Upgraded Atari 1024STf

posted Oct 28th 2009 11:18am by Mike Szczys
filed under: pcs hacks

atari-1024STf-case-mod

[Gerritt] wanted to give his crippled Atari 1024 STf a new purpose in life. He cracked it open and set to work filling it with some modern components. The keyboard from the nearly 25-year-old dinosaur doesn’t have all the keys we’re used to, nor did they all work, so he replaced the original with a 101 key model. The internal hardware was replaced with a microATX board, a picoPSU, Bluetooth and WiFi transceivers, a hard drive, and a slot-fed DVD drive. He even rebuilt the original mouse to use the circuitry from an optical mouse.

The final product is a 1.6GHz Pentium Mobile with one gig of ram. Now he has no need to pick up an EEE Keyboard PC when they hit the market.

Comments [41]

tagged: 1024 ST, atari, Case mod, EEE keyboard

Reader Comments

Awesome. I want one.

Posted at 11:22 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by Josh

that is SWEET!

Posted at 11:27 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by monkeyslayer56

An amusing casemod, but I cannot help but weep for the poor old original hardware!

It really would have been something to interface the new peripherals with the original processing hardware.

Posted at 11:31 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by AnarKit

cool

Posted at 11:36 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by b

@AnarKit: I agree, this is more of a casemod, as opposed to resurrecting the old hardware. Still, very cool stuff.

Posted at 11:46 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by Dan

That’s a Atari 1040 ST not a 1024 (even though it has 1024 memory).

Posted at 11:48 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by Roger

Oh, and it is too bad that he did not ressurect the old hard ware. The Atari 1040 is still the Best (rock-solid timing) MIDI sequencer on the planet.

Posted at 11:50 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by Roger

So in other words it’s a casemod instead of a hack or revived hardware. How disappointing.

Posted at 11:53 am on Oct 28th, 2009 by Marco

@AnarKit: Thirded with the weeping. I went into this article assuming he’d actually super-upgraded the original Atari hardware itself. Would have had a tenfold increase in hack value, I think. :P

Granted, you could probably run an emulator of the original hardware on this now, but… ;)

Posted at 12:04 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by Fortyseven

While the author definitely deserves credit for the work done, I’d rather be seeing original Atari ST pimped with fancy peripherals of all sorts. Sigh.

Posted at 12:30 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by tnt23

@Fortyseven: Agreed. I was anxiously reading through what he had done, only to realize it was just a case mod. I was waiting for all the new changes to interface with the old hardware, but alas, no. Still some nice work, though.

Posted at 12:37 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by japkin

wow, what a way to destroy classic computing hardware. What a shame!

Posted at 12:55 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by millBot

I join the choir of those lamenting the old Atari. Shame.

Posted at 12:59 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by svofski

I see a lot of people lamenting the loss of the original hardware, and slamming this as “just a casemod”, and they do have a point. But even the summary noted that not all the hardware was functioning, and most probably would’ve required a mobo transplant anyways. To do what you’re suggesting, i.e. interface new peripherals into the twenty-something year old hardware, would be a feat of engineering bordering on the miraculous. How many people actually got into the guts of an Atari 1040 ST, anyways? I think it’s pretty neat that he even bothered to save the case, instead of fabbing up something new.

Posted at 2:27 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by rallen

Would of much preferred A ST doing something or other. The case Mod is fun but really the hardware is boring. I suppose he has at least done something with the hardware!

Posted at 3:34 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by ProblemChild

Nice job and not an Arduino in site. Congrats to an article not even mentioning the Arduino. Wait, I mentioned it, Damn me to hell.

Posted at 3:39 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by hrpuffnstuff

This is NOT an upgraded Atari 1040ST. It’s just a case mod.

I’m with all the others who wish the modder would’ve actually did something with the Atari 1040ST rather than just destroying it and making it in to a PC.

Posted at 3:49 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by pastrychef

I’m a long-time Atari ST guy, and that said, I love this mod.

Yes, you can interface an aging Atari ST with modern hardware – there’s Ethernec for ethernet; Eiffel for a PS/2 interface to the ST’s serial keyboard, and there’s an IDE interface that bit-bashes the 68000 CPU. Built all three of them, too.

But…why bother? It’s far easier to leave your ST in pristine shape and gain all that functionality by using an ST emulator like Steem on the PC without having to make a single solder.

As already pointed out, this was a broken ST, so no loss to vintage fans, and it creates something new with an Atari flavor. Bravo!

Posted at 4:10 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by eeun

Amiga for Ever!

Posted at 5:26 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by charlie

Come on. Stop the whining. This is a cool project for a dead system. Congrats.

Posted at 5:59 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by ronald_55

Fine, I accept this machine is dead and he didn’t think it was worth the effort to resurrect it.

But if you a vintage case, why would you paint it black!

Note to the vintage lovers: I just spared one of these 1040STf’s lives… Found it at the curb, it has a new life now. I was glad to see the community still active.

Posted at 6:23 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by atrain

I say Bravo as well!

Now what are we going to do we all these Atari 400s?

Posted at 6:24 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by Seth

This is a case mod, this is NOT an upgrade and honestly I am tired of these. I mean big deal, not if he can put a PC into a Sinclair ZX-81 ok that will impress me. Otherwise bullox!

I don’t care that it was broken, I rather see what can be salvaged and re-used into a working ST.

Posted at 6:39 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by Alvin Pettit

I still have my Atari 512 upgraded w/ 2MB of Memory, and 10MB Supra Hard Drive and another Atari 1024 which I found. Works like a charm! Nothing like the good old days…

Posted at 6:57 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by Bob Saggett

Misleading title, but a nifty mod since it was already a dead unit.

Posted at 7:20 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by Jimmy Sultan

Nice mod, although I’m also in the bandwagon of weepers :P

Perhaps I should upgrade my old (working) ST since the hardware is cheap now. Never got around to put a HDD in it back then.

Posted at 7:52 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by JB

Excellent casemod – nice nod to the retro. Nice whining too, whiny whiners.

Posted at 8:02 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by john

stuck mini itx in a box. didn’t even get the old keyboard working with it. casemon, not a hack. Waste of old hardware, at that…

Posted at 8:33 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by zigzagjoe

I’m afraid the authors definition of ‘begging the question’ is completely erroneous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Posted at 8:38 pm on Oct 28th, 2009 by romulous

Mike found another case mode…

Posted at 12:02 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by therian

Yeah what’s been already said a lot in the above comments, it’s a nice case mod but poor Atari.

At least I hope it was broken in some way first, otherwise I could never do something like this even though I was a C=64 and Amiga 500/1200 kid back in the day.

Posted at 12:43 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by ebidk

So now you have got a really big keyboard case that just takes up load of desk space – BRILLIANT!

Posted at 2:38 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by kryptylomese

/me was expecting some 060 or ColdFire expansion

what a let down.

Posted at 3:30 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by cantido

It’s not an Atari any more…?
/confused.

Posted at 4:51 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by Louis II

Upgrade?! its a pc in a atari 1024sf case, with another keyboard, so even of the case itself there is little left.

Posted at 4:54 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by rachael

I agree, it doesn’t seem like much is left. I could be wrong, but it seems like even the case has been modified. Still a pretty neat looking result though.

Posted at 7:20 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by Jeremy C

FAIL! As nice as this looks I cant help but think thi is throwing away classic components to a classic (and ever rarer) system and in it’s place it’s had half-arsed modern components thrown in. Can’t say I’m impressed at all.

What a shame.

Posted at 10:18 am on Oct 29th, 2009 by TC

Seeing a real classic gutted and some generic pc stuff thrown in makes me cry. In a few years this is just another casemodded slow slow worthless pc nobody wants to use but the Atari would only have increased in value.

Posted at 12:04 pm on Oct 29th, 2009 by Spede

Don’t know If I should chime in on this since I’m the guilty one on this casemod (and that is how I presented it to hackaday) but come on… I didn’t cut up a Atari Falcon or something…

Believe me I did try my best to get a new home for the Atari but it turned out there wasn’t a lot of animo for the classics.

If anyone is in need of those genuine vintage atari parts: I still have the PSU unit and Floppy left and am happy to donate it. I’m not a barbarian!

I’m very glad with my XP/Ubuntu space and power saving nostalgic PC – I can stack my CD’s on top of it just like in the old days (but then it were floppies) and it runs Xenon II like a charm!

Posted at 2:23 pm on Oct 29th, 2009 by ultragalore

don’t people like to relax, lean back in chairs with keyboard on their knees ?

Posted at 1:06 am on Oct 30th, 2009 by therian

good work my friend
but we was make a orginal keyboard and 3,6 ghz cpu ( o-c 4,7 ghz)
st transform to pc for detailes http://www.atariturkiye.com on retro mod section

Posted at 12:56 pm on Nov 13th, 2009 by gunhan

Upgraded Atari 1024STf

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