Author: Shalroth (spc1-leed12-0-0-cust698.seac.broadband.ntl.com)
Date: 11-14-2008 22:07
Hi all,
Just thought I'd drop a line about an interesting project I've been
workingn on... a virtuall Handheld ST!
I'll make a flickr set with picture later, but I'll just describe it
for now.
I've always wanted a portable Atari. Stacies are so rare on eBay, and
so expensive, not to mention heavy and without battery power. Also, I
have questions about the reliaility of twenty year old hard drives. The
best way to run Atari software is on Atari hardware... but let's ace
it, it's not really practical any more. Stacies are museum pieces and
should be preserved and babied, not used on the road in production.
So what else can we do?
I've toyed with the idea of dedicated 'emulation stations' before now,
but the ancient laptops I've tried have barely been up to the task. I
mostly use macs now, but ST emulators for mac OS are a bit weak.
One day I had a brainwave... I had just got an EEPC 701 mini laptop and
thought what a great little emulator it would make!
I got a second hand 4GB flash 701 and upgraded the memory to 1GB. With
that much RAM and an nLite install of WinXP, you can turn virtual
memory off, which would just wear out your flash drive anyway. I also
have a 4GB SD card which I keep most of my documents and apps on. It's
a challenge keeping a working XP installation running smoothly in 4GB
but it's possible!
As to softwware: I have a copy each of STEeM and SainT. I use SainT for
emulating colour mode and STEeM for mono. That way I can quickly boot
up the screen mode I need just from a desktop shortcut. I find SainT
lends itself more naturally to running colour games, because of the
better Disk Image handling, and those quaint FDD noises!
It took a bit of fiddling to get STEeM running properly in full screen
mode - and I hope to be able to share my conf files if anyone's
interested in reproducing this, which you're welcome to.
Key to this project though was STEeM's MIDI remapping. I have a
MIDIsport Uno USB MIDI adaptor, which work flawlessly with STEeM! I'm
not kidding, I've tried it with Cubase 2.0 (abandonware? I found it on
the web) and Cubase Lite (which is now a free download) and hooked it
up to my MicroKorg and it works brilliantly! I have drive D: on TOS
mapped into the file system of my EEEPC so I can easily share files
between them.
You can even 'overclock' the Atari side quite far, it started chopping
at about 24MHz, but I can pretend I have a MegaSTE at 16MHz without too
much trouble. 8MHz is the most stable and reliable though, as you'd
expect. I stick with TOS 2.06 by default, but sometimes drop to 1.0 or
1.62 for compatibility.
I may yet duplicate my STEem installation with colour presets,or find a
way of using alternate .INF files so I can have a Colour MIDI ST
shortcut as well as a Mono MIDI ST shortcut, but I am running out of
space on my desktop!
The icing on this already delicious cake though, was an eBay find, from
the glorious 'myatari' Atari Sales and Service... five unused Atari
metal labels! From the 800XL era, these were unused aluminium labels,
in brown enamel, embossed with the classical Atari and Fuji logo, but
also with a 'Wireless' symbol - which I believe are from a never-
produced Atari Wireless joystick/controller (I know Atari made some
wireless joysticks, but these labels don't appear anywhere on them)!
One under the LCD, and one on the outer case - covering both of the
Asus logos - and the illusion is complete!
I've even had co-workers come up to me (and this is in an IT department
at a university) and say they were surprised Atari were still going!
Why go to all this effort? Well, you don't need me to tell you how cool
TOS is! I've tried Windows Cubase on this laptop and it gets battered.
Solid State Discs don't like audio recording much,and a 630MHz Celeron
won't let me have many virtual instruments. For full on production I'll
stick with my Dual PowerMac G5 - but for on the road, or as a quick
scratchpad, I still prefer good old TOS Cubase. It loads much more
quickly (and I can keep a saved memory state of Cubase being open as a
RAM image to load instantly!) Besides, its age is an advantage now, as
it's so well known. Most of the musicians I work with still remember
all the tricks to get the most out of it.
I will work tonight on getting some photos (and maybe videos?) uploaded
to flickr and youtube... if anybody cares (comments? if not I won't
bother so much).
Best wishes... stay Atari!
|
Handheld ST? Almost! 
