exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Steve wrote: 07 Aug 2022 23:29 I'vealways heard rumours of Falcons that don't need clock patches, @stephen_usher please upload high Res motherboard photos at some point :)

I will have to "undo" my patches and see what really happens at some point :roll: I can't see falcons working properly without the patch. They might appear to work fine if you only used floppies or IDE I guess. Anyway... A topic for another day as don't wanna get told off for hijacking this thread :)

Tonight I was trying to build a VGA cable for the machine but I've given up for the night.

The doner cable's R, G, B and H-Sync wires are mini co-ax and the centre conductors are so fine and fragile that the slightest force on them will cause them to break, so it's proved impossible to get them all soldered at the same time, let alonesoldering on their ground shielding.

OK. I think I have a strategy for tomorrow. I'll solder wires onto the ends of the micro-co-ax conductors and secure with heat-shrink between the insulator and the wire insulation. That should be sturdy enough to support the joint. I can then solder the wire to the plug. It should also make it easier to solder wires to the colour grounds.

stephen_usher wrote: 07 Aug 2022 15:13 Seeing as there are currently no (CPU) clock issues I'll leave the clock patch for another time I think. I realise that if/when chips' tolerances drift over time I may have to go back and revisit this as the timings are on the edge.

I'm not sure if you tested New Beat's JOY demo at all? This seems to be quite a good test for clock patch requirement!
http://newbeat.atari.org/main.php?page=productions

I've not tried that demo, merely the official test program.

I was looking for demos to try, thanks.

For me the best test is using Falcamp to play an MP3, if it plays smoothly without crackles you're probably fine. Also transferring over scsi without any corruption is another. Another good test is listening to Ace Tracker (listening for pops/crackles)

Steve wrote: 09 Aug 2022 12:45 For me the best test is using Falcamp to play an MP3, if it plays smoothly without crackles you're probably fine. Also transferring over scsi without any corruption is another. Another good test is listening to Ace Tracker (listening for pops/crackles)

Ace Tracker seems to play fine.

It's interesting whether there are varying levels of pops and crackles. Ace Tracker is fine for me, most audio programs seem to be, but there is the odd small crackle here and there on some sample editors. It has been a while since I used CAF and LAF, and I never recorded large amounts of audio with them when I did mess around with those. I ought to run the official tool to appreciate, as I haven't yet installed Exxos' clock patch. Mikro suggests Atari realised too late to remedy, realising around August '93, and proposing the first of their official clock patch fixes. I guess, or at least you would have hoped, that the sporadic nature of pops and crackles perhaps lends itself why Atari took a while to realise. Mikro's clock patch documentation, which you are probably aware of is presented well: https://mikrosk.github.io/clockpatch/

@Atari74user

I know it's going back nearly 30 years now, but I remember buying a F030 with Cubase Audio not too long after it had been out (maybe 1994?).

Anyway, the point being, I found pretty much immediately that (IIRC) channel 7 and 8 had crackling on playback. It could be reliably reproduced.

However, that leaves the problem wide open to interpretation still, as there were various revisions of Falcon and CAF, so who knows who had the wrong combination of SW/HW? I certainly did, but can't remember (or never knew) what the combo was! :lol:

@mrbombermillzy Thanks, appreciated, I really need to go back and take a look with CAF... I have a few versions installed, which I sometimes mess about with for MIDI, but I need to sort out my driver for audio, currently using the latest HDDriver which of course isn't going to play ball with CAF etc..., so I need to 're-configure' my Falcon for audio recording, and get that working optimally as possible with my IDE to CF, and more importantly GigaFile on the SCSI bus. I have been lazy with the Falcon, few things I could do with sorting out, including clock patch.