Christos

Definitely. It looks much better that way...

Three things that had to be done were done. With the help of CyranoJ and lp and the guide by techie Alison I mounted the hard disk on the RF shield, added a sony mpf 920 floppy disk drive since my epson died and repaired my VGA cable. Read the original thread here. Crappy cell phone camera pictures follow. I think my falcon looks better like this. I'll keep it that way. What do you think?

Here is a new version of a null modem TCP/IP connection between the atari and a PC this time with the use of the STING stack. I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work with an ST or Mega STE but as usual some things are beyond us.I only have a falcon to test. Setting up the Atari: First it is imperative to install and install properly the HSModem serial port drivers. To do that we place DRVIN.PRG in the auto folder late in the running order but before the drivers and the stack. After that we install the serial drivers. Depending on our machine this should be: SCC.PRG for ST, Falcon or MegaSTE modem 2 MFP.PRG for ST, Mega STE modem 1 [1] * I use SCC for my falcon but without an ST to test I am not really sure about this. I read the manual but I couldn't really understand it TBH. It's trial and error. Next we go to setting up the stack. STING 1.26 has been used. We place sting.prg and sting.inf in the auto folder, after the serial port drivers. We also create a c:/STING folder where we put the sting modules and all accompanying software. The modules need to be placed in the sting folder and not a subfolder. We also need to add the cpx serial.cpx, stingprot.cpx, stingport.cpx and sting.cpx in our cpx folder to be loaded by the control panel. Serial port settings: Modem 2, 38400, RTS/CTS, 8bit none parity, 1 stop bit. Sting port settings General, PPP, van jacobson compression Addressing: MTU 576, ip address appropriate Sting internals Sting Protocols Resolver: 192.168.1.1 routers ip Windows: We set up windows to accept incoming connections as described in my previous entry. Important: The sting prt file needs to be placed in the auto folder next to sting (but I wasn't sure so I've placed it all over ). That's about it. You reboot and you are connected with internet. I've also changed my route.tab and default.cfg according to this. The connection is more stable than the pppd connection with mintnet and I don't know why. I just accept it. On a related note, my falcon's floppy broken down while I was trying to take some screenshots...

Actually my 130XE keyboard works perfectly, while my falcon's broke...

That is a very interesting idea which should be better answered by the Atari historians. My view on the subject is quite different. The ST was not a competitor to the Amiga in the sense that Atari was aiming at the business aspect of the computer. The entire ST architecture screams for that. For example the midi ports. In addition to being an emerging standard for the music industry they could be used for creating a network of ST's. The ST high resolution that is very good to the eye when you need to work in CAD or business applications, the ACSI port and peripherals, high speed DMA devices etc. The whole marketing campaign. It's my view that Atari went after Apple and IBM, not Commodore.

This is a discussion going on since 1985 and there can be no consensus. My view? This one

I can't understand this game. 1600 just a participation. See you on the next one.

Hi, FTL made great games for the ST (indeed you should probably have posted this at the Atari ST section of the forum but I am sure the mods will take care of that ). Interestingly enough Oids is the game selected for the current competition of the ST offline tournament. I saw the video of your game and it looks a pretty cool conversion of Oids for the pc. Good luck with that .

Good morning Paul, I see your problem now. I am not sure whether your investment can pay off but let me try and see for how much of what you want I can offer solutions. First of all your hardware specs scream MiNT. I admit it's not for everyone to get deep into but at least the installation process is a piece of cake with EasyMiNT. You also said you'd be looking for a DTP package. Calamus is still available for purchase, in that case you may want to try the Lite Edition which is cheap and has many functionalities. It's slow in my falcon but yours is about 3-5 times faster than mine so it should fly there. Another thing you need is a word processor and nothing is better than Papyrus which you can find for purchase at 16/32. It is my humble opinion that Papyrus is expensive at 100 Euros especially for an abandoned piece of software but I understand that you want to use original or free software. It may worth checking with the owner whether he has some second hand software at a cheaper price. You also want to design webpages and Joe is a very good HTML editor. It's not a WYSIWYG editor and I don't know much about HTML. However the author is reachable and that's a big plus. It's going to be a tedious process and an expensive one, mostly because we are pc spoiled and at some point we lost touch. Also feel free to add me in MSN for real time communication, if you use that service. Regards Christos

Hello Paul, In order to suggest to you some software in replacement of the ones you are seeking, I would like to know a bit more about your Falcon. More specifically, RAM size and if it is accelerated or not. I do have some suggestions for a spreadsheet and browser. 3d calc is a full featured spreadsheet with the only minus that it assumes an ST mono resolution. I think it will work on other resolutions but it will still be colourless. Highwire. All I have to say is you'll be surprised by the rendering speed. It's a great browser still actively developed. Another thing I would like to address is the operating system. I have gone MiNT and I am not going back. To give you a feel about MiNT running on a standard falcon please view this I captured. I personally find little speed difference compared to TOS while it's faster in some instances. XaAES, the AES used in this video is configurable for optimal performance, something that is not the case in this video. A good replacement desktop is Teradesk but I must admit it doesn't look as good as Jinnee or Gemini. Also if you could describe your requirements from a program I am sure I could help more. As I' ve written before I am extremely happy to see Atari users in the scene. Users that are interested in creating stuff using their machines. Hope this can help you a bit to decide what's best for you and I am awaiting for your answer. Christos

Hi Paul, I also appreciate your offer but I will not be willing to sell them. You've found a good falcon there at a good price. I strongly suggest you keep it . My offer still stands on any assistance you might require with any type of software (since it's my habit to test software and give feedback to the authors (at least some times ). But I'll tell you this, when something else comes along you will be the first to get it . Regards Christos

Hi Paul, thank you very much for your kind offer but I am not in the business of ripping people off. Most of this software is available in the net if you look around and most of it should now be considered obsolete since it has been greatly surpassed by many free software applications from a vibrant Atari community. I would be more than happy to assist you in tracking down applications you need. Simply put, they are not worth a falcon and if I sold it to you I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. On another note, it's nice to have in the community a person interested in using Atari ST applications. Best regards Christos

It's been a while since I've updated this blog. Reasons? The usual . In the news, STOT is going rather well, I am getting a bit better coding but today the courier came! After some delay I got the new stuff of the previous blog entry. What was in there? 22Kgrs of Atari things. The seller also included a lot of Atari 8 bit stuff free of charge. Thank you CyranoJ! So here's a list of what I got (Disclaimer: there's a lot of reading to do!) ST software: Straight Fax 2.0 Diamond Back II and III Data Manager Professional SpeedoGDOS Harlekin 3 True Paint Calamus 1.09 N Stalker 3 GST C compiler ColourMaster DFT Geneva 1.01 Neodesk 3 and 4 HiSoft C interpreter Imagecopy 3.5 and 4.0 TextStyle NVDI 2.5 XBOOT III Redacteur III Rainbow 1.0 Extendos OCR Outline Art ST/Falcon Games Ishar - Legend of the Fortress Transarctica The Bard's Tale Atari 8 bit Hardware and Books Atari XC12 boxed 10 Shrink wrapped 5.25" floppy disks The personal computer book - Robin Bradbeer Advanced programming techniques for your Atari including graphics and voice programs - L.M. Schreiber Making the Most of your Atari - P. Bunn The best of Antic Vol 1 - An anthology Atari Games & Recreations - H. Kohl et al. Compute!'s Atari Collection vol 1 BASIC exercises for the Atari - J. P. Lamoitier The Atari book of games - M. James et al. Atari Software - 1983 Winter supplement - J. Stanton et al. And a 40Gb 2.5" Fujitsu hard disk for my Falcon! Pictures to follow soon! And here are the pics: Cell phone quality

I' ve uploaded a video of my falcon running the wolf3d ST port. I' ve also played it on STEEM in the past and it was very playable. Be sure to visit ray's page. I am not sure if wolf3d on A8 would be anything more than a proof of concept but I really like this discussion .

Not equally funny but funny non the less: http://124sold.gr/auctiondetails.php?id=1730351 http://www.ibid.gr/ViewItem.asp?itemid=4084380 The second link only has greek description but I am sure you'll get the point

I didn't manage to beat my high score (or more importantly pseudografx's score). Next time :>

You guys are getting dangerously close so here's another score: 11311

Oh good news. I am looking forward to the phantomS.

Hmm... Can you modify the 4MB board for more memory or am I better off getting a separate board? Tempest No, I am not aware of any such modification. You will need to find a replacement board. Petr used to make them but I am not sure if he still does. You will need to contact him. Price was 40 Euros. Alternatively, schematics for an adapter can be found here under CTR 14. Hope this helps.

Plus you can use atari's MiNT kernel with Geneva so you don't have that buggy atari AES but still have preemptive multitasking with low memory footprint.

I can confirm to you that this is a 4 MB ram card for the falcon. You can't mount two of them though on a falcon. Best is to get a 14 MB ram card from another source or bulid your own, if you are good with these kind of stuff.

Nah, you don't actually need to get an HD with the falcon. The falcon accepts standard 2.5" IDE drives (laptop) which are cheap to buy second hand (but I can see your point of having to open it up ).

Well you may be right Clint, however I've seen Battlesphere carts going for over $500. That leaves about $100 for upgrade. Of course getting into bid wars can be hazardous so it might be a good trade. Of course I'd consider it not fair since for me the value of a game cannot be that high but who am I to argue with perceived values of things ?

Ehm, not a wise business decision if you ask me. Sell battlesphere, you'll raise enough money to buy a falcon and upgrade it.