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MEtalGuy66

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MEtalGuy66 last won the day on October 17 2009

MEtalGuy66 had the most liked content!

About MEtalGuy66

  • Birthday 10/19/1973

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    I love you, Albert.
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    Houston, TX, USA
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    ATARI XL/XE hardware repair, ICD Multi I/O reproduction/development, SpartaDOS, MAC/65, BASIC XE, ATARI TELNET BBSes and related hardware, AMIGA 1000/500/500+, preservation of the 5.25" floppy as a standard for 8-bit computers.

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  1. Its a completely relative issue and every atari has it. The only question is whether in any particular group of connected hardware, the skew being caused is putting the data bus out of time with PHI2 enough to cause invalid/incorrect bus states to be interpreted/expressed by the CPU. I promise you, if you have a particular "setup" that works, if you add/remove enough hardware (capacitive/inductive load) from the databus, this realtionship will go out of range and create the problems.. Its like setting the ignition timing on an engine.. Just nowhere near as easy to "adjust".. the 'PHI2fixer' simply modfies the phi2 timing of the device that it is connected upstream of, and ensures that it's timing is not skewed from system PHI2 timing. It does not do ANYTHING to correct the system-wide skew/delay that is caused by increasing the load on the databus. This will be about the 1000th time ive explained this crap ad-infinitum on these forums.. Next, Fuck-why will chime in and spew a bunch of bullshit based on his experience with the "jay miner 800" and incognito board.. and another cycle of dejavu, catch22 will be complete..
  2. بِسْمِ ٱللّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ‎ In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. That's the only reason the board works, if you ask me..
  3. Its nowhere near that simple, unfortunately. The "PHI2FIXER" has been around a long time. It's not a universal fix for anything. It does help some devices behave better. It does not fix the system wide bus-timing issues related to changing capacitance and skew between PHI2 and data bus valid timing..
  4. The early production ICD MIOs had a variable cap in position CV1. All of the later ones, both ICD, and mine were built with two 68pf caps in parallel, if I remember correctly.
  5. Hats off to you, buddy.. I did about 36 of those, and they suck ass.. over 1400 solder joints. Warerat also worked his ass off on that project, and deserves all the technical credit. Be sure and run the MIO diagnostic cart on it for about 24 hours and make sure you don't have any bits flipping anywhere before you trust that thing with alot of work/data storage.. Its a really temperamental design and the Atari's shitty unbuffered PHI2 timing really affects it big-time. In fact, any time you change the load on the atari's data bus (even plugging in or removing a cartridge) you need to reevaluate that thing for stability. That's just the nature of the beast, i'm afraid.. Same goes for switching from one atari to another. If you are looking for SCSI devices that tolerate the MIO's half-assed archaic SCSI implementation, Acard SCSI-IDE adaptors and IOMEGA JAZ drives are two devices that seem to work really well. At any rate, I'm glad to see you got another one working. I gave all those boards to Ken Ames because I'm not gonna build any more. Got better things to do with my life..
  6. I have 256kx1 ZIPP rams if anyone needs them to upgrade a 256k MIO t0 1meg. I don't remember ever asking Mr.Fish for anything.. We were using SIMMs from day 1 because a local electronics surplus store here had the sockets dirt cheap. I was looking for various speeds of 30-pin SIMMS for stability testing at one time. 30-pin SIMMS were the no-brainer choice because they are 8-bit data bus, were still commonly available back in 2006, and the DRAMS used on them all support the same FPM type function set/access schemes as the old legacy ram that the MIO was designed with did. And they had much fewer required interconnects than using DIPs or ZIPPs.
  7. Yep. It was pretty amazing what you could do with an MIO and spartados.. Add an R:Time8 and a 20meg SCSI drive, and you had a world class BBS suite.. Even if the whole thing was on the verge of crashing at any given moment..
  8. http://www.rasterline.com/images/Instructions.jpg
  9. I have a couple more 1200XL PBI adapters left.. I was gonna sell them to Curt Vendell but he died before I could do it..
  10. Even back in the 80s when the Rambo XL was being sold, everyone knew it was Claus' design. I have many user group newsletters and text files that made the rounds on BBSes that talked about RAM expansions and how to do various incarnations of them to various machines. All the hardware guys knew it was Claus' design even back then and gave credit whenever they mentioned it, and made light of the fact that the RAMBO XL was identicle. Claus literally set the first standard for banked memory expansions on the XL.. When the 130XE came out with factory extended ram, it was likely as not that they got the idea from user groups that were already doing claus's upgrade.. Of course, they did set in stone the 16k bank size as a standard, which was the second revision of Claus's design, if I remember correctly.. I can't remember if ICD actually offered the RAMBO XL before the 130XE came out, or not.. But, Claus' magazine articles predated both, for sure..
  11. Yeah but I haven't seen any flickering Bios screen, problems resetting.. Anything... In classic mode, or otherwise.. In fact, its surprisingly rock-solid stable compared to a lot of lesser-expanded machines I own..
  12. Yeah. This may piss off some people. But my 130xe+Rapidus+VBXE+1024kSRAM works fine. Never experienced any of the issues that these U1MB users are complaining of. And I've still got DRAM chips for 64k base ram. My memory expansion is of the Hias/Mega-Hz variety from before U1MB was a thing.
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