Yes I was just looking at Lotharek's documentation and have - as we speak - just done that mod to the machine featured in the video. Thanks! That deserves a pin.
Yes - I understand that. If the cost of living is high for us, it's high for others too, and high for the people who would be my customers if they had any disposable income left. All the best, and fingers crossed for 2025. :)
Another Banga! I sure wish a run of the OG SIDE 3 could be made if the parts are available. Also, Hoping for a New Year’s Eve special if time permits. Big Thanks FJC!
Completely agree. I found that things started to go south in terms of robustness as far back as SIDE 3.1, but I don't have direct experience of the most recent SIDE 3 cartridge available on PCBWay (which has reverted to the Lattice FPGA). Thanks for the encouragement regarding a New Year's special. It helps!
Great video Jon, nice machine, perhaps I can see a 130XE in my future too... Anyway, wishing you and the family all the very best for Christmas & the New Year. Due to the ever-increasing cost of those annoying necessities such as 'food' I have doubled my Patreon membership. Merry Christmas!🎄
My Side3 sometimes has issues with the alignment of the PCB and the cartridge receiver. It's not centered well in the housing. I can see the wear marks on the PCB connector are off to one side. If I plug it in slightly towards the left of the slot, it will hang the system. It works better and more consistently for me as a naked PCB without the cartridge shell.
Yeah I don't know what the Hell happened with SIDE 3.2 in particular, but the fit and finish is pretty shabby for the money (plus they cheaped out on the FPGA in that particular case).
I've been debating what exactly what I'd want modified in my old 800XL. Basically i'd just want to be able to play my library of atari games off of something like a Side3 cart, and still have the option to boot something from floppy disk. IDK if need 1MB of RAM, or a faster CPU (Rapidus) or stereo POKEY, but i'll probably want to eventually run modern games that have been made recently that may require all of those things. Maybe i'd like some sort of connectivity to my PC so I can transfer files back and forth. I would also LOVE that new custom mechanical keyboard they have for the XEs, but it doesn't exist on the XL models (yet?). If I got an XE does it even matter if it's a 130XE, 65XE or an 800XE after all the upgrades are in? 1MB is still 1MB even if it has stock 128kb or 64kb, right? My old 800XL has 256k w/ RAMBO XL mod, made a good RAMdisk in SpartaDos X.
All you need for games and demos is decent video (UAV, VBXE, Sophia 2, etc), 1MB of RAM, a multi-cart and possibly a PokeyMax. 600XL, 800XL, 1200XL, XEGS, 65XE, 130XE - doesn't matter. Just watch out for NTSC 65XEs which lack the ECI port, in case you ever do want to connect a parallel peripheral in the future (although the XEGS lacks the expansion port as well and this is a non-issue for 99 per cent of users).
I haven't done any upgrades yet but I'm thinking for video, VBXE lets you do the few games that have been updated to take advantage of it, but otherwise I'm not clear on whether Sophia might give a better picture. I would probably be perfectly happy with UAV, and for any light gun games, that's probably the only one that would still work with a CRT monitor (just guessing). PokeyMax would be nice for the few games that support it. I think I would be happy with FujiNet instead of a multicart, as I'm quite used to SIO2PC (I have one of the originals assembled by Nick Kennedy). The U1MB seems like an awesome upgrade, especially if you want to play with different OS versions, as well as the memory upgrade, so I would want that. The limited support for PokeyMax and VBXE makes them less of a priority than if lots of things used them. So UAV and U1MB would probably be my top upgrades, and it's a bit slower, but I would use FujiNet over a multicart, though why not both? I'm not particularly interested in Rapidus.
@@pfcrow Not sure if a light gun will work with VBXE's RGB output on a CRT monitor, although I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. You're correct in suggesting that FujiNet will work quite happily alongside a multicart. For example: I've used FujiNet on U1MB/SIDE3 systems and everything plays nicely together. The nice thing about SIDE3 is that U1MB offers complete control over the presence of the loader and provides an OS-compliant parallel hard disk (you only get this with the AVG cart when the cartridge is in SIDE2 emulation mode).
@@pfcrow Oh yeah, SIO2PC was basically a USB serial cable modified to to connect to the SIO port, and with the right software on the PC side you can emulate disk drives with any images you can download off the internet. I saw a video where you can easily build one of these, though i don't want to sacrifice the few SIO cables i have left. The only issue I could see using that is i still have a working 1050 drive. So i know i could set either the SIO2PC as D1: and the 1050 to D2: so i can boot.. but switching them back around if i wanted to boot to a physical floppy would be kind of a pain. Since some disks have copy protection and have to be booted from them for it to work, not as an image.
So why did he want the replacement FREDDY chip if there was already a working original one? Did the replacement have some features or advantages he wanted.
I didn't go into sufficient detail at 5:34 but the customer's expectation was that the FREDDIE replacement would generally improve system stability. What this is based on I don't know, since nowhere in Lotharek's documentation is the FREDDIE replacement said to be a recommended companion to Rapidus, U1MB or SIDE3. As it happens, the system worked better with the original FREDDIE chip.
@@flashjazzcat I never fully understood the point of the FREDDIE chip, as an 800XL user, because XL's don't have them with having just 64k RAM. So when the XE's came out it was explained to me that FREDDIE was some sort of memory controller, bank switcher, memory management for the extended RAM the 130XE had. So WHY do the 65XE, XEGS, and 800XE models have FREDDY chips when they only have 64k RAM? Aren't those just basically 800XLs? Plus I modified my 800XL with 256k with the RAMBO XL expansion (back in late 80s or early 90s when I was a teen) which was compatible with SpartDosX and had it's own little daughter board plopped inside with a few wires soldered in. Which is nothing like the Freddie Chip, but I can still do RAMDISKS, and bank switching and whatnot.
@@fragalot FREDDIE doesn't handle XE/PORTB bank switching on its own. The EMMU (when present) takes care of that in concert with FREDDIE (which facilitates separate CPU and ANTIC RAM access). FREDDIE is also a DRAM address multiplexer and replaces a fair bit of discreet logic present in the XLs, thereby cutting manufacturing costs. Since most of the 65XEs were actually 130XEs without the extra DRAMs and EMMU, having FREDDIE in all models also cut down on the differences between the two XE models. Not all RAM upgrades support the separate ANTIC/CPU extended memory addressing supported by the 130XE extended memory model, although said access mode is perhaps rarely used. It would have been nice if ANTIC and the CPU had had separate banking registers right from the off, which would have allowed things like keeping the screen memory permanently in extended memory while the CPU was able to access other extended banks without disturbing the display.
These days it isn't (it was mandated to comply with FCC emissions regulations at the time of manufacture). You may get some barely perceptible degree of extra ground--plane effect from having it attached, but generally speaking it's entirely optional nowadays.
Do you know that with VBXE+SRAM you can completly get rid of Freddie?
Yes I was just looking at Lotharek's documentation and have - as we speak - just done that mod to the machine featured in the video. Thanks! That deserves a pin.
Thank you
Thank you!
Have a nice Christmas and a happy new year! Things are tough almost everywhere, hang in there!
Yes - I understand that. If the cost of living is high for us, it's high for others too, and high for the people who would be my customers if they had any disposable income left. All the best, and fingers crossed for 2025. :)
Thanks!
Thank you!
Another Banga! I sure wish a run of the OG SIDE 3 could be made if the parts are available. Also, Hoping for a New Year’s Eve special if time permits. Big Thanks FJC!
Completely agree. I found that things started to go south in terms of robustness as far back as SIDE 3.1, but I don't have direct experience of the most recent SIDE 3 cartridge available on PCBWay (which has reverted to the Lattice FPGA). Thanks for the encouragement regarding a New Year's special. It helps!
Great video Jon, nice machine, perhaps I can see a 130XE in my future too... Anyway, wishing you and the family all the very best for Christmas & the New Year. Due to the ever-increasing cost of those annoying necessities such as 'food' I have doubled my Patreon membership. Merry Christmas!🎄
Thanks so much Darren. All the best to you too. The increased membership is greatly appreciated!
Enjoyed the video. Hope you have a nice Christmas and 2025 is better for you
Many thanks! Very best wishes.
@57:59 LOL
it can become a new meme
@@elTurBoss It already is. The man is one of those rarest of things: a living meme.
21:37 that component you're poking the wire on, the left ferrite bead, looks loose as if it's not soldered to the mobo. Cold solder?
No, it's fine.
My Side3 sometimes has issues with the alignment of the PCB and the cartridge receiver. It's not centered well in the housing. I can see the wear marks on the PCB connector are off to one side. If I plug it in slightly towards the left of the slot, it will hang the system. It works better and more consistently for me as a naked PCB without the cartridge shell.
Yeah I don't know what the Hell happened with SIDE 3.2 in particular, but the fit and finish is pretty shabby for the money (plus they cheaped out on the FPGA in that particular case).
I've been debating what exactly what I'd want modified in my old 800XL. Basically i'd just want to be able to play my library of atari games off of something like a Side3 cart, and still have the option to boot something from floppy disk. IDK if need 1MB of RAM, or a faster CPU (Rapidus) or stereo POKEY, but i'll probably want to eventually run modern games that have been made recently that may require all of those things. Maybe i'd like some sort of connectivity to my PC so I can transfer files back and forth. I would also LOVE that new custom mechanical keyboard they have for the XEs, but it doesn't exist on the XL models (yet?).
If I got an XE does it even matter if it's a 130XE, 65XE or an 800XE after all the upgrades are in? 1MB is still 1MB even if it has stock 128kb or 64kb, right? My old 800XL has 256k w/ RAMBO XL mod, made a good RAMdisk in SpartaDos X.
All you need for games and demos is decent video (UAV, VBXE, Sophia 2, etc), 1MB of RAM, a multi-cart and possibly a PokeyMax. 600XL, 800XL, 1200XL, XEGS, 65XE, 130XE - doesn't matter. Just watch out for NTSC 65XEs which lack the ECI port, in case you ever do want to connect a parallel peripheral in the future (although the XEGS lacks the expansion port as well and this is a non-issue for 99 per cent of users).
I haven't done any upgrades yet but I'm thinking for video, VBXE lets you do the few games that have been updated to take advantage of it, but otherwise I'm not clear on whether Sophia might give a better picture. I would probably be perfectly happy with UAV, and for any light gun games, that's probably the only one that would still work with a CRT monitor (just guessing). PokeyMax would be nice for the few games that support it. I think I would be happy with FujiNet instead of a multicart, as I'm quite used to SIO2PC (I have one of the originals assembled by Nick Kennedy). The U1MB seems like an awesome upgrade, especially if you want to play with different OS versions, as well as the memory upgrade, so I would want that.
The limited support for PokeyMax and VBXE makes them less of a priority than if lots of things used them. So UAV and U1MB would probably be my top upgrades, and it's a bit slower, but I would use FujiNet over a multicart, though why not both? I'm not particularly interested in Rapidus.
@@pfcrow Not sure if a light gun will work with VBXE's RGB output on a CRT monitor, although I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. You're correct in suggesting that FujiNet will work quite happily alongside a multicart. For example: I've used FujiNet on U1MB/SIDE3 systems and everything plays nicely together. The nice thing about SIDE3 is that U1MB offers complete control over the presence of the loader and provides an OS-compliant parallel hard disk (you only get this with the AVG cart when the cartridge is in SIDE2 emulation mode).
@@pfcrow Oh yeah, SIO2PC was basically a USB serial cable modified to to connect to the SIO port, and with the right software on the PC side you can emulate disk drives with any images you can download off the internet. I saw a video where you can easily build one of these, though i don't want to sacrifice the few SIO cables i have left.
The only issue I could see using that is i still have a working 1050 drive. So i know i could set either the SIO2PC as D1: and the 1050 to D2: so i can boot.. but switching them back around if i wanted to boot to a physical floppy would be kind of a pain. Since some disks have copy protection and have to be booted from them for it to work, not as an image.
So why did he want the replacement FREDDY chip if there was already a working original one? Did the replacement have some features or advantages he wanted.
I didn't go into sufficient detail at 5:34 but the customer's expectation was that the FREDDIE replacement would generally improve system stability. What this is based on I don't know, since nowhere in Lotharek's documentation is the FREDDIE replacement said to be a recommended companion to Rapidus, U1MB or SIDE3. As it happens, the system worked better with the original FREDDIE chip.
@@flashjazzcat I never fully understood the point of the FREDDIE chip, as an 800XL user, because XL's don't have them with having just 64k RAM.
So when the XE's came out it was explained to me that FREDDIE was some sort of memory controller, bank switcher, memory management for the extended RAM the 130XE had. So WHY do the 65XE, XEGS, and 800XE models have FREDDY chips when they only have 64k RAM? Aren't those just basically 800XLs?
Plus I modified my 800XL with 256k with the RAMBO XL expansion (back in late 80s or early 90s when I was a teen) which was compatible with SpartDosX and had it's own little daughter board plopped inside with a few wires soldered in. Which is nothing like the Freddie Chip, but I can still do RAMDISKS, and bank switching and whatnot.
@@fragalot FREDDIE doesn't handle XE/PORTB bank switching on its own. The EMMU (when present) takes care of that in concert with FREDDIE (which facilitates separate CPU and ANTIC RAM access). FREDDIE is also a DRAM address multiplexer and replaces a fair bit of discreet logic present in the XLs, thereby cutting manufacturing costs. Since most of the 65XEs were actually 130XEs without the extra DRAMs and EMMU, having FREDDIE in all models also cut down on the differences between the two XE models. Not all RAM upgrades support the separate ANTIC/CPU extended memory addressing supported by the 130XE extended memory model, although said access mode is perhaps rarely used. It would have been nice if ANTIC and the CPU had had separate banking registers right from the off, which would have allowed things like keeping the screen memory permanently in extended memory while the CPU was able to access other extended banks without disturbing the display.
Is the factory shielding necessary? Wondering if I need to put both large pieces back on as i forgot....800XL
These days it isn't (it was mandated to comply with FCC emissions regulations at the time of manufacture). You may get some barely perceptible degree of extra ground--plane effect from having it attached, but generally speaking it's entirely optional nowadays.
@@flashjazzcat Saved me work. She works fine but wanted to be sure. Thank you
Based on the MoBo, that's a 0XE.
Ha - I see what you did there.