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Should I pass up this old 800?

I found the power supply and fired it up and the computer works great! The floppy drive seems to not work. It does nothing when it comes on, but when the computer gets turned on it spins continuously and the light does not come on. I have no mouse, so I get to use the keyboard keys (that's okay) and I have no carts. So instead of getting another fdd right now I'm gonna go for games :)

I don't know if I mentioned this, but I have an Epson printer that should work great. I don't have the printer right here so I don't know the model, but it's about the same year of manufacture, maybe a few years newer but based on the pinouts, the Atari has a standard printer port. It oughta work. But I am on the quest for carts.
 
I have (for sure) an external floppy for one, lemme know if you need it. I also (might) have, an Atari laser printer (if I can salvage it from ComputerHell). Again, lemme know if interested.

--T
 
NathanAllan said:
The floppy drive seems to not work [..] and I have no carts.
Cool, I didn't know that the Atari ST series had a dedicated cartridge port. From a bit of googling, it appears only a few applications like MagicSac were available in this form, so maybe it is more a hardware expansion port (which also exists on the Amiga) than a traditional cartridge system.

I tried to find any references to ST game cartridges, but I drew zero. Hopefully you know better than me. I found some article how to make your own cartridge up to 128K, which may be on the small side for most ST games.
 
The cartridge port is also known as the ROM port, and I found lots of carts for it on ebay, mainly in England. Looks to be about $5/game give or take. There are a few lots to be had, too.

Terry, I'm very interested in that floppy drive, please email me, dkassandra4ATwmconnectDOTcom to tell me more about it.
 
Maybe I'm more dense than usually, but I found neither Atari ST cartridge or ROM items; searched both Google, eBay US and UK. If it is not too much work, could you please point me to a URL, either a seller or an inventory?

Or maybe the Atari ST is backwards compatible with the 8-bit Atari series and/or the video games: 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx, Jaguar? I somehow doubt it, but I'm far from an expert so I could be wrong.
 
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
 
Hmm, the only cartridge-like thing I can find for the Atari ST are internal memory modules.. :) Hopefully you can obtain a floppy drive from Terry or somewhere else. Perhaps there are even service manuals or alike which would let you diagnose if and how your current drive is faulty.

Mayhem claims to have 400 different cartridges for the C64, of which some may be label, region or other variations of the same title. That appears to exclude utility cartridges like Final Cartridge, Action Replay etc. Not a bad collection.
 
Luckily I have a fdd on the way. I see what you mean about carts being a waste of potential. I want to max this thing out, that's for sure. One thing, Joe told me that he used to make discs on his windows machine to get files for the atari. He would download whatever program and then walk it over and use it. He told me that the atari would see the win system disks, but the pc wouldn't see that atari disks. This seems too good to be true, but I'm gonna try it anyway.
 
NathanAllan said:
Luckily I have a fdd on the way. I see what you mean about carts being a waste of potential. I want to max this thing out, that's for sure. One thing, Joe told me that he used to make discs on his windows machine to get files for the atari. He would download whatever program and then walk it over and use it. He told me that the atari would see the win system disks, but the pc wouldn't see that atari disks. This seems too good to be true, but I'm gonna try it anyway.

Yeah I got spoiled on the ST for transferring files off the Inet from my PC compared to the C64, Amiga, Apple, and CP/M. There are also ST programs to make formatted DOS disks that can be read by a PC. The main drawback is the limited capacity of the double density drives and the limited memory, altho because the OS is in the ROM it is still more than many of that era. There are kits to increase the RAM but up till the STe they were limited to 4 megs. Because of the built-in Midi ports the ST was especially popular with musicians There's a vast number of free music programs out there. Once you get into it you'll likely want to get an STe or Mega. I have a STf 1040 that I hacked to 4 megs and my main one is a MEGA-4 with a tweety board for stereo. Unlike the Amiga the STs Yamaha chip only had 3 channels instead of 4. The FMs and upward did have stereo capabilities.

Make sure the FDD you get is double sided, double density otherwise some programs won't work. There were a lot of hacks and add-ons for them but I would advise you to wait until you have at least a 1040fm or preferably an STe, Mega, or MEGA ste. There is also a hack for a high-density fdd.

Lawrence
 
Terry Yager said:
Micom 2000 said:
Make sure the FDD you get is double sided, double density otherwise some programs won't work.

Lawrence,

What's an SF354? That's the drive Nathan is getting.

--T

Just checked my 2 external DSDD drives and they are both SF314. I can't remember off the top of my aged head what the SSFD was but one would assume the higher number to be a later model. I'll do a search.
They also came with a large beast of a power supply.

OOPs the SF354 is the single sided one. Sorry.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv5n4/disk_drives.html

Lawrence
 
I'll be happy with ANY fdd at this point. I have to have SOME kidn of I/O for it. Once I get the fdd II'll go for the 4mb upgrade kit and some fancy rom expansion if I can find anything that's not too expensive. Definitely a modem for kicks.

I'll probably get a different machine, like you say, probably an STFM but for now I'm thrilled as heck to get this thing :mrgreen:

And yeah, nice link.
 
When I find something to trade I'l let you know. It's pretty dry around here. I don't know what the percentage is, but less than 1/3 of the population here even own a computer(of any kind). So classic stuff is really hard to come by. It seems a shame to me, really. The things help SO MUCH (even as complicated as they are) and so few take advantage... but that's for another thread.
 
WOOHOO! I got my Flashback2 today and I love it! I fondly remember the frustration in Yar's Return and the frustration in most of the other games and the thrill of victory with Combat and Combat2! Right after I got that, I discovered that there's a comp store having a big clearance and all the cables are half off. I'm going back tomorrow to get some improvised midi cables for the 520ST and see if I can't rig up a pc-atari link. We'll see what happens.

And best of all, the FB2 controllers will work on the 520ST! AFK, playing. :!:
 
I've been looking al over the net for a scsi adapter for this thing. I found one but it's sold out. Is there a set of instructions to making my own anywhere? Or a third party that actually HAS them in stock? All I need is to connect some kind of hdd to the db15 scsi port on the ST. Power isn't an issue, nor is cabling or a case. I just need something like that. I mean, it's been around for a long frekkin time, you'd think that there's something out there. :?
 
ACSI was Atari's proprietary hard drive connector. It is derivative of SCSI which had not been completely standardized at the time of the initial release of ST systems. Atari SH-204 hard drives have an ACSI to SCSI host adapter connected to an Adaptec 4000 SCSI to MFM adapter that is attached directly to the drive. It is possible to adapt these units to use the standard SCSI drive mechanisms of today.
http://www.backntime.net/Atari Computers/16bit/Misc. Hardware/Frame16bitHard.html

The ACSI DB-19 (sorry, not 15) pinout:
http://www.ntrautanen.fi/marko/sao/infoa/liittimet/storage/atari_acsidma.htm

No idea if you can make use of this pinout and somehow convert it to any SCSI interface.
 
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