1 Nov
2001
1 Nov
'01
11:12 a.m.
In <f05001900b80791692a27(a)[209.244.213.60]>0]>, on 11/01/01
at 07:13 PM, Jeff Hellige <jhellige(a)earthlink.net> said:
Plus, without 3rd party
enhancements the 1050 had the same slow data transfer rate as the 810.
The Happy upgrade nearly tripled the rate. I'm not sure what the data
transfer rate of the GT's were using DOS XL with syncromesh turned on.
The 1050 was a twitch faster but the US Doubler turned it into a rock of a
double density drive and provided the boost from 19.2kbps to 54.4kbps.
I've seen ads for a 108kbps upgrade in Europe but Bob P told me the
timeing would be twitchy in the US.
All the other 1050 update rom/ram jobs were good. I never used an 810 for
much though. I got into the Atari when the 1200xl was released. That was
my first 'real' computer. The maligned orphan 1200xl happened to be the
best 8-bit machine Atari ever made. I've got one still and have done the
800xl rom mod, and the internal basic mod. On this particular one I tried
Bob Wooley's 1200xl PBI mod. ALLL THOSE CONNECTIONS. I double checked,
rechecked etc. I even redid the mod completely with a new set of chips and
cable. Nothing. Not 'no video'. The machine works perfectly when
connected to my Black Box or not. It just doesn't SEE the Black Box.
I haven't seen any updates to the 1200xl PBI mod and I don't think it
quite works. I think the PBI is not being selected or something. One
more line and it would work I swear....
Anawho the machine still works fine so I left the mod installed. There
are something like 40 wire connections you have to make on different sides
of the motherboard plus a rom change/upgrade. I'd trash my xe in a second
if I could make that 1200xl and it's beautiful keyboard work with a hard
disk.
That's cool...I didn't run my own BBS until
later when I put it on an
XT using QuickBBS. A friend of mine ran a board off of a PCjr using
FIDO and the single floppy drive and a 300bps modem. Needless to say, it
was pretty much for messages only.
Early I ran Kenny Sallot's (The Timelord) TARDIS bbs in 83' or so. We
shared an apartment. At first it was on my Percoms then on the ATR, then
on a 1mb MIO and a 20mb Xebec hdd with an Adaptec ACB400a controller.
The guy was a big, hamfisted, gifted programmer. He wrote the code for
the Tardis himself on a modified AMIS. Useing Basic XE and the extra 64k
in the 130xe? Most sane people used it as a ramdisk. Not Kenny.
He wrote it so that modules and menus were stored in a single 64k string
and used a lookup routine because it was a little bit faster and used less
memory than a ramdisk driver. Gross huh? This guy could fit an elephant in
a vw microbus. The name of the software (TDXE) stood for Technical
Difficulties bbs XE. He got a ton of traffic and the board actually ran
pretty well.
>CSS (Computer Software Services) is now known as
New Life Electronics
>(http://www.nleaudio.com). Bob has allways made hifi stuff. A catalogue,
>information, docs, source, and other such is on the site. To this day Bob
>is STILL an Atari hacker. Something of a god he is to me.
Looks like he's not updated the site in a while.
It's good to know
he's still out there though. It seems all of these communities have a
couple of people that have been elevated to near-god status.
Bob Puff, Bob Wooley, and Claus Buckholtz. I'd like to erect a trio of
statues 300 feet high and made of bronze in Gorky Park.
I mean we won. Didn't we?.....
Regards,
Jeff
--
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Jeffrey S. Worley
Asheville, NC USA
828-6984887
UberTechnoid(a)Home.com
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