Atari stuff from storage, some working, some not, what to do?

[rcgldr]

I just pulled some old Atari stuff out of storage, what is working so far:

 

Atari 520 ST with 1MB upgrade, 1 SF354 floppy drive (haven't tried the other one yet), Sony KV-1311CR used as color monitor, with its special cable, and one mouse.

 

The floppies I've tested so far seem to be working. A boot floppy that sets date, time and installs ram disk, Starglider, Sundog, ST-Copy 3.0, and a floppy used to transfer files between PC and Atari ST (I have format utility for PC, and should have one for Atari ST to create a Atari ST / PC "compatible" single sided floppy). I made new copies of these so I now have freshly formatted and written floppies. I noticed most of the floppies are labeled as single sided. Are the SF354 floppy drives single sided only?

What's not working:

 

Atari Mega ST4 - powered up one time, but now it won't power up (no fan movment).

 

Atari SC124 - monochrome monitor - hear sound, but no display, never used it much.

 

A second mouse barely works, as the buttons are very intermittent.

 

I did a web search and found one site that mentions repairs, but mostly seems to be selling refurbished items. I sent them an email to see if they could repair the Mega ST4.

 

Where can I buy blank floppy disks that will work with the Atari drives? I'm assuming HD floppies won't work?

Edited June 4, 2018 by rcgldr

[+SoulBuster]

the SF354 is a single sided 360k floppy. SF314 is a double sided 720k floppy.

 

You will need to find the 720k Floppies. The 1.44s will lose data after awhile when formatted 720k or 360k.

[rcgldr]

I've got some of the old 720K floppies, but my SF814 is not working.

[rcgldr]

I can't find anyone in the US that can repair a Mega ST4 or repair or sell a SF814 drive, so I have no access to a double sided floppy drive. I tried a few games, since they only need single sided drives, then put all my Atari stuff back in storage. Part of the issue is limited space. If I setup the Atari, I have to store two very old PC desktops and an old PC monitor

[atarian1]

The Mega ST sounds like a dead power supply. No fan movement is a good sign of that. Replacing it with a working one depends on how comfortable you are with disassembling the ST and soldering skills. The easiest way is swapping the broken power supply with a new one but that will set you back about $80.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Considering floppy drives: it is possible to use PC floppy drives, but that needs some smaller correction on cable - if there are no jumpers in drive to set it to A - since they are as B by default.

But worse thing is that disk change detection will not work. See this: http://atari.8bitchip.info/flomodam.html

 

I just had some problems om my Mega STE with floppies and drives. Basically, it is so unreliable and at the end of it's life span that I spent half day with trivial problem - bad drive. 80% of drives and disks what I tried was bad, so it looked as error in computer rather. And nicest thing is that since then I threw away already 2 disks, after only some half hour of usage. Just not usable, good only to get nervous.

 

No wonder many people went on HW floppy emulators, mass storage.

I can only recommend to get some Flash card based storage adapter and forget floppies. You can play games, much faster and comfortable :

http://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd2.php

And some new solutions are under work: http://atari.8bitchip.info/plgold2018.html

[rcgldr]

My Atari computers and related components are nearly 30 years old. I've since found a source for a SF814 for about $125 (US). To set it up, I'd have to store two old desktop computers, an old monitor, buy a computer desk to setup the Atari properly (since I use an old printer stand for the old monitor), with a fairly good chance that yet another component will break down.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

It's not SF814, but SF314 - they are so bad now that even can not read what writes on

For less money you could buy something much better (see post above), what will last. Of course, if you want every component to be original, that will cost lot of money over years.

[rcgldr]

Typo, it's the SF314 I'm looking for. I'm getting scrambled data from it without any attempt to re-read data, so it's not CRC errors, which leads me to believe the internal floppy drive isn't the issue, but instead the circuit board or some other part in the electronics that is scrambling data.

 

For the alternatives to floppy disks, what about all those games that use floppy based protection? Since it's been over 20 years since I messed with this, I don't know if the games have been patched to no longer need floppy based protection. I used ST-Copy 3.0 to make new copies of a couple of game floppies and a couple of regular floppies, and so far, I've been lucky that at least 4 of the old floppies were still readable, and I now have freshly formatted and written floppies.

 

Maybe in the near future I'll take the Mega ST4 apart and see how difficult it would be to replace the power supply.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Sorry fella, but you did not read all replies here. Answer is already there.

[rcgldr]

Sorry fella, but you did not read all replies here. Answer is already there.

Is this a reference to replacing internal floppy drives or external floppy drives or using some type of external emulation of floppy that uses the same interface as an SF314?

 

An internal floppy drive won't help in my current situation, as the Mega ST4 won't power up. I'm stuck with an original 520ST upgraded to 1MB of ram.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Funny thing is how people tend to complain here how their old floppies aren't working now, then asking how can copy their originals - now, when they are 30 years old.

Forget copy unless you have money and time and will to listen. Everything is online for free.

It is not only copy protection what is problem - now age of disks is main problem, And age of drives too.

 

"For the alternatives to floppy disks, what about all those games that use floppy based protection?' - Really sad to see such questions. After I done over 1100 games to work from hard disks instead floppies, someone is worried about copy protection

You should really use some search, some general search about current Atari retro computing. Because it seems that you stuck in year 1992 ,

People now using floppy images, diverse emulators. If there is some ST image in question - so format what can not hold copy protection, with games on it - then guess what ? - copy protections are removed.

What you copied with ST Copy Pro or whatever had no copy pr., or it was some primitive one. There are specialised devices for copying protected stuff - SCP, KryoFlux.

 

Anyway, I want to help you, but how to help someone who comes here, asking for help, and then just ignores answers, which are not such, what he expected ?

 

"An internal floppy drive won't help in my current situation, as the Mega ST4 won't power up. I'm stuck with an original 520ST upgraded to 1MB of ram."

Really ? What about open case of SF314 or whatever you have attached to 520 ST, and replace DRIVE self ? SF314 is not floppy drive. It is drive with case. Ah, and I can not resist to ask:

why you people at other side of ocean calling sport game, where can play with hands too "football" ?

[rcgldr]

"For the alternatives to floppy disks, what about all those games that use floppy based protection?' What you copied with ST Copy Pro or whatever had no copy pr., or it was some primitive one.

It was ST Copy 3.0 (from Dec 1986). It worked on a few dozen or so games released at that time, and yes those early schemes were somewhat primitive and could either be copied or made good enough to pass the copy protection checks. I only tested 2 games, Star Gliders and Sundog, and those worked (ST Copy was able to make runnable copies), despite the originals being nearly 30 years old. Helping here is the fact that these are 720K floppies, with a much longer lifespan than 1.44 HD floppies. However, my goal here is not to restore old games.

 

The reason I want a working double sided floppy drive is to do one more check of some double sided floppies I found in storage to make sure I didn't miss anything when I did backups 20+ years ago. I have a set of zip files I use as an archive of my old stuff, dating back to the 1980's (CP/M, Atari 400, Atari ST, PC, ...) .

 

I'm aware of emulators for the Atari ST, but haven't looked into those yet.

Edited June 6, 2018 by rcgldr

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Well, you must not do it on Atari. There are still PCs with floppy drives around. There is SW for retro format support - on my site, but why should I give link here ?

Other way is to use so called 'PC floppy drive' in Atari, what was also mentioned here, and you can get such for free with little effort. I have here about 3, which are still operational - one in my Atari Mega STE.

Need only simple mod, and will work well on Atari (except disk change detection, but you don't need it).

And must sat that sometimes it is really hard to communicate with US people ... They say 'World is small now' . Maybe that's only because all those superhero/comics movies, what I don't watch. They are of very bad influence - making young people thinking that things can be solved easy, with force, superpower. magic. I never solved anything like that. OK, not 100% true, sometimes I used force. But it was never with electronic.

 

Ahh, one more 'stupid question' : you made backups - images of your floppies 20 years ago, and did not use any Atari ST emulator yet ? Funny ..

Edited June 6, 2018 by ParanoidLittleMan

[rcgldr]

Well, you must not do it on Atari. There are still PCs with floppy drives around. There is SW for retro format support - on my site, but why should I give link here ?

Other way is to use so called 'PC floppy drive' in Atari, what was also mentioned here, and you can get such for free with little effort. I have here about 3, which are still operational - one in my Atari Mega STE.

Need only simple mod, and will work well on Atari (except disk change detection, but you don't need it).

And must sat that sometimes it is really hard to communicate with US people ... They say 'World is small now' . Maybe that's only because all those superhero/comics movies, what I don't watch. They are of very bad influence - making young people thinking that things can be solved easy, with force, superpower. magic. I never solved anything like that. OK, not 100% true, sometimes I used force. But it was never with electronic.

 

Ahh, one more 'stupid question' : you made backups - images of your floppies 20 years ago, and did not use any Atari ST emulator yet ? Funny ..

 

The Atari ST can read PC formatted floppies (and even PC formatted hard drives if using FAT12 if I recall correctly). I wrote format programs for both PC and Atari ST. Both implemented track skewing (offsetting sector location from track to track) to speed up read / write times (so that after completing a single track step sector 1 would be the next sector rotating into position). For the Atari ST, the program could format a PC compatible single or double sided floppy. For Atari ST usage only, the program could format 9 or 10 sectors per track. 10 sectors per track couldn't be made PC compatible (at least not writable) because the PC floppy controller writes too many bytes after a sector write to allow the shorter gaps needed for 10 sectors per track. I still have an old PC with a floppy drive that I can use to transfer files.

 

The issue with my SF814 isn't the internal floppy drive, since it never does any retries when reading a floppy, but ends up sending garbled data to the Atari ST, so the issue is most likely somewhere in the controller or interface.

 

Most of my backups were source files, documents, text files, ..., not games. I'm a programmer and at the time, my job included writing assembly code for multi-threaded operating systems using the 68000 family of processors that were replacing former custom mini-computers. The company was a Motorola development site, so we got early samples (development kits) of the newer processors like 68030 and 68040. When the Atari ST was released, a lot of the programmers at that company bought them. I moved on to another company before they got to the 68060, which was the end of that line (also the end of that company), and followed by the Power PC. Around 2006, Apple and some others using PowerPC switched to Intel X86 processors, while embedded devices starting using embedded processors like ARM or MicroBlaze.

 

As for the games, there are a few games that I was curious about, but never really got into. Sundog was one of them, and I may look into setting up an emulator soon. I was also interested in a strange programming language called APL, since I had used it during the mid 1970's on an IBM 370 at a local college, and there was a pretty good version at the time for the Atari ST. These days, there's an advanced version from Dyalog for Windows.

Edited June 6, 2018 by rcgldr

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Well, I must admit that I'm surprised that you made some formatting SW. Because really make not impression to know much about floppies - sorry, no offense - it was so, and there is still one thing:

 

"because the PC floppy controller writes too many bytes after a sector write to allow the shorter gaps needed for 10 sectors per track." Incorrect. My Windows SW happily writes 10 sectors/track, or 20 with HD floppies. Count of bytes in gaps depends from formatting SW at Atari, and same stays for PC, even of controllers are not same. But indeed WD1772 is faster, and can work with smaller gaps, so I guess that 11 sectors/track is not possible on PC - in any case, that's not something what I care about - so much that I don't even remember did I try it at all .

 

Sundog has no real protection. It just has only 1 file visible, and there are no hidden files, just raw sector content, what reads via XBIOS 8. Every track copy SW can copy it.

 

Just to add that I was on that error is not in floppy drive couple days ago, after trying 4 of them. So, was on to go in harder part - checking FDC and around. But it were drives + 80% of disks. So bad that it is nightmare rather than work or play with computer. And it is not new, it goes over years already.

 

What sense has replacing 30 years old with another one, same age ? It will die very soon. You pay a lot for half past dead stuff. After couple replacements, you will start to pay doctor, medicaments ... Get rid of magnetic crap !

[rcgldr]

"because the PC floppy controller writes too many bytes after a sector write to allow the shorter gaps needed for 10 sectors per track." Incorrect. My Windows SW happily writes 10 sectors/track, or 20 with HD floppies. Count of bytes in gaps depends from formatting SW at Atari, and same stays for PC, even of controllers are not same. But indeed WD1772 is faster, and can work with smaller gaps, so I guess that 11 sectors/track is not possible on PC - in any case, that's not something what I care about - so much that I don't even remember did I try it at all .

 

Sundog has no real protection. It just has only 1 file visible, and there are no hidden files, just raw sector content, what reads via XBIOS 8. Every track copy SW can copy it.

 

The issue with 10 sectors per track, at least on older PCs, was a combination of BIOS and the Intel 8272 floppy disk controller during writing, not formatting, due to gap 3 size, the gap between sectors. The Intel 8272 manual states a recommended value of 27 bytes for gap 3 for 512 byte sector writes (where it would actually write 27 bytes of gap 3 pattern during a write). The gap 3 size is one of the write command parameters, and I don't know the actual gap 3 numbers that were used in the BIOS of most mid 1980 PCs, only that it was an issue for 10 sectors per track on some PCs. The Atari ST's WD1772 fdc only writes 1 or 2 bytes of gap 3 during writes, so shorter gaps wasn't an issue.

 

Sundog would not work if you just formatted a floppy and copied the file, but as you mentioned, a "track copy" program was good enough. I seem to recall that Sundog wouldn't run if the floppy was write protected, and that it always wrote a save game file, which would be a reason for wanting a backup or a modified version (no copy protection) of Sundog (in case something went wrong). I don't know if other games were like this. Considering that most of the 8 bit Atari cartridge games had been modified to be able to run from a floppy disk, I assume that most Atari ST games were similarly modified to remove copy protection, so I don't know how popular "track copy" programs were.

 

 

what sense has replacing 30 years old with another one, same age?

It only needs to run long enough for me to go through a set of double sided floppies that I found in a different location than where I had stored most of my old stuff and had backed up 20+ years ago (this set may have been more recent, I'm not sure). These may be all duplicates from a prior backup, but I can't know for sure until I have some way to read them (assuming they're still readable).

 

As for old stuff, I have a working Kenwood KR-8010 stereo receiver and a pair of Saras model 30 speakers from 1978 which all still work, and I use them as my computer stereo (although most of the time I just use headphones). Still I don't expect 30 year old computer stuff to last much longer, and I don't have the maintenance budget of a historical site like the ones that maintain old hardware dating back to the 1950s like this IBM 83 card sorter:

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by rcgldr

[GlowingGhoul]

Well, you must not do it on Atari. There are still PCs with floppy drives around. There is SW for retro format support - on my site, but why should I give link here ?

Other way is to use so called 'PC floppy drive' in Atari, what was also mentioned here, and you can get such for free with little effort. I have here about 3, which are still operational - one in my Atari Mega STE.

Need only simple mod, and will work well on Atari (except disk change detection, but you don't need it).

And must sat that sometimes it is really hard to communicate with US people ... They say 'World is small now' . Maybe that's only because all those superhero/comics movies, what I don't watch. They are of very bad influence - making young people thinking that things can be solved easy, with force, superpower. magic. I never solved anything like that. OK, not 100% true, sometimes I used force. But it was never with electronic.

 

Ahh, one more 'stupid question' : you made backups - images of your floppies 20 years ago, and did not use any Atari ST emulator yet ? Funny ..

 

Do you have to be so rude? Why are you so arrogant, little man? Sometimes cracks result in perfect games, and many times they break games with strange bugs you don't discover until you've invested a lot of time.

 

The original floppy (or a perfect copy) or some kind of image with protection intact is ideal.

Edited June 8, 2018 by GlowingGhoul

[ParanoidLittleMan]

 

Do you have to be so rude? Why are you so arrogant, little man? Sometimes cracks result in perfect games, and many times they break games with strange bugs you don't discover until you've invested a lot of time.

 

The original floppy (or a perfect copy) or some kind of image with protection intact is ideal.

Rude, with people in country without name ? I give here lot of my time, but people expects some answers according to their bad knowledge, dreams. Misunderstandings about trivial things - terms like floppy drive - and most absurd is that that term originates right from US How to hell talk with so shallow people ? Should I be who adapts to those who use not clear terms ? Think about it. I'm not anti-american. I just expect some level and taking care when talk about technical things, otherwise this is waste of time.

 

"The original floppy (or a perfect copy) or some kind of image with protection intact is ideal." That's BS. You claim something what you think as ideal. That's arrogance. Certainly not ideal anymore, considering condition of drives and disks. Not ideal considering playability. Not ideal .... ahhh, enough of it, everyone in retro scene knows that there are better ways now.

I'm not cracker. I'm much more than it. It's 2018.

[+SoulBuster]

ParanoidLittleMan,

 

People need to realized that English is not your first language. If they do realize it, then that is on them to be more considerate. Inflection and tone do not translate well in the written word. You should not have to Americanize your response.

 

Thank you for all you do. I appreciate it.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

ParanoidLittleMan,

 

People need to realized that English is not your first language. If they do realize it, then that is on them to be more considerate. Inflection and tone do not translate well in the written word. You should not have to Americanize your response.

 

Thank you for all you do. I appreciate it.

Yeah, that's what I heard many times. And I don't think that it is main problem. Surely, I tend to not use rigid English word order, sometime just forget about it, sometime intentionally - because I think that you can accent some things with specific word order better. There are problems too, when I talk about technical things in my mother and father languages too (and that makes 2 of them) .

But all it should be no real problem if there would be more patience and listening better. Today World is just about wanting everything, right now. Some people expects that I add some basic things to my pages. That will not happen. Look around. I did not learn it by asking around in forums - which existed not, of course when I was younger. People comes with how I know so much about disks, filesystems like FAT16 ,,, It's all online, on many sites. Explained on many of them well. And believe me, it is not that hard and complicated at all.

[rcgldr]

In case anyone is following this thread still, I've ordered a SF314 double sided drive. It only needs to run long enough for me to go through a set of floppies I may have missed when doing backups some 20+ years ago. If it continues to work beyond that, it's an added benefit.

 

Surprisingly, it turned out that my Atari 400, 130XE, 1050 floppy drive and Indus GT floppy drive (with ramcharger and CP/M) are also working.

 

If I get interested in the games, I may get some type of emulator.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

I'm glad that you made progress . And I will be rude again: should we all write here, in forum what we did, what we plan to backup, what other computers and working floppy drives we have in our homes ?

Or maybe forums are place for some more general talk, when someone asks for help, and getting it, that should be not only for his case, but for everyone with similar problem, questions.

What I see is plenty of people coming here for some quick help, and is hyperactive, and when it is solved, or maybe not, just disappear, without a word, without any thanx.

 

P.S. emulators are not only for games.

[Lynxpro]

The Gotek is $20-ish. That's probably the most popular hardware floppy emulator on the market, and plenty of ST and Amiga owners are installing them in their systems. If you want to run games on your ST with the least amount of work, then that's the way to go as long as your ST has an internal drive [i'm not talking about the dead Mega 4 which does sound like a power supply and/or capacitor issue]. Almost all of the games released have image files posted online so if you have a Gotek, you can load the image files from a USB flash drive. That's an easier method than, say, upgrading the ST's RAM to 2MB - 4MB in order to use an UltraSatan device along with downloading modded versions of the games that support hard drive installation and the like.

 

There's plenty of Gotek videos up on YouTube whether for the ST, Amiga, or even music keyboards that had their own floppy drives.

[rcgldr]

The Gotek is $20-ish. That's probably the most popular hardware floppy emulator on the market, and plenty of ST and Amiga owners are installing them in their systems. If you want to run games on your ST with the least amount of work, then that's the way to go as long as your ST has an internal drive [i'm not talking about the dead Mega 4 which does sound like a power supply and/or capacitor issue]. Almost all of the games released have image files posted online so if you have a Gotek, you can load the image files from a USB flash drive. That's an easier method than, say, upgrading the ST's RAM to 2MB - 4MB in order to use an UltraSatan device along with downloading modded versions of the games that support hard drive installation and the like.

 

There's plenty of Gotek videos up on YouTube whether for the ST, Amiga, or even music keyboards that had their own floppy drives.

I have an original 520ST upgraded to 1MB ram. No internal floppy, only the SF314 which I just bought, and the SF354 (single side) which was still working. I wrote a format program to create PC compatible floppies on the Atari ST, which makes it easier to backup, which is how I backed up most of my stuff 20+ years ago. I could try to fix the Mega ST4, but I currently don't have a convenient place to set it up.