Tony is a Geek

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 dis...

well.... I couldn't leave it there could I? After a bit of head scratching and Duck-Duck-Go-ing last thing last night, I found a little MS-DOS program called makedisk.exe v1.5.  I downloaded it to my phone at 1am or whatever it was, so that I could copy it over to my old PC laptop and try and use that instead of the Windows based app. It turns out, that I have an old PC (well, Mrs.Geeks old PC that I stole about 10years ago) that just boots into MS-DOS, but has a built in 3.5" floppy disk drive and well, would you look at that... it actually had a disk in the drive that said.... oh...I think I've been here before?! After checking out the date time stamps on some of the files, it looks like I've repeated this same exercise in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017 and yet again now in 2021.... seems like I have a 2year cycle of doing retro-goodness and then get very distracted by work/work and then remember again and repeat the same thing over and over again - except this time, I'm...

 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 b...