More old school computing

 You might remember my first computer well my second computer was an Atari 130XE. It was the last of the 8 bit Atari computers. I got it for Christmas 1987 or '88, I don't remember which. This was fairly late in the lifespan of the Atari 8bit, the 130XE was released in '85 and discontinued in '92, quite a long life for an 8 bit machine.

Anyway in 1985 Atari also released it's first 16bit computer, the Atari ST. ST stands for "Sixteen/Thirty two" to reflect that the Motorola 68000 processor in the machine was 32bit internally but 16bit on the outside. The ST machines were a LOT more expensive than the 8bit and my friend Nate had an Atari 800XL so I wanted something where we could share games so I got the 130XE.

For 30+ years the ST has bugged me so this year, for reasons even I don't really understand, I went looking for an ST.

Locally I found a few 520ST models but with only half a megabyte of RAM I wasn't super excited by them. RAM upgrades are possible but challenging. The prices were also more than I wanted to pay. Eventually I opted for a 1040STf from The Brewing Academy. I opted to pay a little more for one that had been tested.

Apparently these came out of some educational environment which is reflected on the box.

The next job was to figure out how to hook it up. One nice thing about the 1040 is that it has it's power supply built in so only a normal power cable was required. 

The Atari ST's use a weird 13 pin DIN connector for the monitor. I found that the connectors were cheap on eBay and, not knowing if anything else about the machine would work out I decided to start by making my own cable.

Warning, these cables are very janky.

I found the pinouts on the internet.

My cables started life as a VGA cable that I then cut in half and soldered a DIN 13 end on to. The Atari ST has 3 graphics modes, 2 color and one monochrome. The 2 color modes synch at 15Khz which is out of range for most modern monitors. The first cable is my color cable, it wasn't too hard to make but I quickly discovered that I don't own anything it can sync to. The second cable is monochrome which was MUCH harder to make, many of the VGA pins have to tie together. A better way to do this would be to attach short leads to the DIN connector and the solder those to the ends on the VGA cable. I did manage to get the monochrome cable working though:

Notice the power light at the bottom left and the floppy drive light in the upper right.

A cool feature of the ST machines is "TOS in ROM" TOS is "The Operating System" (very clever Atari) and it lives in read-only memory (ROM) on the computer, meaning you don't need a disk to boot the machine.

The TOS desktop is similar to the Macintosh desktop of the period but with a lot more real estate. Macs of the period only had a 9" screen.

At this point I knew we had a runner so I ordered an Atari to VGA adapter.

The adapter cost as much as 10 of the DIN connectors I bought before but it also includes audio capability and with the push of a button can support both color and monochrome modes.

The setup every nerd in 1985 wished he could have had...

So, next steps: I need to get a working mouse. I was POSITIVE I had a PS2 mouse at home but I've looked all around and can't find one. I'm pretty sure I've got several at the office, I need to go there next week anyway. I did pick up a PS2 to Atari adapter, the Atari uses a 9 pin port, same as an Atari joystick port for the mouse. I might even spring for a wireless mouse, apparently the Atari serial port will supply enough power to run a wireless adapter but probably not enough for a USB mouse.

Then I need a way to get software to the Atari. Fortunately the ST will read PC floppy disks, unfortunately I don't have any floppy disk drives around anymore. I *might* have one in the office and I think Angie's office computer has one. Her office machine is due for replacement anyway so this might be the push to finally get that done. I don't really want a big tower machine here anymore but I wouldn't need it that long.

Eventually I play to get an Ultrasatan for this, it's an Atari ST to SD card adapter that can emulate floppy disks or hard drives. It'd be the easiest way to get software onto the machine. I'm also thinking it'd be good to get an Ethernet adapter and setup some kind of FTP server to move files. We'll see.

Finally I need to work out a monitor that can display a 15Khz signal. This shouldn't be too hard. I'm reasonably sure I recently e-wasted a bunch of them from the office. I'm hoping there is one left that I can haul home. Otherwise I'll probably buy a signal converter so I can use the little monitor in the picture above. I like the size of the monitor, it'd make a handy little setup. It has a composite port too so I can hook up my 8bit machines to it as well.

My first computer

Some time ago one of the younger folks (I think he was 17 at the time) at our game night said something like "Oh that reminds me of an old computer game."
I replied "I think your idea of an old computer game and my idea of an old computer game are not on the same scale."

To which he replied that the game in question was about 10 years old. I fired back "Oh, okay, well my first computer had 16 kilobytes of RAM and we saved programs to an audio tape drive..."

At that point one of the 20somethings in the group decided to chime in "I'm going to call shenanigans on that one." but here it is, my TI99/4A

The conversation left me thinking about my good old TI, this was my first computer, we got it around 1982, I'd have been about 6. This was a time when having a computer was kind of a big deal. The TI was already on borrowed time, it was discontinued in 1984, and as we didn't have a whole lot of money we didn't have a ton of accessories for it but it still holds a place in my heart. The TI was a big force in my life, it helped me to learn to read and do math, to learn how to type and a lot about how computers worked. When he brought it home my dad declared "This will take the boy through college." Actually it didn't even get the boy into high school. In junior high we got an Atari 130XE, an Atari mostly because my friend Nate had one. That computer was on borrowed time too but thats a story for another day.

Anyhow my favorite game of all time is "Tunnels of Doom: Quest for the King" which was basically the first RPG, a party of up to 4 adventurers descends into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power. Actually what I didn't know at the time was that while the basic game came with "Quest for the King" and "Pennies and Prizes" there were other adventures that could be played with that one cartridge. The game actually came in 2 parts, the cartridge and, in our case, a cassette, that had the adventures. There was a disk based version too but we didn't have a disk drive to use that. I remember vividly the 200 seconds it took the load the cassette, forever at the time, even as an adult waiting for the cassette to do its thing is agonizing, there was to be a better way.

Well there is, look at the picture of the TI again, notice the thing on top? Thats a Raspberry PI, if you're not familiar the Raspberry PI is a credit card sized computer originally intended to get kids interested in computers, this one is connected to:

The conflagration hanging off the side of the computer is commonly called a sidecar, TI used this mostly for the speech synthesizer, in this particular sidecar is a 32K RAM expander (more than twice the original RAM) and a TIPI. The TIPI (pronounced tip-ee) is really more like a TI-PI and connects the TI to the Raspberry PI. This allows for all sorts of new things but mostly I bought it to have the PI act like a disk drive for the TI allowing me to load Tunnels Of Doom nearly instantly and easily save my games in progress, a 10 level dungeon takes many hours of play.

Overall this project has been tremendously fun although its also quite frustrating, I'm not a computer developer by any stretch of the imagination and the TIPI has stretched my skills to the limit, often I've told people "I'm not really sure I'm smart enough to have this thing..." which isn't far from the truth. I've really just scratched the surface of what its capable of but I'm having fun.


Oh and as a side note I've probably paid more for the TIPI, 32K RAM expansion and PI than my dad did for the computer in the first place...