Upgraded Atari 1024STf

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.

42 thoughts on “Upgraded Atari 1024STf

  1. 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.

  2. @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… ;)

  3. @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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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!

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