atari st

11 Articles

Detective Work Recovers Atari ST ASIC Designs

September 5, 2018 by 28 Comments

[Christian Zietz] wanted to know more about the Atari ST. He found information online from newer Atari machines like the Falcon030 and the Jaguar, but couldn’t find much else. While looking through some archives of old disk images from the Atari headquarters, he found a folder marked “Drawings\4118.” With some detective work and emulation of an old operating system, he was able to recover the schematics for the ST-4118 video shifter ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit).

Unfortunately, this appeared to be a chip for the unreleased Atari Panther video game console. However, it did show the way to how these older schematics were readable. [Christian] continued searching and found some floppy disk images that were a bit unusual. They didn’t have a proper file system but had been created by a backup program called FastBack for MS-DOS.

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Bring A Modern Mouse To An Atari ST

January 23, 2017 by 35 Comments

Human input devices are a consumable on our computers today. They are so cheap and standardised, that when a mouse or a keyboard expires we don’t think twice, just throw it away and buy another one. It’ll work for sure with whatever computer we have, and we can keep on without pause.

On earlier machines though, we might not be so lucky. The first generation of computers with mice didn’t have USB or even PS/2 or serial, instead they had a wide variety of proprietary mouse interfaces that usually carried the quadrature signals direct from the peripheral’s rotary sensors. If you have a quadrature mouse that dies then you’re in trouble, because you won’t easily find a new one.

Fortunately there is a solution. In the intervening decades the price of computing power has fallen to the extent that you can buy a single board computer with far more than enough power to interface with a standard USB mouse and emulate a quadrature mouse all at the same time. This was exactly the solution [Andrew Armstrong] took to provide a replacement mouse for his Atari ST, he used a Raspberry Pi as both USB host and quadrature mouse emulator (YouTube link) through its GPIOs.

He’s put together a comprehensive description of his work in the video we’ve placed below the break, meanwhile if you’d like to have a go yourself you’ll find all you need to know in his GitHub repository.

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An Atari ST Rises From The Ashes

June 9, 2016 by 19 Comments

We’ve all made rash and impulsive online purchasing decisions at times. For [Drygol] the moment came when he was alerted to an Atari 1040STe 16-bit home computer with matching monitor at a very advantageous price.

Unfortunately for him, the couriers were less than careful with his new toy. What arrived was definitely an ST, but new STs didn’t arrive in so many pieces of broken ABS. Still, at least the computer worked, so there followed an epic of case repair at the end of which lay a very tidy example of an ST.

He did have one lucky break, the seller had carefully wrapped everything in shrink-wrap so no fragments had escaped. So carefully applying acetone to stick the ABS together he set to work on assembling his unexpected 3D jigsaw puzzle. The result needed a bit of filler and some sanding, but when coupled with a coat of grey paint started to look very like an ST case that had just left the factory. Adding  modern SD card and USB/Ethernet interfaces to the finished computer delivered a rather useful machine as you can see in the video below the break.
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Suska Open Source Atari ST

January 7, 2010 by 15 Comments

Got a special place in your heart for Atari computing? Now you can quench that need using new hardware. The Suska project has achieved complete hardware emulation of the Atari ST using an FPGA. The project’s progress tracker shows implementation of the major chips at 100%. They are running EmuTOS, an Atari emulator, as the operating system because running the original would violate copyright. The chip used is an Altera Cyclone III. You could load up the code on your own hardware but judging from the number of connections needed it might be less of a headache to buy a board from these guys.

[Thanks Erik]