Recent content by fatwizard

I have modified a standard PC 3.5" floppy drive to work in my ST. The drive needs to be set as drive 0, or the first drive, instead of the typical drive 1 setting for PC drives. Also, the disk change line needs to be connected to pin 2 of the floppy interface instead of it's usual connection...

Hi all, I bought a pig in a poke on eBay the other day. It's a RAM upgrade board that was removed form a "working" ST. It's called a "Z-RAM-3d/4Meg." by a company called Zubair Interfaces Inc. There was no documentation with this item, but I also bought the motherboard the upgrade was...

Hi all. I have been collecting third party disk drives for the 8 bit Atari, and I finally managed to get a Rana 1000 a while back. The drive didn't work, and after chasing that problem for a week, I finally found an open trace on the controller board. After that was repaired the drive...

The pictograms on the rear panel Show a picture of a computer over the male DB25 port, and a picture of a printer over a female DB25DB port. It's got to be a parallel port passthough.

Hi all, I have this Sysgen external 5.25" floppy drive, and I have been searching for software/drivers for it for sometime with no luck. Requests for this have been posted here in the past with no response, but hope springs eternal. It's a HD drive in an enclosure with a parallel port...

Hi all, I have been trying to restore this PS2 Model 30 286 I have. I have it working well, but I have issues replacing the hard drive. Getting my hands on an original drive that still worked seemed unlikely, so I have tried to install an SCSI system. I finally sourced a Seagate ST-157N that...

I know CGA snow has been covered on the forum before, but this is a little different. I have a 5160, 64 to 256K motherboard that I use on the bench for testing purposes. I took it out this week to test some hard drives, and I now have snow in the CGA display all of the time. It's there as...

I can't get any closer. It's been pulled out onto the workbench, and examined every which way. Looking at it right now, and I realize I have made an error. The SMD130A000 -02 number I cited before is actually the number on the Epson drive from my SF-354. The single sided drive. The double...

I have an Epson SMD140A, 720K 3.5" floppy drive that exhibits a symptom I hadn't seen before. It works just fine until it gets about half way to the center, after which it starts re-seeking. This gets progressively worse, and will error out before it gets to the innermost track. It has this...

I have been working with the drive from a SF314 external ST floppy drive. It's an Epson SM140A, double sided DD drive. The issue is it begins to stumble on reading a disk about half way through. I thought it was alignment, but it fails to format a disk in the same fashion. At about halfway...

I'm looking for a replacement internal floppy drive for my Atari STf. It is double sided 720K drive with the big central eject button. A broken Chinon F-354 that still spins the disk would be usable for parts, or a working drive of any make. Thanks

I have been playing around with the Atari STf I recently bought, and the biggest challenge so far has been finding something to use a a monitor. I finally got it working with my Commodore 1084 monitor, but I could never get a good display with the cheap Chinese RBG upscaler that worked so well...

I have bought my first Atari ST machine. It's still on it's way to me, but I have a question I hope someone here can answer. This unit is apparently running version 1 TOS roms. I have been eying an external ST314, double sided drive. Will version 1 TOS support double sided drives?

I am looking for recommendations for a Mac emulator for a Windows 10 laptop. I now have need to run Facetime on my wife's i5 Windows 10 laptop. She is very ill, and her far flung family wants to use Facetime to stay in touch with her, but I don't want to thrust an unfamiliar machine on her. I...

Let's say there was a contest for the loudest, most horrific sounding hard drive that still worked. This would be my dog in the fight. https://www.dropbox.com/s/h1t5tznxhvu2gl5/Quantum%20RacketPro.mp4?dl=0