-tim

 

 

Awesome, that's good news! There's been a couple of message threads about internal hard drive setups for the Mega ST (not the Mega STe, that one is a breeze).

 

You should take a couple of pictures of the entire setup and post them. There's inquiring minds...(you know the rest).  

 

[Techman]

17 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

 

Awesome, that's good news! There's been a couple of message threads about internal hard drive setups for the Mega ST (not the Mega STe, that one is a breeze).

 

You should take a couple of pictures of the entire setup and post them. There's inquiring minds...(you know the rest).  

 

WOW, it’s been a long time since I have looked at this. I need to spend some time looking at what is on the machine, I didn’t see any source, but quite a few programs, etc.

 

 

[Techman]

The hard drive is 52MB!

 

https://www.memory4less.com/quantum-prodrive-52mb-scsi-hard-drive-lp52s

[+DarkLord]

1 hour ago, Techman said:

WOW, it’s been a long time since I have looked at this. I need to spend some time looking at what is on the machine, I didn’t see any source, but quite a few programs, etc.

 

 

Like opening an attic that you've packed things away in for years and years... 

 

[+DarkLord]

1 hour ago, Techman said:

The hard drive is 52MB!

 

https://www.memory4less.com/quantum-prodrive-52mb-scsi-hard-drive-lp52s

 

That's cool. Enough room to maneuver around in.  

 

[Lastic]

Good morning everybody

It's 05:45 AM over here , getting up to start working.

Nice to see your machine still working after all those years and an interesting setup, thanks for sharing.

[Techman]

The good news is I put a new power supply (Mean Well RD-35A) and that is working great.

 

The bad news is it looks like the hard drive died. It spins up, but stopped booting. Booting the ICD floppy, it sees the drive on the DMA buss it just does not respond. Once I whip up a program to dump the drive over the serial power, it take some drastic measures to try to get it to boot again and then quickly back it up.

 

 

[AtariGeezer]

20 minutes ago, Techman said:

The good news is I put a new power supply (Mean Well RD-35A) and that is working great.

 

The bad news is it looks like the hard drive died. It spins up, but stopped booting. Booting the ICD floppy, it sees the drive on the DMA buss it just does not respond. Once I whip up a program to dump the drive over the serial power, it take some drastic measures to try to get it to boot again and then quickly back it up.

 

 

This happened to my Falcon030 and an old IBM PC I used in the USAF.  What worked for me was to repeatedly turn-ON the Atari, then OFF on the fist sign of it not booting, turn it off then right back on.

It wakes up the HD from it's deep sleep...

 

Edited February 16 by AtariGeezer

[Goochman]

My ICD-Fast HD I had similar issue - turning it on no noise - repeated flicks of the switch would eventually jumpstart the motor to running.

[Lastic]

A bit of progress on my side

As of next week I will be the proud owner of 2 Wimodem Pro's once my friend ,currently on vacation in the USA, brings them back to Belgium.
That saves me from 20/30 EUR custom handling + 21% import taxes ( which basically boil down I pay the price of a 3rd modem just to get 2 )

In the meanwhile I have 1 Wimodem232 and 1 Wimodem clone connected to both Modem1 and Modem2 ports on the MegaSTe.
Modem2 is not working with Michtron as from the previous conversations but it does have telnet connectivity.

So I got an eureka moment with my telnet load-balancing idea.

I have a domain-name linked to the dynamic public IP of my ISP (just a regular internet user here).
I have a DMZ and port-forwarding defined towards a LAN IP.

Currently testing with my Ubuntu laptop but I will probably migrate it to a Raspberry Pi , I have setup the following using
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/pen.1.html

pen <internal-port of the DMZ/LAN IP>  Wimodem232_WLAN_IP:6400:1 Wimodem_clone_WLAN_IP:1040:1

And it works like a charm, it balances between both Telnet modems and if both are busy , you can't connect and will receive a BUSY message.

Next step using REST API towards my domain hosting , run a watchdog that checks if my dynamic public IP has changed, push a new A record so DNS is updated , et voila.

Also found a way around the 512MB partition limits of TOS 2.05 to host huge collection of files , USB-CD/DVD-writer connected to a NetUSBee , Extendos and now I can link the SIG directories of Michtron to the CDROM drive.
Still have to get my hands on Dual-Layer DVD's and see if that works.

And the continue to enhance my python script so I can bulk import file-data into the DOWNLOAD.BBS file.

But still a long road , the basis of a Michtron BBS is there now to work further on the concept,customisation and nitty-gritty of the BBS.

I must admit out of all projects I ever started in life , this one has me grinning like a 15 year old again.

[+DarkLord]

Well, sounds like you've made lots of progress. 

 

Just curious, are you using something like "bigDOS" to exceed the standard 512 meg

partition size limit? (or EmuTOS).

 

I use ExtenDOS here with a SCSI CD-ROM. I've got a couple of CD's online. BBS Express! ST

is accessing them by a script that allows users to pick the files they want, move them over to

File Sig #32, and then download them from there like any other file. It actually works pretty

good although (of course) direct access would be better.

 

Thanks.

 

[Lastic]

I haven't looked into bigDOS yet.

Your setup is way nicer than mine, mine is still a simple test I did.
I took an ISO burned it to a DVD, have Extendos map the USB DVD-writer as my D drive ( C is the BlueSCSI hooked up to the internal ACSI/SCSI adapter in the MegaSTe)
and currently have a subdirectory of the DVD mapped directly as File SIG 16.
Downloads from the File SIG in Michtron (so directly from that subdir on the DVD) seem to work fine but haven't tested it extensively yet.

I haven't explored the scripting or commands in Michtron 3.0 yet , I'm working with a PDF version of the Michtron 2.0 manual but that doesn't seem to cover newer features and some of the syntax has changed.

For now just trying to figure out a good approach on getting the basics done and building further upon it, heck I have been wanting to accomplish this since I was 16-17 years old but live got in the way. It's a nice project filling me with nostalgia that I finally want to bring into realisation.

 

[+DarkLord]

At one time, I had 2 of those Pioneer multi-pack CD changers hooked up to DarkForce!. I never had 10 CD's

online at once but I did have 6 or 7, IIRC. I had thought about one time doing just what you did - make an

entire CD a "drive" for BBS Express! ST to access. Good job there.

 

I'm glad you're having fun with this. I've always enjoyed playing around with DarkForce! - it's one my most

favoritest (yeah, yeah spell checker - I don't care that you don't think it's a word!), things in the world to do.

 

I look forward to your continued progress. 

 

[Techman]

Well my hard drive is dead, no amount of magic is getting it to restart. It spins up, it just doesn’t boot anymore. I find it hard to believe that after 30 years it would have booted, just to die within 24 hours, but it happens I suppose.

 

I have a cross compiler working and I can make Atari executables. The code is requiring some changes (mostly due to function prototyping), it’s a simple change for the most part. I have not tried to deal with the assembler code (a couple thousand lines), so I am not sure what awaits me there.

 

I also ordered a ASCSI to SD card board, an SD to SCSI adapter, and a USB floppy drive. All this should be here in the next week or so to assist with the rebirth.

 

I believe the source I have is one build newer than was released to the public. It looks like I was working on ZMODEM at the time. My plan is to get this to build, get in the hands of some willing testers, and then add support for the second serial power on the Atari devices that support it.

 

Stay tuned.

 

-Tim

[Lastic]

A deep-hearted thank-you Tim for taking up the development again after all these years and everbody chiming in.

Maybe another forum member can have a look at your hard-drive ?
ZMODEM and 19200 baud support would already be a HUGE plus. Being able to use a second serial port on Atari's that have those , is icing on the cake.

One last , non-urgent request, does anybody , Tilek ? , yourself have the ability to scan or take a picture of the Michtron 3.0 BBS manual  at least the relevant pages regarding the commandset and keyboard shortcuts?
I seem to be unable to enter a chat when logged on onto the console as Sysop pressing SHIFT-F1 (info from the version 2.0 manual)

[Techman]

Well, a couple of things arrived today.

 

 

I then created a SD card with the ICD drivers.

 

 

It sees it as a 14MB drive (expected), but is not able to create a new partition or format another SD with more and larger partitions (yet). Notice that it sees the whole drive at 29GB.

 

Also, this arrived.

 

 

This is a SCSI2SD adapter, I have not been able to get this to work. I think the ICD adapter might have gone bad, and the hard drive might be ok. If I run the utility that scans the DMA bus it doesn't show up, (even if I pull the new device plugged in the back DMA port). I seem to remember that you could use the internal connection and the external connector at the same time.

 

-tim

 

 

 

73069925888__EB923340-602B-4717-AC7B-4B60F2908782.HEIC

[Tillek]

4 hours ago, Techman said:

Well, a couple of things arrived today.

 

 

I then created a SD card with the ICD drivers.

 

 

It sees it as a 14MB drive (expected), but is not able to create a new partition or format another SD with more and larger partitions (yet). Notice that it sees the whole drive at 29GB.

 

Also, this arrived.

 

 

This is a SCSI2SD adapter, I have not been able to get this to work. I think the ICD adapter might have gone bad, and the hard drive might be ok. If I run the utility that scans the DMA bus it doesn't show up, (even if I pull the new device plugged in the back DMA port). I seem to remember that you could use the internal connection and the external connector at the same time.

 

-tim

 

 

 

73069925888__EB923340-602B-4717-AC7B-4B60F2908782.HEIC 1.02 MB · 1 download

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