wrd@tekigm2.UUCP (Bill Dippert) (04/08/86)
Does anyone have any answers (or questions) in regards to David Young's comments to me about the RAMBO XL board vs the Newall board? If I had of known that a Newell board would work in an 1200XL I might have gone that way. However, I did not. His comments about it not switching the ANTIC chip worry me, but it seeminly is contracdicted by the instructions which (admittedly prejudiced) say that RAMBO XL is 100% compatible with Atari Writer+, BASIC XE, Paper Clip, Synfile+ and others? What does Young's comments really mean? Also, does anyone feel (as I do) that Young's scheme of using one of the additional 16k banks for his Atariwriter+ 80 col scheme is NOT the way to go? Why use up some of the additional memory when you have 16k available to you at the cartridge slot? (Either use a cartridge or at least use the 16k memory allocated for the cart.) Personally, I put out a magazine using Atarwriter+ as my wordprocessor and believe you me -- I use all of the memory of my 130XE. There is not 16k available for his 80 col. soft- ware/firmware. Does some of the CDY stuff already use the cartridge 16k memory allocated? --Bill--
DYOUNG@USC-ISID.ARPA (C. David Young) (04/08/86)
Since Bill has expressed curiosity about some of the details of my AtariWriter Plus conversion to 80 columns, I will talk a little bit more about it since it might be of general interest. AW+ uses the extra memory of the 130XE (or compatible) in a kludgy sort of way. (At least it appears to be kludgy; I have not used the word processor enough to speak from experience.) Of the 5 16K banks that map into the $4000-$7FFF range, the first 3 (the main bank and the first 2 extended banks) are used as 3 independent 16K text buffers. The fourth is used as the kill buffer and the fifth is largly unused: only the first 4K is used for miscellaneous routines. That leaves 12K of this bank unused. HMMM. Plenty of room for the 8K 80 column screen if only we could get Antic to look up there. Now Bill was wondering why I do not use the cartridge area for the 80 column screen. The answer is that all that area has already been used by the program. It is true that there is about 1K at the top of memory that is used for the 40 column screen, but that is way too small for the 80 column screen. Back at the original problem, how do we get Antic to look way up into that last extended bank? Pondering this question, I was suddenly struck by ATARI's foresight (and Newell's for following the same convention in his 256KXL) of giving us the control over the Antic to force it to stay with the main memory bank even when the CPU is off looking at other banks. What if I were to rearrange the order in which the banks are used so that the last bank (the one with the free 12K) becomes the main bank? Then I could leave bit 5 of $D301 high, forcing Antic to look at my 80 column screen while the CPU was off merrily flipping banks. That is exactly what I have done. Fortunately, redefining the order of the banks was easy; there are 5 little routines used to select each of the 5 banks. I merely swapped the bank address in the first and last routine. Unfortunately, the rest of the conversion has been very tedious. In my opinion, the program is quite poorly written. The screen output is not at all elegant or structured. It is brute force and spread out in bits and pieces throughout the code. However, the conversion is about 90% complete and I hope to have it finished by June 1st. It will take the form of a binary load file that will be appended to the AP.OBJ file on the AtariWriter Plus disk. David Young -------
wrd@tekigm2.UUCP (Bill Dippert) (04/25/86)
Thanks for all of the replies to my questions on routing wires for the Newell 256k upgrade kit. David Young (of CDY) has been very helpful and it turns out that there is a way of easily routing the wires to the underside of the board using the holes that the plastic cart holder fits in. Remove the plastic holder and you will see that you can open up both the slot and the hole to route the wires thru. All wires (except the one going to the one resistor pad) can be routed to the underneath and soldered to the socket pins, which is far safer then soldering to the IC leads. No pins need to be removed from their sockets and bent up. One thing that I would suggest, altho, is to discard the black insulated wire that comes with the kit and obtain color coded/striped wire to eliminate any possibility of misrouting/miswiring any of the jumpers. I am still in the process of upgrading my 800XL so more questions or answers may be forthcoming. I am assuming that there must be otthers on the net trying to do this upgrade (or the Rambo xl) as the computer stores are hard pressed to keep these kits in stock and unless everyone is putting them away for a rainy day(?) someone must be trying to install them. As previously mentioned, the Rambo xl kit has quite explicit instructions, with them and the instructions from Newell and with help, I am beginning to see how to install the Newell. It does not have what I am used too in the way of an instruction sheet. However, CDY has made Newell aware of this and maybe better instructions are forthcoming (hopefully) for those of us who are trying this kit out. (I am not holding my breath, however.) Being a model railroader, I am used to vague instructions, however, electronics/computers are a little harder to fix by seat of the pants maneuvers. --Bill-
wrd@tekigm2.UUCP (Bill Dippert) (06/11/86)
Having just successfully completed converting one of my 1200XL's to a 1200XLE (256K upgrade) and converting an 800XL a month ago, I found some interesting things out: 1) Wes Newall's instructions for the 800XL are great (version 2 or version 3 instructions -- version 1 are not so hot) version 2 has the diagram showing the board layout for the 800XL and version 3 has the layouts for both 800XL and 1200XL boards. 2) The 800XLE goes smoothly and quickly 3) The 1200XLE does not particularly go smoothly. Two problems. First is additional jumpers and run cutting, Atari board runs are tough to cut and he does not show where they are, you must ring them out with an ohm meter. Secondly, there is no room for the board under the shield. My solution was to cut a section of shield out and resolder it using some brass angle shapes purchased at a model railroad hobby shop. The section moved upwards about 3/8" and must be at the back half of the computer to clear the upper keyboard half. I would suggest drilling 1/8" holes in the same pattern as the rest of the shield to help cool the Newell board. 4) I still cannot get MYDOS 4.1 to work properly. It will not run an ANTIC magazine disk. I have heard from several people that MYDOS is extremely sensitive and prone to errors, but no one seems to know what to do about it. I still think that the Atari RAMDISK.COM file could be changed to allow it to check for 128k or 256k RAM. Question: I have heard of many different upgrades for the 130XE but none seem to bring it up to the same 256k level. It would seem to me that there should be a fairly simple way to bring it from 128K to 256K. Second question: have heard that Atari at the CES Show showed a 1 Meg 130XE. Does anyone know if this was a prototype or someone's home built 1 Meg variety? Reason I ask as a local basher has made both a 1 Meg and a 3 Meg version, but I was hoping that maybe it was about to become a product. Neil @ Atari -- what about it? --Bill--