leech

Yeah, I meant that SCSI drives were better previous to that. It wasn't until the early 90s that was the case. I think most PCs were still using MFMs weren't they? I had to look up when the first 2.5" drives shipped, that was in 1988. So they wouldn't have existed until after the 520ST was released. http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html Edit: Link also explains why the ASCI port wasn't full SCSI. "1986: The official SCSI spec is released; Apple Computer's Mac Plus is one of the first computers to use it. "

It seems to me that part of the problem was that the older machines didn't have internal space for hard drives, so they were not only costly for the drive, but the external case as well. Though I think maybe the A1000 could have an internal drive, I don't think the A500 and other initial wedges could. But then by the time the Mega was released, more systems could have internal drives. Probably didn't help that most systems went SCSI at the time as well, since IDE sucks in comparison, but is so much cheaper (this is true even today with sas vs sata). Of course there is some bitterness toward Atari for their hacked up ACSI as well. Actually, more on topic. Hard drive as minimum for the dream STe would have helped a lot as well. Granted my Mega STe came with a 50mb hard drive, which I swore I would never run out of space on.... and I didn't until I got a shell account on the internet..

I'm going to have to look into this STEroids mode! I ordered a MiST, it's sitting on my table at home, but I've had about 10 minutes with it since I got it (installed TOS and got it to a desktop and that's about as far as I got, then realized I really liked my old STs so started getting them up and going again.) Agreed with the XEGS/ Mega ST style case, that'd be awesome. I need to do the 'whitening' on my XEGS. Actually I need to do it on most of my Ataris.

I always thought it'd be awesome, now that we have EmuTOS, if we could get 100% compatibility (which I realize is really hard) and then started adding a lot of the nicer looking things that TOS 4.x has (like the better looking windows, I know not much of a difference, but definitely looks nicer) so that we could have overall better looking systems on the older ST line. Granted these days, I have to wonder how many people have upgraded the memory and just run MiNT. It was going to be my goal to see if I could land a CT60e and start updating a lot of the FreeMiNT packages myself and put it out there, since a lot of it seems pretty old. But I'd also like to expand out my TT030 and Mega STe and do the same there. Anyhow, that's a bit off topic You know what would be cool for the topic? Let's make a new STee? FPGA that sucker, get some of the chips from the arcade machines (we could probably use mame bits, right?) and put together a MiST style box. New TOS machine would be pretty epic.

Well put that way... being able to use TT RAM for all the applications and using ST Ram for purely video display would have worked, right? The problem I had with my TT is that most applications didn't realize the memory was even there. I'll need to find out what happened to the guy I was going to buy TOS 3.06 off of so I could play more with my TT

Well, I guess I should stress the word 'Alive'. People in the Atari community seem generally more hyper and the old models seem to be getting as much love as the new as far as the hardware hacks and such. Which by the way seem like the proper term of hack (Soldering for installs!) than most of the Amiga stuff. Actually maybe it's the impression of how bitter a lot of people are in the Amiga community that seems different. Besides the SDL based ports, the software development seems pretty dead, at least for the classic machines. I loved my Mega STe. but yes, there just wasn't enough push to the developers to really take advantage of the newer machines. The lowest common denominator ended up always being the ST, and so the extended abilities were there for nothing. At least if they had upped the desktop resolutions they would have made even better business level machines, for things like DTP. I would have given my left nut for that many colors back when I was using Calamus or Pagestream. I wasn't even aware until very recently that the non-Mega STEs had the enhanced joystick ports. I noticed them when I got my falcon and found out about them. So Atari didn't really advertise any of that much.

That reminds me, I need to look into increasing the bus speed on my Falcon... That's a good question about the TT, would have been nice if you could use the TT RAM for video if you had it for higher resolution/color depth. Would have been an epic feature at the time.

Could be worse, like the Amigas where they used the barrel batteries that would leak acid after so long and ruin your motherboard.

I have to agree that it would have been completely epic if Atari Corp had been able to use Atari Inc's hardware in their computers. I think at the time the STe was being designed, Atari probably thought it'd be better to keep it closer to what the Amiga was using, so that developers could port things over easier. My biggest problem with the STe has always been that while they upgraded the color palette, and they upgraded to stereo sound, they never did add more resolutions. Granted most great developers hacked around that, but it seems it wasn't until the Falcon that they made it more Amiga-like where you could get resolutions depending on your ram, but by then it was kind of too late... well it possibly wouldn't have been, if they'd stuck to their guns instead of ditching the ST line altogether and attempting (and failing) at focusing on the Jaguar. The Falcon has some seriously nice hardware in it, and I consider it quite impressive that my stock one(well, I have 14mb of ram) can play MP3s while my A4000D with an 060/50 and 256mb of ram cannot! Granted, as has been discussed, the lowest common denominator still would have been the ST, and so most things wouldn't take advantage of the 'arcade in a keyboard' that should have happened. Ports would be awesome though!

I believe the Atari800 emulator for Linux is open source, though it does use SDL (not sure how capable the ST port of SDL is). Of course what would be funny is a port of Hatari for the Falcon/FreeMiNT for ST emulation.

And that was that... actually that's been one of my crazy 'what if' scenarios that I like to think about. If Atari had been able to keep the Amiga technology, would they have really done any better than Commodore? I tend to think that Atari was all about their engineers, where Commodore was all about the bottom line and trying to sell the same system for as long as they could. I do agree with being a fan of Jay Miner, and doing the same thing, buying an ST (actually mine was a Mega STe) instead of an Amiga as my step up from the Atari 800XL. I've thought about this long and hard. Even if Atari had done what the original poster had suggested, and the STe line was built off their arcade hardware, while it would have been awesome, and may have given Atari a year or two more, we would still have ended up in the same situation we are in now. I do believe that where Atari failed is the same place they always failed, they couldn't keep developers for one reason or another. I mean most people barely even knew the Atari Jaguar was their last video game console, and barely knew it was available at the time it was released. Not many companies were stating that they were making their games for the Jag, and there wasn't a whole lot of advertising for it. Even the ads that were released were cheesy, granted any advertising I'd ever seen on TV for anything Atari were pretty cheesy. For me, getting back into the Atari world of things is pretty interesting, because I was an Atari guy up until about '95, when it seemed my beloved machine was just being passed by, granted my monitor broke so I had to stop using the Mega STe, and then I got a TT030, but ended up not using it a lot due to having a Windows machine at the time (which I hated, and eventually got into Linux). But then many years later, I got an Amiga A4000D, and jumped into the Amiga community and upgraded it as much as I could, but I still had always wanted a Falcon, and now I have one, it's interesting to see how both the Amiga and Atari communities have evolved since the death of their respective owners. One of these days I'll write an article about it. But to sum things up, it almost seems to me that the Atari community is a bit more alive than the Amiga one. I think the reasoning behind that is the split in Amiga-land between Aros, MorphOS, AmigaOS and OS4. So software development seems to have just choked, with the exception of getting Linux ports. Atari-land seems to get a lot more new software projects happening. Hardware projects seem to be about equal, though most of the Amiga ones seem to be for accelerators rather than memory upgrades. Anyhow, sorry for trailing off topic so much. Just some thoughts.

Wow, I would love a Star Raiders and Joust Cartridge. Wait, I didn't even know Star Raiders came out for the ST. Loved Joust (every iteration, except the 2600 one where the eggs would fly, wow, that was horrible).

It's always Airflow vs Noise when dealing with fans. My preference usually is to go with something with a heat sensor. Attach it to the most heat sensitive bits (or really close) and then if the component does get too hot, the fan will speed up and provide more air flow. It's easy to get more airflow with less noise when you have space for a larger fan (I generally use 120+ fans in my tower computers, in fact my current set up has a 240mm fan on the CPU/heat sink. That thing never gets hot). It's hard to get a silent fan that is 40mm, unless you sacrifice a lot of airflow, so I'll have to see how much this new fan puts out (both sound and airflow). The Falcon itself doesn't seem to get that hot. The A4000D has one of the worse airflow setups I've seen (only internal fan being in the PSU, and my Mediator+Indivision AGA are fairly close together and produce a bit more heat than I'd like them to have.) I never realized how old these systems were until I got back into them. Ha, funny story. I have a brother-in-law that always would ask me to fix his computers. His was having some issues with overheating, so to punish him, I ended up ordering the loudest heatsink/fan I could find. It was so loud, you could hear it three rooms away. He finally commented on it at one point, and I just said "well, there were heat issues before, so I figured I'd not take the chance and it keeps cool this way. I believe that one was called the 'Volcano'.

I was just thinking of this last night, since the fan does make an awful noise. I have previously done the same thing with my Amiga A4000D. While I think the sound of the floppy drives quite quaint and part of the nostalgia, I don't much like the sound of air being blown (I've actually spent quite a bit of money on my intel tower just to make it quiet, granted I still don't quite trust liquid cooling). So where does the fan really need to be in the Falcon? Seems to me the PSU is what mostly heats up. With the PicoPSU projects, would you even need a fan? Maybe if you get a CT60e with a fan/heatsink combo on the 060 you would as well. Fun story about my Amiga. I replaced the fan in the PSU with a high quality one that I thought was extremely quiet, but it was still really loud. After buying yet another fan and trying it out, I discovered that it wasn't the fan afterall, but the stinking CD-ROM. Even when idle for some reason it would just keep spinning and it was really loud! So I replaced it with a Plextor SATA dvd drive I had laying around (with a IDE-> SATA adapter) Now it's nice and quiet. The fan in the A4000D does have little rubber mounts that it came with, makes it nice and quiet. I'll be ordering this one to replace the falcon one. 11dba http://www.amazon.com/Noiseblocker-NB-BlackSilentFan-XM1-40mmx10mm-Ultra/dp/B002DG1QUM/ref=sr_1_10?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1452125608&sr=1-10&keywords=fan+40mm

I just went through this same thing; A) http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/monadapt.htmexplains a lot of it, and they make a cable that works great with some monitors. B) I bought a Dell 2001FP (someone on the wiki found that newer ones (newer than Sept 2005, if I recall) won't work, so you want an older one. Or There is a huge thread about the NEC MultiSync LCD 1970VX working great as well. (I'll probably end up picking one up soonish to see which is better). http://atariage.com/forums/topic/230561-lcd-monitor-that-supports-st-low-res-nec-multisync-lcd-1970vx/ Your ST looks worse than my 1040ST, which just has what appears to be vertical lines missing. Good luck, hopefully it's just a cable/monitor issue.

I think mine was around $800 USD, and I got it last month from someone on Amibay. Had to wait a while so he could get a hold of a US PSU and build a VGA cable, but I got it and it works great (have some Math Co-processors on the way now as well, along with a NetUSBee for it.) But it seems that if you're in the US like I am, you pretty much are going to end up having to source one from across the pond.

That CosmoEx looks awesome, maybe I should have concentrated on one of those instead of the UltraSatan, which passed through customs pretty quick, and left NY last night! Aminet doesn't support something like apt-get either, but I always thought it'd be awesome. To me (and probably many others) it'd be far more worth while to run some simple commands to search and retrieve packages from a software repository, instead of hunting through the lists, finding one, extracting it, installing it, then finding out it doesn't work right or cover your needs, and then rinse and repeat. Whereas with a nice command line set. apt-cache search <subject> apt-get install <package> <play around with package> apt-get remove (or purge) <package> I actually can't stand using much of anything on Windows anymore due to the same hunt/pick/install/remove crap. Ha, I really want to get the CosmoEx now. Hmm, I really need to get the MegaSTe and 1040ST working though....

Being a Debian guy at heart, I would love an 'apt-get install pagestream' or something. Granted, maybe that's a bad example since it's commercial (not sure if they allow the very old and non-updated version for the atari to be downloaded freely or not though, I know they still maintain the Amiga version.) I wonder how feasible setting up something like that would be.

There seriously needs to be an easy way to add support for them, maybe some sort of program that can survive a warm reset to translate Jaguar controllers through the enhanced port into being Joystick Port 2 and 3? Not sure if that's possible or not. The ports are another case of "Atari, you are awesome and have wonderful ideas... you just didn't take them to where they needed to be!" Kind of like the useless LAN port on the MegaSTe/TT030/Falcon030. Everything I read is they included them for that many years, yet never bothered to write a driver for them Back on Topic; I always loved the Epyx 500xj controllers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx#/media/File:Epyx_500XJ.jpg I also have one of these; http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=%28amiga,atari%29+%28power+stick,powerstick,power-stick%29&_sacat=&_ex_kw=&_mPrRngCbx=1&_udlo=&_udhi=&_sop=12&_fpos=&_fspt=1&_sadis=&LH_CAds=&rmvSB=true And I bought two of these; http://knoppix.net/store/PSX-Controller-Black-PS2-pad-with-adapter-Amiga-C64-Atari-Joystick-Mouse_311229868375.html Unfortunately there are two kinds of those floating around and I thought I had bought the older ones (that will emulate a CD32 controller and all it's buttons) sadly, I got the one above, but it does work great as both a Joystick and a Mouse on my Falcon. I just need to get a couple sets of the short joystick extenders so I don't have to keep plugging/unplugging on the ports under the Falcon and 1040ST.

Ha, I had just brought this up last night with my younger brother, about how when the first playstation was announced, there were a lot of magazines that were doubtful Sony could pull it off because they had to compete against the well established Sega and Nintendo. But I would always tell people, "The reason they'll succeed is because Sony has a ton of money to do so." And that's still true today. Granted recently they've been having some financial issues, but they still make a ton from the Playstation portion of sales. It's also funny to think the original Playstation hardware was mostly created by what used to be Psygnosis, who made some of the best looking games around for the Amiga/ST. I kind of think of the PSX as the replacement of the Amiga CD32, and what it really should have been anyhow. It would have been interesting had Jay Miner still had some influence or caused some inspiration in Atari, and they could have had the Jaguar be initially designed as a console, then released as a Computer, like the Amiga chipset did. Granted I don't know if it would have sold by then, so many people had asked me around that time 'What is an Atari?' I was floored whenever I'd hear that, it was pretty sad in the mid-late 90s. They just sort of fizzled out.

So I bought these two drives as an experiment to see if I could get them to work with my Amiga A4000D, and haven't had a whole lot of luck with that. So I tried one on the Falcon today; http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009GG06F8?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0091T4ZWU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage The first drive seemed to have worked at some point on the Amiga and I was able to copy my fat spinning drive to it, but then I couldn't get kick start to recognize it (probably 'cause the IDE -> SATA bridge board I bought broke, I attempted to buy a different one, but it didn't seem to work..) Second drive, (PATA, 44 pin) I couldn't seem to get to work at all. Granted I had to use an adapter (tried two) that allowed a 44pin IDE drive to work on a 40pin IDE setup. But now I've put it into my Falcon and ICD Pro 6.5.5 actually detected it and is now checking it for errors. So my questions are as follows; A) Is "Testing disk for bad sectors" going to take a lifetime on 128GB? Is there really any point in setting up the Falcon on a 128GB SSD? From what I gather, all other ST's have 512mb max partition size, and the Falcon has 1GB. Is that just the beginning partition (like on the Amiga, max first partition should be under 4GB) and others can be larger, or is that all TOS partitions? B) I want to install MiNT, when I tried installing EasyMiNT in Hatari, it kept telling me that it needed a LNX2 partition, or something like that. I think MiNT uses ext2 if I recall, so I was thinking maybe 1GB for the first partition, and the rest ext2? Does MiNT support ext3/4? C) How do I even partition this on the Atari Falcon? I've been trying to find the information for setting up MiNT for days, but it seems mostly empty, at least for English translations. D) I do have an ultrasatan and netusbee on the way, but was probably planning on setting those devices up so I could swap between my 1040ST/MegaSTE/TT030. If I can get the drive covered for the Falcon with the 128GB SSD, then I can just swap around the NetUSBee when needed, and let the other systems use the UltraSatan. Thoughts, answers? Any help appreciated, thank you!

http://www.atari.8bitchip.info/imgrun.phpProbably has the information you're looking for. I'm going to be probably attempting this rather soon myself. I'm still wanting to get my 32GB CF card formated to be able to use it for my Falcon with MiNT, and haven't quite figured out how to do that, was going to do it through Hatari, but doesn't seem to be working... But that's off topic, Much like a lot of things in TOS, you can just drag the .st or .msa file over to the image runner binary. At least that's' what that page shows. As I said, I haven't done it myself, just barely getting back into the Atari world, and have mostly been dealing with Amiga's, where they have their own built in way of doing this with Workbench 3.x (not sure if it's' in only 3.9+ or not, but I've seen it there).

I think my biggest problem was that I was a bit too young / didn't pay as much attention in the magazines and such what was going on between Commodore / Atari. Because I LOVED my Atari 800xl, so naturally wanted an ST, and one of my older brother's friends had a 1040ST which was pretty sweet. Finally when the time came, we managed to talk the parental units into purchasing a Mega STe instead of what really was the successor to the 800xl, the Amiga. But I loved my Mega STe, but around the same time, a friend of mine managed to get an A500, and it was really awesome because the software at the time was really written for the A500's capabilities and I was hard pressed to find ANYTHING written with the Mega STe in mind, let alone STe software in general. I was pretty spoiled though, Mega STe, SC1435 monitor, etc. Now both are sadly in a currently non-working state in my other room. The SC1435 with a cracked pcboard, and the Mega STe needs a serious bath before I plug it in. I had fun upgrading it to 4MB of memory and playing Ultima 6 out of a RAM disk.

Speaking of multi-button controllers, I had no idea that the other STe computers (not Mega) had the Analog Joystick ports until I looked up what the extra ports on the Falcon were! Makes me wonder why with the Mega STe, they just slapped on the two 9 pin ports, and on the other STe computers, they had both, as well as the Falcon. Would have been awesome to start coding a bunch of games with the Jaguar pad in mind.

Interesting. Last night I was reading about the MonSTer, with flashable ROMs, and using EmuTOS on real hardware. What sort of support does EmuTOS have? I'll have to look at it's feature sets, but it'd be rather interesting to get some OS updates for the ol' machines. Even if they were minor graphical ones, like the 3D look of the Falcon's 4.x TOS.