The tale of high density Atari mystery
The Atari ST, like other computers at the time, had Dual Density disk drives with 720KB of storage. DD for short. Since High Density (1.44MB) appeared shortly after, Atari used such drives in the more top of the lines models Mega STE and TT. Additionally, us enthusiasts and hardware hackers added HD capability to the regular ST and STE range since it was neat to store twice the amount of data on suitable disks (and it worked pretty well cutting a hole in DD disks tricking the drives into thinking they were HD, even though the magnetic layer is slightly different).
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
6 minutes
Mega STE 1.44 HD floppy, FPU, fan and RTC upgrades
A few weeks ago I acquired a computer I never had the chance to play around with when it was new, an Atari Mega STE. It’s the culmination of Atari’s 16 bit line of computers, very compatible with the ST(E) range yet much more expandable, usually coming with a SCSI adapter and HD (1.44MB) floppy support. Besides the expandability, it can run at 16Mhz, with cache, compared to 8MHz for the rest of the ST(E) computers.
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
3 minutes
This last weekend me and many others were participating at the third incarnation of the STNICCC Atari ST conference. The first and original one was held in 1990 - where sadly I didn’t attend - and the second one was held as a reunion in the year 2000. Back then they joked about meeting up again in the far far away future of 2015. … and that happened. Me and two others from my old demo crew had written a brand new demo that we showed at the demo competition, and additionally I had been asked by the organizer to do a talk on the latest findings with regards to two of the Atari ST’s more magical demo tricks - overscan and sync scroll.
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
Atari ST chiptune plugin for VLC
update 2018-02-09: VLC 3.0 has just been released. Here’s a compatible version of the plugin (same source revision as before). update 2017-03-18: Link updated with fresh build (VLC 2.x). A few weeks ago I spent some time with the excellent sc68 software written by Benjamin Gérard (Ben/Overlanders). It’s a suite of software that can faithfully reproduce the workings of the YM2149 sound chip in the Atari ST and convert/play songs made for it.
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
It’s somewhat easy finding modern software able to read ancient data formats (note, "somewhat"). It’s often more difficult finding the opposite - conversion from modern formats to older ones. When I’ve wanted to edit graphics using modern software (GIMP) and convert it to Atari ST I’ve so far used the excellent Netpbm package. The steps have involved converting my image in GIMP to use a colormap of suitable size, save the image as a .
Atari · Code · English · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute
It’s retro computing time again! As part of my quite extensive rebuild of one of my Atari STE machines I want to have both an HxC SD floppy emulator as well as the original floppy disk drive mounted internally in the machine at the same time. While that in itself is just a question of making a cable that supports both, another problem quickly arises. In most cases you would want the machine to boot off the HxC (drive A:) and the internal floppy would then be drive B:.
Atari · English · Retro · Uncategorized
4 minutes
picoPSU Atari ST replacement guide
I just did a writeup on how to replace the original PSU in an Atari ST/E with a modern picoPSU. I’m quite satisfied with how it came out - click the link for some pretty pictures ;)
Atari · Picopsu · Retro · Uncategorized
1 minute