25 August 2019 meetup

We had another great meetup at Gary’s today and it was good to see Christoph, Gary, Neil, Paul as well as newcomer Robert (and wife) there during the day. As there are now 2 Rob’s in the group, I will refer to Robert as Rob H in the meeting notes.

It has been a while since we have met up so it was good to catch up with everyone.

Christoph said he has been working on Falcon ports of some Atari games. I am looking forward to seeing these.

Rob H has an Atari STF he has received all the way from Italy. He also had a Marpet 4mb RAM upgrade with him so we got that fitted and so now his Atari has 4mb of memory ready for him to play with. Rob H has a number of Amiga’s and this is his first Atari and it was good to see him and his wife there today. Rob H is going to update one of his Gotek drives with FlashFloppy firmware for use in his new Atari. Rob H’s wife also took a few photos, which hopefully he will share with us.

We chatted a bit about Atari hardware and modifications. Thanks to Gary and family for the food and drinks. As always a great host.

Paul and Gary worked on my dead STE board and made some progress in the diagnosing the faulty board. The CPU is in Halt state and some testing was done on the connectivity to the TOS ROMs from CPU. More work still needed to get this solved and I would like to thank Paul for his time spent investigating.

Rob was given an old Oscilloscope which is not working and so I brought this along with me today and Paul quickly opened it up to look inside. Paul has kindly said that he will look see if it will work again and then this can be used by the group for diagnosing hardware issues.

Gary and Rob H have requested 6 chip TOS 1.04 for their new Atari STF computers so I will get these created and ready to replace that old TOS 1.0 that they currently have.

Neil has promised to bring along his Atari XL once he has the new drive system and looking forward to seeing this all working.

Gary finally powered up his new Atari SH-205 hard drive which we opened up as it was not working. Paul found that the power supply was not connected internally and re-connected it so the drive now powered up. Paul had to leave but Gary and I carried on only to find that the drive had no partitions on it and HD Driver would not create new partitions. Not sure if the internal drive is faulty or not so I left Gary to do some more testing on it.

We had fun today and look forward to the next meetup.