CosmosEx - new device for your Atari ST

[AdamK]

Just got an email from Jookie stating he will have to close down his webshop for a while.

I have to close the business license (self-employment) by the end of this month, so I guess the last order can be made on 29.6.2017, and then the shop will be closed down. If I wouldn't close it at the end of this month, I will be paying 150 Euro to national social insurance company every month, even if I don't make a single Euro for that month, so it's cheaper to close this down. After that I can't legally sell the anything, so I have no idea what I will do with all the things that won't be sold. That's why I'm trying to sell everything I can.

EU-regulations and worthless, greedy politicians extorting the little guy as usual...

Huh? Incredible.... Isn't the EU having huge unemployment ?
They should be giving money instead to people who are being entrepreneur to continue in business.
Amazing, no wonder the state of the Union.

I would not call producing CosmosEx being an entrepreneur, it is more like an extended hobby. But, in most countries, hobby of such scale requires business licence. It is not EU requirement, but in some EU countries, you need to pay some fixed taxes when you operate under business licence. For example, in Poland it is about 200 euro each month (this are mandatory social security taxes). But, for people starting their first business, there is starting period (in Poland 2 years) where you have those taxes limited (to about 20euro per month in Poland). I thins this happened to Jookie - he started with lower taxes, and after some period of time passed, he would have to pay much higher taxes, which you can't really do if what you do is not real business, but an extended hobby.

[dhedberg]

Well, there's a lot to be blamed on the EU, but in this case we're dealing with a local (state) law/regulation. Regardless, I totally agree that enforcing a company to pay social insurances or any other fees that are not related to the company's turnover/profit/salaries is completely insane in every aspect.

[wongck]

If one is trying to do something than just doing nothing.... being entrepreneur.... the 1st step to growing into a business.
Small no matter how small will have some effect... think of the propagation effect downstream.
He needs to get the components ( yeah made in china but he can choose to get from EU ), the logistic, other supporting industries etc, is the country. He has more money to spend food, beers, family that spurs the economy.
There is a pyramid effect.

It may be a local/state law... but the local law is supporting the country.... and country may be unfortunately supporting the union in some ways.... that is i turn supporting the other/rest of it's members.

Unions has it good points, standing together united and making sure there is peace.

Sorry for OT.

But I think in any government, the government want to put taxes on everything it can think of regardless.

[Gaiyan]

I've a registered business in Finland and I operate at such a scale where there are absolutely no extra costs to running it. So EU has nothing to do with it. I find the government encourages entrepreneurs there.

[wongck]

That's a great thing for a country to do.

[calimero]

OFFTOPIC:

All this money-as-mediator-in-human-to-human-interaction is bullshit in today world of see of available data.

If Google/Facebook/Apple (and USA government on top) want, they could calculate exactly how many minutes you need to perform job that you hate or love to get what you exactly want.
"Free market, money, regulations, externality to system"... all can go to history IF these companies is willing to make calculation out of data that we put in THEIR system over internet.

e.g. - Google know that you want brand new Porsche (would be, btw, pass- per-se in this futuristic society), and how badly you want it, and it can calculate how much time you need to perform certain job that you hate (and to compare your hate against that job by other humans so it can get a "hate" score, to put it on comparison scale) so as a price you will get Porsche (or whatever you want). There is no need for this approximative system like we have for past 200 years. Especial when we reach point that Adam Smith mark as most negative - to have monopolies in free market.

EDIT:

two days later, after my post, this video come: Psychographics 101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoMI05ptLpk&t=1049s
Watch first 15 minutes and you will be see what I am talking about.

[qq1975b]

Does someone know if there is a length limitation to the ACSI-SCSI cable of the CosmosEx Falcon version?

Thank you.

[Foxie]

Sorry for the thread bump, but I wanted to add this:

Jookie, would be possible to use that device as an graphics card?

It could be done, but it would lower your hard disk transfer speed and it probably wouldn't work well with existing games and demos (if it would be done through ACSI port), but if you are asking only about supporting new stuff, then you could get interesting things out of it (although there would be lack of ST software for that).

I'd be very, very, very, very interested in such an extension! I pondered the possibility in this thread:

http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 72#p339572

The way I imagined it would be to tap into the VDI calls, and send the drawing instructions (not bitmap data) over the ACSI bus to the Raspberry Pi. The Pi could then use a simple off-the-shelf graphics library to actually draw those primitives to the full-HD screen using its extremely fast GPU. While you wouldn't be able to bit-bang the frame buffer from the ST side, I don't think that matters since software running on a graphics card doesn't bit-bang the frame buffer either (it has to go through VDI - since it knows nothing about how the frame buffer is organised, some cards are chunky - nibble and byte - and some are planar).

Not only would it easily add full HD support to an ST without any internal soldering, it would be absolutely blazingly fast! Since the Pi can draw so quickly, I reckon a simple 1040 would feel about as fast as a TT. A much better solution than adding ET4000 graphics cards - and a lot of people do that so there's definitely demand. Fitting an ET4000 to a 1040 is an enormous pain, so it would be the perfect solution for those who don't own MegaSTEs or TTs.

Obviously it wouldn't work with games and demos. But lots of people use their STs for productivity (especially music), and I think any music software that supports a graphics card would also work with such a system.

I'm not sure I can help much with implementing this. I'm reasonably fluent with 68000 assembly and C, and my main area is hardware. I might be able to do the drawing software on the Raspberry Pi side - I don't know much about Linux internals, but I've used a few graphics libraries before. My sticking point is figuring out how to tap into VDI - I know very little about how it works. I suppose you could just install a new handler for that particular trap but I'd need to do quite a lot of research and I'd need the assistance of someone deeply familiar with VDI.

I don't think it would necessarily cause a major problem for hard disk speed. When there's lots of activity on the screen (especially blitting bitmap data from ST RAM to the frame buffer) the bus will be busy. But most programs do very little screen updating when loading/saving. Cubase Audio might be slightly more difficult because it needs to update the screen and read/write the disk when recording and playing. But even then, Cubase is mostly just doing simple line drawing and rectangle fill operations - the commands to initiate those drawing operations are tiny and would use hardly any bandwidth.


I have another completely unrelated suggestion too. Seeing as it allows connection via SCSI, does that mean you can use it as a USB mass storage device for other SCSI hosts? I'm thinking particularly of musical instruments like samplers. If so, it potentially opens up another much bigger market! There do exist micro SD card to SCSI adapters, but they're still relatively expensive and don't accept USB. Dealing with micro SD cards is just an enormous pain. Of course, it would be even better if you could tell Linux to mount a network share and mount a hard disk image on an external server. Samplers use non-standard file systems so I don't expect to have file-level access, but it would still be great to network it to another computer which hosts the hard disk image.

One feature which would be really handy for sampler support would be the ability to emulate a CD-ROM drive using an ISO image. You often need to load sample CDs into a sampler - one of the existing SD to SCSI converters allows this by formatting the SD card in a special way. But it would be so much more convenient to bung an ISO file on a USB stick and have the Raspberry Pi detect it and mount it. I think CD-ROM emulation is very similar to emulating a hard disk, just with a different sector size. Again, samplers use non-standard file systems so it would need to just make the ISO available to the host on a sector-by-sector basis - not try to interpret the file system.

[Foxie]

Does someone know if there is a length limitation to the ACSI-SCSI cable of the CosmosEx Falcon version?

Thank you.

I'm not familiar with the electrical specs of the CosmosEx, but it's possible to take a guess based on cable capacitance and pullup resistance. If we assume 165 ohms termination resistance to 2.5V and 100pF/metre cable, that's about 32ns to reach a logic high with 1 metre of cable. I can't remember for sure what speed SCSI is used on the Falcon, is it SCSI-2? If so, that's a clock rate of 10MHz. You need to meet a rise time of 100ns for reliable transfers at this speed. Therefore you can have about 3 metres of cable.

For SCSI-1, those lengths will be doubled. If the termination resistance is higher, the cable length decreases dramatically.

[qq1975b]

Does someone know if there is a length limitation to the ACSI-SCSI cable of the CosmosEx Falcon version?

Thank you.

I'm not familiar with the electrical specs of the CosmosEx, but it's possible to take a guess based on cable capacitance and pullup resistance. If we assume 165 ohms termination resistance to 2.5V and 100pF/metre cable, that's about 32ns to reach a logic high with 1 metre of cable. I can't remember for sure what speed SCSI is used on the Falcon, is it SCSI-2? If so, that's a clock rate of 10MHz. You need to meet a rise time of 100ns for reliable transfers at this speed. Therefore you can have about 3 metres of cable.

For SCSI-1, those lengths will be doubled. If the termination resistance is higher, the cable length decreases dramatically.

Thank you!

[LevelFT]

I need a ComosEx for my Mega STE....

[SweYC]

Z,

I was wondering, but lack HW knowledge: would it be hard to add hardware reset option to CosmosEX? In games or demos, ctrl/alt/del dont work... It would be nice, if we could control reset on HW level from browser as well: load image, upload, reset.

Janez

[nanard]

Z,

I was wondering, but lack HW knowledge: would it be hard to add hardware reset option to CosmosEX? In games or demos, ctrl/alt/del dont work... It would be nice, if we could control reset on HW level from browser as well: load image, upload, reset.

Janez

I guess it would mean solder some wire on the motherboard and having some way to command it with a GPIO pin of the RPi...

[umberto1st]

Any body update the main app on cosmos via ce_config(web update) dated 5/10/18. It has locked both my cosmosex devises on power cycle's. I can get it to respond after a ce_start.sh command from a console, but still locks every time after power cycle

[mikro]

umberto1st: first, open a new thread for it. second: connect a HDMI screen and post the output.

[calimero]

Hi,
I bought CosmosEx from Jookie in January 2017. (with all cables but without Rpi).

I still did not installed it coz I need to buy Raspberry Pi first: which version of Raspberry Pi should I buy?

Documentation is not consistent. I read somewhere that Rpi ver. 3 is not supported and then on other places that it is supported...?

Thanx!

[Gaiyan]

Hi,
I bought CosmosEx from Jookie in January 2017. (with all cables but without Rpi).

I still did not installed it coz I need to buy Raspberry Pi first: which version of Raspberry Pi should I buy?

Documentation is not consistent. I read somewhere that Rpi ver. 3 is not supported and then on other places that it is supported...?

Thanx!

If it's the latest CosmosEx, Rpi 3B is what it came with. Totally supported. The latest 3B+, I'm not sure.

[metalages]

...
I'd be very, very, very, very interested in such an extension! I pondered the possibility in this thread:

http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 72#p339572

The way I imagined it would be to tap into the VDI calls, and send the drawing instructions (not bitmap data) over the ACSI bus to the Raspberry Pi. The Pi could then use a simple off-the-shelf graphics library to actually draw those primitives to the full-HD screen using its extremely fast GPU. While you wouldn't be able to bit-bang the frame buffer from the ST side, I don't think that matters since software running on a graphics card doesn't bit-bang the frame buffer either (it has to go through VDI - since it knows nothing about how the frame buffer is organised, some cards are chunky - nibble and byte - and some are planar).

Not only would it easily add full HD support to an ST without any internal soldering, it would be absolutely blazingly fast! Since the Pi can draw so quickly, I reckon a simple 1040 would feel about as fast as a TT. A much better solution than adding ET4000 graphics cards - and a lot of people do that so there's definitely demand. Fitting an ET4000 to a 1040 is an enormous pain, so it would be the perfect solution for those who don't own MegaSTEs or TTs.

Obviously it wouldn't work with games and demos. But lots of people use their STs for productivity (especially music), and I think any music software that supports a graphics card would also work with such a system.

I'm not sure I can help much with implementing this. I'm reasonably fluent with 68000 assembly and C, and my main area is hardware. I might be able to do the drawing software on the Raspberry Pi side - I don't know much about Linux internals, but I've used a few graphics libraries before. My sticking point is figuring out how to tap into VDI - I know very little about how it works. I suppose you could just install a new handler for that particular trap but I'd need to do quite a lot of research and I'd need the assistance of someone deeply familiar with VDI.

I don't think it would necessarily cause a major problem for hard disk speed. When there's lots of activity on the screen (especially blitting bitmap data from ST RAM to the frame buffer) the bus will be busy. But most programs do very little screen updating when loading/saving. Cubase Audio might be slightly more difficult because it needs to update the screen and read/write the disk when recording and playing. But even then, Cubase is mostly just doing simple line drawing and rectangle fill operations - the commands to initiate those drawing operations are tiny and would use hardly any bandwidth.

Very cool idea. Reminds me initial x server philosophy. Like a bunch of sun stations connected to a main server when I was at school. Here the pi would be the station

[Foxxy74]

@ Jookie: What a GREAT invention. I was busy reading last 22 pages in about 3 days, and 99% is very excited about this,so you achieved somekind of historical point in the Atari world!

Inside my clab MK-X, there is a plug-in board (requires no soldering) where my SCSI drive is attached to. There are,i believe, 2 wires soldered on that board. If that helps,or somebody here can re-fabricate that, perhaps I can lend it out for some time.See topic:


http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.ph ... =Clab+MK+X

I am going to order a CosmosEx (nice name) in a few weeks.

Hope things are good for you! Last reply was a while ago.

Cheers, and many thnxs from all of us for this awesome product!

[mishap]

Are the CosmosEx devices still available for sale?
Will another production run be planned at time soon if not?

[theGoat]

Are the CosmosEx devices still available for sale?
Will another production run be planned at time soon if not?

I'd like to buy one too.

[Decky]

Hi Guys, I know this thread has been silent for a while but I hope you don't mind me asking a question or two.
I have a CosmosEx from the first run probably, around 2014. There is a Raspberry Pi 1 currently in it and Yocto Project on the SD Card. My question is. Would there be any benefit of substituting a Raspberry 3 Model B v1.2 in place of the Pi 1? If there would be a processing benefit and it would be recommended how would I connect the CosmosEx to the Pi 3. The GPIO Pin array looks double the length of the Pi1 connection.

I am also looking for a IKBD adaptor for my original CosmosEx, are there any for sale?

[jfceklosky]

Where can order the CosmosEx device from?
I live in the US.

[GoldenGrahams]

I purchased the smaller 'Micro CosmosEx' (MicroCosmos) device a few years ago (the one without the floppy emulation) but have not had time until now to attach/install it. Do you have any advice/guidance on the best way to attach it to my Atari STE via ACSI...? Ideally I would prefer an internal installation... or is an external installation the only option?

[1st1]

Ist it a 1040STE ? This one has no internal DMA or SCSI connector.