atarian1

I don't know Len personally, but I do remember reading his articles in Atari magazines. As others said, he seemed like a true die-hard Atarian and wrote with what I sometimes thought was too much passion to the point of turning off Atari officials. Now I'm reading that they were actually impressed with him. Definitely changed my image of him. Sad to see another piece of my childhood reading the various Atari magazines gone. 😞

I eventually got a Pentium 3 1GHz PC around 1999 when GEnie finally folded. I mainly used the ST (upgraded to a Falcon in 1996) everyday for telecommunications at that time because that was where it really excelled and it was fun. I lost interest in gaming so telecommunications was my new "game machine". Since there was still the usenet, GEnie, and a few local BBS that supported Atari around here in the 90s, there was plenty for me to do during my little free time on my Falcon while spending most of my waking hours studying in college. However, usenet posts started going down, BBSes were going down, and the last straw was when GEnie folded. Everything was on the internet by then, so I went the PC route. That is where I encountered the chipset problems with soundcards. My PC had a VIA chipset and I wanted to use a pro-sumer sound card (can't remember the name, but it was a Turtle Beach card) to continue my sound editing fun that I started on the Falcon, but now with sharper graphics and MUCH faster editing. The system locked up whenever the card was installed, but worked fine with cheap ass SoundBlasters. My dealer who I bought it from (who was also an Atari dealer) tried his best to figure out what was wrong, but he was unsuccessful. He mentioned that if he knew I was going to use the PC with a "fancy" sound card, he would have recommended a motherboard with an Intel chipset instead. He wouldn't allow me to exchange it or anything so I was peeved at everything PC. Luckily, CompUSA allowed me to return the card and got a full refund. I would have been really pissed if they didn't as I think it was like $600. At that point, I knew my next computer would be a Mac as I didn't want to deal with this chipset incompatibility crap again. Thank Apple for the Mac Mini.

Looks like a 5200 controller with a big joystick, a spinner and big round buttons instead of small rectangular side buttons. The keypad and three buttons on top are just like the 5200.

I think this is the same situation with my Dell U2412M. The earlier models seem to work with the ST/Amiga, but my later version does not. Let's compare serial numbers, where it was made, manufacturing date, and other info on the box and the back of the monitor to get to the bottom of this mystery! I'm interested in a smaller monitor too.

Hi Al, It seems to be working again. Thanks.

In the last two days when I logged into AtariAge, I usually check out the new posts in the forum by clicking on the "Unread content" button in the upper right corner of the webpage. Then I use an Activity Stream that I set up years ago to show a list of all the new posts in the last 24 hours. This has not been working for the last two days. Yesterday, it showed the new posts in the last two hours and then started listing posts from 2015 and then "no new activity". Today, it showed the new posts for the last 9 hours before it started showing random posts from previous years including 2015. I am using Firefox on a Mac if it helps. Thanks.

The classic case that even the US Patent Office uses is "Delta". Delta Airlines and Delta faucets seem to co-exist just fine with little confusion.

I have been meaning to attend one of these, but life keeps getting in the way - particularly in the last several years. I think next month, life things will finally start to settle down for me so that I can start doing some fun things like this instead.

San Leandro Computer Club https://slcc.wdgeo.com/

I have a couple 1040ST motherboards that are untested that I would like to use in my H5. Some of these boards look wonky to say the least. It looks like upgrades were done on them, but then ripped out because I see some cut traces. They look like they were tossed around and were just about to be junked before someone rescued them. Even the reset buttons are all broken off. I'm wondering if I should try to get these motherboards working, or if I should just take out/desolder all the chips, desolder some ports (cartridge, DIN14, DB19) and stick them into the H5 and troubleshoot from there. I'm leaning towards the latter, but does anyone think I should do the former? TIA.

SF Bay Area. I haven't gotten around to the SLCC Zoom meetings yet as I'm very busy right now. Hopefully one day when things calm down.

I'm not sure how TOS knows, but I think it's something in the Control Panel or DESKTOP.INF or something like that. I can't remember. I do know if you use an alternative desktop like Neodesk, there is a radio button in one of the configuration windows (not sure where) where you tell NeoDesk to load X.PRG in TT RAM instead of ST RAM. Of course, the program has to be a cleanly written GEM program to take advantage of this.

There was a dry cleaners near me that sold Atari computers and software. I vaguely remember...(trying hard to dig deep into my brain...)...as you enter the store, to the left was a glass counter display with Atari software and hardware. They had some Atari 8-bit cartridges along with some APX titles too. I remember they sold peripherals because I remember buying my Trak disk drive from them. That's all I could remember though. I remember as you enter the store, to the left was the counter for Atari products, but going straight from the front door was the counter to pick-up/drop-off your clothes to be dry-cleaned. I wish I had pictures or something because I always thought that was odd.

I got a STacy with no power supply, but the seller pointed me to a universal power supply that he used with it. After I got it, I looked at the bottom of the STacy, and it shows that it wants an 18V center negative power supply. However, when I looked online for pictures of the original Atari STacy power supply, it shows what you showed - 16.5V center positive. I was perplexed too, but never got the time to ask on the forums. Anyway, thanks for your help. 😃 Now, the next question is...does it want 16.5V or 18V?

That sounds like your hard drive is dying. I doubt it will break your STacy, but it could cause read/write errors that you are seeing. Next step would be to disable the internal hard drive, but I'm having a brain fog right now about how to do it...

Awesome! 😀 I remember the old days of comp.sys.atari.st where there were no more ACSI interfaces for sale, so someone hunted down Tom Harker at ICD to see if he would release the designs to the public domain. He said no, and asked for a hefty sum of $$$ that, unless you're rich or somehow plan to make money off them, was too much for most of us. This was in the early days of the internet, so there was no crowd funding back then. Great to see that this can be preserved and people can make them if they are inclined to do so. Looks like this will be on my to-do list when I retire in 10+ years. 😜

I don't recall 1st Word Plus being very popular here in the US, but I remember being impressed by the ability to import pictures into the text as shown in the Atari magazine reviews. There were a lot of word processors on the ST vying for a small piece of the pie. Word Writer (for the "ordinary" people) and WordPerfect (for the "power" users) were the ones that stuck out in my mind in the US market. LOL. Yeah, I'm sometimes amazed at how I stuck with ST Writer myself. 🥴 I remember buying the ST magazine (forgot which one) that had Write On on the coverdisk too! I don't know why, but I just couldn't get use to it. It seemed "cluttered" to me for lack of a better word. Something about Papyrus' design impressed me by its layout and elegance finally made me switch to a font-based word processor.

Word Writer offered a lot more features than 1st Word. The big dictionary was a huge deal. I would call Word Writer the most popular commercial word processor (1986 to...1990ish when developers really started pushing the ST's untapped power) here in the US. It seemed like everyone who could afford it used Word Writer. I was a poor student, so I only used ST Writer. 🤑 1st Word came free with early STs so it was bound to be the most popular. I think that distinction needs to be pointed out here.

Given that they shafted Atari's 50th Anniversary is really saying something. ☹️ Not even one panel or special section puzzled me and others I talked to. Off the top of my head, they did have the 40th anniversary panel for the Atari 8-bits, so at least they celebrated one Atari product in 2019...

That looks like a weird modified 520 STation setup that was sold back in the day. It was a fancy monitor stand where you could shove two disk drives and the three power supplies into the case and then have the monitor sit on top of the case and the 520ST slides underneath the case. Here's an example: https://bytecellar.com/2007/06/17/my_atari_520st/

Can you scan it or take in-focus pictures? Sounds like one of the many AtariFests in the late 80s run by local Atari user groups. This one was run by the MAGIC user group in Southfield, Michigan. I recall the Michigan-Indiana-Illinois area had a pretty big Atari computer userbase because it seemed like they always had some newsworthy shows. Wow, all those booths full of developers. 🙂 The good old days...

Click on a drive icon first (like the C drive icon) to highlight it first, then go to Install New Drive. I don't think there were 15MB hard drives, but the C drive is usually small so that it can be dedicated to AUTO programs, accessories, fonts, and other terminal-and-stay-resident type programs.

Turn off the computer first. Press the button on the Monitor Master to switch monitor. Turn on the computer again. I don't recommend pushing the button on the Monitor Master while the computer is on to switch monitors. I see no circuitry inside that makes it look like an "intelligent" device. The only device off the top of my head that did allow this was the Astra SW-1.

Yes, that's it. I was starting to get into Sierra On-Line games. I started out with Leisure Suit Larry 2 which came on three floppies. It look a looong time to load each scene, but at least it was "linear" game where you had to solve one puzzle to go onto the next. Once I got Larry 3 which came on 4 floppies AND you did not have to solve puzzles in any sequential order (mostly), disk swapping became more frequent = pain in the arse. Good thing Sierra allowed their games to installed on a hard drive because the disk swapping was starting to drive me crazy.

Syquest 44MB removable hard drive for the Atari ST. I never liked the idea that once you filled up a hard drive, that's it. You need to buy another one or start deleting stuff off of it. It was such a turn off compared to floppies that you could just buy another box of when a floppy disk was full. When the Syquests started coming down in price and increasing in popularity, it certainly piqued my interest. I don't remember what finally made me purchase one though. Syquests and all removable hard drives before the Zip drive were more expensive than fixed hard drives.