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At Revision in April 2015, Heaven gave me his Atari 130 XE and his Atari 65 XE with VBXE 2.0 installed. The first one had broken down at the party. The second one has a VBXE built-in but not an adapter cable to connect it to a TV. While the Atari 130 XE worked fine after cleaning and re-soldering, the VBXE machine had an Atari ST monitor connector and a complex switch built in. I sat down for hours and traced the different signals through the wires, buttons, and connectors. I found that the way the wiring was, the connector could simultaneously serve as FBAS-SCART and RGB- SCART, depending on the switch position. But I didn't have a proper plug for the connector, so I had to order one. I had to learn that there are different types of 8-pin DIN plug with slightly different pin arrangement. None fully matches the Atari ST monitor connector.
Months went by, and finally, I got a working plug. Still, I was frightened by the thought of soldering SCART cables with 21 pins into the damn tiny DIN plug, not knowing where color meant what and which pin is actually which (plug vs. connector, front-view vs. rear-view, ST plug vs. VBXE pinout, before the switch vs. after the button....). And guess what: How right I was.
Today I was in the mood and decided to give it a try. After Three hours of soldering, measuring, desoldering, measuring, re-soldering, and dozens of mapping lists and diagrams, I finally made it. And then, when the cable was complete, I tested it. And it didn't work at all with my SABA CRT. So I started measuring, desoldering, and re-soldering and checked the diagrams repeatedly. Then I tried the 2nd CRT (Goldstar). It gave a very dark b/w picture and no VBXE picture at all. The 3rd CRT (Grundig) showed the same result. Meanwhile, I was 100% sure that the wiring was OK.
CRT number 4 (Schneider) then gave a clear picture with greyscales - in red. IN RED ?!?! Back to the board, did I swap luma with red - no, I'm not that stupid. Phew, no, I'm not. The 5th CRT (Sony Triniton) presented a distorted picture as it didn't detect that the input was on RGB, not FBAS. Finally, I grabbed my (almost) last available CRT: The Phillips that had just left my living room before Xmas. I plugged it in, and WHOA - it f-cking worked. It just worked and looked perfect. The cable had been correct from the start, but it took 2 hours to find the TV that could handle RGB via SCART. Priceless. Merry Christmas, Heaven, you'll get your present soon! Here's what the CRT battlefield looked like.
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I finally escaped the real-life daily job business and had a great week with the sun, beach, and DIS6502. Don't you believe that? Check the commits. Again, much of the monolithic plain C has been transformed into readable classes with clear interfaces and dependencies. Now I understand the code well enough to implement the new load/save for the new workspace structure.
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Features:
- The download now contains a "TheCartStudio.exe" for Windows users. This wrapper program has proper icons, a version and location test for the Java Runtime, and the required Java parameters to ensure enough heap memory is available.
- The download now also contains a "TheCartStudio.sh" for Linux users. This script provides Java with the required parameters to ensure enough heap memory is available.
- The download now also contains a "TheCartStudio.app" for Mac OS X users. This one is still very experimental and is not yet tested as I don't own a Mac OS X machine. But I wanted to get this version out now.
- Online help has been revised. New sections and diagrams now explain the workflow and creating and flashing workbooks. Also, the different options to add files directly or via Maxflash Studio and MegaCart Studio are now described.
- The selected line in the extended menu now uses black text and a more constant, darker flashing. This reduces bending and artifacts on CRT TV.
Fixes:
- Player missile graphics of the extended menu are now disabled correctly before an entry is started. That was an issue, for example, with Flop Magazine 56 Intro.
- An exception that occurred with ATR files that do neither have a boot manager menu nor are DOS 2.5 disks is fixed.
- New Atari software version 2014-04-07 included. It includes a fix for the CAR or MyPicoDOS when loading OSS modules.
- The "-createSampleFiles" command now correctly creates separate folders "ROM-Correct", "ROM-Size-Too-Small", "ROM-Size-Too-Large".
- Console output for error messages is now routed to "System.err", so the command line can adequately distinguish between information and error messages.
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RevEng pointed me to some issues related to using DASM on 64-bit machines. So I took the chance and updated the archive containing all compilers and the zero installation distributions. They now include
- DASM (2.20.11-20140304/2015-04-04)
- KICKASS (V3.39/2015-03-26)
- XASM (3.1.0) for Mac OS X Intel provided by 0xF
For the exact versions, dates, and platforms, see the section Installing Compilers. I've also automated my build for the compilers process on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X so that I can provide future updates, hopefully with less effort. I also contacted Mark Schmelzenbach, so hopefully, I can update ATASM to version 1.08 soon.
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Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, and Brad Arnold host an entertaining ANTIC podcast on Atari 8-bit computers. In December of last year, I had the pleasure of giving Randy an interview via Skype that has now been released. The download as MP3 is available at https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com. Enjoy 50 minutes of stories and funny explanations of why nerdy people do nerdy things.
