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Atari Portfolio

This item popped up on eBay recently and I was very happy to have my offer accepted. The unit came even with a serial adapter! I quickly found 3 AA batteries and inserted them...

The Atari Portfolio is an IBM-compatible 'Palm-top' PC from 1989. If you were paying attention whilst watching Terminator 2, then you would've noticed it was used to break into an ATM. You can even still download the software they used to fake the hack. The unit itself is just bigger than a VHS cassette, but the profile changes once you attach the serial port adapter.

The unit is DOS 2.x compatible, with a few apps already built in. There's a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar and phone book. When I read that it had these features, I instinctively just typed edit on the command line when the unit first powered up. The response of Bad command or program not found came as a slight surprise, but then I thought that it must have another name as it's not official MS-DOS. I then tried ed, editor, nano, emacs, vim... all to no avail. It wasn't until I looked a little closer at the keyboard that I saw that 'Editor' was the Atari-text (the function that executes when the Atari button is held down) under the E key! Nice! It's actually multitasking?

Using the text editor

Just because I found this slightly harder-than-expected, here's a quick primer. The text editor is actually really cool and can be opened by pressing Atari+E. Use Fn-1 (aka. F1) to get to the File menu to start a new file, open a file, etc. F2 gives you a help menu and I seriously recommend that you go through the items in the list. There's a ton of shortcut keys that'll come in handy. F3 is the clipboard menu with options for copying and pasting. At any time, Escape will exit menus and even exit the app right back to the command prompt.

Note, when opening files: if you don't know the file name then just type an asterisk and press enter to get a list of 'openable' files from the hard drive. For fun, I created a simple text file with a random sentence and saved it to C:\. This became useful when testing the serial port.

Note that, at any point in time, Fn + O will turn the unit off. Spacebar will wake it back up.

Initiating serial communications

My unit came totally blank, so I had to fumble my way through getting files transferred over to it. For those playing at home, what follows is the most-simple step-by-step process to get it up and running. These steps were borrowed and modified from Paul Rickard's blog post titled Atari Portfolio Serial Interface: How To Get Terminal Software.

Firstly, we'll need a cable to connect your PC to the Atari. I happened to have a USB-Serial adapter that Windows 10 was happy to use, so I plugged that in and grabbed the relevant converters to get from DB-9 to the DB-25 Null-Modem adapter that I had in the junk box.

Download and extract CoolTerm and get it up and running. Set the 10ms delay option and choose 300 BAUD rate with no hardware controls.

Power up the Atari and open Set Up via Atari+S. Configure the serial port to BAUD 300, leaving the other settings alone. Make sure you select Initialize! at the end. Next , open the Editor and type a sentence, saving the file to C:\. It'll default to unnamed.txt. With CoolTerm open and connected, type the following:

copy unnamed.txt com1

If you're in luck, the file will have been spat out to the CoolTerm console. If not, then go over everything again... specifically making sure that your cabling is correct!

Transferring actual files

For those that have a valid connection, you can now try and transfer files. Using the DOS copy method above, I tried to copy files bigger than 1kb, but it always failed. Even with CoolTerms transmit delays, I couldn't successfully do it. This is probably the reason why Paul has used xload/xterm. So, the next step is to set up a proper terminal app on the Atari. To do this, you'll need to download both xload and xterm and extract them somewhere.

We'll first use the basic DOS copy command to get xload.com over. It's a tiny file that does the same as DOS copy, but has the ability to copy larger files. To get this over, type the following in the Atari, but don't hit enter:

copy com1 xload.com

Now, on CoolTerm, choose Connection -> Send Text/Binary File. Set the filter to all files and find xload.com. Select it, but don't hit Open just yet. You'll want to hit enter on the Atari, wait around 3 seconds and then hit Open on CoolTerm.

The Atari wont flinch, but you'll hopefully have a transfer window in CoolTerm flash past (it doesn't stay open as the file is so small) and the file will be transferred. A few seconds later, DOS will drop you back to the prompt and you can list your files to see what copied over. If you have an xload.com with a size of 178 bytes, then you've succeeded. Type xload and see what happens. If it has failed, or it's the wrong size, then repeat the steps above until it works!

With xload now on your Portfolio, you can use CoolTerm once more to send the larger xterm.com file. xload will only ever copy serial bytes to a file called xterm.com, so don't try and use it for anything else. So, in CoolTerm, select to transfer a file and get ready to hit Open on xterm.com. On the Atari, type xload and press enter. Once you see the screen below, hit Open on CoolTerm. Note that at this point you have the option to switch the BAUD on both units to 1200... I left it at 300 for safety-sake.

After a successful copy, you should have xterm.com in your C:\ at a ginormous size of 2944 bytes.

Type xterm and hit enter... crossing your fingers at the same time.

Nice... trashed binary. I re-did everything again and sent exactly the same... maybe I left it a second longer between hitting enter on xload and choosing Open on CoolTerm...

Yessss! We have a terminal application. xterm on the Atari supports XModem file transfers, but I couldn't work out how to do this with CoolTerm. I was on Windows 10 and managed to find two applications that can do XModem: Hyper Terminal and ExtraPuTTY. For fun... we'll use the former:

Hah. It still runs on W10... so ugly. It'll throw crappy errors at the start, telling you that you need a modem installed... just ignore/skip/cancel where appropriate.

Configure your serial port exactly as you'd done in CoolTerm, turning off any flow control. You can then open xterm on the Atari, choose F2 and send the files from Hypertrm via XModem.

If it's working, then you'll see the dots across the screen... if you don't send via XModem, then the guts of the file will be printed out to the Atari and shit will get weird!

Transferred and executable!

Games and other software

Most Atari Portfolio software is compressed as LZH. 7-Zip had trouble with most of the files I downloaded, so I had to grab an archiver and do the extraction on the unit. As that there's very little spare space on C:\, this became quite a shuffle. For example, there's a file called yankee.lzh which plays the Yankee Doodle Dandy tune. To decompress it, you'll need lzhe.com on the Atari as well. Transfer both files using xterm and then try and extract the files by running lzhe yankee.lzh. It'll fail on the last file as xterm + xload + lzhe + yankee.lzh + half of the extracted files take up the entire internal storage. To fix this, delete xterm as you don't need it anymore. Leave xload as it'll help when you need to bring xterm back. Inside the LZH file is ptune and it's documentation. The .doc file is actually useless to us, so delete it and then use the editor to create a file of the same name with 0 bytes in size. When you then try to extract the contents of Yankee again, it'll ask to overwrite, but just say no. Finally you'll have yankee.bat that, when executed, will play the tune (poorly) and present the lyrics...

All of this shuffling would be circumvented if I had a memory card in the left-hand slot!

Memory cards

Atari chose the Mitsubishi Bee Card as their memory card type. This card allowed sizes ranging from 32Kb to 128Kb. Any memory cards with larger sizes were 'banked' and required powering off, switching banks and rebooting. The Bee Card was also used in MSX and Korg/Roland music equipment, and so you'll find that there are a variety of options when trying to source cards. There are also home-brew multi-cards, such as this one, if you have the cash and if COVID won't stop your shipments.

Quantum Bigfoot 4320AT

I remember these drives... they became available around the time I had a Cyrix CPU and an S3 graphics card. We were not willing to cough up for a proper Pentium ~200mhz. Anyway, these were the budget drives also, making use of space instead of enhancing technology to fit more bytes in smaller places!

The Quantum Bigfoot pictured above is the 4320AT model, meaning it's listed capacity is 4.3gb. Of course, partitions never manage to give a drive's entire space to the user, so a FAT32 partition via USB-IDE via Windows 10 formatted out to 4.03gb.

This drive usually wouldn't even warrant a mention, but this model has a specifically interesting feature. It also seems quite rare, since googling didn't result in too many versions of this style of Bigfoot. Looking above, you'll see a transparent sticker over a window in the drive. It's actually a window that exposes the read heads! That's a really strong sticker... or so I hope, I haven't tried to remove it. Regardless, it lets you actually see the head has stopped when it's powered off... better yet, you can even watch it move when it's in operation!

Totally random! And amazing to watch!

Atari Controller Test Rig

Long-story-short, I've got a new night-job, bringing a large quantity of Atari-related paraphernalia back to life. I've done it before with the 2600 Jr, and I'm ready to do it again, and again, and again, with this batch.

First up is a box of gamepads and controllers. My initial plan was to get one of the Atari units in a known-state, and then test the controllers from there... but that could lead to issues if the console wasn't actually 100%. Instead, why not just rig up a DB-9 port to a simple 5v LED circuit to test each button?

Google will produce a crap-load of results for Atari Joystick Pinout, so find one of them and get started. I chose this one. It turns out the controllers are very straight forward... they just act as a conduit to ground. Pin 8 is the common ground wire and all buttons (directional-pad inclusive) just join their respective pin to this wire.

The above rig was therefore constructed. Voltage is supplied from my desktop power supply and a miriad of LEDs were selected from the junk box. A selection of 48ohm resistors tie them all to the 5v rail. Their anodes all go to a respective pin on the controller port... starting with Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B from the left-most green LED. Of course, A and B are contentious, as the 2600 only utilises one fire button. Even better, the DB-9 socket also supports trigger, so that's the clear LED placed awkwardly on the left-hand side.

First controller to be tested was an Atari gamepad and it instantly misbehaved. Upon opening it, I found that both A and B buttons were tied high with resistors.

A little googlin' declares that these gamepads are actually for the Atari 7800, which supported two buttons. They've nicely made them backwards compatible though, allowing either button to be the standard button for the Atari 2600 jr. Regardless, those pull-up resistors meant that my A and B button LEDs were always dimly-lit!

Upon pressing either button, their respective LED fully-lit, and so did the left-most trigger LED. This makes me think that trigger is the actual 'button' for the Atari 2600 Jr and A/B are for newer systems. Regardless, the unit still had an issue. For those keenly-observing the photos up until this point, you'll have guessed that the directional pad's right button was crapola. It worked sometimes... and then it worked all the time when you jiggled the cable at the entry-point to the controller. So, what to do? Truncate!

Take a good length off, away from the game pad. Cable fractures, when entering casing/housing, are a very standard thing. Usually, very much like this unit, there's 'protection' inside the casing where the cable is held in-place to prevent it from being wrenched out and putting pressure on internal components. This 'protection' in this case is a zig-zag of pins to hold the cable in place without putting serious pressure on it.

For this unit, this 'protection' has done its job and kept the internals safe, but the cable has instead formed an issue directly after it exits the controller case. Here, thanks to humans like me, waving the controller around (rather than pressing the correct buttons), causes undue stress internally and ruptures the wires. In this case, it actually severed the wire that conducts a directional-right press.

As above, strip the newly truncated cable and tin all ends. Once done, de-solder the original chunk of cable, re-soldering the newly cut ends in the same order. Make sure to keep the white bridging wire between both PCBs. Finally, run the cable through the zig-zag and hold it there for a bit to make sure it understands its new role. If you just place it and let go then the cable tends to want to return to it's standard straight-line form. It's actually tough for a thick cable to make those curves, but as mentioned above, it's for the sake of the guts of the contorller.

Finally, test, test, test and test again! Ah... that GREEN RIGHT LED is beautiful.

Atari 2600 Jr – Recapping + Controllers + Composite

Another one of these little units came across my workbench. This time it was a full set with two joysticks and a lot of games... including a boxed version of Frogger! I'd played with one of these before in my previous-previous apartment, so it must be nearly 4 years ago that I met my first Atari. This one wasn't as clean-and-tidy as the previous version, but it still worked nicely.

The first task was to upgrade the unit to composite output, so I jumped over to my previous post on the topic. I purchased all the components needed from Jaycar and, just before I was about to solder to the pins on the IC, realised that the actual mod instructions showed you where to solder. Not to the pins of the IC, but to the legs of the surrounding resistors.... the diagram is even colour-coded. I therefore also didn't have to scratch back a ground pad either!

In no time, the composite signal was being sent out and my TV Tuner card was picking it up nicely. Whilst I was performing the mod, I noticed that the surrounding electrolytic capacitors weren't looking the cleanest, so I replaced those too. After another trip to Jaycar, purchasing 4x 4.7uf and 1x 2200uf (unfortunately they didn't stock double-ended!) capacitors, I went about removing the old ones and soldering in the new ones. Solder wick really works well here to clean the holes in the PCB prior installing the new capacitors. The positive pins are also nicely marked on the PCB.

With everything replaced, there was no noticeable change in video quality or system stability, but neither were a problem to start with. This was more for longevity! I slapped in the multi-cart and tried Pitfall out. The Quickshot controller worked OK, but felt very sticky and the buttons weren't responding to each keypress... what to do? Pull it apart.

The board was not clean... so I grabbed some isopropyl wipes and gave it a good once-over. I also re-soldered the main A button wire as it had previously been compressed by the case and didn't look like it'd hold out much longer. With the unit back together, I could now jump on-command with the button on the base, but the trigger button up top wasn't overly responsive. The stick itself has three screws that hold it together, so I popped them out to have a look.

Turns out the top button had been mashed to within an inch of its life and the previous players had actually punched a hole in the PCB, removing the trace that the button was meant to make contact with.

A little bit of solder was added, which caused a height increase of the pad. I was slightly concerned that this would mean the button could mis-fire, but the spring prevented that from occurring... instead it just meant the button didn't have to travel as far to make contact. I could now jump through Pitfall reliably! Mario Bros was also now a lot more fun!

I suppose the final step now is to find a new ball for the top of this chewed-on stick!

Sega Mega Drive – Composite + Region-Free

On a total tagent from recent Amiga stuff, I found this in a box whilst I was moving house. I'd totally forgotten that I'd picked it up from a flea market prior to the Christmas Trip overseas.

I grew up a Nintendo-kiddie with Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, so the likes of California Games (oops, that's master-system-vintage) and Sonic were a weird adventure whenever I went to friend's houses. This unit arrived slightly scratched-up, but in perfect working condition. It came with a power pack and RF switch, but I wanted Composite output... so I started googlin' for hacks. Then I looked at the back of the machine and realised it had an 8-pin DIN for A/V output. A quick search found off-the-shelf cables, as I didn't have a properly degree'd DIN plug available that'd fit the socket. Your standard 8-pin DIN has the top two outer pins at a different degree and therefore wont fit.

Instead I had to make one from a 5-pin DIN as it turns out the pinout of the A/V Output port has all the pins I'll need at 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9'oclock!

I purchased a 5-pin DIN port from Jaycar and hacked a standard stereo composite RCA video cable in half. From there, I joined ground together and soldered that to pin 3 on the 5-pin DIN. I then twisted L+R together, as this unit produced MONO sound and soldered that to the left-most pin, when looking at the back of the plug. Finally, the central wire from the yellow video plug was soldered to the right-most pin.

From here, the unit worked perfectly! Of course, to test I only had one game...

To make this fit, I had to actually gently file the cartridge slot.

Turns out the japanese-release games are square, whereas the Australian (and probably elsewhere) release carts have 2 rounded corners. After making it fit, the game just worked... although it might play slightly faster on a 60hz clock!