Submitted by The pinout of that 68K Game Shifter, however, does not match the Shifter IC in any of the Atari ST computers. But incidentally, the never released Atari Panther was to be a Motorola 68000 based game console. Furthermore, the Panther prototype board features a chip conspicuously marked 4118!
So after the cancellation of the Panther development in 1991, I may well be first person for 25 years to be looking at the design of its shifter chip.
I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories. Great work!
What I would love to see is some of this information being used in some of the awesome hardware projects out there, like the MiST. Maybe even to build a modern Super Atari ST, like the Natami project was supposed to be for the Amiga. With actual hardware specs that could be used to further the architecture, something amazing could be made.
The Natami is back on track with the collaboration of the Apollo team (CPU core, RTG/SAGA core, 16 bits Paula replacement, etc…) and the Vampire team (FPGA based hardware).
It’s going to be a great toy!
This Saturday (10th September) at BalCCon 2k16 conference in Novi Sad will be a world premiere of Vampire 500 accelerator…
Sweet! I’m waiting for the Vampire 4000 myself.
So from what I was reading about the Natami, it was more like the Vampire rose up from the ashes of that project, but I didn’t think they were going to continue with it, since Natami ended up being a little bit more than what they thought they could handle, or something like that. Sometimes these projects go on too long and people involved lose interest for one reason or another, good to hear that it’s looking more like it’ll come about eventually. If the Natami is released with all it is supposed to be, I may end up selling my A4000 at that point, but not before!
Again the vampire card was created by one person (Majsta) wholly independent of the Natami project. There is no connection between the Natami project, the Apollo core or the Vampire card except a few persons. The Natami is dead or at least in a deep coma.
No you are wrong – the Natami design have nothing to do with this current design. What they call SAGA is the RTG component (using a separate HDMI port), there is no Paula replacement or things like it. Natami was about the chipset replacement where the processor could optionally be based on FPGA logic – this is a processor card.
Vampire team BTW? It is one person that learned hardware design from scratch as nobody else tried to do an Amiga accelerator based on FPGA! Much more impressive than implying there is a team behind it.
These articles are cool. Feel free to post more
There’s also this;
http://mail.atariforge.org/pipermail/freemint-list/Week-of-Mon-2016…
Running EmuTOS / FreeMiNT on Amigas.
5 1/4 floppies. You actually ‘plugged’ your Word Processor. How expensive. but with a tape recorder you didn’t have an actual ‘DOS’. Mitsubishi ‘plotter’. Daisy printer.
Got to know and endure working under extremely ‘Reduced Instruction Sets’. You need to develop a special kind of BSM psyche. Or trow the towel.
nope, wrong era. It is about Tramiel’s Atari not the original one. 3.5″ floppy, 512K to 4Meg RAM, M68K, GEM and midi.
I used my (eventually, heavily modded) Atari 1040STf for ten years. I’ve never owned another computer that’s been useful that long.
Mods: Upgrade to 2.5MB RAM, then had a friend wire a couple of 1MB SIMMs in to get it up to 4MB, SCSI adaptor, 1.44MB floppy adaptor and drive.
Its replacement was an original BeBox in 1996. 🙂
I really do hope you still have both of those machines.
Sadly, no.
The BeBox went to a good home, at least…
I would like a functioning Atari ST and a BeBox right now.
I couldn’t afford the ST back then as I was just a kid saving his allowance. I got a 130XE instead, loved that little machine.
Never had a BeBox but did have the first public release of BeOS running on my Power Computing mac clone. I bet I still have the BeOS shirt it came with !
I’d have loved a BeBox. Still have my copy of R5 Pro, and this week I soldered up an RGB cable for my STE and booted that for the first time in over 10 years. Looks glorious!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrvqDz3UEAQ-6wc.jpg:large
I got lucky there. I was a DOS kid (my first PC was an original IBM PC) and I never even knew about the ST until maybe 10 years ago (turns out they were significantly more popular here in Canada than in the U.S.), I was out riding my bike on big garbage day and saw a perfectly good (if somewhat yellowed) 520STFM, with high-res black-and-white display but without mouse or software.
Life’s been distracting and funds have been tight, considering I have more nostalgic stuff I’ve prioritized, but I’ve been working to make it useful.
So far, I’ve picked up a PS/2 mouse adapter (I’ve got plenty of those boxed up), a composite-out cable (Praise be to whatever kind soul wired up the composite out lines from the garbage NTSC RF modulator’s input side to unused monitor connector pins), and an RCA-to-3.5mm stereo cable.
I still need to find room in my budget for floppy and/or hard drive emulators and a composite-to-VGA converter like I bought my brother years ago so he could play his Playstation 2 using his monitor as a TV. (Even if I decide not to use my LCDs, I’ve got no TVs, but I’ve got three or four VGA CRTs in the closet.)
I liked the beeping sound the atari drive made when it was booting and loading.
I remember loading games in 1-2 minutes where the same game on the Commodore 64 would take 15-20 minutes.
My Atari collection is still in working condition: A MegaST and a 1040 ST, both equipped with the original high resolution B/W monitors (including sound) and external hard disks (MegaFile, if I remember the name correctly); even a 40 MB SyQuest exchangable disk drive is available. I’d like to make use of their built-in MIDI interface, but sadly I lack the software and the compatible instruments.
Now I can compare them to the 800XL and 800XE (with tape drive) I still must have somewhere… 🙂
So far 520ST 1MB with integrated HxC and S-Video/Composite output, 1040STFM, 1040STe 4MB, 2x MEGA 1, 130XE, 2x 800XL, 600XL, 2x XEGS, and a proud owner of Falcon for a few months now
My current list of Ataris.
1) 800XL Stock(my first computer, still works great!)
2) 600XL Stock
3) 130XE Stock (I have the excellent SD2SIO plugged into it)
4) 800 (I need a power supply for this, I think)
5) 1040 STf (This has some weird video issue I need to track down)
6) Mega STe (my first ST, sadly I think it bit the dust, now has TOS 2.05 because I swapped out the one from…)
6) 2nd Mega STe, Currently trying to figure out how to best mount the CosmosEx inside it, currently has an UltraSatan attached
7) TT030. This one needs TOS 3.06 in it, and has 4mb of TTRAM and 2MB of ST ram, needs to be upgraded.
8) Falcon, upgraded to 14MB of ram, running 160gb IDE SSD with a HxC ‘Floppy’ in it. Also has a NetUSBee in it so I can get networking through FreeMiNT.
I actually ended up buying 5 50mhz FPUs to place in the Mega, TT and Falcon, they seem to work just fine.
Such brilliant machines.
Oh yeah, and I have a Jaguar and JagCD connected to the TV next to the 130XE
Have you checked out the UIP Tools for the NetUSBee? Super easy way to get file transfers happening from within TOS.
Is that the one where you need Windows to copy over? I actually just created an NFS share on my desktop that is mounted on the FreeMiNT side. Works great.
The software these days is easy enough to obtain. And you can get some MIDI keyboards for fairly cheap.
Check out this link
http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21473&hilit=Bakward+III&…
I forgot about that.
*goes to eBay to order another $4 USB-MIDI cable*
(I have a Yamaha PSR-E413 keyboard (almost the exact soundfont used in Final Fantasy 7 for PSX), which only has USB input, so my current P133 DOS/Win31 nostalgia PC uses a couple of MIDI couplers to connect a Gameport-MIDI cable to a USB-MIDI cable and I then use aconnectgui on my desktop to patch the P133 through to the keyboard when I want it.)