Thorsten Günther

I am also interested in the CF version. Not sure which driver, but as all my machines are 1040STfs and up, I gather the normal driver will work for me.

On th other hand, you also devloped CATA, and all the ST games will snuggly fit onto a CF card should anyone (finally) be willing to mass produce the CATA.

JFTR: these PSUs are ridiculously overpriced on amazon.co.uk. Unless there are cheaper stores in the UK, I recommend purchasing them in Germany at stores that do not only ship to the UK, but also feature a multi-lingual websites for your convenience such as rock-gear.de or schneidermusik.de.

I have successfully run a 1050 on a (Euro plug) 2.1A PSU (Rock Power RP NT8), these should also be available with a UK style plug instead. Anything below that will most probably not work.

Re Falcon: you are aware that the Jaguar doesn't have a flightstick nor a keyboard and the game uses approx. 45 different (40 plain keypresses plus 5 control combos) keyboard commands plus the D-Pad? Thunderhawk AH-73M or even F-29 Retaliator would be much easier to shoehorn into the Jaguar. Re Ballblazer: I doubt Thomas "8bitjunkie" Schulz would be interested in porting his game ("Masterblazer", as his Amiga port was renamed to) to the Jaguar, but of course you may ask him, as he is an active member of this forum IIRC.

I don't think it will get much better on the VCS than Space Raid - available from the AtariAge Store.

And IMHO that was due tot he fact that there was not an obvious advantage of coding specifically for the STE - by the time it was published, most coders had perfected coding for the ST. A 256 colour mode would IMHO have changed that due to the obvious advantages for in-game graphics. I'd also have liked the overscan capabilities that were available as ST hacks implemented into the STE hardware - overscan with 400x232 in ST low mode (and possibly 400x232 or 200x232 in 256 colours) and 700x480 in ST high without the significant slowdown of software solutions would hav ebeen a plus.

I acknowledge that the CPU speed issue was addressed much too late by Atari with the Mega STE - and third party solutions like the one Atari put into that machine were already on the market for the DIL CPUs in regular and Mega ST models when the 1040STE came out. The 520/1040STE had upgradeable RAM (bog-standard SIMMs), but the fact was never even advertised. The DD FDD issue was addressed by Atari (again much too late) with the AJAX (which could even be clocked to 32MHz to work with ED FDDs - yet these never became popular), the WD1772 was only capable of HD access if 100% overclocked, and this only worked somewhat reliably when using the -02-02 revision of that FDC. Commodore had a much worse problem, since they couldn't simply upgrade PAULA they had to buy special, expensive FDDs that ran at half the speed in HD mode.

The main problem with the STE was that screenshots did not look any different than ST screenshots. And the specs didn't exactly scream "superior to the older model" either (IIRC the SIMM sockets were not even mentioned), so people stuck with the cheaper STFM. A 256 colour mode could have mended that, even if only in 160x200 to keep the CPU load low.

I did not even know anyone besides the AVGN and the VGC considered Attack of the Mutant Penguins to be among the worst games for the system - sure the controls could be a little more precise, but this is a very fun Lemmings style game IMHO (you can see me playing it on the 2015 eJagFest briefly about three and a half minutes into this video - yes, that evil laugh was mine). Evolution: Dino Dudes is also pretty decent (it's also on the Lynx as "Dinolympics" and on many, many other platforms - known as "The Humans" on most of the latter), and apparently only the VGC thinks this is one of the worst titles (I am pretty sure he also hates "Lost Vikings") While I consider Bubsy to be hard as nails, I can get a little further whenever I play it.

I have a Goldstar (or LG, as they prefer to call themselves nowadays) - after some updates, it doesn't seem to crash any more (I had it depict an all blurry, non-moving screen after switching on several times with the older firmware and nothing except for removing the power cable was able to fix it. And while it shows a picture after 20 seconds, one cannot run Amazon Instant Video (e.g.) during the first minute of operation. It also had issues recording onto an attached USB hdd with the older firmware, often only recording video without any audio. In several ways, this IS a step backwards - CRT TVs simply worked. BTT: I wish there was a way to have a DLI after each scanline in Graphics 0 - that way, we could have an APAC text mode which would be very useful for games.

I have a Goldstar (or LG, as they prefer to call themselves nowadays) - after some updates, it doesn't seem to crash any more (I had it depict an all blurry, non-moving screen after switching on several times with the older firmware and nothing except for removing the power cable was able to fix it. And while it shows a picture after 20 seconds, one cannot run Amazon Instant Video (e.g.) during the first minute of operation. It also had issues recording onto an attached USB hdd with the older firmware, often only recording video without any audio. In several ways, this IS a step backwards - CRT TVs simply worked.

The 400/800/5200 hardware, available in late 1978 was built to play scrolling games (horizontally, vertically, diagonally or multi-directionally) like e.g. Snokie, Necromancer, Zaxxon or Cavelord. And the 2600 could at least scroll vertically, as shown in Pitfall II or River Raid. The horizontally scrolling Jump'n'Run seemingly just didn't catch on until Super Mario Brothers made the genre popular, as most 400/800 Jump'n'Runs are single or multi-screen,

Not quite a computer, but a great 6809 based piece of kit:

Yes, but you'll have to solder a 13 pin DIN plug (i.e. the ST monitor connector, Kenwood used the same connector for some of their car stereo equipment, but they are still quite expensive on your side of the pond) to VGA cable with a 4x switch - which is necessary to switch between mono and colour modes: http://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/interfaces.php#multisync_switch

That monitor will most likely only display the lower two resolutions, but for gaming, that will fully suffice (there are very few "mono exclusive" games on the ST, and most of those are mediocre PD stuff), but for a start, I'd aim for a NEC Multisync 1970VX or NX. These are dirt cheap and sync to 15 kHz/50 Hz (despite this not being an official feature). Are broadcast RGB CRTs really that expensive on your side of the pond? For a used Sony BVM 20M4E I have spent 50 Euros here in Hamburg - cash on collection though. While that was very cheap, I wouldn't spend any more than 200 for such a monitor.

Many Mega STs were shipped with TOS 1.02 ("Blitter TOS"/"Mega TOS") though, not with 1.04 ("Rainbow TOS").

Provided that you have a colour monitor that synchronizes with the 50Hz vertical frequency of European games and demos, there are no compatibility issues - just be prepared you may find games in German, French, etc.. There even is a Finnish racing game "Romurallia Rotiskoilla II" and I still wonder what that might mean. If your monitor does not like 50Hz and you encounter a rolling screen or "out of range" message after loading a game, try pressing F6 or F5, several games have a frequency switching functionality included.

While I can understand Atari's decision to publish ATARI BASIC in this form, I wonder why they never openly embraced what OSS achieved with their BASIC dialects and ACTION! afterwards. I have never seen an original cartridge of these prior to buying one on ebay.com, only read about ACTION! in the "Computer Kontakt" magazine and they were really expensive (more than 200 German Marks in the mid 1980s). It would have helped a lot if these were distributed through Atari.

This method should(!) work, but there are some kind of SIMMs that share the same form factor physically, but have a different type of RAM on them (was it EDO?) and are said to cause stability issues, the STE needs 4 fast page mode 30 pin SIMMs with 1 meg capacity each to reach its full potential of 4 meg (the "MMU" chip doesn't allow for more, the workaround is installing up to 10 megs "alternate" RAM on a daughter board, which is similar to "Fast RAM" in the Amiga or "TT RAM" in the TT030, yet actually slower than ST RAM, and pushes the limit to 14 megs on normal STs and 10 megs in the Mega STE (4 megs of address space are reserved for the VME bus found in these machines)). "Alternate" RAM requires a driver software to be accessed, IIRC.

I have put some cartridges (mainly for the A8, but also a loose PAL "Subterranea" for the VCS) up on eBay, among them Tigervision's "Espial" and the two vintage Taiwan pirate carts I accidentally acquired with a lot of other games. See here: http://www.ebay.de/sch/thorsten_guenther2/m.html