Life, the universe & everything...Atari (well, mostly)

[JezC]

Another potential donor system has been brought to life - yay - I mean noooo

This one caught me out as it's a 1040 STF with a C070789 board with 1 meg memory, no modulator but TOS 1.00 in 2x chips...

I thought it was broken (booted to desktop but no floppy icons & couldn't get the cursor to move with the keyboard keys) so I pulled it apart, put a Gotek in place of the floppy & all then was working ok except still no cursor movement - and I then had a vague memory that the keyboard moving of the mouse wasn't in TOS 1.00, so plugged in a mouse & hey presto, it lives!

@exxos - I think we're going to need a new smilie for this, given all the successes with the new developments etc. ?

So another working board...but again one less candidate fro a donor for the H4s.

One step forward, two steps back...

This kind of makes up for 'breaking' my son's PC (he'd run out of room on his Windows 10 partition & so we removed the Linux Mint partition, converted it to another NTFS partition & installed office so he can do his schoolwork.

Then tried to boot it & we've managed to upset GRUB in the process


So I'll either have to repair GRUB or just put in a vanilla Windows 10 MBR & have ti boot Win 10 all the time.
Yet more chores to stop me getting any further on those lovely H4 boards...

[exxos]

Smiley's, I already installed 2 this past month

I don't think we need any more, your previous post is already looking like a website from the 90s already

[JezC]

Well, it seems rude not to use them whenever an opportunity presents itself!

[JezC]

No overtime for work for a while, so I'm taking that as an excuse for a few minutes of retro time after normal work finishing time but before tea...

Managed to fix my son's Win10 PC over the weekend so have now picked up an STFM with persistent boot filaure (looks like a RAM fault).

Put in the DiagROM EPROMs & now trying to work out what settings I need to use in TeraTerm to see the serial o/p from the ST...while the screen on the ST is just showing garbage.

I know I saw this info on a thread somewhere...but I can't find ti now for the life of me

Off to sort tea & see who might (hopefully) post a link in the meantime - @PhilC or @rubber_jonnie maybe?

If not, i will continue the search after dark when all family members & furry critters are in their respective sleeping places...

[PhilC]

Its 9600 8 N 1

[JezC]

@PhilC Hmm - I tried setting Teraterm to that to start with...but saw no info even when I reset the ST.

Do I need to press something on the ST to send any output? Or is it possible the ST isn't getting far enough to send serial data?

When I power-up the ST (520 STFM) I see the outer border & an inner area with garbage in it, so I was hoping it was just a RAM fault...maybe not

[PhilC]

@JezC sounds like it not getting that far. Usually if it's a ram fault you'll get a repeating list of failed ram test addresses.

Probably a good idea to get your scope out and make sure all the clocks are ok and then sync and Vsync, awe if it's at 50hz, if still at 60hz it's likely not reading the rom or worse

[JezC]

@PhilC Thanks for the pointers!

I will see about making sure the Teraterm on the PC is working - it's a built-in serial port on a Win 7 box and I've had problems with them before.

I have an old laptop (with a real floppy drive!) with XP (and Win 98SE) with a real serial & parallel port so I will fire that up tonight & check with that.

I think it's doing something with the ROM accesses as the screen was different with the DiagROM EPROMs inserted compare to the TOS 1.02 ROMs...but I've no idea how much.
I'll also connect it to my Benq 17" monitor as that usually shows vertical & horizontal refresh/scan rates & so might tell me if it's got as far as switching to 50Hz or not.

Given the number of STs I have lying about at the moment, i should really run a terminal program on one of them & use that instead - I'd just need a suitable program I guess.

[DoG]

Yeah. Test a diag cart in a working Atari and hook it up to another Atari, Amiga, PC with a com program with 9600,8,N,1 to see how it all works.

I use a USB to COM from a Win10 laptop hooking up to a broken Atari. Can't remember what com program I use though.

[PaulJ]

If you use 2 ST's transmit and recieve are on the same pins so you need to make sure pin 2 & 3 get swapped on one end so t->r and r->t. Try a cable on known good st's to make sure cable works. I'm sure you know but sometimes one just assumes the cable is right.