exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

The new TOS206 ROM decoder board prototypes are now on order..


Getting a small run of the Falcon FPU overclocked boards made again. This was in light of developing the Falcon clock buffer patch version 4 recently. It may ultimately just be better to drive the FPU clock from its own local oscillator. The V4 patch does fix a lot more issues.. There will be a long write-up about the Falcon clock patch investigation. I've already done the draft but still needs a lot of work yet. But more on that another time.


Also the STE DAC noise fix boards which I seem to continuously forget about.


The SMT parts will all be assembled in all the above boards. But header pins will not.

Reading about your wasted day trying to get bluetooth headphones working, so it's not just me who has trouble like this! Google makes you feel like you're the only person in the world who ever had a problem with <insert device>.

I remember in the late 90's being able to google for help with a problem and the search results would be based on the *exact* words you used. It was so easy to get the answers to just about any problem back then because you could phrase your search carefully to turn up a good forum post where someone else asked the same question.

I imagine they get a better return for shareholders these days though.. ;)

wub wrote: 13 Sep 2022 19:07 Reading about your wasted day trying to get bluetooth headphones working, so it's not just me who has trouble like this! Google makes you feel like you're the only person in the world who ever had a problem with <insert device>.

Yeah totally agree there. It is why I stopped building new computers because it was just a ongoing nightmare of stuff been faulty then arguing with computer shops and I just could not cope with it any more. If something works I just leave it alone. Always looking out for better stuff but it is generally just not worth the hassle.

wub wrote: 13 Sep 2022 19:07 I remember in the late 90's being able to google for help with a problem and the search results would be based on the *exact* words you used. It was so easy to get the answers to just about any problem back then because you could phrase your search carefully to turn up a good forum post where someone else asked the same question.

You should see the video about the Internet being deleted.. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw

I've been thinking for a long time that they used to be loads of results about all sorts and the Internet just seems to be a wasteland these days. One reason I was asking in the chat forum about cloning websites to bring them back to life speak.

wub wrote: 13 Sep 2022 19:07 I imagine they get a better return for shareholders these days though.. ;)

Most likely. I mean yeah I paid £3 for the thing.. So I really was not expecting it to work but even spending is a small fortune on stuff does not necessarily mean it will be any better.

I think China just churn out something in the millions cheap and it will sell. Regardless of what it is.

I spent a lot of time designing and researching step up inverters about 20 years ago. All the China ones were terrible and people were buying them. I was even reviewing inductor core materials and efficiency of various thicknesses of wire and all sorts. Pretty much the only comment I got was they did not see the point in the inverter. I think I still have them somewhere.

Just had a mini rant on " cheap audio man's" page. I was heavily into audio years ago. Even tried to set up a company to produce quality audio products. My systems got used in three theatres around London I think. But it was just not enough to keep the business afloat. People just wanting to buy modules and then Asking around forums mods could be done.. I mean you buy cheap china cup and do mods to it to make it better.. I was producing stuff out of the box working properly.. Trying to convince people otherwise.. I just gave up in the end. People just want to buy cheap crap.

I think we just are in a age where we just accept all this crap and keep on buying it. I often think I should invent a cheap pen and get millions main thought it will die after writing a couple of sentences.. But then I think.. They are already flooded on the market anyway :lol: :roll:

Thanks for the link! I've been using a search engine called startpage.com for a long while now. It used to be called ixquick and it is a lot more privacy based. I just tested it with the same search term as that video and only got 6 pages of results with none of that "repeating the same results" stuff that he had. It's hard to know with that one as its a fairly controversial topic with an ongoing investigation happening..

Sorry to hear your audio business didn't work out, sounds like you had the right ideas, and deserved a lot more success with them.. like you say, being cheap is all that matters sometimes.

wub wrote: 13 Sep 2022 20:06 Thanks for the link! I've been using a search engine called startpage.com for a long while now. It used to be called ixquick and it is a lot more privacy based. I just tested it with the same search term as that video and only got 6 pages of results with none of that "repeating the same results" stuff that he had. It's hard to know with that one as its a fairly controversial topic with an ongoing investigation happening..

Not heard about one. Does not look to list many results when I search for "exxos atari". It does list the forum but I suppose it is how good their crawler engine is I guess. I have been using duckduckgo more recently.

I have been wondering about starting my own retro search engine. Oddly there does actually seem to be a retro search site but it does not really list anything. Likely will be one of those projects I will never have time to start.I hope to start a Wiki soon which will host links anyway. But of course it really needs everyone in the community to add content for it to really work and preserve information.

wub wrote: 13 Sep 2022 20:06 Sorry to hear your audio business didn't work out, sounds like you had the right ideas, and deserved a lot more success with them.. like you say, being cheap is all that matters sometimes.

Yeah cheap sells always. Nobody can really compete in that market because China has dominated it. Very difficult to make a name for yourself in any market. It all just comes down to how much money you spend on marketing to how successful anything is.

Wish I could remember the name of the amplifier which was incredibly expensive with all the raving reviews. Might have mentioned it previously a few years back. The main it looked good that a huge transformer which is what people understand. But for me, it was always coming to me for repair. It even blew up my speakers which I am still annoyed about. But the story there is people were claiming how powerful it was because it could actually blow people speakers.. But that was not the case. It was killing people speakers ( like my) relatively low volume levels because the output inductors were crap. The high the volume was the more RF it put into the voice coil and thus burnt it out rather easily.

Output MOSFETs were just generic crap which were always failing. He things on them were grossly inadequate but it should even needed heatsinks with a proper MOSFET. The bulk capacitance on the board was inadequate. Digital amps have a triangle waveform generator where they made no attempt to actually make a triangle. It was just a 555 timer charging and discharging a capacitor which in no way gives any sort of triangle wave.. I really could go on and on.. And this was the bestselling most expensive amp at the time. It was total garbage.

Then there are the "DIY modders" communities where they would increase the bulk capacitance By literally daisy chaining like 200 small capacitors all in parallel using about 20 miles of cable. Then saying how it improve the dynamic sound etc.. Yeah probably caused the massive amount of oscillations "improving" the sound. The whole thing just made me cringe.

Trying to convince people of this was just a uphill battle. They just cannot compute such things so I gave up in the end. I cannot remember the name of the guy who is designing this stuff. But even if I did I would not mention him because I would just end up with a wrath of the followers. Maybe he has actually improved in more recent times but I've been out of the audio circles for over 15 years now.

My old job I used to diagnose why amplifies is to explode for no reason. Even working closely with the manufacturers was just headbanging all the time. How any of these companies stayed in business is beyond me. Some of the amplifiers were just so bad and yet they always manage to find buyers of them.

A lot of companies did everything that you are not supposed to do in amplifier design. Like adding huge heatsinks onto digital amplifiers to keep the MOSFET cool, likely because they were just pennypinching on the MOSFETs. If they are just used something a little bit more expensive they could have avoided huge heatsinks altogether. In fact in my lunchtime I used to tweak around the circuits make them a whole lot better. Get more volume and better quality and more efficiency at them by doing almost nothing.

Not like I am bitter or anything :)

exxos wrote: 13 Sep 2022 20:55 Not like I am bitter or anything :)

lol if you've kept your sense of humour intact through all that then you're the winner here! :)

Soon ended up with PCB all the problems :roll:

JLCPCB - Seem to have gone into a panic because I have a bottom silkscreen. To their credit they did find a short on another board. So I sent them updated files.

PCBWAY - like two days ago send them images of some parts for assembling Trudie. very clearly states "customer supplied parts" in the BOM. so they quoted for 1 line and complained because I did not put a URL for them to purchase" parts from. FFS. So send them again tracking information and explained again but I have sent these parts.

Thing is I have done several orders and proceeded in exactly the same way and had no problems at all. Seemingly am talking to the same international sales representative. But I don't think this can be possible as several orders well without problem and all of a sudden there is a problem when I have done nothing different.

These are the type of problems I'm just having to deal with on a weekly basis. I think all these companies in China are operated from new recruit teenagers who have no idea what they are doing. PCBWAY up to now has generally being one of the best companies to deal with in particular over JLCPCB and a million others. The whole thing just gets very tiresome year in year out. :pullhair: :headbang:

EDIT:

So JLC cannot replace my gerbers with the updated one. That would be too simple wouldn't it.

exxos wrote: 12 Sep 2022 23:52 Not feeling well at the moment :cry: Just been pottering about and did this new design.. probably won't work, but it does on paper :lol:

Ooo funky.

Is that a sit-over-the-pins-of-a-PLCC-socket design? Will you be able to remove it again with the pins so close to the edge, do you think?

BW

exxos wrote: 13 Sep 2022 20:55 Not heard about one. Does not look to list many results when I search for "exxos atari". It does list the forum but I suppose it is how good their crawler engine is I guess. I have been using duckduckgo more recently.

Startpage is a wrapper for google, basically it removes any data that could identify you and passes the query to google. The results differ from google because google knows you are exxos and what you most likely want to find ;) If you launch google in an anonymous browser session, the results should be identical.

Since knowing what I want improves the results greatly, I confess to using google directly :roll:

Badwolf wrote: 14 Sep 2022 12:50 Is that a sit-over-the-pins-of-a-PLCC-socket design? Will you be able to remove it again with the pins so close to the edge, do you think?

It pushes in the PLCC socket like my 4MB MMU RAM expansion board does. I've tested 100s of boards on the same socket. It's getting a bit iffy these days though oddly :lol: