Atari ST 520FM

Performa

Performa

Member
Picked this one up "as is - for parts" on eBay, and it fired right up when plugged in.



While Apple only had one Macintosh at the time that could boot from ROM (the Macintosh Classic) and Amiga needed at least one disk to boot anything, the Atari has the entire operating system built into ROM. It runs a program called "Graphical Environment Manager" or "GEM" which was cooked up by Digital Research before Windows was a thing, and the Macintosh influence is plain to see.

I can't get any farther than this as it needs a mouse to work, and I haven't got one. The Atari mice aren't compatible with other mice of the era, but adapters for PS/2 aren't too expensive, though most have to ship from Europe.

The really nifty thing about this one is, assuming the floppy drive works, the machine can read 720k disks made by regular PC computers. I'll have to mess around with it a bit, but we should be able to get games loaded onto this thing fairly easily, which would be fun at a future show!

More to follow!
 
Performa

Performa

Member
Got a mouse for the Atari- slim pickings online, so I had to grab something from the "as-is" pile on eBay. Still kinda scary how expensive old peripherals are getting now.



It didn't work too good when it came in, and I quickly found at least one reason it wasn't working:





Eww.
 
Performa

Performa

Member
One oversight of the Atari ST's design is that the sides are all occupied by ports, connectors, and floppy drives. That left no room for the joystick and mouse ports. So Atari relocated them to the bottom in this narrow little pocket underneath.



Now, on it's face that's not terrible- but another design flaw really makes this arrangement troublesome. Port zero (on the left) is both the mouse port and the port for the player 1 joystick- so to change between the two, you have to upend the computer somehow- easier said than done when it's all plugged in with cables and peripherals.

Thankfully (kinda?) this was a problem back in the Atari ST's heyday too, and a whole range of third party companies leapt on with solutions to this issue. One such company is the aptly named "Practical Solutions" and their "Mouse Master" which is basically a lump of plastic, some wires, and a switch.



With this device plugged into the ports underneath the Atari ST computer, you can plug in all your joysticks, mice, and whatnot one time, and just flip the switch to alternate between them, no lifting the machine or rearranging your desk. As I expect we'd be doing a lot of swapping between the Macintosh-esque GEM desktop and games at shows, I though one of these might save us all (especially me) a lot of aggravation.

More to follow! I hope to have this machine show ready very soon!
 
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Performa

Performa

Member
Here's the Atari ST underneath most of the metal shielding. The power supply is in the upper left corner, sitting over the ROM chips. The metal boxes in the center are the video processor (bottom) and RF modulator (top). The chips on the right side are the logic and interface chips, as well as the Motorola 68000 CPU, the biggest one of the bunch. On the bottom there's the 512kb of RAM, with a bank for the second 512kb bank to make one megabyte- the only difference between our low end 520ST and a "high end" 1040ST is that second bank of RAM and a case badge. It is possible to upgrade the RAM, but it'd be a lot of work.

 
Performa

Performa

Member
I really liked the Gotek solution Mr. Jaeger had for his Amiga, and while looking for something similar, I ran across one for the Atari ST.

It's pretty neat.





 
Performa

Performa

Member
An update on the Atari ST! It had it's show debut at LincCon in Merrill, and was a tremendous flop. The only game it will run reliably is 9 Lives, which is, to put it politely... substandard as platformers go. Nothing else loads, behaving oddly before crashing. I'd believed this was simply due to a shortage of RAM, but some more knowledgable ST gurus have indicated the problem is likely hardware based, probably not a RA/m shortage.



I'll have more updates as I find time to fix it.
 
D

DaveG

New member
If you are interested, there is a really good 27" multisync monitor out that does all three of the Atari ST resolutions. Right now Office Depot has it for $89.99 (through Saturday). It is also available on ebay (direct from Dell) for $99.99. You can set it to 4:3 so the picture isn't stretched. The two color resolutions are absolutely beautiful. The Mono resolution has some Herringbone patterning but is still easy to read.

You would need a 13pin to VGA cable to use it. I made mine two out of an extra ST video cable that I had laying around. One is a switchable letting me move from mono to color and the other is just a color cable. The pinouts are different. I made the switchable, but you can purchase them online.
 
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