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ST Repairing 10 years after they died out experiment.
(sorry for any dodgy spelling errors)
Day 1
Date 19/06/01
Worked on for 3 Hrs
Decided that today would be a good time to start my project,
so i got my Atari 520 STFM board out, a dodge atari st power
supply that is buzzing, an atari keyboard that is missing most
of its keys, and this is all the atari stuff i have (not really
enough to build a system).
First of all i decided to try to get it working (without blowing it
up, or blowing my self up). So i connected the psu and keyboard to
the main board, and built a tv cable out of an old aerial extention
cable and a phono end. I connected the system to my tv and turned the
system on (borrowed mains lead off notebook, will replace when i nick
one from work). The TV kept picking up black screens and not the GEM
desktop i was expecting.
After having a cup of tea, i decided to press all the chips down firmly
and turned the st back on again, and then did another search on
my tv, success i have a GEM desktop.
Need a disk drive or this is useless, firstly i had to find a disk
drive power connector, i took this off an old pc's PSU, and stuck it
onto the disk drive power cables, then with a file, i filed the
bump off the top of the disk drive cable connector (the data one),
then i pulled out a pc 1.44 mb disk drive, and set the drive to id0
and mc (think it means media change) and connected it up, great it
is reading 720k formatted dos disks, but not 1.44mb ones (this
probably requires some sort of software driver).
Because atari st's use gem desktops as there operating system,
a mouse is recommended, though i can't find any atari mice, so
i dug out a serial mouse (which works and only cost £2.50), and
a 25 pin female to 9 pin male socket converter, after connecting
this up, i used some software called gmouse and now it is
working like a charm (well its alot better then the old mouse).
So next steps:
The PSU buzzing is irrating, will look at replacing it with a
PC PSU.
Memory is low (only 512kb), and it is hard to find ram for the
stfm, so i've found someone with a sim board which will connect up,
but there is no ram on it, will need to find some 30pin sims,
(my 486 has 32mbs worth of them, but i dont know if they will
work on an atari st).
The ST needs a case, might build one out of wood :).
I would like to add it to the network that my pcs are on, so
some sort of ethernet adapter will be needed.
An IDE interface so i can connect a Hard Disk.
Some software, will probably download this.
Keyboard that has keys, might try to adapt a pc keyboard to do
this.
And that is about it, if you can help me with the above, please
drop me an email on richardsmith20@hotmail.com
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ST Repairing 10 years after they died out experime new
