Zogging Hell

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.

Ideally you'll want a couple of different ones, as some joysticks seem to work better with some games than others. I have a Quickshot Python 1m for some games, AM Action Pad and Cheetah Bollostick joypads for others, and a zipstick and competition pro for games that require the joystick to take a beating. The Python (make sure it is the 'm' version as the non microswitch version is not great) is a bit fragile for some people, so if you want a tank it is probably not for you, I liked the precise movement though. The Bollostick was great for platformers, but gave you hand cramps if you had to hold a direction for too long (like in a driving game say). The AM Action pad had astonishing autofire (great for Xenon 2) but also had hyperactive movement. The latter two seem to be the most popular and always seem to come up in best joystick lists. I have a collection of about 40 or so joysticks and those were the ones I liked the most, but it is quite a personal thing.

The big one I remember was POV (Persistance of Vision) Ray. You can get that here https://websites.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Graphics/Raytrace/Pov/ and it looks from a quick scan of the archive that the src is available. A lot more advanced than Pearle, although also a lot slower to render as well due to the complexity..

Generous donation! You should be able to get something from the RF on a new UK TV I believe although it would look god awful. There are a couple of things it could be unless your chosen TV is a bit fussy. Firstly a Falcon will take up to 30 seconds to boot to desktop with no floppy in the drive, so you will get a white screen up to that point after a very long memory check screen. Secondly and more likely, is that the NVRAM in the Falcon has died (this is kind of a system setting storage backed up on a battery powered chip which at this stage is well past its sell by date) or been left set to output in a resolution not supported by your TV. You could try and reset the NVRAM using something like this https://dhs.nu/files.php?t=single&ID=123 , but this requires you to have access to a good floppy disk and a means to write something to it. The NVRAM chip can be replaced but it is not a job for the faint hearted (soldering and delicate motherboards...). Finally you could buy either a direct scart cable (if your TV still has this) or something like this https://exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/0146.html which allows a normal VGA cable to be connected (some TVs still have VGA or it is more simple to convert this to HDMI if not). Most likely if the floppy drive is spinning and the light going on and off, the Falcon is fine. If you have a floppy disk you could insert it and see if it access the disk and then stops (including the light at top right stopping). If it does this it is most likely to be alright. You would need to press space immediately after you turn the computer on to skip the memory check otherwise you could be there a while.

Not heard of this one, so thanks will have to try it out. Personally I always used Profile 2 for hardware/ TOS specs as it interfaced better with GEM with nice output in a window.

The Magic shadow archiver isn't all that great at copying protected disks and you would probably need to go down the hardware imaging route if you want to make an image of your own disk (or perhaps a pasti image). Regarding the cracked versions not running, you could try altering the specs of your ST in Hatari to something more akin to those the Sentinel might have been expecting in 1987, i.e. TOS 1.0 or 1.02, and 512k of memory as a start as it may have been coded to not expect later alterations like TOS 1.04 or 1mb of ram.

And it seems to work on the Firebee as well! I will have to wait until the old finances improve but will definitely purchase these some way down the line

I believe I read the Atari cables were short for a reason, i.e. any longer and they were unreliable. I would personally build yourself a stand that straddles the ST for the hard disk and monitor to sit on above it, that way you can use the short cable. You can make one out of three pieces of wood for next to nothing.

I've never used medium on a wide screen monitor/ TV, does it work better when it is stretched out by upscaling (i.e. do the pixels look squarer?). Medium today seems awful but for when I only had a TV with my ST it was the only usable resolution for word processing etc. Having 80 columns was kind of essential back then, it was the main reason computers like the Atari 800 were not taken seriously by business, so you literally had to have it to be taken seriously.

Ah yep I see, I have memories of the ZX81 ram connector extensions in my head now for some reason!

I suppose the white does blend quite well with the menu bar though

I believe the green colour was for RF TV viewability, kind of like the Amiga's blue background colour (although it technically is meant to be a slightly worse choice than blue). I think it actually works better on RF than the Amiga's blue, mainly due to the monochrome icons, not clashing horribly like that blue orange combo that pervades the Amiga's default colour scheme. The green does look a bit... ghastly... on a proper monitor though.

How does the cartridge port reroute? Does it add buffering? (sorry going way off topic here). Does it reroute the joystick ports as well? Questions questions sorry!

I'd prefer a 'desktopper' style top that fits on the original Falcon base myself (or a genius to come up with a CT60/ Ethernat/ Supervidel all in one combo that is small enough to fit in a real case and can fit all its ouputs through the holes left by the PSU removal). Something tall enough to fit a decent PSU in there.. I've heard some confidence draining things about the Pico PSU to slightly fear using it, so have a ATX psu trailing out the back.. The problem with the tower cases is the Falcon has ports all round it, and no matter what you do something will not be easily reachable (like the cartridge port)