Hi all,
(TL;DR - Cloning a working cartridge using a new USB programmer fails. Not sure what's the problem. The entire cloning process completes without errors)
Recently purchased a new USB programmer and 8mbit flash carts to use on my Windows 10 machine for my Atari 800 machine and have encountered an oddity that I'm hoping someone on the forum can shed some light on. The Win10 drivers and the studio all installed fine w/o issues. The studio software finds the USB programmer just fine and all status seem to indicate it is working great.
I purchased an 8mbit Atarimax cart preloaded with 76 games on Ebay several months ago before this entire adventure started and the cart works perfectly on my 48k Atari 800. All of the games work and I had a blast playing all of the games from my youth.
Here's the mystery: I dumped the 8mbit working cartridge using the USB programmer using the studio in an attempt to make a copy. The studio dumped the cartridge binary to disk seemly fine (the bin took up 1,048,576 bytes on disk as expected). However, burning the bin to a fresh 8mbit cart completes successfully but the cart itself doesn't seem to work on the Atari 800. Booting with the cloned cart on my Atari 800 gets me into the cart menu but none of the games seem to load. All attempts to load a game results in a black screen with no further activity observed.
What am I doing wrong? The original cart that I got from Ebay works 100% of the time, no issues at all so I am left scratching my head on what may be the issue. Seems like cloning a cart by dumping and then turning around to burn it onto a new 8mbit cart (I've tried all 5 that I bought) should be easy peasy. I am using the supplied USB cable plugged into my Windows 10 machine's USB port directly (not using a hub)
I've also dumped the cloned cart to disk and compared the contents to the original dump and no diffs were observed.
Any insights would be appreciated. In fact, nothing burned by the USB programmer has worked in my Atari 800 and no errors were reported by the studio software in all of this. I've tried several of the workbooks and images that I've found on the forums and none have worked so far.
Thanks, -Wade
|