Retro Atari devices...

As a distraction update, yes, I know I'm meant to be doing stuff with a Raspberry Pi 4, servos' & 3D printed robot heads...but y'know...I get bored quickly and like to hop between things.  My latest piece of old tech of fancy is an Atari Portfolio:

Click HERE to read more about it.

and a quick YouTube video (I love how even this video feels retro!)

Whilst I await for that to be packaged up and posted over, I thought I'd dust off the old Atari ST that I've had stacked up in the corner of the room for, well....let's look when I last did a post about this?...errrr... since....let's see, well, it wasn't THAT far back...cough cough.... okay about 3years ago... which isn't bad for me... I mean I can have projects knocking around for 10years+ before I get back to them.  ah, the luxury of time that we waste in our youth... of which I am no longer and have to be very careful with how I spend my much valuable time...

Anyway, check out these links for some previous Retro Atari ST stuff.  I've just skimmed through them and I'm actually quite impressed by myself (even if I do say so myself), I actually hooked up an Atari ST to the internet and was sending/receiving emails via GMail.... (you can see why I then put it on the shelf)

http://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/p/30year-old-atari-st-gets-dusted-off.html

https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/p/lets-code-some-atari-st-c.html

That article about coding in C on the Atari ST does still ring true and is probably something I will actually return to during 2021.

Without further ado, here are some Retro goodness shots of the Atari ST in action, this very evening:

It also turns out that I have an old PC that once belonged to Mrs.IsAGeek (about 20years ago), that I'd wiped and stuck MS-DOS 6 onto for doing parallel/serial file transfers to the old Amstrad CPC machines that I used to have (sadly now all gone, and yes, I did see pretty much my same collection on eBay the other day asking for £10,000 for the lot....yes, I sold my lot for £800....but y'know..time moves on...)

There appears to be some software on there that does Parallel transfers to the Atari too, but not sure how much use that will be, seeing as I have a GOTEK usb drive.  Interesting to walk around the HDD of the PC though, looks like I partitioned it into 6 drives and there is one drive that has a ton of Atari ST software all zipped up... okay, that might prove interesting to walk through one of these evenings and see how to get them off the PC and onto the Atari ST.

Actually, one of my plans is to use one of the IBM PC 110 Palm Top devices to connect (if it is possible?) or it might be the Gateway 2000 Handbook 486 (as I know that has a serial port) and use that to connect the two devices up....I was even looking at a new GPD "laptop" device as that's something very new that has a serial connector and it'd be just amusing to hook up an Atari Portfolio to a GPD and get them communicating...."why?".... you have to ask?!

I did boot the Atari ST, as shown above and selected a random disk, unfortunately I just looked and it's 150mb file, so I'll have to do some tweaking to get it under the 100mb limit and then I'll post it below.  It is surprising just how well the old Atari ST works and still looks & feels fresh.  Ahhh.....that green boot up GUI brings back memories of the late 80s, very early 90s....

anyway, here's an appalling game to demo the Atari ST, but it does show off the setup & shows it's all still working as it should: