jens

Seeing this project I'm thinking that I might rather have parted from my ST-Book and kept the STacy instead. I thought so several times before on different occasions, but I must admit that using my Dell is not that cool, but for me of more practical use. Plus I wouldn't have been able to do the the works you did on your STacy. So, not having said that before: Congrats to this fine Atari portable, DarkLord!

My Mega/STe was happily using an hd floppy drive with TOS 2.05 and the WD chip. After some years I upgraded to TOS 2.06 as I wanted the Atari logo on boot.

Would've guessed that! Great work, especially the nice use of those radiant colours for the casing. Did I see some light black there beside the evil black and the pitch dark black?

Aaah - you're showing off!!!

Yeah, a real Atarian came up. :-) I like complaining about the Mighty Sonic 32 not being that nice as the CT2b is, as that beast actually is faster and holds more RAM, still being as compatible as the MS32 is in theory. I had several talks to a longtime Falcon AB40 user who claimed he used an Eagle Sonic before, and it was all rubbish, having problems with the DSP - which are apparently the same problems that my Mighty Sonic has. The Mighty Sonic sometimes locks up when starting FalcAMP. Never had problems with any other piece of software though. And it had been for months or even years without problems until about four years ago, when I decided to leave it in my cellar after moving house. Some months ago a fellow Atarian stayed with me for some days, and I wanted to show him about this, but had to realize that after booting up and playing one mp3 file (without speakers attached, but definately not locking the machine up) it wouldn't do anything after having switched it off. In december that guy was here again, we replaced the PSU, and now the Mighty Sonic Falcon is running MagiC or EasyMiNT, just as I need it, and sometimes even plays mp3 files. Demos are quite nice on it as long as they don't require an RGB monitor, having just a VGA attached. Ok, enough off-topic from my here. I had to laugh when I opened up the Milan as it's quite full around the card slots: I have the S3 PCI, the PS/2 plug, RTL8139 PCI, RTL8029 PCI, RTL 8019 ISA, Soundblaster ISA there. The different NICs are used for MiNTnet, Magxnet and STinG using different drivers. I found someone with an RTL8029 PCI 100 mbit NIC, so this theoretically should give Magxnet fast ethernet as well, but the card is used in an old PC still, so I won't be able to obtain it. My Milan still has not been used any further, as I'm fiddling with one of my TTs, running TOS, CrippleMiNT and EasyMiNT besides a testing environment for a recent linux-m68k system. Made a partition available and put a root file system on it via MiNT, then went back to TOS to be able to bootstrap it. We had tons of quite interesting error messages so far, but although some things will have to be adjusted the system comes up and allows me to type things on cli. I should setup two further partitions and install NetBSD on it, so after dropping MagiC onto drive C: I'll have everything the Atarian might need. Enough said for now, have a nice day, and good luck with finding proper Milan material. :-)

Hi. I can't tell what is this thing with the S3 cards not running, sorry. It really mighty be that enormous amount of RAM on it, but as said above: I can't tell you. :-/ But, I took the Milan apart to see which S3 is running in it. The chip is an S3 Trio64V2/DX. Hth. Mighty Sonic with Nemesis still would be fine. I haven't got one, but the MS32 is mostly running nicely. :-)

Yeah, search cd.textfiles.com or such.

I think it's about the 1040 (and maybe 520) STe models, not the Mega/STe. Got a 520 STe with the faulty DMA chip here, and when serving the complete hard drive from an xcontrol/ sting/ ftp_serv floppy everything went ok. I wasn't trying to unleash its ultimate powers which might have resulted in problems.

Damned bastards!

Well, I believe I told you already but maybe this is a piece of warning to other people: Another classic-computing guy had severe problems as actually no one told him his things were waiting for him at the customs office... They were sent back after some time, and he had to ask for a second delivery a short time after which he contacted the customs office to ask if he could fetch his box.

Yeah, Gr8 stuff! But I don't hear the 520 anywhere around.

PeST hast arrived in Europe. Many thanks, Ronald. :-) Btw.: I had no problems with the customs office.

I don't have any Mega STs atm, so I can't look that up, but the Mega STs do have the Megabus, not the VME, and in short the STacy is a Mega ST with a different layout and casing, so I assume this should be a Megabus, not a VME. Ok, I do have to correct myself. Just found someone who was able to tell me it's a STacy expansion slot which is neither the megabus nor the VME, but as it's the full 68000 which is accessible there it would be possible to make adapters for either of them.

Just downloaded it, and yeah, cool stuff! My Mac plays the Strange Light album now, and it's just sweet. :-)

I'd go for a hard drive, not whatever card. My Falcon holds a 120 gig Toshiba of which about 30 gigs are filled already. Mp3 files need space. You can hardly hear the Toshiba, while it's pretty fast having 16 megs of cache which is more than the Falcon holds as main memory.

I think so. A C32 I had used a VME adapter and sat in a case as big as a Mega/STe or TT casing so you could put the computer on it. Another card had a similar adapter and resided in a bigtower together with a TT. So maybe it would be interesting to search for a TT if you want to upgrade your Mega ST.

Afaik a Falcon expansion board based speeder will use the motherboard FPU without problems. And btw.: There are megabus graphics cards which have an FPU slot to upgrade the 68000 in the Mega ST. I had two of them, but I gave them away, not remembering the names anymore. I do believe both to have been Matrix cards. (Darklord, listen to this! Upgrade your STacy with a Matrix megabus graphics card!)

The only possibility I personally see is an upgrade in VHDL, as PAK (at least with 020) / FRaK and Panther would be too big for the original case. With Panther you'd have the graphics thing sorted. Then plug an EtherneA to the internal DMA port, maybe together with an ACSI2SCSI converter giving access to a SCSI SC card reader... *dreams_away*

In theory a STacy is a Mega ST which could use Mega BUS upgrades. There are graphics cards for that bus, so it is theoretically possible to attach a graphics card. With a Matrix C32 1280x960 in 8bit would be possible. Only drawback is that the card would not fit into the original STacy case, so the machine would have to be put into a bigger suitcase.

I'm running some S3 card in my Milan. An ATI Rage II would be interesting for people who want to use higher resolutions and colourdepths, e.g. for Calamus, but the S3 drivers seem to be faster than the ATI ones as many people mentioned. Beetle told me some time ago he thought it might be possible to use an ATI Radeon with the Milan, as drivers for the Falcon/CT60/CTPCI do exist. He mentioned Didier Mequignon as some candidate for adjusting those drivers for Milan use. ATI Mach 32 or 64 cards might be options as well, if someone adjusted the drivers for the Eclipse (PCI) or Nova (ISA) cards for Falcon or TT. I do have some spare video cards which I might test at some point in the future. I'm fiddling with my Mighty Sonic 32 Falcon atm, and there is not sooo much space that I want to have the Milan attached here additionally. Nonetheless it won't be too long until I fire it up, as someone mentioned using a PCI Soundblaster card with it.

Hi. Yeah, thanks a lot. :-) Pm is sent.

Btw.: I do own a Milan manual, which unfortunately happens to be written in German. I don't know if there is an English version available somewhere.

Some (german) stuff about the Milan: Milan Hilfeseite Some files to setup the machine The Milan Hilfeseite states you'll have to flash some chips within the Milan to cope with the SCSI-sound problem.

I found in DOIT ST back when my ST-Book wasn't ready to do anything apart from throwing four bombs.

You might have to do a mainboard reset: Remove batteries and power supply. Press sleep and power button for about 30 seconds. After that put back batteries and power supply. The ST-Book should again boot correctly.