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 Subject: RE: New to Atari ST
Author: Shalroth (cpc10-seac20-2-0-cust470.7-2.cable.virginmedia.com)
Date:   06-08-2013 14:07

1: correct, see my other post. It's waiting for a disk to boot from for twenty to thirty seconds. A blank disk in the drive speeds up the process.

2: You are correct. This isn't the ST's fault, it's the nature of composite video. Try and get an RGB cable I (as I'm in Europe, I use an ST - SCART cable). You'd have the same issues if you tried to watch DVD on that monitor, so don't. I used to use an Atari SC1435 monitor, which is electrically identical to a Commodore 1084S, and also the Phillips CM-8833 mk II. You get the full scan rate with an RGB cable. I used a composite cable with my Commodore 1084S, on my 800XL and 65XE etc, but you really need RGB for medium resolution. This isn't the ST's fault.

That said, I used to use a black-and-white 12-inch television set for my ST for a lot of my ST days, and I got used to the fuzziness in medium resolution. Don't get me started on the High-resolution emulators (although Sebra worked very well with Cubase Lite).

3: Your mouse is probably knackered. The STM-1 mouse supplied by Atari looks gorgeous, but has a resolution of around 100 Dots per inch. There were a few revisions, some were easier to clean than others. If you've cleaned the rollers (some were plastic and easy, some were brass and harder) you may need to clean the mechanism. The mouse is easy to disassemble, and you should clean the infra-red LEDs and photoreceptors with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab (isopropanol works well; don't use nail varnish remover such as acetone / props one because it can dissolve many plastics). You should probably give the interrupter (the slotted disc) a quick how's-your-father a quick go as well.

That said, there are many after-market mouses that are far superior to the STM-1. The Naksha mouse got great reviews in the 1990s. eBay always has many compatible mouses, a lot of them are Amiga-compatible as well and have a switch on them to convert between Amiga and ST mode (two of the pins are reversed if memory serves). There's even a vendor as of June 2013 that sells optical and optical wireless mouses, converted for use with the ST / Amiga. I use a "Squick" mouse on my Falcon, and it's great.

4: 89mm (3.5-inch) drives were uncommon for the C64, so if you have one, well done and hang on to it! The floppy drive in the ST is much faster than the external drives for the C64 because the C64 uses a serial interface for discs, transferring one bit at a time. The original CBM DOS could only transfer data at a rate of 300 bytes per second - compared with the 23,000 bytes per second the ST was capable of (Western Digital 1772 floppy disk controller). Also, the ST formats disks to 720KB for compatibility with other platforms (My TOS 1.62 STE will format a disk to 728064 Bytes, compared with a PC formatted disk of 726016 Bytes, yet completely compatible) AT THE GEM DESKTOP. Using third-party utilities such as Fcopy, it's possible to fomat a disk with an unusual geometry, using extra tracks and sectors thus gaining extra capacity. In the day, I regularly formatted high-quality disks to 80 tracks and 11 sectors, getting around 830Kbytes. I may try accessing these disks soon, proving (or disproving) the format is stable over twenty years.

5: Atari introduced the Ctrl-Alt-Del three-finger-salute at some point. It works on TOS 1.62 and later for sure, and anecdotal evidence suggests it works in TOS 1.4 and later. (I have an STFM but I'm not sure of it's TOS, 1.4 I believe, and TBH I really only have it as an e,regency backup and for parts). The three-finger-salute works well in GEM applications and many .TOS programs, but not many games as it doesn't generate a none-maskable-interrupt like it does on a PC. For those machines that support it, Ctrl-alt-right shift-delete does a more complete system reset (more of the RAM is cleared).

6: it sounds like you have an ST with an early version of TOS - in the 1.0 to 1.2 range. There's nothing wrong with that (unless you plan to use a hard disc) but the ST's PC compatibility with regard to disk formatting was unsatisfactory at best in earlier versions. A 720KB disk formatted on a PC should work in most cases ("FORMAT A: /F:720") and your ST should be able to write to that disk. .ZIP files are just .ZIP files, and you can expand them on your PC or use something like STzip on your Atari. I don't have much experience with .ARC files but I imagine they're similar. .MSA files are a bit like Ghost images, and can be written with a PC or an ST (Magic Shadow Archiver). With an ST with one floppy drive and limited memory, this will be an exercise in patience.

Consider upgrading your ST's OS. TOS 1.4 ROMs are available on eBay, but you need soldering skills - they're 64-pin packages and you probably need two of them, check first. TOS 2.06 is also a possibility, the GEM Desktop is much improved, but it's far less compatible with games and such. I have an STm with TOS 1.0 and 2.06 on an upgrade board, and I can switch between them in software.

Above all, DON'T GIVE UP!!! The community needs people like you, asking questions and enjoying the hardware. It's extremely rewarding, getting the last few grams of performance out of classic machines like ours.

 Topics Author  Date
  New to Atari ST new Andrew 11-18-2012 21:14 
   RE: New to Atari ST new The Paranoid 11-19-2012 19:10 
    RE: New to Atari ST new Andrew 12-24-2012 23:31 
     RE: New to Atari ST new The Paranoid 12-25-2012 11:30 
      RE: New to Atari ST new Andrew 12-27-2012 00:21 
       RE: New to Atari ST new The Paranoid 12-28-2012 14:36 
        RE: New to Atari ST new Andrew 12-29-2012 01:45 
         RE: New to Atari ST new The Paranoid 12-29-2012 13:41 
          RE: New to Atari ST new The Paranoid 12-30-2012 13:43 
         RE: New to Atari ST new Shalroth 01-12-2013 21:05 
        RE: New to Atari ST new Andrew 12-29-2012 07:41 
       RE: New to Atari ST  Shalroth 06-08-2013 14:07 

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