rcgldr
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Everything posted by rcgldr
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I can't find anyone in the US that can repair a Mega ST4 or repair or sell a SF814 drive, so I have no access to a double sided floppy drive. I tried a few games, since they only need single sided drives, then put all my Atari stuff back in storage. Part of the issue is limited space. If I setup the Atari, I have to store two very old PC desktops and an old PC monitor
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Follow up, I found the dongle, and I have 3 floppies which are copies of the originals. Since a dongle is used, the floppies are not copy protected, and I used an PC compatible format on the 3 copied floppies. The floppies are double sided, so you would need a double sided floppy drive such as SF814. I've got the original box stored in one of several totes which I'll have to search through. Right now I'm stuck with a Mega ST4 that won't power on, and a broken SF814 floppy drive.
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Prior to Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and PC's, there were numerous CP/M systems with a very popular word processor called WordStar. Other than S-100 bus based CP/M systems, these weren't compatible, but they sold well to businesses and also hobbyists. The only popular CP/M game I recall in those days was the text game Colossal Cave Adventure. When PC's game out, there was an Ascii art version of Rogue. For the Atari ST, the Alcyon C compiler (it included an assembler as well) was probably the best, in terms of producing reasonably efficient code. It was included in the early ST development kits. Although the Macintosh was popular, the programming environment was stuck with a backwards compatible mode where programs were split up into 32K chunks, using the 68000's 16 relative addressing modes. Programs had to use "handles", which were pointers to pointers in the first 32K segment, so the Mac could move allocated chunks of memory around, which could happen with most of the system calls, requiring a program to reload any local pointers from the handles. The toolset, MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), was text based (it brought up a console window in order to run it). While Microsoft toolsets evolved into GUI based toolsets, MPW interface remained the same for about 5 to 7 years, although other development toolsets like Think C and Prototyper (programmer "drew" the user interface, Prototyper generated the code), were released. Atari ST was smart in essentially porting Digital Researches version of MSDOS (Gem) to a flat 32 bit model, but never ended up with the popular apps from PC's, other than Word Perfect. I don't recall how popular WordStar was by the time the Atari ST was first released.
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I may have a set, but I need to check if it still works. The dongle is a brown dongle that plugs into the left side of a 520ST? There are 3 floppies, the program floppy and 2 "additional" floppies.
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I just pulled some old Atari stuff out of storage, what is working so far: Atari 520 ST with 1MB upgrade, 1 SF354 floppy drive (haven't tried the other one yet), Sony KV-1311CR used as color monitor, with its special cable, and one mouse. The floppies I've tested so far seem to be working. A boot floppy that sets date, time and installs ram disk, Starglider, Sundog, ST-Copy 3.0, and a floppy used to transfer files between PC and Atari ST (I have format utility for PC, and should have one for Atari ST to create a Atari ST / PC "compatible" single sided floppy). I made new copies of these so I now have freshly formatted and written floppies. I noticed most of the floppies are labeled as single sided. Are the SF354 floppy drives single sided only? What's not working: Atari Mega ST4 - powered up one time, but now it won't power up (no fan movment). Atari SC124 - monochrome monitor - hear sound, but no display, never used it much. A second mouse barely works, as the buttons are very intermittent. I did a web search and found one site that mentions repairs, but mostly seems to be selling refurbished items. I sent them an email to see if they could repair the Mega ST4. Where can I buy blank floppy disks that will work with the Atari drives? I'm assuming HD floppies won't work?
