VOGONS


First post, by Beegle

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Hello!
I have in my storage an old Atari 1040ST. It was given to me by a colleague who was moving, and since I love retro stuff I was happy to save it from the trash. However I grew up with PCs and MS-DOS and I have no clue if there is anything interesting to be done with this specimen.

It boots up, can read floppies, the monitor works, everything seems fine.
But I have no idea what to do with it.

Any tips, ideas?

The more sound cards, the better.
AdLib documentary : Official Thread
Youtube Channel : The Sound Card Database

Reply 1 of 14, by Roman78

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Play old games... Do you have a colour monitor?

Unfortunately I'm an Amiga Kid, so I have 4000 Amiga disks and none for the Atari.

Reply 2 of 14, by HighTreason

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Have an STF with a hell of a lot of software... it is useless. It is novel to play with from time to time though and I'd like to get some sequencing software and use the MIDI ports. I wonder if I can control the internal tone generator with my keyboard or another sequencer.

My Youtube - My Let's Plays - SoundCloud - My FTP (Drivers and more)

Reply 3 of 14, by idspispopd

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MIDI, Games.
Of course an Amiga usually has the better game versions/ports, but the Atari has the advantage that it can read plain 720k DOS formatted floppies.

Reply 4 of 14, by BSA Starfire

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Download Starball, it's a fabulous pinball game, makes the ST really shine 😀

286 20MHz,1MB RAM,Trident 8900B 1MB, Conner CFA-170A.SB 1350B
386SX 33MHz,ULSI 387,4MB Ram,OAK OTI077 1MB. Seagate ST1144A, MS WSS audio
Amstrad PC 9486i, DX/2 66, 16 MB RAM, Cirrus SVGA,Win 95,SB 16
Cyrix MII 333,128MB,SiS 6326 H0 rev,ESS 1869,Win ME

Reply 5 of 14, by PeterLI

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I have very good memories of the ATARI ST. It had lots of cool games. My best friend who lived a few houses away at the time had one in the early 1990s. 😀

Reply 6 of 14, by MMaximus

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PeterLI wrote:

I have very good memories of the ATARI ST. It had lots of cool games. My best friend who lived a few houses away at the time had one in the early 1990s. 😀

+1
most of my friends in the late '80s / early '90s had Atari ST machines - the games were much better than their PC counterpart, with better graphics and better sound. I remember us hanging out together to play games like Dungeon Master, Bubble Bobble, Xenon 2, New Zealand Story, Lotus Challenge, along with various arcade conversions.

The ST was also a very good machine for music production thanks to its built-in midi ports.

Hard Disk Sounds

Reply 7 of 14, by Jorpho

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The only game I know of that I'd consider playing on an ST is Sundog. There have been plans for a remake kicking around for years, but it seems that it's not finished yet. (FTL might make it redundant.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy

Of course, there's not much reason you couldn't just run it in an emulator instead.

Reply 8 of 14, by zstandig

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If you like there are probably ways to upgrade the RAM and add other hardware goodies, maybe a CF card instead of the old hard drive. I know there are ways to get an SD reader so you can store a bunch of games on one SD card.

Reply 9 of 14, by bergqvistjl

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I had an old 1040STe a while ago, that I upgraded to TOS v2.06 via flashing the OS image onto replacement ROMs, and upgrading the ram to 4MB.

I had a huge bunch of software with it, mostly games but also Notator, which I could get connected up to a MIDI keyboard & read off MIDI files from disk, which was cool.

Reply 10 of 14, by awgamer

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Beegle wrote:
Hello! I have in my storage an old Atari 1040ST. It was given to me by a colleague who was moving, and since I love retro stuff […]
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Hello!
I have in my storage an old Atari 1040ST. It was given to me by a colleague who was moving, and since I love retro stuff I was happy to save it from the trash. However I grew up with PCs and MS-DOS and I have no clue if there is anything interesting to be done with this specimen.

It boots up, can read floppies, the monitor works, everything seems fine.
But I have no idea what to do with it.

Any tips, ideas?

Barbarian by Psygnosis, for a game that apparently a number of people didn't like, I thought it was great. The mouse interface being the thing pointed to as being disliked but that's integral to the challenge of the game, so I see them as missing the point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8j4pjuNko4&l … fYUrSxm#t=0m27s

Reply 11 of 14, by soviet conscript

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What about Captain Blood? isn't the ST version the only one with proper sound?

Reply 12 of 14, by Arctic

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Definately Elite and Battlezone with a Joystick!
Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion and of course the very first LAN game: Midi Maze

My favorite PD / Shareware Games were:

Bouncing Bobbles or Boubles?
Delta Patrol (Helicopter game)
Towers of Hanoi

and some others, I have to fire up my MegaSTE and see what games it has on it.

Reply 13 of 14, by Beegle

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A late thanks to everyone, for the numerous replies!
I'll keep the machine in storage for now, and when I move into a real house instead of an apartment (next June!!), I'll have dedicated computer room where it will be installed and used.

Roman78 wrote:

Play old games... Do you have a colour monitor?

I think yes, but since I have no software I can't verify.

zstandig wrote:

I know there are ways to get an SD reader so you can store a bunch of games on one SD card.

Yes. That's what I'm doing with my MS-DOS PC at the moment, and it works like a charm. Less hassle installing games, more time to actually play.

For all excellent game suggestions, they are duly noted 😀

The more sound cards, the better.
AdLib documentary : Official Thread
Youtube Channel : The Sound Card Database

Reply 14 of 14, by soviet conscript

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I've also found many games tend to be cheaper on the ST if you like having physical big box games. I'm actually an Amiga guy myself but some games the graphical difference is negligible but the ST version can be had cheaper.