Lastic Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 (edited) A question to all involved parties in this thread. I feel that I'm hijacking this thread a bit with the progress of setting/working up/on my BBS. If you feel that this should be a seperate thread , I will open one in the Atari BBS Gurus Club. my domainname hosting only allows access to their API if I'm a reseller so I found another workaround in case my dynamic public IP changes. I've found and modified a python watchdog script that checks if my public IP is changed and sends me an SMS That way I can update the A record at the domainname hosting manually. Bought a Nano PI Neo that can serve as the load-balancer (pen) for 2 Telnet nodes and running the public IP watchdog. Since it runs a very low-mem footprint debian might still find/have other uses for it . I burned an ISO 9660 version of the Dual-Layer Fading Twilight DVD but although Extendos would recognize it, I could not access the mounted D drive. I started to have the same issue with the already working/tested DVD+R and noticed how the drive would not spin up completely. USB power from the NetUSBee is not enough. Now I have the USB DVD-Writer connected to a powered USB HUB -> connected to NetUSBee USB port. And it works, 8 GB of data accessible from the Dual-Layer DVD. Hooking up 2 USB DVD-writers however doesn't seem to work, I guess they get the same USB device ID so Extendos only mounts the first one it finds and ignores the other. I still have several untested ACSI to SCSI external adapters so might give that at try in the future, not important currently. Since Michtron expects a flat directory structure , I will need to move all data from subfolders to the root of the DVD and begin the process of creating descriptions for them. My bulk import Python script still works with a fixed date instead of the current date but for bulk adding all these files it will serve it's purpose. Once that has been done or at least a trial has been setup/tested , comes the hard part, artwork and custom menus , I do have a bit of a concept visualized in my head but still ages away from the real thing. But focus on getting the basics/foundation done. Edited February 27 by Lastic typos/grammar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 I don't think anyone objects, but if you wanted to set up a separate thread in the Guru club, that's what it's for (and others have done so as you well know). That way we can keep things on topic just for you.... But like I said, I don't think anyone is bothered. As for dynamic IP, I use afraid.org which sets me back only about $5 a month and depending on your router, it might automatically update it for you (my router actually updates it for me automatically). It's a fairly good option since it has full DNS options allowing me to send things like bbs.sfhqbbs.org to my dynamic IP, but www and mail. to the appropriate places. It does have a free option but I use the paid option to get a little more flexibility (and I can have multiple domains that I'm managing there). Didn't get a chance to comment earlier, but good job on the load balancer. As for the DVD.... I was actually working on my 100 disk DVD jukebox that I got awhile back, but it seems like one of the drives (4 readers) seems to be throwing an error. I think instead I might look at the possibility of using a Blu-Ray. FANSI is a good Atari based ANSI editor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 I will make a seperate topic then in the Guru club seems more appropiate. Then it can become a bit of blog instead of side-tracking this topic 😁 DVD Jukebox hooked up via SCSI to an Atari or ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 We can move restoration of my Atari 1040ST to a new thread also, and keep this about the BBS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 1 hour ago, Lastic said: Since Michtron expects a flat directory structure , I will need to move all data from subfolders to the root of the DVD and begin the process of creating descriptions for them. I will check this to confirm. It certainly has a path limit 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 1 hour ago, Techman said: I will check this to confirm. It certainly has a path limit Thank you , I might be wrong off course, but I thought SIG1..16 point to a drive or directory you specify and it won't descend into subdirectories ? Will try on my end also to experiment a bit further with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 1 hour ago, Techman said: We can move restoration of my Atari 1040ST to a new thread also, and keep this about the BBS I would keep Michtron and your restoration progress in this topic , I moved all my "rambling to fellow BBS aficionados" to a different topic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 9 hours ago, Techman said: I will check this to confirm. It certainly has a path limit. The download has a function called locate_file. It, in essence, looks at the defined upload path and all the download paths, and if they are defined, it will concatenate the name from the database and try to open the file; if it is successful, it starts the xfer, so as long as the filename is compatible with the OS (e.g., legal characters, path length), it should just work. I don't know if there are any other issues. But I would give it a whirl. -tim Edited February 28 by Techman typo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 7 hours ago, Lastic said: I would keep Michtron and your restoration progress in this topic , I moved all my "rambling to fellow BBS aficionados" to a different topic. Thanks. The Acsi2stm is an interesting piece of hardware. I can for sure get it to boot an SD that was created from an image following this guide (http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=332), but I am not able to either modify the SD card or create a new one as he suggests. I am convinced that the hard drive did NOT fail; I think the ACSi adapter board failed, as when I booted the SD card and used the ICD utilities, the adapter was not detected. Fun times. I need to get back to the source code work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 6 hours ago, Techman said: Thanks. The Acsi2stm is an interesting piece of hardware. I can for sure get it to boot an SD that was created from an image following this guide (http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=332), but I am not able to either modify the SD card or create a new one as he suggests. I am convinced that the hard drive did NOT fail; I think the ACSi adapter board failed, as when I booted the SD card and used the ICD utilities, the adapter was not detected. Fun times. I need to get back to the source code work. And scratch what I suggested with HDDriver... Just looked at it again and apparently there are some issues with that device. https://www.hddriver.net/en/features.html Too bad. It tends to work much better than the ICD drivers in my experience. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 10 hours ago, Techman said: Thanks. The Acsi2stm is an interesting piece of hardware. I can for sure get it to boot an SD that was created from an image following this guide (http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=332), but I am not able to either modify the SD card or create a new one as he suggests. I am convinced that the hard drive did NOT fail; I think the ACSi adapter board failed, as when I booted the SD card and used the ICD utilities, the adapter was not detected. Fun times. I need to get back to the source code work. That is why I was suggesting that maybe a local forum member might have a chance to revive your harddisk using a different SCSI/ACSI-SCSI adapter. If the disk is still working but the interface is failing , you might be able to replace the interface and still get your old harddisk and setup running again. I'm a bit far away to drop by or lend a helping hand 😁 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 1 hour ago, Lastic said: That is why I was suggesting that maybe a local forum member might have a chance to revive your harddisk using a different SCSI/ACSI-SCSI adapter. If the disk is still working but the interface is failing , you might be able to replace the interface and still get your old harddisk and setup running again. I'm a bit far away to drop by or lend a helping hand 😁 I'd be willing to help... I recovered a few drives back in my service tech days, and I do have a lot of the equipment needed as well as access to people even smarter than I am. And I'm right next door to him in Ohio. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 22 hours ago, Lastic said: I will make a seperate topic then in the Guru club seems more appropiate. Then it can become a bit of blog instead of side-tracking this topic 😁 DVD Jukebox hooked up via SCSI to an Atari or ? That was the plan, to hook it up to the BBS originally, but I wasn't sure if I would be able to access the changer through code, so I was going to put it on the TT instead. Just replaced the castors on it since those had disintegrated to nothingness. Now I need to see if I can get it up and running. It's an old Pioneer DRM-1004 if you're interested. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted March 1 Share Posted March 1 On 2/28/2024 at 11:27 AM, Tillek said: I'd be willing to help... I recovered a few drives back in my service tech days, and I do have a lot of the equipment needed as well as access to people even smarter than I am. And I'm right next door to him in Ohio. I might take you up on that. I’m about 90 minutes north of the Michigan/Ohio border. There are a couple of things on the drive I would like to recover, but it’s not that urgent. I am looking on eBay for a adaptech scsi controller, that I can put in Linux box and take a dd image of the drive. The ACSI board will work good enough to present the image for testing, etc. Playing around with the ACSI2STM trying to get GemDrive mode to work, all I could do it get it to 3 cherry boom (which means word alignment exception). On a lark, I tried disabling the 16MHZ CPU upgrade, and the cherry bombs went away, the C drive showed up but didn’t open to show any files. (I think this is a RAINBOW TOS 1.04 issue). So for now I’ll use ACSi mode, I can use hatari emulator to mount my images, copy files to my image and burn a new SD card. I have a file transfer program that uses the serial port that I can also use. Making good progress on the cross-compile, all the C code is compiling clean, and I have started on the assembler code. That is going quickly also. For some reason the cross-assembler doesn’t like the use of ‘; comment’ and I have to change all the comments to the form of /* comment */ weird as I never used that ever in assembler. I am using a modifier of sizeof(int) == 2, which is what the compiler (Alycon) of the day used, Once I get a clean build, Ill rebuild with sizeof(int) == 4, which is more appropriate for m68k and make the changes in the assembler code. I don’t remember how long it used to take to compile the BBS back in the day, but it was certainly longer than the 60 seconds or so for a complete build on my M1 MacBook. It’s kind of scary. That’s all for now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted March 1 Share Posted March 1 On another note is anyone using. a) Emutos b) FreeMint I am liking Emutos (loaded from AUTO), I might burn some ROMS so I can run it native. FreeMint is on the list to try. I recently moved and I have a box of monitors, I need to find the box and pull out the monochrome monitor I had for the Atari, while the color monitor is nice (and working), I used to prefer the monochrome. Can someone send me an IMAGE file with ‘Michtron Utilties Plus?’ I have a license to it (I can show it to you LOL), I am having trouble reading the disk. Also a pointer to the TOS utilities like XCONTROL etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted March 1 Share Posted March 1 46 minutes ago, Techman said: On another note is anyone using. a) Emutos b) FreeMint I am liking Emutos (loaded from AUTO), I might burn some ROMS so I can run it native. FreeMint is on the list to try. I recently moved and I have a box of monitors, I need to find the box and pull out the monochrome monitor I had for the Atari, while the color monitor is nice (and working), I used to prefer the monochrome. Can someone send me an IMAGE file with ‘Michtron Utilties Plus?’ I have a license to it (I can show it to you LOL), I am having trouble reading the disk. Also a pointer to the TOS utilities like XCONTROL etc. I've used both. I actually do have a Mega ST (and Mega STE) with EmuTos burned in rom... works great. FreeMint also has some easy install options out there. There are some sites with good collections... http://www.atariuptodate.de/en Michtron Utilties Plus https://www.atarimania.com/pgesoft.awp?version=29934 (also attached to this post) If you're available Sunday for the Atari BBS Community Zoom Meet (this Sunday, March 3rd at 3pm eastern), since Lastic indicated he'd be there, we could just do a MichTron/BBS Setup working session. michtron_utilities_plus_michtron.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted March 1 Share Posted March 1 58 minutes ago, Techman said: I might take you up on that. I’m about 90 minutes north of the Michigan/Ohio border. There are a couple of things on the drive I would like to recover, but it’s not that urgent. I am looking on eBay for a adaptech scsi controller, that I can put in Linux box and take a dd image of the drive. The ACSI board will work good enough to present the image for testing, etc. Playing around with the ACSI2STM trying to get GemDrive mode to work, all I could do it get it to 3 cherry boom (which means word alignment exception). On a lark, I tried disabling the 16MHZ CPU upgrade, and the cherry bombs went away, the C drive showed up but didn’t open to show any files. (I think this is a RAINBOW TOS 1.04 issue). So for now I’ll use ACSi mode, I can use hatari emulator to mount my images, copy files to my image and burn a new SD card. I have a file transfer program that uses the serial port that I can also use. Making good progress on the cross-compile, all the C code is compiling clean, and I have started on the assembler code. That is going quickly also. For some reason the cross-assembler doesn’t like the use of ‘; comment’ and I have to change all the comments to the form of /* comment */ weird as I never used that ever in assembler. I am using a modifier of sizeof(int) == 2, which is what the compiler (Alycon) of the day used, Once I get a clean build, Ill rebuild with sizeof(int) == 4, which is more appropriate for m68k and make the changes in the assembler code. I don’t remember how long it used to take to compile the BBS back in the day, but it was certainly longer than the 60 seconds or so for a complete build on my M1 MacBook. It’s kind of scary. That’s all for now. Sounds good... I'm in the Akron area so it's not a bad trip (or you can ship it, either way). I also have some adaptec SCSI adapters... just need to know the slot type. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted March 3 Share Posted March 3 Just a reminder for the Atari BBS community zoom chat for Sunday, March 3rd 2024 at 3pm Eastern. For more information and the proposed agenda, go to http://www.ataribbs.com/zoomchat This is also the link to the zoom meeting itself (it will automatically forward from 15 minutes before until four hours after the meeting starts). This will likely be a Michtron 3.0 for the ST themed meeting as we hope to have both Lastic and the author, Techman! Also planned, another install/demo of FANSI, an ANSI editor for the ST, and a demo of the TattlerSystems WiFi RetroModem V3! Hope to see you there! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted March 3 Share Posted March 3 (edited) Zoom desktop client installed , old Logitech eyeball looking webcam installed pointing to the MegaSTe instead of my sleep-deprived face 🙂 Notes prepared , see/hear you all in 12 hours . As a heads-up some of the Michtron specific questions I currently have. NewUser: function currently requests password,street,city,state,zip code and phonenumber. GDPR and EU laws aside, I feel that street and phonenumber are a bit obsolete nowadays, could those be re-used/modified as country and system used to connect to the BBS ? How to setup a News section ? From the demo-disk examples it isn't entirely clear to me if you need to do it yourself from scratch or if there is already some functionality built into Michtron. What I'm looking for is a forum-alike discussion setup but maybe that isn't what you would use the News section for. ANSI/VT52/ASCII support, currently and I might be wrong it looks like Michtron supports everything that the Atari console can display so VT52 and plain text. I have some ASCII .MSG files which are called from the MAIN.M using the list function but some characters aren't displayed whereas in Everest they show up normally. Might be an issue on my end using a hybrid of modern OSes (Linux/Windows) to get these. The idle timer , is there a way to configure it or is it a build-in fixed value ? some functions which were posted in the topic aren't entirely clear to me (without a manual) on their usage. 2 basic things I would like to know currently are , how to pause and ask for a keypress and if there is a way to clear the screen . Edited March 3 by Lastic adding additional info Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted March 4 Share Posted March 4 A quick scan. -tim 03-03-2024_MichTron_BBS_3.0.pdf 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted March 4 Share Posted March 4 2 hours ago, Techman said: A quick scan. -tim 03-03-2024_MichTron_BBS_3.0.pdf 9.44 MB · 3 downloads Thanks a lot Tim for delivering us the Holy Grail , a lot of reading to do now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted March 4 Share Posted March 4 2 hours ago, Techman said: A quick scan. -tim 03-03-2024_MichTron_BBS_3.0.pdf 9.44 MB · 5 downloads It gave it's life so that we may gain understanding..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 Eric, Here is some code that I found, using this tool, it will take the "ansi art" and wrap it with MCL for use in the program. I have attached the 'C' source, compiled binary, and an example where the output was inserted into MCL file. You use it like this from a command line ans2mcl <inputfile >outputfile ans2mcl.c ans2mcl.tos antonio.m 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lastic Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 14 hours ago, Techman said: Eric, Here is some code that I found, using this tool, it will take the "ansi art" and wrap it with MCL for use in the program. I have attached the 'C' source, compiled binary, and an example where the output was inserted into MCL file. You use it like this from a command line ans2mcl <inputfile >outputfile ans2mcl.c 728 B · 2 downloads ans2mcl.tos 163.13 kB · 2 downloads antonio.m 11.25 kB · 2 downloads Hi Tim Thanks for this, currently I'm still going with ASCII artwork but I gave it a quick try. I guess I would need something like Michtron DOS-SHELL for it ? I tried renaming it to a .TTP under TOS 2.05 but that seemed to do nothing. I then tried EMU-CON using Hatari with EMUTOS but only got an output file with a header of 46 bytes which is basically the first print statements of the C routine /* Converted with ans2mcl.exe */ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Techman Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 (edited) 2 hours ago, Lastic said: Hi Tim Thanks for this, currently I'm still going with ASCII artwork but I gave it a quick try. I guess I would need something like Michtron DOS-SHELL for it ? I tried renaming it to a .TTP under TOS 2.05 but that seemed to do nothing. I then tried EMU-CON using Hatari with EMUTOS but only got an output file with a header of 46 bytes which is basically the first print statements of the C routine /* Converted with ans2mcl.exe */ Need to provide it input with the < filename With the ascii art, it will still work, it will just put the art in print(...) statements. Edited March 5 by Techman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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