New Stf - Questions

[Charlie_]

This is my 1st ST machine. Ive never used one or even seen one in person before. Even so, I think some things about my STf are weird.

 

1st of all when I turn it on, it sits at a light blue screen and checks the disk drive every few seconds. Is that normal?

 

2nd if I start it with a disk in the drive it will go to GEM or auto boot the disk. When in GEM it can read disks made on the PC.

 

When I do Desk Info, there is nothing about a TOS version.

 

Also the disk drive doesnt look like a stock drive. It is kinds loose in there and a little floppy.

 

Here are some pictures, please fill me in on what is not normal about my Stf

 

[Ato]

Also the disk drive doesnt look like a stock drive. It is kinds loose in there and a little floppy.

 

That is certainly not the original floppy disk drive.

 

Cheers,

T.

[Tenorman]

This is my 1st ST machine. Ive never used one or even seen one in person before. Even so, I think some things about my STf are weird.

 

1st of all when I turn it on, it sits at a light blue screen and checks the disk drive every few seconds. Is that normal?

Yes. If there is no disk in the drive when the machine is first booted it will sit there and look for it for a while before taking you to the desktop in about 30-40 seconds. If you want to speed up the boot process, put a disk in. It doesn't have to be bootable. It can even be blank.

 

2nd if I start it with a disk in the drive it will go to GEM or auto boot the disk. When in GEM it can read disks made on the PC.

Yep. Most of the floppy based games autoboot, if they don't you will be dropped into the desktop. Their are a lot of rules about reading and writing PC disks on the ST and vice versa, depending on what version of TOS you have, and where the disk was originally formatted. I don't remember all the specifics at the moment, but it's not surprising that you can read a DOS formatted disk.

 

When I do Desk Info, there is nothing about a TOS version.

It's 1.0. You can tell from the copyright date.

 

Also the disk drive doesnt look like a stock drive. It is kinds loose in there and a little floppy.

 

Here are some pictures, please fill me in on what is not normal about my Stf

 

 

Yeah, that floppy drive definitely isn't original. This is how it looked originally:

 

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/atarist/h/1040rs.jpg