Dal_1978

Wong, try www.hostpapa.com instead. May be some co.uk domains are filtered in china. So long as you can get to the AF page, all is good!

I went with http://www.hostpapa.co.uk superb hosting company, checked out their online support chat facility as a 'test' and got a representative within a couple of minutes... On new years day! Cost worked out at £126-ish for three years unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth with the usual cpanel interface etc. I'll have a think about how we handle costs etc. I'll start a thread about it on AF once it's up as I have a few ideas and I know others have expressed a wish to have some kind of voluntary donations mechanism. Here is not the right place to discuss though.

New host has been set up. I have created a temporary landing page that details everything that has been going on and where we are with getting the forum back. Please check there for further updates. Note that the name server was updated today (thanks Brume and Silver Surfer). So depending where you are in the world, the change may not have replicated to your neck of the woods yet. Cheers.

Sell separately. Bundling the monitor will make the auction less attractive (nobody wants to pay the extra carriage charge for a bulky CRT monitor they probably don't want). The mega will probably go for about £50-£60 going by recent auctions (a mega4 ST went for about £80 recently and a mega2 ST went for about £70). I would sell the scanner and external floppy drives separately (check they are working first). The bj30 will probably not be worth anything in it's present state. To sell, it would need new print head (£25 on ebay) and ink (about £5 on eBay). And you'd be lucky to sell it for the price you paid to replace these parts. Either sell it separately on eBay with 99p start price or donate it to someone on a forum as it is. Monitor I would probably donate too. I have a Phillips Cm8833 mk2 that will be going the same way... Just my opinion.

Yes agreed - anything that provides a future proof chip replacement option is a good thing. Best Electronics will run out of chips eventually! Not to mention the opportunities for present day output options (HDMI might be overkill though!)

Simbo on AF talked about a solution to replace (the shifter?) with a riser card and fpga chip. The theory I believe is that it behaves the same as far as the ST is concerned but also handles the scan doubling required for VGA output. All pie in the sky stuff at the moment, but he reckoned it was possible...

Agreed. I'll look into it a bit more over the weekend. I think Ijor has a point - UK or EU based hosting is the way forward. Anyway, I'm supposed to be setting up for my last gig of the year. Catch up with you all in the next few days or so.

@blues76 - I am one of the site admins. There is also Silver Surfer and Brumme. However they have been otherwise commited elsewhere in their lives. I had the keys passed over to me at the beginning of December by Silver Surfer. I have been in contact with him since the 27th when this latest outage occurred...

From what I can make out, 250host is a very small operation (may just be the one guy with a couple of servers). In fact I have done some digging about and found a site that details company profiles - turns out 250host is apparently worth $47... http://websiteshadow.com/250host.com Sounds rather odd to me given that Silver Surfer has been paying somewhere in the region of $24 per month As you will see further up in this thread, our intention has always been to move the site. I wanted to leave it until the new year though as it was my baby's first Christmas, wife has been in hospital and to be honest I wanted a bit of time with the family rather than using it to move the forum. If there is anyone who reckons they can provide hosting for AF, then I can tell you the database in it's entirety us approximately 6GB - we'll want a bit of room to grow. Bandwidth I'm not so sure about bandwidth as I only got access to the backend when the forum came back online. However there are approximately 5000 registered users (mostly dormant accounts now I believe). I guess approximately 1GB to 1.5GB per month will be plenty of bandwidth... PM me if you can help or know of someone who can. The hosting needs to be professional with backup facilities and the ability for me to create cron jobs to sync backups with cloud storage etc... Also must be able to support FTP, php and mysql. Cheers, Darren PS. Happy New Year!

Agreed it is frustrating however until I have some idea from the host as to whether they have an outage or gone bust, then I can't make a decision. Worst case scenario is they have gone bust and we will restore a backup to a new site. We are checking a backup created on 4th December.

And where would 5.25" drives have left the STacy?

Hi Charles - that's very odd. When I checked it all out, the host company was completely down (try pointing a browser to http://250host.com). However out of curiosity, could you forward me the email you received? I will send you my email address via a pm. Cheers, Darren

Get the original here nice and cheap! http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/ol/0830627618/ref=aw_d_ol

I have tracked down the MD via facebook and sent him a message asking whether this is a temporary glitch and if so, an indication of how long we will be out of service for. Will update as soon as I have any news. Cheers, Dal.

No news I'm afraid. Trying to get in touch with the MD of the hosting company to confirm what has happened. I'm also trying to enjoy the remainder of my Christmas holiday... :-)

Er - Atari had no way of knowing that at the time, they were not interested in the Atari scene as we know it now, they purely wanted to capture a market that was available at the time and leverage profit from it whilst remaining competitive with the likes of Apple and Commodore. Your argument is almost the same as the vinyl vs CD/digital downloadable music - in retrospect, vinyl is still proven to be the best quality (frequency range, completely lossless), however companies need to move with whatever technology is considered to become the next standard. It is always a lottery and some companies don't get it right (VCD anyone?). I still maintain that Atari made the right decision in line with the key players of the time including Apple, Commodore and IBM. Trouble was Atari was so keen on cutting manufacturing costs that we ended up with an architecture that isn't inherently compatible with the majority of floppy drives without modification to the ST or the drives. This is the reason people have a headache trying to make floppy drives work first time. Technology has moved on again - the final floppy disks will be rolling off the production lines and that will be the end of that. Products like the HxC floppy emulator are a realistic replacement for floppy drives (your floppy disk collection is replaced by a mass storage device full of floppy disk images). My STE setup currently has a HxC emulator to act as my floppy drive, an UltraSatan acting as a hard drive and a NetUSBee to get files off my STE and onto my network via the FTP services hosted on my NAS drive. No floppy disks and pretty future-proof for the foreseeable future... My opinion is that the Atari ST would have failed miserably if Atari had taken the decision to use older 5.25" technology over the up and coming 3.5" technology at the time of release... Oh and I have trouble finding enough space for my ST as it is without it being another 2.5" or so deeper! :-)

An interesting question. However, I would wager that Atari already had plans to make an all in one solution so the 3 1/2 inch form factor suited this objective. Putting the frankly criminal SS decision to one side (pun intended!), it was just as well Atari went down the 3 1/2 route. I have memories of triple format cover disks (PC, ST and Amiga), double format cover disks (ST/Amiga Format) that simply would not have existed if Atari had done anything other than adopt the 3 1/2 standard. Finally, I reckon the ST would not have stood a chance had it not used the same media as the Amiga (would have affected decisions by some software producers I suspect).

Seems like this thread has gone a little off topic? LOL :-)

It's down again :-( The host provider is down (currently no response from http://www.250host.com)...

Yes - Silver Surfer has taken the database offline for some maintenance. However the site as a whole is up (where it most certainly wasn't before). It will take about 3 hours or so before the database is back online and the Forum can be used again.

It's UP! Turns out it was nothing more serious than an issue with the automatic billing.... Silver Surfer has paid the outstanding bill using Paypal and now it is up again. We will still explore the re-hosting but at least we have life again!

Ouch Does that mean that the whole database might be lost? Hope that Silver keeps one of his backups safely, so that in the worst case only the last activity is lost. Well let's not speculate - Silver is on the case with the host provider, as soon as I have any news ('good' or 'not quite so good'), I will post back!

Maybe the MCU was killed by something further back in the circuit? Logic would suggest you'll need to break the BNK5 line somewhere to force it low and check bit 7 again?

Update! I have provisionally organised some hosting (massive thanks to Graeme who is hosting Atari Legend). This will solve the issue with 250 host filters in place with BT and Virgin Media. Silver Surfer has got back to me with the following: So, once we get the site back from 250 Host then we can move forward with the restore and re-hosting. Fingers crossed people.

Define the word 'need' and you have your answer! If you want a complete collection of Atari 16/32 machines, then of course the answer is yes. However if you want a computer to use for specific tasks, then you will find there's not much out there on the falcon that can't be covered by your existing machines. The only 'uniques' for the falcon IMHO are: Cubase Audio (but you already said this isn't your 'bag') Some Falcon only games and demos Functionally though there's little the Falcon can do that the TT can't. If you are just using general apps (word processing, pixel art, web browsing, floppy imaging, playing the odd game and demo), your existing machines cover everything you could possibly hope to get from the Atari 16/32 platform. There was a thread on Atari Forum where somebody who owns both TT and Falcon stated that he prefers the TT as the bus it 32bits wide throughout (whereas the Falcon is actually a 16bit bus with 32bit chipset). This was met with many counter arguments as you would expect. The main being that with a CT60/63, the falcon will run miles faster than a TT. I think most Falcon + CT60 owners would agree that if you buy a Falcon, the CT60 investment would be highly recommended in order to make it the best it can be. As for Firebee.... We shall see - I am still deliberating it. The main argument for me is that assuming there's a strong take up, it has the potential to replace the entire Atari 16/32 bit line and reach preservation 'utopia'.