I'm a geek, doing geeky things and often write some short articles to remind me what I've done and to potentially help other geeks out if they have similar interests....
Atari 800 XL - Part 2 (SIO2PC USB cable)
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I was trawling the internet, as you do....
I found a few Atari 800XL related web-pages and YouTube videos, thought I would share them here:
That then led me onto this cable video:
The interesting thing about this video is - that is NOT just a bog-standard ordinary USB cable.... no no no. That has a USB to Serial converter built into it, that's why the USB part is a bit larger / longer than normal. Well, funny enough, when I was looking for the ESP8266-01 programming device I found such a cable and it has been sitting on my desk waiting for a purpose... I now have one!
I also mentioned HERE about having a cut/worn SIO cable, well that makes for a perfect cable to cut up and join to the USB. What's not to like?
Okay, I confess, I did actually "finish for the day" and went to bed... alas, I did not sleep after a couple of hours, I gave in...and went back into the "office", fired up the soldering iron and made the cable (in 1 go), then went back to bed, slept for 4-5hours, then woke up, plugged in the UBuntu laptop and then... well, you'll have to scroll down to see what happened next!
Well, there's the already damaged SIO cable..
...and there's the USB with Serial converter contained within, the give-away is the nice set of cables hanging out the other end!
If it all goes pear-shaped, I do actually have a USB to Serial converter board right here, just connect the right wires up and away we go - might make this as a version 2?
Right, time to chop...from the SIO, all we are interested in is the black / green and orange wires.
BLACK------BLACK (GND)
GREEN------WHITE (TX)
ORANGE----GREEN (RX)
That's it, don't need anything else.
Not my best soldering, but it is about 01:00am or something... it works, I gave them a lot of wiggling around / tugging to make sure they weren't going anywhere.
and there we have it... a complete cable. Of course I wrapped it up in about 3feet of electrical tape before I've even tested it - I have confidence.... gulp!....
Right, where was that website again?
Take note there are actually 2 github repos, the "other" one has an older version (v4) on it - not sure of the difference, will let you know if I need to know.
I then noted that you needed some pre-installed libs as it uses QT, it errors on qt-default, just remove that reference.
I found this post quite a bit later on:
As I already use that laptop for Arduino IDE, I had my user in the dialout group already, but I expect when I do this from the Raspberry Pi, I'll have to remember to add this step.
Now, let's start up the app... yay! there it is. okay, the laptop clock does not lie! (top-middle)
Kind of intuitive... ish.... of course I've not read any instructions.
Without USB plugged in - then with USB plugged in - and there we have it, the USB / Serial adapter is detected. yay!
Yep - it is indeed plugged in. I can confirm that.
I then changed the setup/config to have 'ttyUSB0' as the port (and see later - I should have chanegd a few more things here)
I get some indicators that it should work fine. however, I should really go to bed / sleep now.
Right, let's add some ATR files into the Disk drive slots.
There is the laptop with the cable - I'm glad I didn't trim it down too small!
Okay, after 10 minutes of fiddling around (NOT with the hardware, but the software config), I "see" data being sent from the PC laptop to the Atari 800 XL....
There we have it - it is indeed running JOUST that I just transmitted down the new cable. The cable works! wow! first time.
So, what config tweaks did I need to make?
Well, I needed to make these changes above for it to work properly.
Also, I checked a couple of these settings so that I can "see" the data values being sent down the wire.
and there we go... I see the debug output showing all is working as it should. Data is transmitted down the cable, received and as far as the Atari 800XL is concerned it received that data from a 5 1/4" disk from within a 1050 Disk drive.
There we have "The Last V8" loading from the PC Laptop and running on the Atari 800 XL.
You know, if you think about it - that SIO connector on the back of the Atari was probably the great-grand-father of the USB. huh... 1979 technology concepts that they are still faffing about with (USB-C) today and attempting to standarise on. Well, as shown, good old serial connections TX/RX is all you really need, all the other layers are just complexity for the sake of it.
As before, here are a couple of moving picture videos to prove it happened for real (apologies for the bad camera work, it was early and I'd been up until late):
I then discovered that there is an UBuntu atari 800 XL emulator (of course there is) and this page, if you scroll down, gives you what the KEYS are to get into the menus for configuration and the all important F1 (setup/config), F2 [option], F3 [select], F4 [start] and F5 [reset], along with ALT+Y to select the system type and ALT+C to put a cartridge in place...
Appendix B has a wonderful section about "Human Engineering":
Right, on that note - I noticed that there was a Raspberry Pi version of RespeQT that can be used... well, it seems a little bit of a "waste" to use a big old laptop for such a trivial task, when I could use one of my "spare" RPis... that has a tiny little screen attached with an 8GB SD Card (more than enough storage!) and could also potentially be powered by a LiPo battery I have on my desk.... hmmm.... do I go play with that over xmas or wait for the "proper one" to arrive in the post early next year?....
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