oracle_jedi

I seem recall The Lone Raider, from Atari UK, was released on tape cassette in a large format clam shell package. I think some of the Atari France titles were similarly packaged.

And.... I answered my own question! I needed to add 120Ohm resistors to the RGB lines when connecting to a 1084 monitor. Looks so much better now!

Hoping one of the experts might recognize this, or have an opinion. A Tandy 1000HX. When in the 16 color graphic mode, some of the display is clearly not right. What is supposed to be white comes off pink. Green colors are not consistent. The Secret of Monkey Island shows that for some mode/colors it looks fine. Leaderboard shows how the green is causing ghosting. Two different Commodore 1084 monitors showing the same issue, and both monitors work fine with an Atari PC1/Amiga/ST etc. Composite mode is better, and mono text looks fine. I am guessing this might be a sign I need to recap the mother board? Anyone seen this before?

So here's a fun one... I recently acquired a Tandy 1000HX. The Tandy defaults to booting off DOS 2.1 in ROM if it does not find a bootable disk in the drive. To boot off the XT-IDE I added, it needs to update the EPROM to disable the ROM boot. The only way to update the EPROM is using a special program from Tandy. I downloaded the HX1000.EXE program to my laptop, but the only 3.5 inch disk on a PC I still have, is when I plug an SF314 into an Atari PC1. That would work, but to get the EXE program onto the Atari PC, I would have to either pull the XT-IDE CF card out - and that would require dismantling the whole PC, or I would have to use ZMODEM or something similar to transfer the program over a serial line. The simpler solution was to use the NetUSB to copy the file to an Atari 1040ST, and then write it to a MS-DOS formatted 720K floppy. Most of the time however I use the STs for games

As @tjlazer says, you can install new TOS ROMs into your machine, and if you do so, I would suggest TOS 1.04 as it adds support for boot-from-harddisk. The ROMS are *usually* located under the power supply, but exact locations depend on the motherboard revision. You can also find a tool called "SELTOS" which allows you load up an alternative TOS to the one in ROM. It will however consume 192K of RAM, so if your 520STFM is stock, that won't leave you much RAM for applications. Bear in mind that switching to a U.S. TOS means that some keyboard mappings will now be wrong. If you merely want to switch to a 60Hz display refresh, there is utility you can download to do that, and set to auto-run on boot. That said, your RF will only ever be PAL on UHF channel 36. The composite video out will also be PAL (now at 60Hz). The RGB output will switch to a 60Hz refresh.

And that's a great example of what Atari might have done differently - to go back to the OP's original question. "Focus." In the example you've illustrated above, Atari might have rolled up to CES 1985 with the budget 2600, the now-available nationwide "Pro-System" 7800, a soon-to-be-released Amiga-based 16-bit game console, the Atari 600XL/800XL/1450XLD home computers, the 1600XL home-computer/IBM PC combo, and the Atari Sierra computer line. Let's not leave out the also new Atari Holography game console and the AtariTel video phones. They would have has more overlapping/competing/incompatible platforms than Compaq had after they acquired DEC and Tandon. The portfolio would have been a muddled mess. Indeed Atari engineering was apparently so distracted by all the side shows, that the system they really did need to get out - the 7800 - had to be farmed out to a third-party. Of course which of the above product initiatives they should have focused on is an interesting thought. My heart says the Amiga chip set. Since it is the spiritual descendent of the 400/800. My pocket book tells me that Atari might have followed Tandy's model, releasing a series of PC compatible machines intended for home use, but with Atari audio/video extensions ala "Tandy Graphics". I read somewhere that Tandy sold more 1000EX/HX machines in the U.S. in the back half of the 80s than Atari and Commodore sold STs and Amigas combined. I don't know if that claim is true. But Tandy sold a lot of computers.

Exactly. And even had Morgan not mothballed the project and it had been released in Spring 1984, that market might have seen Atari shift thousands of 1450XLDs. But to be viable, they needed to shift tens of thousands and by Spring '84, more than a year after the introduction of the Apple IIe which had manufacturer supported 128K RAM/80-column mode/expansion slots, the only people who might contemplate a 64K/40-column system with a speech synthesizer, a slow modem and a weird disk drive as "serious computing platform" were die-hard Atari fans, most of whom are right here on this forum today. I wanted a 1450XLD too. But that doesn't change my conclusion that there wasn't a viable market for them. Atari was right to kill it.

I ask myself the same question. As much as I wanted a 1400XL or 1450XLD, had they come to market as planned, I expect the result would have been the Ford Edsel of home computing. The lovechild of an Coleco Adam and a PCjr. Imagine if you will. Its January 1985 at the CES in Las Vegas. Jack Tramiel never left Commodore, Atari is still owned by Warner and James Morgan is still CEO. After a brutal year, all eyes on are the show for what's going to save the two beleaguered micro manufacturers. Amongst rumors of Commodore's upcoming 16-bit "ST" line, that will bring Macintosh power to a sub $1000 price point, Commodore is currently showing off their new C128. With 128KB of RAM, an 80-column RGB display, a full ergonomic keyboard, massively improved Commodore BASIC 7, a claim of full C64 backward compatibility and the ability to run still-relevant (but admittedly rapidly declining) CP/M applications, the new machine creates a buzz with its ~$500 price point. If you want to go online and explore the exciting new world of computer assisted communications, Commodore has a plug-in cartridge modem for ~$100 that also works on the existing C64. Meanwhile over at the Atari stand we have the all-new 1450XLD. For ~$1000, Atari offers you a machine with 64K of RAM, a 40-column display, a built-in 300 baud modem (yawn), a speech synthesizer that sounds like a TI Speak and Spell from 1978, and an all-new disk drive the format of which is incompatible with the 810, the 815 and the 1050. And should you decide to add the also new 1090XL expansion box, you will have a machine on your desk about the size of a small Honda.

Thanks for all the great advice guys. I am going to try Farb's tool as a first port-of-call. @FastRobPlus loaned me some disk magazines to try to archive. "The New Aladdin." Issues Feb 87 and Mar 87, which he thinks are not currently archived. Mar 87 was a breeze. A simple sector copy and no issues. Feb 87 was littered with bad sectors and disk errors. The Atarimax APE/PRO system was able to copy the disks, I don't yet know how much of the content is actually usable. Rob thinks he might have a second copy of Feb 87 so it might not matter in the end. It would be nice to be able to share the disk images in a format everyone can use, and not have to have the Atarimax cable and software, which to be honest I cannot even get to run on Windows 11, and I have to rely on an old XP machine to support.

I have a bunch of .PRO disk images. I can read them on real HW using an Atarimax interface cable and the APE software. Is there anything else that can read these? Any emulators? I don't think SIO2SD supports this format. Does anything else? Is there any software that can convert a .PRO image into a .ATX image, as the latter seems more widely supported? Thanks for any pointers.

BITD I used to have a Lazer enhanced 1050 drive. In the UK in the mid 80s, and before the internet, Happy enhancements were hard to get hold of, so I got a Lazer from a friend-of-a-friend-fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry type deal. It was boardless. The whole unit was delivered encased in what I think was bathroom tub caulking. Amazingly it did actually work for a good few years, but then started acting erratic. I think I replaced it with a US Doubler to keep the double density. By the late 80s, Atari User and Page 6 magazine were both carrying ads for U.S. Doublers, Happy drives and something I think was called "The Plate". Happy memories!

I went to a 286 PC with a colour VGA monitor and a small hard disk. It was 1991 so probably Windows 3.0 or 3.1. But I had to sell the ST to afford the new system, and it took a while to scrape together the funds, so I actually moved back to my 800XL, 1050 drive, 1027 printer for occasional correspondence, and got distracted for a brief time by a cheap and nasty used Advance 86B which was an awful 8086 PC clone.

Can you be a little more descriptive of the issue? Does the unit power on? Do you get anything on the screen? Is the display all-white, all-black, garbage? Does it try to boot the internal floppy?

Thank you porting these games to the Falcon! My dog loved "Alice's Mom's Rescue" on the Jaguar, and she approves of these ports too 😀 One question - is the lack of support for the Jagpad on the Falcon a deliberate design decision? If not, is it hard to add?

It does switch just fine on every other ST - 1040ST (US-spec), 1040STE (UK-spec), 1040STE (US-spec), Falcon (US-spec). On this 520ST (US-spec) the 50/60Hz switch program causes the screen to offset to the upper right of the screen. I am guessing maybe something with the older video hardware? Was hoping there might be a "swap this IC for a later revision...." type of known fix.