My two projects, can anyone help?

[Krisjohn]

Wonderful timing on these forums!

Here are the two projects I'm looking at. If anyone can help with parts, software, ideas, I'm all ears.

* Project 1 - Atari 800XL dial-up BBS.
- Take one Atari 800XL
- Add a MyIDE cart, an IDE-to-CF adapter, an 850 interface and an old modem.
- Use the bonus phone line that comes with a new ADSL connection (slow but it will do data)
- Add BBS software to taste (Probably BBS Express 850)
- All solid state, no moving or noisy parts.

This one's more or less in hand.

* Project 2 - C64 telnet BBS.
- Centering around an RR-Net ethernet cartridge.
- No Wintel PC should be involved.
- No moving parts, no noise -- solution must run silent.
- Possibly the RR-Net enabled C64 acts as a bridge to a second C64 actually running the BBS.
- Same sort of IDE trick to use a CF card as storage. Since IDE adapters appear to use the same port at the RR-Net, then two C64s is actually very convenient.

If anyone has any ideas on this second project, please post.

[Sysop Fox-1]

Krisjohn said:

* Project 1 - Atari 800XL dial-up BBS.
- Take one Atari 800XL
- Add a MyIDE cart, an IDE-to-CF adapter, an 850 interface and an old modem.
- Use the bonus phone line that comes with a new ADSL connection (slow but it will do data)
- Add BBS software to taste (Probably BBS Express 850)
- All solid state, no moving or noisy parts.

-An Atari XL can never be a problem. Look at eBay and you'll have one. A 130XE or 65XE will also do.
-Old modems are also not that of a problem I guess, an 850 is a little less common but not a real problem on eBay or other marketplace.
-BBS Express 850. I ran it, way back, it works, but is very outdated. It was replaced by BBS Express! Professional (which I have now). It's a commercial product. Take a look at cth.dtdns.net/ for more info.
-IDE interface... There are (were) several, but most are discontinued. The MyIDE is an 8-bit IDE interface, so you can only use half the space of a 16 bit IDE device. Contact the developer. It seems he did make a new run at the meanwhile, since the last time I talked with him he was sold out. Check www.mr-atari.com/ You can get an IDE-2-CF adapter in any good computershop.

[Krisjohn]

As I say, Project 1 is more or less in hand. I already have the 800XL and I just need to borrow a friend's paypal account to pay for three other parts.

Thanks for the heads up on the MyIDE cart. I'm only intending to use a 128MB CF card, so I don't know if that means I'll get all of it or half, but 64MB is still plenty for an 8-bit BBS.

The C64 is really going to be the tricky project.

[Sysop Fox-1]

Krisjohn said:

I already have the 800XL and I just need to borrow a friend's paypal account.
Thanks for the heads up on the MyIDE cart. I'm only intending to use a 128MB CF card, so I don't know if that means I'll get all of it or half, but 64MB is still plenty for an 8-bit BBS.

I noticed the "already have 800XL" note a bit too late :-)
AFAIK all CF cards are 16 bit, so yes, you'll end up with 64MB storage....
Hmm, my Atari BBS runs on a 130XE with 320KB and 676MB SCSI harddisk. Due the nature of the O.S. I can only enable 8 harddisk partitions of 16MB each, with the RamDisk as the 9th drive, but it was not enough so I had to code an on-the-fly partition swapper for the BBS to swap in/out the downloadsections at the right moments.
If you don't have a download section (or a very small one) 64MB may be just enough. Also depends on the kind of BBS software you want to use. BBS Express Pro! (4.0 or up) supports many things like ASCII, ATASCII, ANSI, VT modes, CGS, etc... all in both 40 and 80 columns, so if you want to enable all those features it means you'll have to "draw" every menu screen in the BBS multiple times, taking up extra diskspace.
If you're really interested in the MyIDE, ask Sijmen (the developer) about issues when usied with SpartaDos. I know there were incompatibility issues with this DOS in the early stage of developement, and if you want to run a BBS you more or less have to use SpartaDos.
I'll meet Sijmen this Sunday at the Dutch annual Atari meeting. I hope I have the time to talk with him as I have some questions for him also :-)

[Krisjohn]

Primarily it will be a trading post for retro hardware. Secondarily I'm going to aim for some old games. Files are a distant third.

[Sysop Fox-1]

Krisjohn said:

Primarily it will be a trading post for retro hardware. Secondarily I'm going to aim for some old games. Files are a distant third.

In that case 64MB should be more then enough I guess. At the last meeting we were talking about those CF cards as some users are using them for a while. These cards have a write limit. After xxxx-writes to such card it stops functioning. In our case the BBS uses memory-overlays (swapfile) on the harddisk which are used very frequently. You can figure out the rest....