Zogging Hell

All three are fantastic, but the second was the highlight for me. Have fun! P.S. Shouldn't you be starting with Crystals of Arborea -you haven't reallly got the full set there tut tut

I never had a problem with Deluxe Paint stability either. I think it was the best art package on the ST, although none of them were perfect and you had to use several of them to get all the best features. Having used Deluxe Paint (1) on the Amiga, Deluxe Paint ST is definitely an big improvement (the first Deluxe Paint is probably about equivalant to Neochrome). At the time the ST version of DP was said to be parity wise with the Deluxe Paint II on the Amiga. I think the 3rd Amiga one pips it but it is two iterations higher so not really a surprise. It is a shame the ST version never got a sequel.

There is some confusion over whether the Clabs Mk I's came with the clock patch. I had a conversation with someone on Atari Forum who got quite irrate when I insisted my Clab Mk I came with no fixes and I had to get them done later, whereas he insisted they all came fixed. The simple answer to this apparently I found out later was that you could have the fixes applied when you ordered from the supplier, and so a lot of them would arrive fixed as new. Mine was ordered stock and did not have the fix. I got the clock fix and the line out changes done later when I got into Cubase Audio. Regarding the keyboard colour, could it be it came with a non- US keyboard and he swapped it out for the US one which is a fairly easy and cheap swap? Personally I would have put up with the foreign keys, I have another original Falcon with a similar arrangement, an ST keyboard has been swapped in, but the light colour doesn't sit right for me personally.

You are probably quite right, I'm a bit out of the loop on Ultrasatans, I brought two of the older 'Satandisks' some time ago and have not played with the newer model!

My thought when mine go was to hotwire an Ultrasatan into one... which I think would involve gutting it and then have the Ultrasatan connect directly to the ACSI port via soldering a ribbon cable to it. I would then try and keep the power supply and fan for the hurricane/ heat effect! I will probably need to desolder the ACSI port from the Megafile 'motherboard' though to reuse it. The only thing this would loose is the hard drive access noises, which are very distinctive and I will miss those when they are gone. I suppose those MFM drives really are dead? Sometimes they just stick and require oiling... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErXDjMJ2dA . Worth a try if it is the nostalgia that your after.

The only one I know of was third party and called the Trojan Light Phaser. There were a few games released for it, I think Space Gun was the only one not released by Trojan themselves. It's a pretty standard light gun, much like any other from the time. There were no official Atari ones.

Now that is a good motherboard, and now worth a fair sum if ebay is anything to go by. I must admit I've not encountered the stability problems you mention with the alternative chipsets on socket 370, but they were all clean installs with final drivers so maybe that is why (being aquired much later). They do seem to run slower though.

I've not personally been that interested in the minis myself, but would probably buy an ST one if it came out, just for something to sit under the TV. I think any games on it should try and steer clear of the standard scrolling games as these are invariably marginally better (or in some horizontally scrolling games cases much better) on the Amiga. An ST one for me should concentrate on the ST's strengths where it could beat the Amiga handily, like early flat shaded 3D, god games and Dungeon crawlers, with a few exceptional mainstream scrolling games like Rainbow Islands or Xenon to cover the other bases. If the mini had a speed boost setting that would also help with the 3D that would also help with the 'must be 60 frames a second' crowd who are likely to blanch at the 10 fps of early 3D a bit. To me that would show the ST in its best light, rather than as a 'not quite a good' Amiga and would also make the library a bit more unique as not so many of those games make it to the minis. Main problem with all those games is they pretty much all need the keyboard, which never really suit the minis.

I should probably qualify this slightly by saying I followed the Atari line though to the end with a Clab Falcon in c. 96 and then a Milan computer in 98. So basically my computers/ consoles split in two with Atari for the serious stuff and older gaming and the consoles taking over for modern gaming. Didn't get a PC until 2002/3, with a shocking socket 370 pre-built with a Cyrix 533mhz CPU and onboard graphics and then a suprisingly better Compaq Armada Pentium 233mhz laptop. I was still using the Atari's for 'serious' stuff, mainly report writing and music, until the late noughties, mainly because they didn't have the internet (well not in a everyday use way) and I could concentrate better without it, and I still wrote sections of text for academic stuff even a few years ago.

Ah a classic motherboard from a fine maker (joke!). I have one here myself, well two in fact, although one has lived up to the PC Chips reputation for quality and died. The inbuilt graphics were awful as well, but at least it could run Doom well!

It's a good stick but not arcade quality imo, those fire buttons definitely aren't anyway. It is great on some games and not so good on others like all joysticks, presumably down to the stick the particular developer was using when they wrote the game. Doesn't the Megadrive pad damage your ST if it's used due to the way it is wired?

Brought a SNES basically for Streetfighter II, as it was the first game my STFM couldn't do successfully well (or at least the US Gold version wasn't great!). That said my ST was still used for a lot of my games for years after that, as a lot of the games I liked were on there (and this is still the case) and was still being used after I had got bored of the SNES and moved onto the Jag, Saturn and N64.

Did you check the power supply with a dummy load, as you won't get the right readings without? It would certainly be my first suspicion if it hasn't been recapped.

There are probably a number of things you can try yourself before sending it off, especially if you aren't afraid of opening it up. Firstly what monitor is it connected to (modern, old?), secondly an ST can take up to 30 secs to boot, so are you getting a white screen when switching on? When you press the keys do you get any noise from the monitor speaker? Any other symptoms (do the power lights come on for example?) The hard drive is quite probably dead at this point, but probably worth a try if you can get the ST going again.

I suspect if you have an original 1040STFM you may not need to solder anything to upgrade and could get away with just snipping some resistor legs for 4mb, but it depends if you have surface mounted MMUs or video shifters (those tend to come in later when Atari was cost cutting). The Marpet Xtra ram does not necessarily require soldering and I don't think Exxos's one does necessarily either. The install is not without some risk/ effort though as you have to dismantle the machine and press one part into the MMU socket and then remove the shifter chip from its socket and plug the other part in. Although to get you to 4mb you have to disable the onboard ram, which involves 'pulling up' resistors which most people solder wires to for reliability. The original Marpet Xtra ram came with a jumper cable(s) that clipped onto the resistor and then 5v, however, so it is totally possible to leave the soldering iron in the box. It is totally doable for most people if they are patient and follow the instructions, however, and most ST owners in the 90s would have done this themselves. A lot of people slag the Marpet one off for damaging the MMU socket, Exxos's upgrade works the same way, and yes it does, but if you're not going to pull it out ever again and are not in the habit of throwing your ST about, it is totally reliable (I've had one in an ST working fine, after several house moves, for about 25 plus years without a blip). It was also the only way to get an upgrade with no soldering back in the day, which is the reason it was so popular. Unfortunately, the ST can't really have any plug in ST ram (as opposed to TT/ fast ram) in the way an Amiga can for example, it just isn't designed in the same way and isn't physically possible.