75 replies to this topic

[poobah]

I'm speechless. Awesome!

[geosteve]

that is absolutely awesome! you rule

[krupkaj]

The machine is awesome, I saw it on PLatariada event live. I have some photos here.

[Evidious]

Great work!! That's an incredible job

[Stephen]

krupkaj, on Mon Jun 11, 2007 5:43 PM, said:

The machine is awesome, I saw it on PLatariada event live. I have some photos here.

Thanks for the pictures! I am so jealous - that looked like an amazing show.

Stephen Anderson

[Beetle]

OK,

what is a battery powered Laptop without internal drives?
Not very useful.

So this is my first mod to the new machine: a CF drive.
I have some experience with the SIO2IDE interface and some
of my machines are equipped with it. Nice thing is, it uses
standard FAT filesystem, so its very easy to put new files onto it.

Here is the 1500 opened:


I added a slot big enough for a CF card:


Then put the interface and CF adapter in:

I can clean up it later

This is what it looks like now. Pretty much invisible, but easy to reach.



More guts to follow...

Edited by Beetle, Sun Jun 17, 2007 4:58 PM.

[pseudografx]

Beetle, on Mon Jun 18, 2007 12:21 AM, said:

OK,

what is a battery powered Laptop without internal drives?
Not very useful.

So this is my first mod to the new machine: a CF drive.
I have some experience with the SIO2IDE interface and some
of my machines are equipped with it. Nice thing is, it uses
standard FAT filesystem, so its very easy to put new files onto it.

More guts to follow...

Good job, Beetle, looking forward to more updates :-)

[TwiliteZoner]

pseudografx, on Mon Jun 18, 2007 5:18 AM, said:

Beetle, on Mon Jun 18, 2007 12:21 AM, said:

OK,

what is a battery powered Laptop without internal drives?
Not very useful.

So this is my first mod to the new machine: a CF drive.
I have some experience with the SIO2IDE interface and some
of my machines are equipped with it. Nice thing is, it uses
standard FAT filesystem, so its very easy to put new files onto it.

More guts to follow...

Good job, Beetle, looking forward to more updates :-)

Amazing work.

[Beetle]

Time goes by, upgrades go in


This picture shows what is stuffed under the keyboard:
the internal power supply with charger, the heatsink is for the charger's MOSFET.
Right of that is the SIO2IDE interface , next is the 512k SRAM upgrade, and most right is the CF-Adaptor.
The IDE cable would cover the whole RAM upgrade, so i left it out for this pic.

You can also see the final NiMH cells are in now. They have nominal 3.300mAh and powered
the Laptop for 2h40 yesterday. Right now the running 1500XL sucks 1.14A out of the freshly loaded
battery which is at 16.7V at the beginning.

Here is the schematic of the power supply Mega-Hz did for my project. My Kudos to him at this point


Its starting to get a usable machine. But here are still some entry on my todo list.

Greetings from Germany
Beetle

Edited by Beetle, Wed Aug 1, 2007 5:18 AM.

[peteym5]

Looking at the "YouTube" video, it looks like it has more abilities than the standard ANTIC/GTIA chipset. Of course I can be fooled from the video. Does it have an extra graphics chip, looks like the Videoboard XE videos we have been seeing. What are some of the hardware specs?

[mos6507]

This totally looks like what Atari might have done if they had color LCDs back in the day.

I wonder what the battery life is?

[Beetle]

Quote

Looking at the "YouTube" video, it looks like it has more abilities than the standard ANTIC/GTIA chipset. Of course I can be fooled from the video. Does it have an extra graphics chip, looks like the Videoboard XE videos we have been seeing. What are some of the hardware specs?

That is just the "Drunk Chessboard" demo. It rus on any 64k XL/XE (perhaps any 48k a8 ?).
No extra hardware needed for that demo.

Quote

I wonder what the battery life is?

As i wrote above, i already had about 2h 40min.

Edited by Beetle, Wed Aug 1, 2007 2:32 PM.

[Marius1976]

Perhaps a little offtopic,

But I have 2 sio2IDE's here... and never thought about connecting a CF card to it.

(I did the same thing on MyIDE, but never thought of doing the same with Sio2IDE)

Is there something special I should do with the CF card before it works with sio2IDE?

Thanks
Marius

[doctorclu]

Marius1976, on Wed Aug 15, 2007 6:09 AM, said:

Perhaps a little offtopic,

But I have 2 sio2IDE's here... and never thought about connecting a CF card to it.

(I did the same thing on MyIDE, but never thought of doing the same with Sio2IDE)

Is there something special I should do with the CF card before it works with sio2IDE?

Thanks
Marius

An IDE to compact flash converter. Around here you can pick one up for $3. Want me to get one for you? Be my contribution to the Inside Atari 8-bit BBS you're relaunching.

[Beetle]

Quote

Is there something special I should do with the CF card before it works with sio2IDE?

Make one primary partition on the CF card. Format wth FAT32 under Windows (if using Win9x prefer DOS Mode).
Formatting to FAT32 under Linux surprisingly didn't work for me.
Formatting with FAT16 gave me problems from time to time, too.

And don't use too small CF cards. I never got my 16MB and 48MB cards to run.
All 256MB-1GB card i tested ran just fine, no matter if brand or no-name.

Greetings,
Beetle

[Marius1976]

Beetle, on Wed Aug 15, 2007 3:15 PM, said:

Quote

Is there something special I should do with the CF card before it works with sio2IDE?

Make one primary partition on the CF card. Format wth FAT32 under Windows (if using Win9x prefer DOS Mode).
Formatting to FAT32 under Linux surprisingly didn't work for me.
Formatting with FAT16 gave me problems from time to time, too.

And don't use too small CF cards. I never got my 16MB and 48MB cards to run.
All 256MB-1GB card i tested ran just fine, no matter if brand or no-name.

Greetings,
Beetle

Somewhere I did read CF cards do only work on Sio2IDE 4.4 and hihger? I have an old version of Sio2IDE (from 2002), and besides that version, I'm 100% sure there is also a bug in that sio2ide. In my version of sio2ide al ATR's are 256 bytes larger than they are, so the atari get's terrible confused in case of a 65535 sector sized atr (actually it sees that one as 255 bytes)

Is there an update for this Sio2IDE version, and if updated, does it support the CF card as you described?

That would be cool
Thanks
Marius

[Marius1976]

doctorclu, on Wed Aug 15, 2007 2:45 PM, said:

An IDE to compact flash converter. Around here you can pick one up for $3. Want me to get one for you? Be my contribution to the Inside Atari 8-bit BBS you're relaunching.

Hi Doc,

that is very nice, but I already have a bunch of these. A week ago I bought 9 of these on Ebay. they work great on MyIDE too.

The only thing I needed to know was: what to do ON the CF card, but beetle explained it.

I'll let you know when the BBS is reachable again. Things are already up and running, but I have to change and test things before I let people on it.

Thanks
Marius

[Beetle]

Quote

Somewhere I did read CF cards do only work on Sio2IDE 4.4 and higher? I have an old version of Sio2IDE (from 2002), and besides that version, I'm 100% sure there is also a bug in that sio2ide.

Here my answer as far as i know:

Your 2002 version will have a 4.xxx MHz Oszillator. You need to change it for a 7.3728 MHz one.

There is a 3.3a Firmware from 2005 which makes your older version CF-capable.
You have to built yourself a "ISP cable" which is a cable that connects one end to the SIO2IDE
interface and on the other end to your PC paralell port. Then you can update your firmware
by using the flasher program Marek did for Windows.

The bug you mentioned is not on V3.3a

All information is on http://atariarea.krap.pl/sio2ide/ . You need the SIO2IDE_3.3a file and the avrprg.zip
from the site. There is english documentation inside the zipfiles, too.

[Beetle]

Hi again,

next step is done: My Laptop now has its Stereo upgrade built in.
The two speakers left and right of the screen make now sense.
No deep bass due to the tiny speakers



Stay tuned...
Beetle

[pseudografx]

Beetle, on Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:25 AM, said:

Hi again,

next step is done: My Laptop now has its Stereo upgrade built in.
The two speakers left and right of the screen make now sense.
No deep bass due to the tiny speakers

1500stereo.JPG

Stay tuned...
Beetle

Nice!
What's on your to-do list?

[dwhyte]

Once everything is said and done, you should make a small production run of 1500's... I'm willing to pay a couple to a few grand for one...

[Beetle]

regarding production run: Yes, as soon i won the lottery jackpot

ToDo List:

- adding some status LED for BASIC, IDE, charge, line power, battery low
- wireless SIO2PC interface (i do terminal stuff on my a8, would be awesome to do that wireless)
- cleaning up the back (removing temporary switches, fit needed switches
- do a nice final paintjob and better labels

[Gregory DG]

Hehe... Take it on a train or a bus and see how many people ask you about it.

[Beetle]

Hi again,

finally i made it to the "Print Shop". Not the a8 version but a company that
prints whatever you want on whatever you want

They printed the labels i prepared at home.

Now my Laptop has a nice "1050 style" outer label:


And as soon its opened you see the inner label:



And, more a joke and not final (perhaps someone could do nicer ones?)
i added some infostickers, similar to those "Intel core duo" or "Nvidia powered"
stickers you see on new laptops.




If someone wants to contribute better versions of those, i'll put them on.
I am still looking for a nice "Designed for BASIC" or "QMEG 4.04 ready"
stickers

Greetings,
Beetle

[mimo]

LOL, really like the new stickers, how about "8 bit inside"?