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[Dyne]

Hi folks, I just adopted an old Atari 1040ST (E) personal computer from my high school. It was used for years for the Music Composition class, and I saw it all alone upstairs when I was doing inventory for them the other day. I just brought it home and it has a mouse and the monitor. I hooked it up and it's in perfect working condition. Thumbs up.

So does anyone know where I can get some floppy drive files to run this thing? Is there any games I can play on it?

Does anyone else have one?

I used to have an old Apple IIc but my parents threw it out about 5 years ago.

 

[bishoptl]

"adopted", eh? THIEF

Get an Amiga instead, you'll get tons of help on these forums.

 

[Dyne]

Yeah, as soon as I told my friend I picked up an Atari, he told me he'd give me his Amiga. He's got like 200 games for it too.

I didn't steal it, I had to wait 3 days for admin authorization to take school property. And there's a big logo on it too, though it's on the back so you don't notice it much.

Is there ANYTHING on the web for it? Boot disks, games, anything? I also heard about a game cartridge port in it of some kind..

Speaking of Amiga, is there any way I can get Ducktales or "It came from the desert"? My friend wants to play those.

 

[cja]

To start you off..

http://www.atari.st/
http://www.atari.org/links/ST/
http://www.atari-forum.com/

http://makedisk.atari.org/
to make disk images from real ST disks and real ST disks from images. This is required as the ST used 720K floppy disks and its own file format.

Ebay is likely to have a lot of stuff but disk images should be quite easy to find online.

I'd recommend games such as Speedball 2, Gods, North & South, Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Turrican 2, Dungeon Master, R-Type, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Supercars 2, Kick Off, Secret of Monkey Island, F1 Grand Prix.... ports of pretty much every big Japanese developed game around the time as well but the quality varied.

Atari ST > Amiga

 

[bishoptl]

That's a fanboy war you don't want to start, friend.

 

[Dyne]

Thanks for the help cja.

 

[cja]

Pompey Pirates, Automation, D-bug, Flame of Finland, Care Bears, were some of the top.... erm... Demo groups of the time. You have the top specced mass-market ST so you shouldn't have many problems playing games with it. Some (about 5%) of early games were incompatible with the E models and only ran properly on the FMs.

That's a fanboy war you don't want to start, friend.

Oh boy, I fought it a million and one times already.... with Amoeba owners!

95% of games were available for both platforms and virtually identical, go on talk to me about AGA chipsets....

 

[Avazee]

Oh man... lucky you, the Atari 520/1040 ST were way ahead of their time... great games like Dungeon Master, Time Bandits, Pro Wrestling and last but not least, World Games! Make sure you play them all.

 

[Dyne]

Hmm, well, I got some old DD disks off my Amiga friend (720k size) and I tried writing the .ST images onto the disks, but the ST couldn't read them.. And for some reason I can't seem to get the makedisk program working.

Oy, old technology.

 

[Lord Error]

Speaking of Amiga, is there any way I can get Ducktales or "It came from the desert"? My friend wants to play those.

If he doesn't have a hard disk and modem equipped amiga with internet access, it's difficult... Really, the easiest way is to buy those games on Ebay. Shouldn't be that difficult, and should be quite cheap. If he doesn't have access to the internet from his Amiga, the process of transferring games from his PC to an amiga floppy can be quite painful, unless he is well versed with various file splitters, MS DOS disk mounters, and other utilities on Amiga.

95% of games were available for both platforms and virtually identical

Looking virtually identical, true. Too bad that in 95% cases they sounded like crap on ST, compared to Amiga version :\ Amiga had it's true visual gems though, stuff that without question was impossible to reproduce on ST.

 

[GigaDrive]

and the Sharp X68000 (another 16-Bit computer from the 80s) has games that cannot be reproduced on the Amiga

 

[Lord Error]

and the Sharp X68000 (another 16-Bit computer from the 80s) has games that cannot be reproduced on the Amiga

Yeah, but I reckon Cray had some stuff that couldn't have been reproduced on X68000 (in other words, who cares)

 

[wazoo]

95% of games were available for both platforms and virtually identical, go on talk to me about AGA chipsets....

and the human race is 99% identical to the chimp ...

I ownes a ST because it was the cheapest at the time. Amiga was truely superior.

 

[cja]

Hmm, well, I got some old DD disks off my Amiga friend (720k size) and I tried writing the .ST images onto the disks, but the ST couldn't read them.. And for some reason I can't seem to get the makedisk program working.

Oy, old technology.

Tried Windows Floppy Disc Copy ? makedisk isn't really recommended with windows. Also if you're trying to do this with copy-protected discs it isn't going to work, pirated games and public domain stuff will be fine of course.

 

[ourumov]

I own one...I even have a scanner for it....Don't use it a lot.

 

[Mustang]

I had both an Atari 1040 STE and an Amiga 2000.

I liked them both but just about anyone would have to say the Amiga was the better of the tow. The software support on the Amiga was better and the hardware and OS more powerful also.

I did like the design of the ST's a bit better though.

 

[Dyne]

Tried Windows Floppy Disc Copy ? makedisk isn't really recommended with windows. Also if you're trying to do this with copy-protected discs it isn't going to work, pirated games and public domain stuff will be fine of course.

Hmm. Maybe I'm not using the right type of discs then, because they're not reading. They're all blanks.

Specifically: Sony Single-sided MFD-1DD discs.

I should go back to the school to see where they put the music composition discs because those would probably work great.

 

[AndreasNystrom]

i havea a 520ste with 4mb aroudn here somewhere.. also have had amiga 500, 2000, and
a 1200.
I really prefer the amiga, cause it had much faster graphicsupdate.
and the sound was better aswell. 4channel (4 real channels) sound, etc.

 

[AndreasNystrom]

use ordinary 1.44mb discs where you just put a tape over the whole that tells the diskdrive if its a 720 or 1,44mb disk!

i used that with my pc to make some discs for my atari, and it worked.

singlesided discs?.. ouch.. that hasnt been around since the first atari 520, with the
external discdrive that only could save 360kb... so just throw them in the garbagecan

 

[Dyne]

use ordinary 1.44mb discs where you just put a tape over the whole that tells the diskdrive if its a 720 or 1,44mb disk!

i used that with my pc to make some discs for my atari, and it worked.

singlesided discs?.. ouch.. that hasnt been around since the first atari 520, with the
external discdrive that only could save 360kb... so just throw them in the garbagecan

Thanks! *high five*