Atari ST Hard Drives - SCSI - ACSI - SD Cards - Is it worth it?

[@TheRetroShack]

Hope you enjoy the episode :) Minor correction needed: The speed comparison is showing an SSD throughout rather than the NVME that I refer to - NVME is even faster :) :)

[@RetroGod1982]

Try an interface IDEal interface with a 2.5" internal HDD from TUS Developments. I used one with a Veloce+ board.

[@Dr_Mario2007]

IDE has a very good thing that keeps it alive in embedded application, and that's ease of interfacing, you can get $1 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller to talk with the hard drive and SSD with classic Parallel ATA interface. eMMC SSDs come pretty close but require the microcontroller to have SD card interface to work, so there's some parity in embedded options. And NVMe is a usual standard for PCIe SSDs so it's just much faster.

[@TheRealBobHickman]

I came into a bit of inheritance cash back in the early 90s and got an MegaST2 and a MegaFile30 (I think it was the 30MB, but can't fully remember). What I *do* remember though, is that the HDD cost me £768 at the time, a massive amount of money, but as a coder, having access to DevPac2, my code, and all my resources was just incredible. I also suggested the name for the LAPD public domain library, since Leigh and Clive were both coppers. I met Leigh on his rounds at the local petrol station in Derby where I use to hang out on my way home from the late (very early morning) shift at the UCI Cinema I worked at. I went by The Shadow (as a coder) back then, and made a couple of bootsectors for LAPD and the official LAPD Virus Buster, among other things. I dabbled in the demo scene, but was always a little bit late learning the newest tricks. It did cement my interest in software though, and I've had a long career in technology and tech leadership including console games, theme parks, and now self driving vehicles. The humble ST was a huge stepping stone that shaped my future, and I will always love it.

[@TheVanillatech]

Cool comment!

[@batlin]

Brilliant! I used to love booting up and browsing the LAPD catalogue disks as a teenager in the 1990s. I still remember the grey tiled LAPD bootsector screen, and the intro (done in STOS I think) that played the excellent Thundercats theme tune.

[@TheRealBobHickman]

@@batlin I don't remember who made the intro, but it may well have been done in STOS. The bootsector code was all assembler in less than 384 bytes, since that's the only spare space alongside the geometry info and checksum.

[@FutureIsBlue-tq1xy]

I used to buy PD software from LAPD. I remember the bootloaders by you. Shadow was a cool name.

[@TheRealBobHickman]

@@FutureIsBlue-tq1xy Thanks, I certainly thought it was cool at the time :P All of that stuff did lead me on path to a good career in software though, so I don't think I'd really change anything.

[@TzOk]

Current release of ACSI2STM (3.0) has a driver built-in. It injects driver code into the data stream, so no need to have it installed on the SD card itself. You can use regular FAT16 DOS formatted SD card.

[@methanoid]

Thanks for that info. What is biggest Card we can use for ST and partition sizes/numbers?

[@fredflintstone505]

@@methanoid I had a 65MB drive on my Mega ST2. He mentioned an 80GB.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@methanoid there is not direct limitation to SD card size, what is limiting you is the TOS partition size support which with TOS 1.2 and lower is 256MB and 1.4 and above 512MB size, and the number of drive letters available (up to M?, dont remember sry). You cant use more and the rest of your SD card space gets wasted. There are some modified TOS versions out there that support proper FAT16 (ST TOS has not full support) and those allow larger partitions (1 or was it 2GB?). But it is a good habit to make the first partition just 30MB large... So the sweetspot is the SD card sized 8GB and less. But dont be sad, even 512MB HDD is huge size for ST.

[@EannaButler]

What a great vid. Got an 520 STFM on a family holiday the summer I turned 13. Had learned how to program BASIC for 1h after school every day on Apple ][e's, I had a book of 71 BASIC listings that I typed out in full, incl. a calculator that had double precision calculation (completely black art to me), a tick-tac-toe game playing an optimal strategy, and many, many graphing of various curve functions (that I converted from text-based HTAB/VTAB, to HGR2 graphics mode plotting). The ST was the future! I had never used a mouse - we bought the ST in John Lewis on Oxford St., London. Brought it home to our holiday home in Kent. Double-clicking wasn't working!! We brought it back to the shop the next day - "No, you need to double-click quickly, not slowly" was the very-helpful and patient computer demonstrator in John Lewis that day. Living in Ireland, that was probably the last time I was in a John Lewis shop, but they couldn't have been a nicer gang. The John Lewis Christmas ads are always worth watching, but for me, they hold a particular poignancy. So back to Ireland with the ST... Worried about Customs on the ship home, was elated with relief that my Da didn't have to pay even more to get it into Ireland. I got the Summer Pack '88 - 21 games IIRC - some old titles, but many classics - well, in my head, they are bona-fide classics. The next three years, I would learn Atari ST BASIC, then from picking up ST World, ST Format, ST User, and later, ST Now, magazines in Easons on Patrick St in Cork, I learned GFA Basic (a coverdisk came with the GFA Basic 2.0 interpreter - my brother working in London bought me the GFA Basic 2.0 Compiler), and I learned the rudiments of C, with a strangled (save-disabled) version of Turbo C. Fast forward another two years, did Computer Science in university. Graduated 1998, I still use programmatic tricks I learned in the late 80's in software I write today. Seeing those SupraDrive and ThirdCoast HD units brings me RIGHT BACK to the ST magazine ads I would ogle. Damn... Thank you SO MUCH for bringing these back into my life! I bought an 520STFM, upgraded to 2.5MB, about a decade ago. I now am working in the software industry for 24 years, and I do up tracks on soundcloud, using Midi (soft synths and hardware synths) for over a decade. I must get myself a HD interface, resurrect the ST I bought, get a VGA connector job, and sequence some beats and samplers like a boss! Fatboy Slim I *think* still has all his ST rig, he was bringing his ST out live up to about 15 years ago. Still the most rock-solid Midi timecode / zero clock jitter from an ST! PCs and Macs over USB are not at the races, still to this day! Some technological solutions do exist, e.g. Steinberg Midex, but if you want perfectly-repeatable playback of Midi synths and effects, it has to be an ST... Excuse the long post. I love your channel man! It's got a wonderful way about it. Thank you very much for keeping the important things alive for this Irishman... Much love from Ireland x

[@jmclabexperience]

Thanks for giving credits to my little ACSI2STM project ! The project is still growing on the little amount of spare time I have, and thanks to the very patient and competent feedback from users.

[@peterwarner9572]

I've been thinking about getting one of these for a while. The thing putting me off is how involved is it to setup - getting the converted games, maybe installing scumm VM lite etc. A back to basics beginners guide to those things would be fantastic

[@camp0017]

Around 1993 I had an ATA HD (186 MB) installed inside my Atari ST. There was a local electronics engineer who built the interfaces and installed the hardware (he was actually a student at our Technical University in Gliwice). Later I also added a CD drive on the same interface and had all my programs burnt on a CD. It was well worth it! My Atari, previously upgraded to a newer TOS and 4MB of RAM worked like a monster!

[@cdeford]

I never had an Atari HD and like so many others had to move to the Amiga in the end. But the ST will always have a place in my heart.

[@cathrynm]

Atari ST was smart to 'just include the hard drive port' like this. It basic worked and was fast enough for the day.

[@thepenultimateninja5797]

Strangely, a lot of ST games that would have easily fit on a single disk were distributed on two disks anyway. The reason for this was that early STs had a single-sided floppy drive. I guess software houses wanted to maximize the number of ST owners who could use their software, so they supplied it on two single-sided floppies instead of one double-sided one. My own ST originally had a single-sided drive, and it meant that , while I could load commercial releases just fine, I couldn't use any of the cracked menu disks from the likes of Automation etc, which were invariably on double-sided disks. Needless to say, I nagged my parents for a double-sided drive, and upgraded my ST with my dad's help. I'm sure there couldn't have been many ST owners left who didn't perform the upgrade, so I was always a bit baffled that the software houses continued to inconvenience themselves and almost all of their customers by providing legacy support for what must have been a tiny number of machines. Floppy disks weren't all that cheap back then either. so it must have increased the cost of the software somewhat too. I remember ST Format magazine had a workaround for this problem by coming up with a clever disk format. The disks were readable on both single and double-sided drives, but single-sided drive owners could only access the main root directory. Double-sided drive owners could click on a 'Side 2' folder and access extra software.

[@Caroline_Tyler]

I built my own 20Mb HD - used a 20Mb MFM disk with an MFM to SCSI adapter card feeding into an SCSI to ASCI card all built into a custom box with a chunky PSU. Disk and PSU from Henry's Radio on the Edgeware Road. I was 'blown away' when the bloody contraption worked 1st time off!!!

[@fattomandeibu]

Hard disks rarely still work after that long, I find. I mean, the only one that old that I've found working is my A1200, but even that is making grinding noises and getting stuck at regular intervals, making it pretty unstable for running things on. These CF/SD card solutions are really saving some of these old machines, particularly x86/IBM compatible machines, where from about '91 or so, a hard disk was required to even get into the OS.

[@firsteerr]

have you got "wool merchants of Essen" for the ST ?

[@robertlock5501]

I'll be on the lookout for the follow up on this one - interesting stuff

[@Savagetechie]

I definitely need to dig my st out again, it's kinda buried somewhere in the back of the cupboard but I've got loads of good memories of it.

[@dorinxtg]

Great episode, as usual Just one small correction: You're talking about NVME, but you're pointing to SATA SSD. NVME is about 6-8 times faster (PCIe 3.0) than SATA SSD.

[@PaulGreeve]

I had one of those in the day (the official Atari middle). A huge 30 megabytes! Open the case and you find it was a IBM PC comparable drive as well. But watch out for the exposed and mains live heat stinks in the power supply - they bit me a few times when I was poking around inside it. Ouch! But compared to floppies, it was a dream to use and I never filled it over the couple of years I was using it. Though it’s internal fan was very noisy and annoying, especially when compared to the fan-less and quite Atari ST computer it attached to.

[@Evercade_Effect]

I enjoy seeing retro computers get new life with modern tech

[@spinnetti]

I had a 520, 1040 then a TT030 with every upgrade I could find, max memory, both color and monochrome monitors, modem, (75 baud to 56k over time) a scanner and printer. I had the Syquest drive too but maybe that was just on the TT, as IIRC it could use SCSI drives directly. I remember my first hard drive was 5meg for $500! - over $1,100 in todays money. I was clearly nuts given my income at the time. I also ran Magic or Mint - can't remember which... ST series were what I consider my first "Real" computers i.e. good for something other than games, but strangely I don't have anything like the nostalgia have have for my Zeddy or other 8 bit machines - maybe because those took a lot more imagination and real work to get anything at all out of them and you had to do most things yourself (it was all "Potential") whereas with the 16 bit generation, I was just a consumer. Also why I have even negative interest in old PC's; those are just ewaste!

[@DeadCat-42]

I have an Atari ST with a SCSI tower I built, it contains two CD ROMS, two Hard drives and a Zip drive. I had a BBS when I was a teen . Troll BBS, 2 lines, 2400 baud 48 MB online. Running the WWIV BBS on a 286 add on board and doubledos. Power of Vintage channel is checking out the 286 add on right now.

[@declanmcquay3476]

I have the UltraSatan on my 1040STe and currently using the HDDriver tool. I have used the 8bitchip tool in the past, but found the HDDriver used less memory at start up, which even on a 4MB system seemed essential for some games. I recommend trying out some of the Dead Hacker's Society demos like US Policy, which really pushes the data throughput on the Ultrasatan and it would be interesting to see how the ACSI2STM runs it. In regards to Atari ST vs. Amiga, copying files to and from the SD card for the Ultrasatan is so much easier to manage compared to having to setup a CF card on an Amiga. On my Mac the SD card for the Atari is recognised natively, no need for drivers or specialised software. Compare that to setting up a SD/CF card for the Amiga where you need to have WinUAE installed to setup and copy data to and from the card

[@another3997]

The portability of hard drives between different platforms depends largely on the file system used. FAT and FAT32 can be used on an Amiga, and those can be directly read by any other computer OS that understands the FAT file system, including Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

and I have to add, that if you have multiple Atari ST/TT computers, the ASCI2SD/Ultrasatan(mini) solutions are great, since when you are in mood of using ST instead of TT, you simply unplug and plug in to different Atari. Also in terms of data transfer, I tend to use the NetUSBee and Ftp instead of pulling the SD card, Im lazy...

[@MrPetari]

Really strange to say that HDDriver uses less memory than PP driver (8bitchip tool - funny to call it so) . Plus, it is not relevant how much RAM is used at start up, what matters is how much RAM it uses during regular work. I see complete bad opinions all over Atari forums - people is just so confused and lost in all it. To add that RAM usage may depend from partition sizes too - larger partitions need larger buffers, and they may take more RAM than driver self. In any case, some 42 KB RAM taken is no problem, not even with only 1 MB RAM in machine.

[@Sl1pstreams]

The ICD board inside of the hard drive was called a host adapter, and you always needed one to interface ACSI (Atari interface) to SCSI. The two primary manufacturers of host adapters, apart from Atari themselves, were ICD and Supra. Many ST users rolled their own hard disks. You’d buy a case with a host adapter and power supply, and then source your own hard disk from various manufacturers. They had to be SCSI to work with ICD or Supra host adaptors though. Mega ST users could buy a third party kit to install a hard drive in the Mega’s case. It was not until the TT/Mega STE/Falcon era that Atari offered machines with provisions for integrated hard drives. Interestingly the SH-204 drive from Atari wasn’t SCSI but rather MFM, with a weird custom adaptor inside the case. I don’t think you could swap a larger MFM unit into an SH series like you could with later Megafile units. Finally, the Falcon supported 2.5” IDE internal drives, and also replaced ACSI with a SCSI standard port, both of which made purchasing and using a standard HD much easier by eliminating the need for a host adaptor altogether.

[@peterhurst]

I had a Third Coast box with my ST, the RHS had the PSU and I had two Seagate SCSI drives fitted. As far as I can recall I used the standard Atari driver as the Third Coast had a floppy that came with it to get you going and set up the hard drive(s). I recall they may have been 20Mb drives (MFM) but formatting RLL bumped them up closer to 30Mb. I'd completely forgotten the make until you produced that third coast box and it all came flooding back

[@Dan-in-Virginia]

I bought the ICD dual 50MB (total 100MB) hard drive unit in the fall of 1987 for my Mega ST4. Later, I got a 200MB Conner hard drive and the ICD internal drive adapter to mount inside my ST4 case.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

freaking rich kid 😉 just j/k

[@Dan-in-Virginia]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I worked at Burger King all summer for $4.25 an hour.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@Dan-in-Virginia what I said stays valid, a rich kid (self made, but still...) 😎

[@audiodiwhy2195]

Minor correction. At 7:11 You show an stm programmer not a dev board . Stm32h7 mcu if you can find one for sale at all is usd $13 or so. Not $1. Very scarce due to supply chain issues. Dev boards for h7 series like nucleo with an h7 is about $30 usd from digikey. They are still affordable but not that affordable!

[@lahtinenk]

I feel sorry that I sold my Atari ST long time ago. I was quite proud of it as it has a tower case and all 40 MB HD, that was from Quatum. I was working at an importing company, so I got it at a whole sale price.

[@ivmup2232]

Never sell it...I rebought them plus sd card hd embedded and triple os switcher..

[@terminalterminus]

I had the Third Coast 65MB harddrive. Not sure about it costing the GDP of a small country but it did cost "around" £630 when I bought it new. Sadly the Seagate SCSI drive eventually suffered from sticktion...

[@MeinElektronikHobby]

Ein schönes Video - da muss ich mal sehe, wie ich meinen Atari ST aufpeppen kann. - A nice video - I have to see how I can spice up my Atari ST.

[@stephenhookings1985]

Aufpeppen - I love learning new German words - thanks for this one :-)

[@MeinElektronikHobby]

... aufpeppen -> Aufmotzen, verbessern, upgraden -

[@aaroncheah2088]

I have the Atari MegaFile 60 for my 520STFM. Bought it from a friend back in 1990.

[@voidtoast4880]

You should take a look at emutos an open source evolution and replacement of the old tos that works on real hardware, it's worth a video on.

[@PersistenceOfVisionAtari]

I had a Third Coast Technologies hard drive like that. I even went to their workshop near Wigan. It was only a couple of years ago I chopped up the case. I bought a BlueSCSI for my Falcon which uses the same STM32 chip and use Peter Putnik's software on both my Falcon and STe (I have an Ultra Satan)

[@Barnaclebeard]

Eric R. Smith's MiNT was my gateway to UNIX, the first chance I had to play with a real POSIX-ish multiuser environment. I loved it so much and it remained my favorite OS until I eventually made it to FreeBSD.

[@fredflintstone505]

back in the late 80's early 90's my brother had the ICD drive and I had the Atari MegaFile 30 that I upgraded to 60 MB later. I later partitioned it for half ST and half Macintosh with the Spectre GCR upgrade.

[@paulwratt]

If you intend to use MiNT and (especially) EmuTOS, then the HDDriver is the better all round option. However if you are only ever going to use TOS based partitions, the the Putnik driver is more than "fine", and from a software point of view, is a souped up AHDI driver (which will also work fine with certain modern hardware - but get the right version).

[@milgeekmedia]

I had a 20mb Protar hard drive specifically to run Calamus and DA Vector Pro... Which kinda gave me a 'poor man's' Mac! 😂 I used to feel very superior as a hard drive on an STe was like a mystical creature and my friends used to gasp when they saw it! LOL (...20mb, oh my god...)

[@BAZFANSHOTHITSClassicTunes]

I loved my 520STe it was my first tru 16bit computer - prior to that i had the good old C64, and various machines prior to that. I remember getting some simms to upgrafe to a full 1 meg abd i felt king. But i too folded and in 93 i got the almighty A1200 and used that til 96. Great times.

[@enexprod]

Very nice video!

[@welliben]

I'm not sure I would bother with MINT on a plain ST, even with 4mb of memory and a hard disk. It is pretty hefty and doesn't even run particularly well on my Falcon. If you want to see how multitasking should have been done on a plain ST you are better off trying Magic, which was excellent, faster than single TOS and just a joy to use in the 90s - although sadly it is no longer really supported.

[@Xenon0000000000001]

I used Magic back when it was called Mag!X (v2, I think). It was so much faster than GEM, had proper multitasking, an improved desktop environment and had pretty good compatibility with existing software. I'd recommend anyone who's wanting to try out productivity software on an Atari ST check it out.

[@giulianomarco]

Snap! Fellow 520 STFM -> A500 owner here. Bought mine from Silica Shop £299 IIRC. 😁👍

[@cowasakiElectronics]

I had a third coast 30Mb hard drive! Built like a tank and about as noisy. With a DMM to SCSI, SCSI to RLL and then a 30Mb RLL drive (all from memory.....). I'm typing this as I watch 4 minutes go by

[@JVHShack]

For those that have a SupraDrive or the official Atari hard drive box and wish to keep it, there is a modern solution: BlueSCSI. It would be interesting to see how the BlueSCSI stacks up against the ACSI2SD since they utilize roughly the same blue pill. If the BlueSCSI doesn't support this, it should soon as it's constantly being updated.

[@TheRetroShack]

I’m being sent a test copy to build, test and review so watch this space :)

[@frankowalker4662]

I found my 520ST fm and monitor in a skip after the town had a flood in the 90's, it all worked perfectly. Unfortunately there were no disks. 2 years later I found a ZX81 emulator for it. (I grew up with the 81 so it was perfect). I just could'nt get any other software. I just stopped using it about 2010 and stuck with my A1200, Speccy and real ZX81. That's a great add-on for it, though.

[@sideburn]

I just got an SH204. Surprised it was not mentioned here.

[@thomasrotweiler]

Oh that's cool . Still have my STFM and 4MB STE. And a Third Coast ICD hard drive which works (or did last time I powered everything up.) And an Atari Megafile60 which I never managed to get working. (I think I was given that along with some other ST hardware.) Anyway having the hard drive made running serious software like word processing and DTP so much easier. It was hooked up to the STE so didn't run games from the hard disk. No idea how or if it was possible to get games running from hard drives - I suspect some had it as an option but I could be wrong. In the UK things ST related seemed to completely die out over 20 years ago, there was never the continuation which we have seen with the Amiga. As far as I know. Currently waiting for someone to do an ST Next with huge screen resolutions, working with a tiny b&w monitor isn't much fun these days.

[@blackterminal]

Yes it's sad not much love for St. But there's some if you look. Check out exxos

[@cannfoddr]

I still have my original Atari Megafile and it still boots - to Neodesk

[@timballam3675]

When you say "dead" do you mean not spinning? If so as you power it up try a sharp tap from a mallet on the side as you do so, as it could be the oil in the bearings is too thick!

[@TheRetroShack]

Thanks for the tip - I’ll give it a go!

[@stephenhookings1985]

@@TheRetroShack I was attempting to repair a SCSI drive (opened the platters etc) a while back - then mysteriously it flew across the garage at great speed and was totally broken. I think was about the time Man City scored against QPR hence winning the title on goal difference - funny how drive repair goes. Great video. I have got back into the ST bug - can u put in description where u got the new HD from and any hints if you needed to buy a driver for it? From what I understand all of these devices need it (Ultra SATAN, your one, others).

[@stevetodd7383]

Erm, that was a SATA drive spec not M.2. M.2 is over 10 times faster under PCIe 4. I had a 120MB Quantum drive back in the day, and due to a TOS bug you couldn’t have volumes bigger than 16MB. I had drive letters out to I:

[@TheRetroShack]

Already a pinned comment on this little faux pa of mine :) :)

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

what TOS did you have? The 1.0 and 1.2 was limited to 256MB later versions to 512MB. It was a good way to partition the C: to 10 or 30MB for better function, but I never heard of 16MB partition limit...

[@stevetodd7383]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 From memory it was TOS 1.02. Theoretically you could have had 32MB volumes (16 bit FAT, 1 sector cluster size), but there was a bug that meant that you were limited to 16MB (probably a signed vs unsigned thing). I believe the bug was fixed in later versions, and then the cluster size was made configurable so you could have up to 512MB volumes.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@stevetodd7383 if you had TOS 1.2 (yes I know it was 1.02, but for some reason we used to call it that), then you could have 256MB partition size, except the first boot partition that had a limitation (dont remember the size), therefore we always used 10MB on 1.2 or lower and 30MB for 1.4 and higher, but just for the boot partition (usually C:), all the rest could be larger.

[@radman8321]

I bought a 3rd party hard drive for my ST. 40MB (divided up into 4 x 10MB drives) and system utilities that were only in German! It also cost an absolute fortune. I must have been mad.

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

If only we had these back in the day. I could have saved a lot of money.

[@Colin_Ames]

Great episode, as always.

[@stephenelliott7071]

Another great episode, thanks.

[@TSteffi]

I have a bit of experience with the St and the expansions. HDDriver has one great feature going for it. It can create partitions in a byte swap mode. This switches the byte order on the disk from the Motorola mode to the Intel mode, and that means a modern PC can access the partition. Of course it costs some performance, because of the byte swapping. But it is extremely convenient to just plug your Atari "hard disk" Into a USB card reader and be able to copy files onto or off of it. The pera putnik driver doesn't have that feature, but I think it can get a little bit more speed out of the same hardware. And then there is the original old ICD driver. It is not the fastest, but it has a really nice boot screen and it's original from back in the days.

[@JesterEric]

They were supplied with basic on disk. If you booted with the language disk it installed some desktop accessories

[@dempseydiscus]

I have an UltraSatan and ended up paying 10€ in order to get Petaris HD driver, it's a breeze when the SD card can be read on both your PC and on the Atari without any problems or fidiling.

[@merman1974]

Very interesting, I had heard of UltraSATAN but not this project.

[@chaoticsystem2211]

are your teeth ok? after chewing on that connector... btw, since you started bard's tale, have a look at fate - gates of dawn. no idea if they ever made it for the atari. i only played it on the amiga. a lot...

[@FXGreggan.]

Ahh always wanted a card reader for my ST but can't really justify the cost since I rarely use it.. just upgraded it to 4meg which is nice and got a 15khz capable lcd monitor.

[@kaitlyn__L]

I can’t help but notice that it would take about 90 seconds to read out the entire 90 MB hard drive, but it would take about the same to read out a 128 GB SSD at the quoted speeds! (And of course if it was a 512 or 1024 GB SSD, it will take even longer!) Pretty interesting how capacity has continued to expand a bit faster than read speeds.

[@alankingvideo]

Everyone I knew who had a HD used neodesk, to replace GEM.

[@CFalcon030]

Once upon I had the choice between my Mega STE or an STE (the STE would have been given to me for free, and the MSTE I could buy). I chose the Mega because I couldn't think of using a machine without a hard disk. Now that you have a hard disk a whole new world opens up. First of all, you can install NVDI and have a much faster desktop and fonts. If you want to increase the usability of the desktop you can install something like Teradesk, which is a lightweight and good desktop replacement or something like Thing or Jinee which have all the bells and whistles. If I were you, and if you don't want to check any unixey stuff (not that you could with ~1MB of RAM left), I would avoid freemint since it's slow on an 8MHz machine and I would go for Magic. Multitos had received a lot of backlash back in the day, but I thought it was nice, but it did slowdown the machine. Magic is much snappier but I do prefer MiNT, it seems to have a better architecture. There are also AES extensions like Multigem and Geneva that increase the cooperative multitasking capabilities of TOS. I think that Ultrasatan is compatible with HDDriver and ACSI2STM isn't. That means that you lose the ability to have partitions with Fat 32 or Ext2 filesystems, so that's a bit of a minus.

[@Qone78]

Back in the days i had the original Atari105 MB Hdd für my ste... it was the second biggest solution by atari and i had to spend round 5k German Mark for the setup.... it was insane....

[@shamon351]

10:10 About the environnement, did you try emuTOS ?

[@RachaelSA]

I spent a lot of time on BBS's as a teen. Would yours run over telnet? because I don't think i could afford dialing into the UK, and I'm not even sure if I could find an old modem either. I guess you could set up a pi on ethernet that people could ssh into, and have a serial interface connecting a linux to the atari and people can ssh in and run minicom to connect?

[@danboid]

Multiple cassette games? Like what? I never remember any game taking up multiple cassettes.

[@battmann7089]

Top notch video as always👍I’d love to invest in one of these for my two ST’s but I’m not sure if I have enough memory in my systems to run one. I have a 512k 1986 issue machine and a 1 Meg version (Not sure what year) and I’m tired of floppy disks!! Would this work relatively painlessly on one or both of them? Any suggestions gratefully received.

[@masteries100]

In the 1 MB machine you can execute almost 90 or more percent of software. Few titles require more memory, mainly due to the possibility to save actual game state to the hard disk. In the 512 KB machine you can use the hard disk, but only few titles can be executed.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@masteries100 depends, if he wants to run games from HDD (i.e. the Putniks version), then he will need one more meg of RAM then the floppy game version.

[@battmann7089]

@@masteries100 Thanks for the info, i think i may have to invest fot the sake of that 1mb machine.

[@richardpeel6056]

I've got a Progate 120DC hard disc drive for an Atari, inside the metal box is a Maxtor 7120SR 120Mb drive. The QC stamp says 1992. My Atari has been set up but not used for 20 years when I got a 486 PC. I got everything working today except for the hard drive. I remember when I did use this hard drive I had to switch it on and off a few times to kick start it. I've tried this today and got a couple of clunks from it but not managed to actually get it going. Can anyone help?

[@noelsaw]

Atari was one of the first companies to announce an affordable consumer CD-ROM drive but in typical Atari vaporware fashion, it never arrived in time to make an impact. Whatever buzz and good will Atari made when announcing it was lost to history, sadly.

[@retroguy59]

I have built a acsi2stm device and uploaded and tried all software versions but all I get is a blank screen then normal desktop with no HD shown serial output just shows sd card size and success then after about 1 or mins seems to refresh then display sd card again. I press shift-s at bootup for setup but just blank screen still. Anyone have any ideas whats wrong as I really want to get this working :)

[@Megatog615]

M.2 NVMe SSDs are much faster than 540MB/s. I think the example you showed is for a 2.5" SATAIII SSD which has a theoretical max read/write speed of around 500MB/s.

[@TheRetroShack]

Thanks! I’ll post and pin a comment to that effect :)

[@007KnightBond]

hello where can I get one of those? I can’t seem to find it.

[@CyborgPrime]

I still have a working 1040St with a memory upgrade and the external hard drive but one of the hard drives in the bank is dead. My falcon also still works. I'm looking to sell my working Atari St and falcon if anyone is interested.

[@manueljesus3147]

Picked up a 1040STFM here in the states for $75. In the box, like new. Very nice but my Amigas were nicer in many ways.

[@Richardstevens1234]

It's a shame commodore ended but they kept making all kinds of pc's, no wonder the costs of those pc myst have cost a bomb

[@sideburn]

I have an ultrasatan external SD HD ant I can’t run anything on my 520 ST aside from a couple programs. 512K isn’t enough to do anything. I assume the HD emulator is consuming ram since sysinfo shows only 370k or so available.

[@Sl1pstreams]

It was always better to upgrade the RAM and then get a hard disk with a 520 for just this reason.

[@sideburn]

@@Sl1pstreams I have an original external harddrive but ended up doing a 4k ram upgrade on the 520 and got a gotek for it.

[@Sl1pstreams]

@@sideburn That’s a dream config. A user in the ST era would have been blown away 😁

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

3 major wrong statements in this video: 1. Atari HDD solution where very expensive when compared to others. No, actually about 20-30% cheaper, and when compared to AMIGA even 50%-100% cheaper then same sized HDD since AMIGA didnt have a HDD controller. Where did you live in 80s? Also gamers didnt often get the HDD for ST or A500 since there was no point to do it, productivity users did. In fact, in 1987 the Mega ST came out, and the Megafile line of ACSI HDDs was designed with Mega ST design in mind. 2. AMIGA Workbench faster then ST TOS/GEM GUI.... are you kidding? ST is doing circles around WB in terms of speed, even a Floppy based ST has faster GUI workflow then a SCSI AMIGA 500, Jesus.... 3. When MiNT came out, (and dont forget MagiC) AMIGA was just getting the WB 2.0... So the Atari was way ahead... The problem of AMIGA fanboys is that they tend to look at AMIGA with todays optics, using turbo cards, maxed out memory, OCS to ECS upgrade, SCSI2SD adapters, flickerfixers, scandoublers, 3.xx WB. But this is NOT AMIGA experience from 80s. AMIGA back then was nothing special, just a gaming machine and few Video applications. Luckly I was in both worlds and I saw the problem, average AMIGA user was just a gamer, average ST user knew how HW works and had a programing skills, or was a productivity apps guy... so AMIGA guy had to win the argument which computer is better. ST users didnt care much, but they liked to taunt AMIGA guys so they start to a rage.

[@Xenon0000000000001]

Yes, my Amiga friends would come over to use my ST if they needed to do word processing/DTP. They also had to swap Workbench disks just to copy a file. The best thing I found about the ST was the breadth and quality of productivity software that was easily available. That was mainly thanks to magazines like ST Format, in the UK, and an amazing PD/Shareware scene. I had full office suites, desktop publishing apps, midi sequencers, technical drawing apps, multiple programming apps, stats and graphing software, plus fun stuff like raytracing (only took a weekend for a single picture!) and fractal generation, all while being a kid with only pocket money to my name.

[@old486whizz]

Used to have an external drive for Atari 520STe (expanded to double RAM).. The drive was white, just over an inch tall, 50MB I think, orange LED switch on the right and I think maybe a red LED on the left.. can't find what it was at all.. unsure if using parallel or SCSI type connectors.. would love to open it now, see if it's one large disk or not.

[@josegoncalves5048]

Is there any info or pre image for programming th blue pill ?

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

what about a SCSI LVD to SATA adapter.

[@FordForTheWin]

i bet you wish workbench was as snappy as gem at normal file browsing

[@blackterminal]

What tos is that running and does that later tos effect game compatibility?

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

you can use TOS 1.4 easy, with full game compatibility (except STE games).

[@blackterminal]

Tos 1.4 is on my ste. It will not play many of my Atari St games. So the Ste rarely gets turned on.​@madigorfkgoogle9349

[@Charly6666666]

Jesus Lord...a Megafile that was a Dream... I could get a Megafile30 for 100 bucks and hell i did put all my disks on it wich had no copy protection. It was so fast and my Arm could finaly relax from Disk changing. I could do finaly run Programs much better and save while i did use the Programs. Without a HD it was a pain in the butt. I could finally use the ATARI 1040 STF for my financial accounting and tenant management without fear of losing data.

[@omniverideus]

PCIe 4 M.2 NVMe SSD can do up to 7000MB/s (7GB/s)

[@TheRetroShack]

Already pinned a comment about this little faux pas :) :)

[@omniverideus]

@@TheRetroShack I saw that and thanks for the video, I love your content. Just put up a number for those that may have been curious. :)

[@HuntersMoon78]

I have an Atari 1040 STe and can get a 1040 STfm soon for cheap, should I buy it?

[@agntdrake]

I had a 1040STfm, and always was jealous of people who owned the 1040 STe (and Amiga 500s if I'm honest).

[@blackterminal]

@@agntdrake no need for jealousy. Yours would run many games their's would not

[@janwilt6974]

I had the Atari STfm with a 40MB hard disk, then I got the Atari STe and I could use my 40MB HARD DISK on it, then I got the Atari Falcon and it had a 60MB hard disk built in.

[@bogganalseryd2324]

I had a Megafile 30

[@bazza5699]

hmmm i have a 520 stfm with only half a meg, is there a memory limitation using this?

[@TheRetroShack]

Nope, you’ll be fine :)

[@bazza5699]

@@TheRetroShack have you tried some of the hard drives that you can use on the Mister atari st core?

[@TheRetroShack]

@@bazza5699 Not yet - but now I will be :)

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

but be aware that the starting games from HDD on Putnik image as presented in this video will not work on 512KB. Besides, you can upgrade your ST pretty easy nowdays, but yes soldering is involved...

[@systemchris]

How much ram does the Atari need?

[@david-spliso1928]

Depends what you want to do. Min spec was initially 256K. Maximum is 4MB.

[@TrenchcoatSteve]

Most software was made to run fine with 1Mb but advanced features may need 2Mb or more. Max RAM on standard STs were 4Mb (14Mb in some cases), Mega STs were 12Mb-16Mb, TT and Falcon were 4Gb (the highest I have seen running on a TT is 1Gb and I have 260Mb in mine).

[@david-spliso1928]

The most on the ST is 4MB. So in context with the video this is the maximum.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@david-spliso1928 there was no 256KB version of ST, initially the 128 and 512KB version was planed, but before release the 128K version was dropped. So the lowest RAM ST version was a 512KB version. Also the limit of 4MB is given by MMU of ST, but technically the 16MB (1-1.5MB restricted) is what can be addressed on M68000 of ST, and it was often used in laboratory specialty use of ST computer (not very known) to address VME adapters and VME to ISA adapters also some graphic adapters used this.

[@david-spliso1928]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 For a time the 260ST with 256K only sold in Europe.

[@B3tanTyronne]

You certainly lasted longer with your ST than I did, thankfully within a year I had moved from it over to the Amiga and never looked back. The only game I can say I really missed was oids but thankfully due to emulation now, that is no longer the case as I can play whenever I wish without having to own an ST.

[@Sl1pstreams]

I can always tell the British users because you guys always talk about games when discussing the ST and Amiga. North American users were about serious productivity apps and the situation for the ST v Amiga was almost perfectly reversed; the ST had more and better apps for creative and productivity uses.

[@Ziplock9000]

Amiga once again was better at this too

[@FatNorthernBigot]

When I first started buying DVDs, I found some movies would require two disks, or at least turning over. They were clearly made by ST owners.

[@lasskinn474]

Two sided dvd's we're common for a little while.

[@FatNorthernBigot]

@@lasskinn474 ...like Tamagochis and the Macerana.

[@lasskinn474]

@@FatNorthernBigot i think it was some cheaper manufacturing thing making single layer or single layer per disc side discs

[@FatNorthernBigot]

@@lasskinn474 They went out of fashion even quicker than DVDs themselves.

[@TheOriginalCoda]

@@lasskinn474 All of the double-sided DVDs I own are the same movie in different aspect ratios, i.e. 16:9 one side, 4:3 the other.

[@blackterminal]

You say the Amiga desktop is better. I absolutely do not agree. You dont get any desktop without a floppy disk. If your disk has failed or your drive has failed you get nothing. The Atari Gem desktop is solid in Rom. I have both computers and totally dislike having to put a wb disk in the drive. Also you stated you were a hard core Atari Fan. No Atari Fan swaps to an Amiga after 2 years. No you were not loyal to Atari at all.

[@Phunker1]

I still have my original Megafile 60 and it still works. I also have one of very few original racked megaST. It would be a nice piece for a collector. Anyone fancy a racked megaST?

[@blackterminal]

Racked?

[@Phunker1]

@@blackterminal Yap. Big Metal rack. It comes with a built-in 16bit 44.1khz sampler. I think it was made by a company called Hybrid Arts.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@blackterminal some musicians used to get their ST/Mega ST mounted in a 19" rack, so they can use it alongside professional racked gear like Akais, Rolands, Yamahas. 19" rack box is a industry standard.

[@blackterminal]

@@Phunker1 how much are you wanting for that? I'm a big ST fan