NathanAllan said:
Just do a search on any ebay for "atari st" and you'll get some hits, some will be the carts. I just did it and it yielded results for me.
While carts may seem like the way to go they were not common, unlike the Atari 8 bit machines. The most common carts were like the Real-time cart or other specialised carts related to hardware functions like the Mac emulator. There is a massive amount of software out there for the ST and as an ST freak I have a very large collection of ST peripherals and software but no software games or programs on carts.
As an esoteric approach to the ST it might have value but is limited.
Your wasting your time and the power of the ST to concentrate on carts. Atari had abandoned the cart approach by that time and I believe put the cart slot in only to assuage the Atari 8-bit users and possibly provide DMA access. The only cart I have is a Mac emulator which has MAC ROM chips on it, but even it uses FD programs to access the cart. Almost all the updates involved internal or external additions such as the Xtra Ram or the Tweety board. ISTR there was also a cart to provide a thru midi port
and another for fast parallel transfer of files or something like that.
You have a very early version of the ST. Like the Amiga 500 don't expect a lot from it. Especially if you don't have a functioning FDD. Sam Tramiel always loved the idea of proprietory peripherals and except for the similarity of the Atari disks to the MSDOS system's one has to learn to work around it. eg; the LINK to attach normal SCSI HDs, Extendos to add CDs to a SCSI chain and other BS. But with the OS in ROM, GEM desktop,
and a CPU faster than most of it's era, Midi in/out, 2 color resolutions and a 3rd with the Hi-resolution mono monitor it was an impressive box.
Even C-64s don't have that many carts available and even with GEOS it's destop is pretty abysmal. The ST is remarkable but one must remember it's era. The NEXT was and still is great but compared to some of the newer systems seems limited. I love many of my old computers including the Atari 130XE and the XEGS or the Apple GS for that matter but why not operate them to the limit of their capabilities not regress to their earlier brothers. STs were 16 bit machines and the FDDs were their strength.
Lawrence