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.

Going vintage, again

I think I've written about my first computer on here before but its been awhile. To bring you back up to speed its my old TI99/4A. It came to me for Christmas 1983 a mere 2 months after the model had been discontinued. 😎

In 2018 I picked up a TIPI for it. The TIPI connects my TI to a Raspberry PI which allows all sorts of interesting things. I primarily wanted it for mass storage. TI used a gigantic "Peripheral Expansion Box" (PEB) for floppy drives and its really inconvenient and loud. The TIPI is little and handy:

You actually can't see the TIPI in this picture, at the right side of the computer theres a sidecar that contains a 32K RAM expander and the TIPI. On top of the computer is a Raspberry PI 3.

Mostly what I got the TIPI for is to play my favorite video game of all time, "Tunnels of Doom" (ToD).

ToD is one of the original role playing games, its actually a framework under which many games or I guess game scenarios can be played. The one we played when I was a kid was "Quest for the King" where you take a group of adventurers into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power.

The worst thing about ToD as a kid was the load times where you had to wait 200 seconds (3 1/3 minutes) for it to load from audio tape. Then often the tape load would fail and you would need to try again. The TIPI is so easy, I just type "TIPI.TOD.QUEST" and it loads in a second or two.

After playing a quick game I messed around with the telnet client. I managed to log into the Heatwave BBS which at least purports to be running on Geneve hardware which is old school cool.

Anyhow in recent days I've run the TI/TIPI combo 3 or 4 more times. I've got a game of TIPI Chess underway. This is actual multiplayer chess across the internet. Its slow, I'm generally making a move every other day but we're getting it done. I've also logged into Heatwave a few more times and played some door games.

I missed the BBS scene back in the day, I was just a little too young. So its fun going back and playing around on Heatwave to get some idea what it was like back then. So far I've lost a game of Battleship but it was oh so close. I've also lost the "Trolls Lair" text adventure several times, I can't figure out how to get past the troll...