Author: The Paranoid (p5B17C97D.dip0.t-ipconnect.de)
Date: 12-28-2012 14:36
Hello Andrew,
any thoughts ? Sure, lot's of them.
1. Yes, the Atari ST can boot from a disk and will wait for one to respond, even if it will then boot from ROM. It's sort of a relic but still allows the ST to boot an "update" if desired.
2. Midres is a bad compromise. However, i never had any problems with Commodore monitors displaying midres properly. Tried fiddling with screen height/width settings ?
3. Atari mice tend to become touchy when not having been used for a longer time. If you just want to play around a bit, ALT+Cursor keys will move the mouse cursor, ALT+Insert represents the left mouse button, ALT+Clr/Home the right.
4. The standard format is indeed 720K = 9 sectors, 79 tracks. Atari users tended to format their disks "fat", using 10 or sometimes 11 sectors and 81 or 83 tracks, achieving more than 800k as well.
5. From TOS 1.04 on, Atari ST computers support a warm reset by pressing (guess what): CTRL + ALT + Delete. I therefore assume your ST has TOS 1.02.
6. A single-disk Atari ST is not much fun for getting software downloaded from the net to work, that's right. However, here are a few things to make life easier:
a.) Take a HD disk, cover the index hole (that's the opposite side of the write protection slider), then insert it in your PC. The PC will see it as a DD disk and format it accordingly using 9 sectors/79 tracks. Now your PC and ST can read/write to it. The ST will always "support" 2 disk drives A: and B:, even if you only have one. It will then prompt for disk A: or disk B: when needed. This way, you can run a tool from one disk and work on the other. Tedious, but it will work.
b.) If your PC has an RS232 port, you can try to link the PC and the ST using a Nullmodem-cable. Depending on what OS you run on the PC, you might want to try Ghostlink. Using Ghostlink, the PC can serve as a file-server for the ST but it will not run executable files. Still, it will be good enough to copy files to disk using the Atari ST hosted on your PC. This would, for example, allow to run an ST2Disk tool on the ST, writing an ST image to disk loaded via Ghostlink from the PC.
c.) Make yourself a work disk that has the most common depackers (ZIP/ZOO/LHarc/ARC), MSA or ST2Disk on it on the PC, then copy archives, ST or MSA-files to other disks. Using A: and B:, you can work with files < 720K.
To work yourself through 300 disks, this is still no fun at all, i agree. So here's the final idea:
d.) Try to find an old ACSI harddisk on ebay or Craig's list, for example an SH205, Megafile 20/30/60, Vortex HDPlus or similar. They are slow and loud, but very robust and uncomplicated regarding software drivers.
I understand that this is not very convenient. But please note that you're using a computer representing the lower end of the Atari ST family without any extras.
Try using a PC from 1987 without a harddisk and then judge again ;-)
Many greetings and good luck,
The Paranoid / Paradox
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