Womble76

Hmm - not sure thats true. I had heard that there were no STs released to the public that had less than 512K. There was a 130ST and a 260ST with 128K and 256K respectively but these were demo models that were never sold. The 130ST was only able to run a prototype TOS due to RAM constraints and the 256K had only about 35K left after loading TOS that it was next to useless anyway. The RAM prices were falling so rapidly that by the time they came to actually manufacture the 1st STs they could put in 512K for the same price as 256K when it was on the drawing board. There were STs with the model name "260STs" sold but they came with 512K base. They were released to market at the point that Atari started making the STFM with the larger case. The 260ST was a cheaper limited line to use up the back stock of old style ST cases that couldnt fit the internal PSU or floppy. It was aimed at the home user, at a time when Atari were still chasing the business markets for their new machine. They used the 260ST name to avoid confusion with their newly launched 520STF and 520STFM. An ST with 256KB would let you run GEM and virtually nothing else - seems rather pointless, unless its just for autobooting games I suppose. The only 260ST I have seen had 512K onboard with no signs of it ever having been upgraded at all. The TOS on floppy is a separate issue. Having TOS on floppy doesnt mean you need less ram, and 256K leaves so little RAM free if TOS is loaded that the machine could only run very very small apps anyway - something in the region of 30KB free for programs to use. The very 1st machines were released with the TOS on floppy as there was some delay to getting the ROMs manufactured. These were quickly upgraded once the ROMs were released.

Disconnect the HDD and the floppy then try. I had issues with mine when I got it - the HDD was dead and it hung the IDE bus. Then the floppy died and it did the same thing. Ended up having to relpace both.

Seeing as the server itself is still up I imagine some form of hard drive failure, or perhaps even a total server fail with the server being replaced by the drives not yet hosting the forum recovered from backups.

The main problem with the ST line was that it was cheaper but not so future proof. The Amiga was more expensive but had a longer shelf life, it just took longer to get going, but it was going strong when the ST was running out of puff. The STE was the attempt to stem the tide but it was a bit too late. If I was to single out Atari's single largest mistake with the orginal ST was the inclusion of the single sided floppy on early machines. Even when the DS drives had been out for sometime software manufactures always stuck with the SS disks to ensure the largest possible market. So the media costs per application were double what they were on the Amiga, and apparently this was a significant cost increase in an era when floppies were not $5 for 20. The floppy effect was the same deal with the STEs failure to gain market share, software writers always want the largest possible market so catered primarily to the lowest spec of the family. It was fairly late in the STs life that 1Mb became unavoidably neccessary rather than just beneficial. Had Atari released the STE in 1986 it would have cost a small fortune, as did the early Amigas. As manufacturing economies of scale kicked in and hardware prices fell it too would have got cheaper as the years went by. Potentially the ST peaked too early, too soon and just ran out of steam. The upgraded STE would never gain large scale acceptance as by 1990 too few people were buying into the line. It was too small an increase for people en masse to upgrade from their older FMs, and not enough of an increase to tempt folk away from the Amiga.

Yeh the postage would put off many prospective buyers of the ST, but if you state you would throw in the monitor free if they cover the shipping for it you cover both scenarios. If you want to get rid of them this is the best way - selling CRT monitors is always tricky as the postage is far more than the price they would go for. So packing it up for transit is a lot of faff for a few bucks it brings in. I have 2 monos that I cant even give away for this reason.

Actually you should ask, a lot of german ebayers dont like Paypal as the fees are somewhat higher there for some reason, often they have an account but don;t advertise the fact. If you offer to pay any fees then you can sometimes use paypal, the small fee is well worth avoiding the hassles of other methods. Worked for me, tho I have resorted to buying Euros and posting them over.

Well thats the thing, if its got a new CPU, new RAM subsystem, new drives, new optical storage, new case, new powersupply and new video card...... .....is its still a Falcon? I mean doesnt the CT63 board bypass the majority of the Falcons original circuitry? When does it stop being a Falcon? As long as the floppy drive is original? Afterall - is this a still a 1971 Dodge Challenger? It goes one helluva lot faster but...

Actually yes yes and yes - it’s a classic destroyed to upgrade it to a truly pitiful specification by modern standards, basically that of a ten buck Pentium, effectively just so you can keep running a niche version of TOS. As for looks, folk may have hated the ST case design but the falcon in that photo looks like any of the several million cheap black cases that IBM wrapped around the first batch of vanilla P4 PCs that litter offices worldwide. It’s a falcon dressed up to look seriously mundane, just to get it to do modern PC type tasks the hard way, at least it looks the part I guess. It’s like taking a vintage classic car, ripping all the bodywork off and putting a Ford Escort body on the chassis. Sure you can now fit a stock spoiler, a turbo blower and roof-rack but it’s a classic car ruined none-the-less. In years to come, a Falcon in its original case is gonna be far more collectible than one that is dressed up like low end PC clone despite the 256Mb RAM, 20X CD drive and CPU upgrades, both will be totally useless by then (as opposed to being virtually useless now except for very very niche activities). I think if you are hell bent on paying obscene amounts of money to bring the Falcon up to the speed of a $10 PC from eBay you should keep the case and keyboard, and once the madness has subsided restore the Falcon to its original condition. Coz they aint making any more of em. This isn’t a flame bait post honest – it’s just my opinion. Then again every Falcon that falls to the "must fit mirrored alloy wheels, lower the suspension and bolt on a spoiler that looks like the strap from a lady giants handbag" urge means my mint Falcon gets that little bit rarer.

Feel free to add me to your list Womble76 Location - Melbourne Australia (after this weekends mammoth move) Pet Falcon is a mint 030, with FPU and Petr's marvellous 14Mb upgraded board. http://www.volny.cz/boban07/RAM_kartice/ Oh - also has 256Mb Compact Flash drive mounted internally to replace the hosed IDE drive it came with.

The best thing I have found for cleaning ST cases is Jif Bathroom (now called Cif in Europe for some reason). Its a cream cleaner that is very very slightly abrasive - it doesnt create any visible scratches on the casing but ploughs through caked on grease and grime like you would not believe. It wont remove the yellowing of old sundamaged plastic tho but it does a superb job of returning unsun-tanned STs to pristine condition. The only caveat is - Dont use it on the ST badge - the early badges were actually painted strips rather than the later plastic embossed badges - Jif will take off the paint on early badges. I use it with a nail brush by the way, usually do a full strip down in the kitchen sink- Case upper Case lower Keycaps individually Keyboard baseboard Floppy drive button and spring flap (removed from drive) Has returned many a tatty ST to mint condition. Its the keyboard that takes the time. Dont attempt to put the keycaps in the dishwasher - you might get away with it but you might not. Dishwashing poweder is very alkaline and the temperature the dishwasher hits is very hot. You many not have much usable left afterwards.

First off I would say you need to give the case a good wash - that yellow smearyness is almost certainly cigarette residue - if you paint onto that the paint will flake off very quickly as it will be stuck to the gunk and not the plastic case.

I think you have to tape over the HD detect hole (ie the one thats not the write protect tab hole) and then format it at 720K on the ST, then both the PC and the ST will be happy. not 100% sure on this tho as have never done it - can anyone confirm?

STMs, STFMs and STEs can all be connected to TVs - the M in the pre-E machines stands for Modulator - ie RF output. That 1040 is going to be either a 1040STF (ie internal floppy but not RF), a 1040STFM (int floppy and a modulator) or a 1040STE - the Enhanced ST - stereo output, larger colour pallete, blitter chip, and a few other bells and whistles - nice to have an STE but very few games every took advantage of its higher powers. Pre F/FM machines had external power supply bricks and external floppies - these were the 520ST and the 520 STM, I dont think they were ever badged as anything other than 520ST / 520STM so it wont be one of those. So a 1040STFM will do you just fine for gaming - it has the 1MB that many games did need and will let you connect to a TV. If its a 1040STF then you will need a monitor - these are somewhat less common tho - its probably an FM as they were the most prolific model from the entire range. An STE would be the ideal machine to score but a 1040STFM is about 99% ideal - you wont have any compatibility issues. You will need a stash of DS DD 720K floppies - you can easily write .st files to them to run on the ST - there is no way to send the .st file to the ST and for it to run it from the file. There are ways to get the ST to write the .st file to floppy disk but these days its far easier to do with a PC. Running hames from a hard disk is very problematic - mainly coz finding a hard drive to work with the hard drive port on the ST is pretty hard / costly. Also games tended to be written based on the assumption they are loading from floppy A - so the code will try to access floppy A at some point - very few games were written at the time to run from HDD as so few people had them. Games that were designed to run from A drive will have had to have been modified to run from a hard disk - again it will be a very few games and not the ones you will find on the menu disks of the day. Ignore the hard drive idea and save your sanity.

Good man - can you take a shed load of decent res pictures of the whole package. An unopened Falcon is surely a rarity to be documented. Does it have that great new electronics smell still?

Has it died? DNS servers no longer seem to have heard of it, have done a dig at Aussie, NZ, UK and US servers and they all know nothing - wonder if they forgot to re-register their domain. Anyone know anything?

The export plugs into the modem port - which is really just an RS232 serial port, at the time the most common use for such ports was an external modem, so thats what they labelled it. That serial port on the falcon is in the more modern format - the STs serial is the old DB25 style whereas the falcon uses the DB9. You can get adaptors for a few pennys so electrically you can plug the export into the falcon - it may or may not work tho as the pins of the DB25 that are not present on a DB9 serial seem to be involved with clocking, newer serials get the clock from the bit rate itself whereas the DB25 serials handle clocking independant of the data. You wont damaged either device even if it doesnt work - it might garble the data tho. Even if its is compatible electrically and protocol wise, I can't say whether the falcon will recognise and use it tho. Give it a go - nothing to lose.

The 260 was released worldwide I think, but they were only launched at all to use up the stock of boards and cases at the time Atari was moving to the STF and STFM format machines. They were advertised as game machines (the STFMs were advertised as serious use machines originally) and did come with 512K of ram and TOS onboard. There was a prototype ST that was called the 260ST and it did have 256K of RAM but it was never sold to the public, it was next to useless as TOS didnt leave much free RAM and the price of RAM had dropped enough during the dev of the ST that the base spec was raised to 512K. Hey - does anyone know if later models do the above if they have their TOS chips removed?

Its odd that STs are so hard to come by in the US, and therefore quite pricey. In NZ I have picked up a couple of STEs literally for free, as in they came bundled with something else I was buying, the seller said that they were going to the dump if I didnt want them. I would have thought there would be far more STs floating around the US than in little old NZ - after all our total population is only 4 Million.

With an old ST theres not a great deal inside that can be shock damaged anyway - a floppy drive may not thank you for bouncing it but the ST(M) doesnt have one inside. Its deff worth a go If it improves the issue or fixes it totally then you probably should take it apart and reseat by hand. If it doesnt help then it actually doesnt prove anything, it may still be a cheap seating problem, just one that needs a more directed approach to fix.

Nah thats pretty easy too, you just have to boot your PC into DOS to write any downloaded disk images to a floppy for your ST to run - theres plenty of info on the MAKEDISK program on the forum. Also the fact its the very earliest ST doesnt matter - from a software point of view there is no diff between a 520ST and a 520STFM. You may find that your ST has 1Mb in which case it would be the same as a 1040STFM. The vast majority of games will run on your machine - the only problem might be that you will have TOS1.0 in the roms - although I have never had a problem. When you get the lid off I would strongly advise pushing quite hard on any chips in sockets to reseat them. My 520STM had the same problem your does, ie it barely registers the floppy drives presence. I actually pulled out and fully reseated the floppy controller chip to solve that issue. If you want to get the the full low down on your ST, format a floppy with it, and then use your PC drop this file to it. (Even XP can read these ST formatted disks - albeit slowly) http://cd.textfiles.com/suzybatari1/extras...154/sysinfo.prg Then run it on your ST. It will tell you how much ram you have and what version of TOS is in ROM. It will also tell you about a thousand other bits and pieces but those 2 are probably the only things you need to know.

"SCSI-II External Hi D-Sub (male)" is also sometimes refered to as the Honda connector.

Re that broken key - is quite easy to replace. Just post a comment on here and on www.atari-forum.com asking for the keycap and the key post. I assume the cross profile key post has broken on your keyboard? All you need to do to replace it is take the lid off the ST, disconnect the keyboard and take out the 30 or so small silver screws holding the PCB into the keyboard assembly. Lift the PCB out and you will see loads of small rubber caps - make a note of how many you have and which contacts on the PCB dont have one - I think there is one point on the board that looks like it should have one but actually doesnt - they need to go back in the same pattern as you found them. Some rubber caps will be stuck to the PCB and some will be lying free on the keyboard, just collect them all up and put to one side. Now you have the keyboard in bits its very easy to see what you need to replace - just retrieve the broken key post and drop the replacement in. Hold it in place while you attach the keycap from the other side - make sure you push the two together firmly. No grap a couple of matchboxes or similar and support the keyboard at each end, so the keycaps are hanging below by gravity. This makes it a piece of cake to drop the rubber caps back into the upward facing positions. Once all the caps are in their places you can plop the PCB back on top and replace all the little screws, and connect it back to the ST. It sounds complicated when written out but its very easy to see what you need to do. Am sure someone will respond to your plea for the spares - alas i have no spare keyboards or I could send you the bits. As for what type of ST to go for... I would say the sweetspot for ram would be 1Mb - STFMs will be fine for midi, it not like the midi software would use any of the funky features on an STE anyway. The only benefit of the STE is the ability to take SIMM memory - upgrading an FM is not easy so you are wise to get a 1040 from the outset. Also bear in mind that midi does not use samples so the memory usage will be much lower than you may think. 4Mb may be nice to have but unless you are composing an entire symphony you are unlikely to really need it.

You can buy them http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Atari-ST-PeST-PS2-Mo...1QQcmdZViewItem They actually have built in software to translate the signals as its not just a wiring issue. Building one would be a headache. You can format DD drives on modern floppy drive, even under XP but you have to do it at the DOS prompt and its a non standard command - I have it at home, cant find it online for some reason. Its mentioned in the forums tho.

Not at all - am highly selective in my haunts.

Fancy seeing you here!