Atari ST - Oct 2023 revival
Why revival? Well... apparently I did "some stuff" with my Atari ST back in 2017 and then again in 2021... and due to over-working on work/work stuff and not setting aside enough personal-time, the machines kind of moved further and further under piles of "stuff".
Well, I decided to take 2 weeks off work. literally. off work. It took a few days, okay, about 5, to totally disconnect and wind down and stop / not think about work/work related things. During this time, I decided to "sort out the 16/32 bit room". This was my old home/office, basically a large double-bedroom that a child of any age would absolutely love to have; however, I had managed to overfill it with "stuff" and it had become a mini-cave with very little or not desk space. In fact, no space at all - considering it is quite a large room, there was a tiny little corner desk where I could use a bit of desk space. I decided to bite the bullet and do what I did earlier in the year when I created the "8 bit room". I got onto Amazon and ordered new furniture (matching throughout now - oh, look at me being all posh).
As this furniture was going to be delivered flat pack and I had to build it, I needed to dismantle the existing furniture that I'd had for about the past 15+years from a previous house/garage/office space that wasn't really designed to fit in this room, it was all a bit of a mish-mash and was just too big for the room, made it feel smaller...well, that and the huge content of "stuff" on or in the furniture.
Lots of refuse-centre trips were made, I got brutal with myself and basically just binned the lot and started again - I am so glad I did, it has free'd up the space massively. It has also helped mentally, the room feels non-restricted, free-er - or that could just be me projecting? but anyway, it was needed & it feels better - now I can have a space to work and to play. I keep forgetting about the non-work part and, well, my years are ticking by now, so if I don't do some playing now, I never will...
Right, so the Atari STs.... well, it turns out I actually have four (4) of them, well, 5 if you count the random motherboard that I found too! "Why the sudden interest?" I thought the Amstrad CPCs were the technical toys of choice? Well... I did indeed have an Amstrad CPC 464 in 1984/85 and I did grow up with it and in around 1988/1989-ish my mate Gary had an Atari 520 ST that was mind-blowing in comparison. In fact, I'm not sure exactly how it happened? but I actually bought that Atari from Gary - how do I know? because it still has a sticker/label on the back with his name and parents address on it! I recall playing Super Sprint, a lot! and using the Atari for early college work, word-processing and print outs etc... before I then moved onto a 286 PC. (Of which I have the original 20MB HDD and I'm pretty sure I have the mother board some place too!) anyway, what I didn't realise is that the Atari ST was actually released in 1985.
Yes, this machine was released at around the same time as I was using the Amstrad. The difference is a bit like using a Ford Fiesta 1.1L to go to the shops versus taking the Lambo. They are so far removed in relation to specification and potential usage, it's mind-blowing that they existed in the same era.
"That's lovely, but still doesn't explain the why?"
Well...as posted about previously, I purchased a FujiNet device for the Atari 800XL that internally uses an arduino 8266 to connect to the WiFi and I have a couple of devices for the Amstrads that do the same. I wondered, "is there such a thing for the Atari ST?"
Turns out that someone wrote some code for the Raspberry Pi PICO W that plugs into a NetUSBee device and allows for this to occur.
Now, I am a huge fan of the PICO W, they cost about £5-6 and you can write native C code, so basically anything you can do on an Arduino you can do with the PICO... and the W...well, that is the "Wireless" part. Of course I have a few "spares" available.
As to the NetUSBee - yep, apparently a few years ago I had that setup using the ethernet connection to connect the Atari ST to the network, using a linux laptop as a proxy to the WiFi and/or connecting to the plug-in TP-Link thingies.
So..I thought, seeing as I'm re-designing the "16/32 bit room" (btw - the ST for Atari ST is named that because it means 'Sixteen/ThirtyTwo", so an apt name for the room!) I thought I'd make it so that I can ACTUALLY have desk space to use the Atari STs, the Atari 800 XLs, the Amiga 500 (yes, I have one of those too - I believe an ex-work colleague Ian P. donated that to me (or I paid for it?) anyway, for some reason back in the mid-2000s (2003-2006-ish) I went on an eBay mission and purchased HDDs and stuff for that machine, but have literally never used it!) and a variety of old Pentium PCs running MS-DOS 6.22.
That was the challenge I set myself. I shall do a follow-up post where I'll show a short video of BEFORE and AFTER, just to show the difference, I really like it now & will do my best to keep it like this & remember to "have fun", whilst I still can.
Back to the Atari ST & WiFi - so I blitzed the PICO W... the I had the fun task of spending a few days (yes, days!) trying to remember how the UltraSatan SD-Card HDD worked, how the NetUSBee worked, setting up new drivers to use the NetUSBee for NET_USB - wasting an entire day or TWO, going around in circles trying to debug why the Atari ST believes it is all setup & working, but not being able to PING the IP Address from my laptop... then figuring out that for UIP-Tool to work, I need to NOT load STinG! aaaaaarrrrrghhhhhh!
Right, well, that then gave me the ability to basically have the Atari ST connected to the WiFi, expose a web-page where I can drag & drop files to/from the device itself.
That took waaaaaaay longer than it should have done, but it a nice distraction. I also purchased new furniture on a daily basis from Amazon Prime, so I was doing this debugging whilst cleansing / remaking space(s) around the room...
Once I then had the Atari ST connected to the WiFi... I then totally moved on! I looked on my home 4TB NAS drive & I saw that I had a folder all about the Atari ST and I had downloaded pretty much EVERY piece of software that was ever available for it. I thought about using the new WiFi connection to drag and drop the files over, but that would take, forever...
Then I realised that all the files were in the .st file format - these are great for emulators, they are basically an "image" of the floppy-disk. The emulator can load the .st file and read the contents inside as if you'd just put the 3.5" floppy disk inside the machine - however, the REAL machine cannot process these files. I have to extract the contents manually somehow... and even then I would be extracting them and then still need to copy them over to the Atari ST - OR, I could just copy them onto / into the SD-Card that I was using for the UltraSatan HDD device... smart thinking.
Well, sort of. Quite a lot of the .st files were larger than the 720k DS-DD (Double-Sided Double Density) 3.5" floppy disk formats, some were 800k, 810k and some random other sizes. Some also still had copy-protection in place...and I thought this was going to be simple.
Luckily, I had been "gifted" a few months back an old Windows XP desktop/tower machine.... and I found some software that was written for Windows 95/98-era that could do the extraction of the .st files for me... in fact, it could also extract the files directly out to the 3.5" internally floppy disk drive (apparently only works with an internal drive due to the low-level hardware access), that I can then take out of the PC and put straight into the Atari ST and boom, the software now runs on the real machine.
I would like to say that exercise above took me all of about 1-2 days, in reality it took about 5-7 days in total - but y'know what? I didn't THINK about work/work ONCE. Mission accomplished.
Also, I got very good at ROAD BLASTERS and I even setup and got HI-SOFT C running too - even wrote a few C programs, compiled them (actually, once of the unique things out this version on this machine is that it is interpreted - meaning as you type it tells you if you've coded something wrong, rather than waiting for you to write it all, then attempt & fail to compile - this was genius ahead of it's time). However, as you will see in the images below, I did spend a lot of time just burning disks and playing games until 1-2am!
As to the WiFi - yes, I will get back to it, now that I have a C-compiler, I'll look at how I can get the Atari ST, the Atari 800 XL and the Amstrad CPC all "talking" to each other over the WiFi network, just for fun, nothing serious, "just because"....
Right, here's the whole exercise documented in photo's as and they are in chronological order of when I took them - minus the MASSIVE gaps in time when doing the debugging / troubleshooting:
...and that was that.
You may wonder why I have been typing "disk" through this article and previous Amstrad ones I have written "disc". Well..... the Amstrad used a 3" disc and everything else used a 3.5" disk. I am not sure if it was a "thing" to distinguish between the two different types of discquettes, even if it wasn't an Industry distinction, it was something I personally did and have done since, well, the late 1980s - so I find myself still doing it today. Not that anyone cares as who the hell uses physical discs/disks when you have USB / SD-Cards and online folders (someone elses servers = Cloud).
Right, time to burn some more disks.... test out the joysticks that I found, setup the Amiga 500 on it's own desk area and oh, I need ANOTHER desk table to put the PCs on.... hmmmm.... this has started to turn out rather expensive with all this new furniture - perhaps it would have been cheaper going on a "2 week holiday" somewhere?.... ah, but it wouldn't have been as much fun! Also, I now have an awesome Retro-Cave room to work from over the winter months.
As I say, I started off focused on the WiFi connectivity and proving that it could be done - then immediately forgot about it & moved onto getting software for the machine itself. I shall return to the WiFi as mentioned, at least I now have a nice work space to revert back to.
Oh, I also need to document the "8-bit room" at some point, that has the old Amstrads and my electronics / soldering space, that's for another post.
Comments
Post a Comment