witchy

Cost. I'm not bothered about speed and a SatanDisk is much cheaper than UltraSatan. I'm not a hardcore Atari user, just someone who needs to preserve disk contents. That's ideal, thanks! Half the price (and functionality) of an Ultrasatan+cable but will do what I need. Having said I just need to preserve disk contents I'm looking at Lotharek's site now and have just noticed an UltraSatan Mini at £72 that I can use on any of my machines at exhibitions so now I have a quandary Thanks folks!

Hi Tillek, I should've said originally, SCSI drives aren't a thing I'm short of thanks to working in DEC/Compaq/HP Field Service for the last 30 years, neither is an RLL drive. Looks like my best bet is to try and track down a SatanDisk rather than UltraSatan though. Cheers!

I read somewhere that the Megafile has space internally for a SCSI drive so I'll look into that before going down the UltraSATAN route, those things are a bit expensive for a one-off job. Maybe I can make my own... Cheers!

Hi folks, As part of a Retro exhibition going on this weekend I'm showing my Mega ST4 DTP system with SLM804 Laser printer etc. The machine needs a good 30-40 mins to warm up and boot but the HD checker reported 26 bad sectors in various files. Today I left it running and noticed it had crashed just before we wound down for the day. I rebooted it and it all worked! I could access all the apps that previously had reported bad sectors. This gives me hope that I can successfully back it up to...something. Question is, how can I take an image copy of the drive? Searching doesn't reveal much but I can't believe nobody's done this before. Cheers! Witchy

Hi, Sadly back after a week off I got a Happy 7.1 disk with it which is the one that expired but I think I've got an ATR of it, I'll check now and let you know. Might be too hot for the thing to work at the mo!

Looks like that's what it was, it's been happy (sorry) all afternoon. Off the back of your links I found the actual ISPlate utility disk and WARPDOS7 and eventually managed to transfer it to a real floppy once I'd changed the actual disk transport. It passed the high speed transfer diagnostics so all looks good. In the course of all this my original Happy Floppy decided to give up the ghost but I think I have all the software as image files now. I also made this: so I'm sorted for transfers. I have a pair of 410 cassette recorders so I 'borrowed' the SIO cable from one of them... Still haven't verified the IS Plate loading the original games I was given with the drive though Thanks for the help! SaveSave SaveSave

Oh NICE. Disk downloads too, good work there Gah. I was doing that a LOT last night. I don't like turning the drive back on with a disk installed so I always eject it partially before turning on... As it happens I've just spent the last couple of hours putting this together - http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/atari_forever/Extension/Sio2PC/The%20SIO2PC%20interface.htm since I had all the spares kicking around. Just about to test... SaveSave

This is the board, on the back it says "ISP 1986" All I'm booting is the Warp Speed V7 utility disk that was with the drive and initially it did pick up D1 as a Happy drive, but I'm suspecting there's maybe a heat problem in there because it works from stone cold then fails after a while. The drive works ok otherwise, or at least boots DOSIII and KDOS. I do have 2 more drives but one is suspect. Also looking at the pictures I took yesterday the Warp Speed utility thought the drive was a Happy 810, not a 1050. Let me know if that pic is too big and I'll resize it Cheers,

Aye, after I'd posted that I spoke to the lad who gave it to me many years ago, it's actually a 'Chip' clone, not a Happy. This probably changes my whole line of questioning! I'll post a pic in a bit. Cheers

Hi folks, Today I was reminded that one of my 1050 drives had an original Happy board in it so I dug it out and degreased the head guides so they'd actually move, bit of machine oil later and it would happily read disks. Some of the disks wouldn't boot however and some searching showed I probably needed to set the drive to UnHappy mode which I did. Trouble is I now can't get it back. The docs say turn off drive for 10 secs and it will return to happiness but mine says 'the drive cannot be programmed' and it remains undetected as a Happy drive. There's only 2 6264 SRAMs, a 6502, an EEPROM and an unmarked chip on that board (GAL?) so I've been puzzling as to how it's set to UnHappy mode, given that a power cycle will normally return it to normal. I'm guessing at startup time the whole EPROM is copied into RAM and executed so the Warp software just changes a bit in RAM to UnHappy the drive. Anyone seen this behaviour before? I can easily swap the RAM but I don't want to throw £10 at something that might not fix the problem. Also, these days there are SIO2PC cables and various ways to fake the 1050's presence so am I wasting my time trying to fix the Happy board? Cheers!

Just for yuks I grabbed a 400 power brick and plugged the machine into my 'test' TV....and it works! Auto detected NTSC and ran with it. Only half a dozen keys work though so there's work to be done. Thanks for the adapter link though, something to think about.

I really should clean my 410s up and test them, but all my 400/800 games are on cart or disk.

Funnily enough I came here to find the monitor socket pinout of my 1200XL so I could make a cable for it since I'm in the UK and don't have an NTSC compatible TV - it's a US machine originally Made in Taiwan 72R DA 02950 163