Bringing my 520ST system back to life.

[gjwsr]

I have set up my 520St after 25 years. Surprised at how much of the system is still in working order.

The causualtes are:

The mouse doesn't process the clicks.

On of my 3.5 drives doesn't work.

 

Years ago I used the system as an emulation tool. I was an embedded systems program consultant.

I used the software package PC-Ditto to run emulators that I had on 5.25 floppies that run via MS-DOS.

Unfortunately PC-Ditto need as MS-DOS boot disk that I no longer have. It's been years and I could use some pointers on how I go about obtaining an old PC boot disk that will fit on a single sided 3.5 diskette.

 

A similar problem arose when I brought up Magic Sac. I get to the point where the emulator shows the Mac icon smiling at me wanting a Magic Mac diskette with a Mac Program and the Finder on it. I have no idea where those ended up. Is there any where one can purchase, or obtain otherwise, Mac software that old that will work with the Magic Sac 4.2?

 

It's been a kick bringing up some stuff I wrote using Personal Pascal and seeing how dated they seems today, Also a kick going though the massive Tackle Box documentation and thinking never again!

 

I even brought up Minx and remembered the 25 year old username and password.

 

Any help out here is appreciated.

 

Stay warm,

 

GJW

 

 

[tjlazer]

Make sure and get a DSDD drive so you can easily transfer files and disk images to disk for use with your ST! You will need an older PC with an internal floppy drive to do the disk image conversion. Or you can format disks on a USB PC or Mac to 720k and read then on the ST.

[Zogging Hell]

I don't recall exactly but I think Magicsac needs Finder etc to be installed on a hard disk as (although Spectre later managed to do it) the ST can't read Mac disks directly. Magicsac might have an intermediery floppy disk format that behaves like a mac disk but isn't compatible directly), but this won't be any good for transferring stuff over as the Mac can't read it. In the old days I think you had to transfer software over via the serial port to the hard disk, but you might be able to do something with a SD card hard drive setup.

[gjwsr]

My gut is telling me this is going to be more trouble than fun! I've been trying to put together a DOS boot disk to get the PC-Ditto emulator up and running -- to no avail. Nothing I've tried so far works. I'll keep at it for awhile longer.

 

I have not tried to do anything with the MagicSac as yet other than see if I could buy some sort of Mac program on the Internet. And yes MagicSac does require the Finder to be on the floppy.

 

I'm going to give this a week or two before I throw in the towel -- then I'll probably look into selling the individual components somehow.

 

Thanks for your responses.

 

GJW

[Zogging Hell]

What DOS version are you using? You might want to try here for a DOS floppy as they seem to have most...

 

https://winworldpc.com/library

 

 

I'd try from something around DOS 3 and up. Software PC Ditto is pretty slow though so might be an unrewarding experience..

[pixelmischief]

You're emulating an Intel PC on an Atari ST? You have it backwards, I think. =)