exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

PhilC wrote: 03 Apr 2025 12:19 The composite video on my 800 is good as is, as you've said, so I think other than having done the incognito, I think that's all it will get

I agree, the 800 has really good composite, so Incognito is all thats really needed.

OK, so since the 400 isn't getting an Incognito I wanted to be sure the SDriveMAX's I have are all good and work with both the 400 & 800, and since in Colleen mode the Incognito doesn't work with ATRs for some technical reason, I still wanted to be able to use one of the SDrives with the 800 too.




I must admit, the yellow device came with the XEGS and suits that better, however I may look to get a more suitable case as it's not the best. Weirdly though, the 2nd one wouldn't boot from D0: like it should.

OK, bad SD card perhaps? Or SDrive iteslf?

So I took the booting SD card and swapped drives and it works. Right, so it's the card then? So I formatted the old card, imaged the good card and wrote it with the previously taken image.

Still did not work. Did the same with a different card.

So I looked at the files through the menu on the SDrive menu and the sdrive.atr file plus a bunch of others aren't there...

So with a brand new card in hand I used the SD formatting tool to format from scratch with overwrite enabled, copied just sdrive.atr over and it worked.

So I copied over the rest of the files, and it's a big fat nope, and I can see all the files now including sdrive.atr now as well.

It makes little sense, and I have tried multiple different sizes and brands of card.

Bit of a head scratcher.

OK, so the SDriveMAX issue is fixed, but I effectively had to hand build the card starting with the sdrive.atr first. Sometimes the boot is intermittent, but it will boot and even better its working perfectly with Colleen mode on the 800 and I can boot ATRs with that since the ATRs on the Incognito card aren't seen in Colleen mode.

What a pain that was.

Also managed to find another XL style case on eBay that I can transplant the yellow beast of an SDrive into, it'll blend in a lot better.

:dualthumbup:

A little post Amiga tinkering with my Atari 410 cassette deck and the 400 today.


The 410 has had a disassemble and clean and with the exception of the tape counter belt (I didn't have one small enough) all belts have been replaced.

Does it work? Well kind of...

It is reading data from cassette, but clearly it's doing so very badly!!!

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it because cassette operations on any of the Atari units (410, 1010, XC11, XC12 etc) are very slow and pretty unreliable, but I just wanted it to power on and do what cassette decks do, then I feel like I did my bit to preserve it. As well as the 410 I have 2 1010's and 2 XC12s, my favourite being the 1010's because they have SIO pass through, which if you're going for an honest set up like back in the day of an 800XL with cassette and 1050, it all matches and all plugs in nicely with space to plug in more SIO devices.

I will, to give it a chance, try and save a basic program and load it back, but that'll be my lot.

And, saving and loading from BASIC works!!!

Happy days.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 19 Apr 2025 17:17 And, saving and loading from BASIC works!!!

Happy days.

Yay !

:cheer: :yay2: :cheer:

Reminds me of a song...

I now have nearly matching SDrive Max devices :)


Definitely preferable to the bright yellow case I had.