leech

I've lately been wondering about attempting to compose something... but actually want to do it in an interesting step up. By this I mean start off with tunes from Music Construction Set on the Atari 8bit, then sample and mix it in with some MIDI from one of the STs, and kind of go up through the ages, so to speak... still working out the concept

Ha, I have one of the Lotharek ones sitting in a box for the day when I finally set up my Mega STe again... but lately I've been having fun with my 2nd Falcon. Though now that I might have a solution for putting the top back on my 1st Falcon, I'll get the SV and all that jazz set up...

Huh, my Mega STe came with the SCSI 1 controller? The sad thing is, I had bought a 1.6gb drive off a friend to replace the 50mb one... never could get it to work. It was decades later that I found out it would .ax out at 1gb...

I think the one thing I could argue the JagGD would never replace... ease of getting music to run through the VLM. Unless it magically grows network support and can stream off of a NAS/Plex/Whatever. Sure you could put MP3s on it, or something. But with all of the gotek drives and images and dealing with flash drives elsewhere, adding a musical playlist to that sounds exhausting... Though I'm likely just a weird one, and enjoy putting on an album and staring at my TV while colors dance about.

The crap thing is that this causes some impossibilities. Like I think a CD based collection of all your ST ports would be amazing. But since the GD doesn't work with the CD, it means you couldn't really protect them from the ebay/etsy scum and villainy. I haven't been using my GD that much, as I have the CD plugged in, and rather leave it there for the occasional on-cart game, and of course the VLM. Though now I have a Nuon I should use...

Ha, would that be a Mini STacy, or STacy Mini? I really would love a STacy or an ST Book (though I think only a very tiny amount of these were ever made). Edit: I was looking at the Wikipedia entry (after seeing a couple STacy's on ebay... I want one, but I don't 2,000 dollars, want one...) and it states it has the same external and internal ACSI like the Mega STe... I could be wrong... but I don't recall the Mega STe having an internal ACSI, unless that is what the SCSI controller plugs into? The Mega ST on the other hand, definitely has an internal ACSI port. Back on topic, I use my STs for... well, I'm working on doing a review of different Word Processors and Office Suites. Kind of stuck at the moment, since I'm trying to get some fonts to appease some example docs

I keep thinking this game has a dark story behind it in an alternative universe to Burger Time, and it's Burgers made out of people named Tom...

So Jealous... I wish someone would make a proper portable FPGA set up in a laptop form factor... having an Amiga/ST laptop would rock. I wonder if we could convince Gunnar that should be their next project over for the Apollo Core team...

Which program do you use for formatting the USB drive? I have a sort of funky set up; I'm using a card reader with a Compact Flash card (2gb) that I formatted with fat16 (supposedly) on Linux. Problem is, when I'm in normal TOS instead of FreeMiNT, I can't read / write to it, so I'm assuming it's still Fat32 instead. The fact it supports long file names also sort of gives it away... I was thinking I should be able to format it with HDDriver, but haven't attempted such a thing yet. Mostly wanted it for swapping data between my Falcon and 'modern' computer. Also, would use the UltraSatan, but seeing how the Falcon omitted the ASCI port, I'm kind of unable to do such a thing

I only asked, as I figured that may actually be a very useful thing to have access to, if you're attempting to recreate some of it's features on the Vampires.

Yeah, they would have had to be the mythical 4160s. Did anyone bother trying to call something the 2mb version? Seems to me most people just went from 1 to 4 on the STe. Sure there was the Mega ST 1,2,4, and the Mega STe... I think came with a minimum of 2mb? I still remember spending 100 on 2 more mb of ram to get it up to 4. (memory may be fuzzy, it may have been 99 per stick).

Ram is easy to check in the MegaSTe, you just unscrew the hard drive screw and lift the lid up to look inside. For the 1040STes, if I recall, you likely have to take off the lid and the top shield. Been a while since I opened mine. There is also the potential of getting a floppy disk with the control panel on it and the System Info CPX (SI.CPX) to show the memory if you don't want to open them.

I tend to think one of the Falcons should be put into the hands of the Apollo Core people, so they can test software behavior on it compared to an ST and their Vampires! Get that development going even faster

I mean the Coleco Adam is really cool... definitely not successful, but then again, who would have thought that a computer that had a printer for a power supply would be successful? (Oh yeah, Coleco apparently did). Ha, yeah, the XEGS is Conceptualized as a Console -> Made into a computer -> released later as a console... with a keyboard and SIO.

The Falcon is such a beautiful machine. Reminds me of Dominique Dunne, young, beautiful and killed before truly being able to show off her talents. (My brain goes to weird places when I've consistently had about 4-5 hours of sleep three days in a row... don't start playing Enshrouded, it's evil.)

I could have sworn it came with one... but I haven't owned one since the 80s. The last LQ / Daisy wheel printer I recall using was this massive Brother printer my grandmother gave my family... it would shake the entire wooden desk we had it sitting on when it printed. The thing was huge, I think you could actually print on an A4 paper size in landscape... Granted, I was smaller, so maybe it wasn't that big.

But where is the fun in that?

Ha, I think getting fujinets for all of them and networking them into an AI to take over the world would be much more entertaining.

Seriously. A decent portion of my 8bit collection is from a place where people just donate stuff, and I and my friends at the time had bought pretty much all they had of Atari 8bit stuff. My friend currently regrets at one point getting rid of his 1200XL, but that is where I managed to get a 130xe, XEGS (with keyboard) some 1050 drives, etc. Still have all of it except for some of the 1050s, which I sold for a license to HDDriver for the ST... forgotten I'd done that, but found the receipt one day. Unfortunately due to some terrible circumstances, a bunch of my stuff got tossed into the dump... a TT keyboard, an Indus GT, SC1224... still pissed about it.

(stupid internet fail). I was trying to find a clip of A Fish Called Wanda, where Michael Palin says, "Look Wanda, Treasure." That was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Good god, what was it like before? Also, that is the most yellow TT030 I've ever seen! Not that I've seen many of them. On the bright side, no matter how many times I start to think "man, I have a lot of Ataris" I'll inevitably see someone with way more than I have.

Oops, the glue I used is called 'Beast Bond' https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B89Z4S69/

Quite some time ago I bought an 800XL off of ebay with a U1MB and VBXE already fitted inside, someone had also done the chroma/luma with composite/s-video switch mod to it. But one of the main reasons I ordered it, was that it had one of the mechanical keyboard types. The keycaps have a + like most Cherry keyboards, and a PCB. The previous owner seemed to think that the spacebar needed some stabilizing springs (it still might, but not sure) and so glued it under the spacebar... unfortunately this seems to have caused too much pressure on it, and one of the solder pads had come off the PCB. It was still connected to the pin of the key, but definitely wasn't making a connection to the trace. The other pin to the key was loose but still held on. I ended up pulling out some soldering wick, removed some of the solder, and got some Guerilla Glue to glue the pad back down over the hole. Let it sit for a bit, then soldered the pin and widened it enough to touch the trace, then soldered up the other pin, and now all seems to be good! I may need to touch it up a bit, as it seems still a bit iffy, but it's at least working Any other glue I should have used? Are springs needed for this keyboard type?

Ha, yeah, you almost need a full comittee, like some open source projects have some 6 month plan of features they want to target, work on those during that 6 months, while setting others for the next 6 months of work, and so on. They basically have project management and assigned tasks if they are large enough projects. I think the benefit in case of GOS to being opened up would be more in the API of it, so people could write applications for it, granted that of course would all depend on how complete it was. There is also the curiosity of "how the hell did he make that work so well?" so people want to look at the source!

Ha, I wasn't even aware that there was source code available for Jag games. I kind of go through periods of roaming around, paying strong attention to stuff, then wandering off again. A lot of open source depends really on finding someone who wants to pick a project that interests them. Like I definitely want to learn to code, if for no other reason than to try and port that Ultima IV remaster to the Atari...but finding the time...