Retro Sunday night - Atari ST - Part II

well..... it turns out that technology is not always your best friend.

I ended up being successful and copied the Monkey Island .st files to a USB stick that I placed into my 1040 STFm that has a GOTEK drive within it.  I can now boot from disk1 and everything works as it should - game works, mouse works, in fact all fine - not sure what all the fuss was about?!

What niggled me though was the fact I wanted it running from my 520 STFm that has 4MB RAM and the UltraSATAN hard-drive connected.  Never happy am I!?!

Well, this was the challenge, but also the flaw.  I was using my Apple Mac with an external USB drive connected to copy the files from my 4TB HDD NAS storage onto the 720k formatted double density disks.  I was then copying those .st files manually onto the old MS-DOS 6.22 PC and using makedisk to extract the .st files out directly onto other double density disks - allowing them to be formatted for the Atari (usually 800k).  I would then take out that disk and then put it into the Atari and then finally copy those files onto the UltraSATAN hard disk.  Phew, what a faff!

Turns out that series of steps was flawed...from step 1.  The USB disc drive connected to the Apple Mac is, apparently, flawed in copying files over.  Therefore, all of the hot & miss experiences I'd been having was due to this step.  Looking back, in hindsight, it does make sense.

I was doing some fiddling around with a Vortex 30 external HDD (German version of the MegaFile 30) and was attempting to get it to work with my basic 1040 STFm with normal floppy disk drive - I was failing badly at this, apparently the HDD software could "see" the drive was on BUS:0 but would not connect to any partitions or allow formatting to get partitions - I suspected that the ST-238R 33MB hard drive itself was faulty internally - it did make all the right noises and flashing lights, which is why I persisted so long.  However, during this exercise, I was copying HDD related files via the USB floppy disc drive and was noticing oddities with the files being copied over - this is what highlighted me to that as being the source of the file copying corruption.

I then (stupidly) copied some .cpx files over to the UltraSATAN c:\ drive for the Control Panel software to use - fatal mistake!  Now when I rebooted the hard-drive was detected, it attempted to load the CPX plugins and then showed 2 bombs! and rebooted in an infinite cycle.... and there is no-way to "pause" the steps, there is no ctrl+c....

I hunted around for another micro-SD card and I found the original one that I had used when I got the UltraSATAN, I plugged that in and it booted up quite nicely and showed me that I had 5 hard-drives setup with a load of files.  I wondered for a minute or two as to why I stopped using that card... then I clicked on the F:\ drive and I saw some "corrupt" file names - I had assumed that the micro-SD card was no good.  It was formatted as FAT-16, which allowed you to connect it to a PC/Mac and manually copy over the files directly onto the micro-SD card itself, then just unplug and plug into the Atari and off you go.

HANG ON AMINUTE..... I noticed a D:\ drive that contained a huge folder that matched what was on my HDD NAS storage... that included a folder named SECRETMI.... I wonder?  I double-clicked START.TOS and there we have it, Monkey Island started up, went into the game (press ESC), and the mouse worked too... I could play the game running from the hard drive with no issues at all!  This is what I've been trying to do for the past 3 weeks!  and it was always already there..... typical!

I took that other micro-SD card and plugged it into the Mac, but it could not read it at all - so I'm assuming that when I set it up I used the ICD .img file that formatted it in a specific Atari format, which means I cannot read the micro-SD disc and therefore it is knackered, it'll have to be wiped and started again.

In someways that's not too bad, I can format it FAT-16 (if I can do it via my Linux laptop?) and then be able to back it up, so I won't be in the scenario again.

Roll-on tomorrow night, when I'll look at getting it all back to where I was a month ago.  Got to love technology!

So...I finally figured out how to format FAT16 on a Mac... yep, it can be done, took a little bit of research: https://www.dssw.co.uk/reference/diskutil.html

The trick is to NOT use Disk utility - but run the above command from a Terminal session.  As you can see I've now made, what I believe is a compliant setup for the Atari ST.  The "C" drive will be the P1 15MB partition, this will just store the hdd boot stuff and desktop.inf, then the other E2/3/4 partitions will be for C coding apps, games and utils.  I've left E5 to be 1GB for now.

In theory, I should now be able to copy files over onto the card from my NAS HDD and then just put the SD-card into the UltraSATAN and it should work.  Obviously, I doubt that will work, I'll need to install ICDHDD driver and then map the C: D: E: F: drives and save Desktop.inf, but if this works, it will save all the grief - however, it still won't solve the files that are in the .st format, but if I use the Hatari emulator with a GEMDos HDD and just extract the files out from the A: drive to the HDD, the files will then become accessible to then copy over.  we'll see!