exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

@stephen_usher

Nice, I didn't have one back in the day, as by the time I could afford one, the STFM's had arrived and they had disappeared. I got this one from exxos last year, and it had a bad piggyback RAM expansion installed.

I tried to fix it as I have a good stock of spare RAM chips, but some tracks had been cut along the way, and I just couldn't get it going again. TBH, if I knew then what I know now (My Mega4 has taught me a lot), I'd have probably carried on and fixed it.

But I had a spare Marpet adaptor and fitted that instead, it was much simpler and took the bad tracks out of the equation. Of course the other part of the story is the Mega4 died (AGAIN!!) so I ordered an upgrade from exxos to fix that, but then fixed it!

So the spare upgrade had to go into the 520ST.

I know what you mean about the cables, but there is something nice about the original design. The Gotek in the external 3rd party drive works just great, that particular case, a Datel here in the UK, works brilliantly and is simple and robust.

I know what you mean about keeping stuff stock, but in this case if I'd done nothing, it's be dead. I have a Mega1, which I've kept stock other than an upgrade to a patched TOS 1.04 that allows booting from IDE, plus a Megabus IDE adapter built from PPs design. I very much like having the original FDD, but also having the external Gotek so I can drop SW onto the hard drive easily when I want to, but still have the floppy original. I think it's a good compromise.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 May 2020 15:42 I know what you mean about the cables, but there is something nice about the original design. The Gotek in the external 3rd party drive works just great, that particular case, a Datel here in the UK, works brilliantly and is simple and robust.

Indeed, though I had to respray mine last year as the paint was bubbling due to rust underneath. I don't think that they cleaned the steel (or primed it) before spraying the paint on. Why would they? They probably thought the lifetime of the product was only a couple of years anyway. (Just like the TT/MegaSTE LED supports.)

stephen_usher wrote: 03 May 2020 16:10

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 May 2020 15:42 I know what you mean about the cables, but there is something nice about the original design. The Gotek in the external 3rd party drive works just great, that particular case, a Datel here in the UK, works brilliantly and is simple and robust.

Indeed, though I had to respray mine last year as the paint was bubbling due to rust underneath. I don't think that they cleaned the steel (or primed it) before spraying the paint on. Why would they? They probably thought the lifetime of the product was only a couple of years anyway. (Just like the TT/MegaSTE LED supports.)

Oddly my Datel has a good paint job, but the drive inside has a really rusty tin cover on the floppy drive.

Just popped up to the man cave and found the 520ST on loop 791 of the XTRA_RAM.PRG test, and no errors. I'll call that done.....


:girldance: :girldance: :girldance:

I've decided to try and get Pure C set upon my ST, well across my ST collection via CosmosEx/Hard drive and I'm finding it a bit of a pain!

There seem to be 2 types of config file:

CFG
PRJ

I have some PRJ examples which help with that, and I can see how to configure and save settings for things like the Compiler, Linker etc, but when I use a text editor to look at the CFG files, I'm finding strange directories that don't exist at all on my hard drive, and I can't find any way to change these, or even remove them.

Has anybody out there got any advice on setting up Pure C from scratch?

BTW I am currently reading through the overview file, and the files included with Pure C, but any advice that anyone can offer would be gratefully received!

Ah ha!!

So a bit more digging and I have managed to get my head round things a bit in Pure C.

Using the default PRJ configuration, I soon realised that the very first file it called for wasn't actually present, so I removed it and my Hello World .C file now builds properly!!

What was really cool was running debug in 'animate' mode and seeing the code stepping through one instruction at a time.

I think there is more to do, as I have a bunch of other libraries which come with Pure C that I can also add, plus I found the GodLibs which seem to extend the functionality quite a lot more.

I'll figure this out more on Hatari before I look to migrate to a real machine.

Annoying Microsoft thing of the week.

I have a number of machines running Hyper-V at home for lab purposes. One machine is Server 2016, the rest are 2012.

If I build a VM on 2016, it consider itself a next generation machine, and won't replicate to one of the 2012 servers.

However, if I build it on 2012, then use the 'Move' feature and move it to 2016, it picks up the earlier generation number and lets me replicate.

Surely some kind of tick box to say what generation you want would be nice.

And there is an alternate generation thing to make it more annoying. When you create a machine, you get to choose generation 1 (Legacy hardware) or generation 2 (UEFI hardware). It doesn't matter which one you choose, because it doesn't change the VM generation, which for 2012 is 5 and for 2016 is 8!!

:mad: :mad: :mad:

It's the same for all virtualisation platforms. They are all only forwardly compatible. That's not only Hyper-V but VMware etc. They assume that your infrastructure has been homogeniously upgraded as they don't support anything else. Anyway, isn't Server 2012 out of support now?

stephen_usher wrote: 11 May 2020 17:23 It's the same for all virtualisation platforms. They are all only forwardly compatible. That's not only Hyper-V but VMware etc. They assume that your infrastructure has been homogeniously upgraded as they don't support anything else. Anyway, isn't Server 2012 out of support now?

I know, it's just MS annoys me with the way they force an upgrade path, just like with Exchange only supporting several steps forward of Outlook.

Extended support is until 2023 for Server 2012, so I am looking to upgrade to 2016 across the board, but it takes time to upgrade.

Well, looks like my shipment has left China:


Let's hope they shipped what I actually ordered and not a box of stones :)