Retro Sunday night - Atari ST

 So.......I took the plunge a month or so ago and decided to just buy a fully modded Atari ST 520STfm - except this one is a little different, this one has 4MB of RAM (instead of the normal 0.5MB) has some other internal upgrades and TOS v1.04.  It also has an UltraSATAN HDD plugged into the back allowing it to have a HDD up to 2GB - more than enough for the entire amount of software EVER released for this device.

I found a big box of Double Density disks in the loft - yes the rare old 720KB versions, not to be mistaken for the PC disks that have 2 holes in them.  Yes, the old trick of putting tape over the hole to allow formatting back to a 720KB disk still works.  However, going through a lot of the disks has been somewhat of a bust - a lot of duff disks, which is a shame as a lot of them were original software.

Ah, ha.... I then checked out my trusty 4TB Backup HDD and found that I had about 1.8GB of zipped .st files in a sub-folder from 2013....I must have been busy back then.... 

This got me thinking, I can use an emulator to run Hatari and emulate an Atari ST on a PC or Mac, but it's not quite the same thing.  I can actually use all of the software that I have backed up though.  Problem has now come though - how to get the software back onto the ST?  and now that I have a HDD, how to get it running on there?

Small steps.  It turns out there is a piece of software that runs on Windows that allows you to open the .st image and copy it out to a 3.5" disk that gets formatted in the correct way - some of the old Atari ST software actually formatted the disk up to 800KB!  However, there are some "issues"... first is that you need a laptop/PC that has a built in 3.5" disk drive. Hmmm.... okay, so I have a PC from 1994 that has one of those....sadly though it runs MS-DOS 6.22 and the software runs on Windows only...and as I found out, it really needs Windows 2000 upwards.  damn it.  After a bit more rummaging around, I found an old DELL laptop that I used to use for PIC programming (don't ask), that is running Windows 98 and has a fixed 3.5" disk drive.  awesome.  it has a bit of a dodgy power supply and the battery no longer holds a charge, but let's live risky!

First steps.  I plugged in a USB 3.5" disk drive to my Mac and copied the .st files over.  Then on the Windows 98 machine I copied those files locally.  I then ran the floimgd.exe  software.  It complained that I needed to install the floppy driver - I installed that and that complained it would not run with less than Windows 2000, it would still work but would not do the magic of extracting the .st image and formatting the disk and copying the files on... It would let me extract the .st files into a folder and manually copy them over.  Then I could take the disk and place it into the Atari ST and either boot directly from the disk or boot to the HDD, copy the files over and then run from there.  I got mixed results!

I started with a tester: XENON.  worked perfect. great! 

I also tried it with OutRun - yep, that works fine booting from the disk too.  There were a few oddities like Rick Dangerous where the .st image file contained a dodgy file that could not be extracted - I guess that had some strange copy protection or my file is corrupt?

I then tried Secret of Monkey Island...and I didn't notice the subtle (de) in the file name, it worked fine running from the HDD, but it was in German language!  The mouse pointer worked and as far as I could tell, all is good...just cannot understand it!  It still has the copy protection, but that's available online now.

I did find an English version - but after copying that over onto the HDD it just presented me with 4 bombs! when attempting to start.  If I really want to faff about, I might find a way to merge the files and make a proper game?

Anyway...it kept me busy / occupied for a few hours and I'm recording the info here - just incase I come back to doing this again in 8 years time, I can see what I did!  (I won't be leaving it that long, I've found a few C compilers for the Atari ST and will be using a few of them to write some code - just because)

 yes, I know I'm meant to be doing AI / Robot stuff, but sometimes it's nice to have a bit of a distraction....