As an Amigan, I had never ever messed with Ataris, always thought of them as inferior (well, except for MIDI stuff). Recently I got my first Atari 520ST from eBay. The bundle looked right - it included a mouse, a red joystick, ten floppies (games), a power cable and a big fat SCART cable. Only it appeared to be in French; I saw an AZERTY keyboard so it most likely had a French TOS. As soon as I won the auction, I ordered a VGA cable for the monochrome hi-res, and the next day bid on a big red Steinberg SMP II SMPTE-MIDI interface for it 😈 (The last was an impulse bid as a couple of months ago I passed on a MIDEX and regretted it badly, even without owning an ST back then - that's how much of a hoarder I am...)
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As mentioned above, I was clueless about everything ST. Days were passing by and with more rational thinking before even receiving it, I researched a bit to see the various possibilities, only to get more and more depressed: the ST can't take more RAM easily, Cubase doesn't run with the stock 512kb, lack of blitter etc etc. On second thought, maybe I should have waited to get something better, and certainly not in French...
...but looking closely to the auction images, what I won appeared more like an STe...!
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Long story short, it indeed turned out to be a 520STe with blitter, which had at some point been upgraded to 1mb! (It's also indeed in French, but that's minor 🤣). Today I opened it up to upgrade the RAM with standard 4x1MB 30pin 70ns SIMMs, wrote Cubase 2.01 to a floppy so as to verify that the SMP II works and played some Lemmings on the TV with the SCART cable! It's like entering a new world...
Pics are from the auctions... Hopefully will take some myself as soon as I find more time. It's been sitting in my room for, like, two weeks and only today I managed to fool around with it 😢 Next plans are to fit in a CF-IDE adapter (I also bought an IDE interface for later), might consider a picopsu or something like that too, but the ultimate target is to make an ultra-barebone setup with a keyboard and two modules at most, and try to come up with a small track on it. Time will tell...
Stojke wrote:Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.
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