bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Blogs & guides and tales of woo by forum members.
Post Reply
bigbloke
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:55 pm

bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by bigbloke »

This is where I will document my machines, as and when I open them and fiddle with them.
bigbloke
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:55 pm

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by bigbloke »

My first Atari in at least 25 years is an eBay sourced 520STFM in Sep 2021. Hermes managed to play football with it and it needed lots of plastic repairs, but it was quite clean and remarkably un-yellowed for its age. It seems to be a 1989 build judging by the IC date codes. TOS 1.04 build.

I have problems with the after market 720K floppy drive. (Probably needs the pull ups fitting - as a gotek and a genuine atari drive work fine).
Needed a major clean up on the STM1 mouse (now runs as well as any of these bricks can!), and the original QuikShot joystick that came with it. Not in bad shape for 30+ year old plastics.
I got a gotek to play around with software (read games so far!) on this machine.
I bought a RGB SCART lead from cool-novelties on eBay.
I used my original Philips FST TV (from 1986!) as my colour monitor exactly as i did back with my original 1986 machine!
I riskily bought a SM144 monitor off eBay for a reasonable £60 delivered. It was superbly packaged and survived its journey. It is a little tired (needs most controls near maximum values to get a good picture). But maybe a re-cap and refurb of some parts will help. It will need "retro-briting" next summer once we see the sun again!
Went looking for a switch box for connecting box monitors all the time (save wear on the old connector) as they were common back in the day. Not now it seems. Will have to build something methinks.

Last week (Nov 4th 2021 to be precise), I soldered in 16 256k DRAMs and 8 capacitors to make it a 1040. This should now run any ST game I'm likely to play.

Plan is to keep this machine fairly stock and play games on it, as it has a broken case and is of little monetary value!
bigbloke
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:55 pm

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by bigbloke »

My second machine (bought Oct 2021) is a Mega ST2. Another eBay find, I ended up driving to Bradford to collect it! So add £40 fuel to the purchase! 1987 machine (I think) with original long button floppy. After cleaning it reads disks well but is super sensitive on ejecting disks (buttton frequently kicks out whilst removing disk risking damaging drive and/or disk. Bizarrely waiting a few seconds with finger on button reduces this risk). It came with SM124 monitor (decent picture), a nice Naksha ST/Amiga mouse, an external floppy with no psu, so not tested yet. (Think it just needs 12V). A big box of disks, Starglider 2 game, A midi doodad (it's upstairs and I'm currently down, so will update later). And finally a red Staples branded mouse mat which was almost exactly the same as I had back in the 80's!

This machine's previous owner was a musician and came with a lot of disks of .mid files. I need to find a way to play these and see what he got up to with it. I have a basic Yamaha keyboard with MIDI (no I still haven't learnt to play it!), and I am awaiting some MIDI cables to have a play.
bigbloke
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:55 pm

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by bigbloke »

My third Atari machine will be a 1040STE I have just won on eBay (9th Nov 2021). I eagerly await it and will document it here hopefully.
bigbloke
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:55 pm

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by bigbloke »

So my 520 STE turned into a bit of a saga! The eBay seller stated that it "turned on" but couldn't test any further. It was also advertised as without a floppy drive. Not a worry to me as I'll add either a gotek, Ultrasatan or similar.

Finally arrived, in one piece this time but with a very worrying rattle. So I carefully pulled it apart and the brass standoff for the floppy drive was careering inside the shielding and the PCB. Lordy how much damage has this done I'm thinking. Then I notice that the ram slots are empty, and looking around further I see the ROMs are missing! I'm now thinking I've bought a complete dud here that post will have finished off. It's a later build STE with blitter in the GLUE chip, so I can't even raid it for many parts if it is a duffer.

So in the spirit of retro computing I decide to throw good money after bad and order some cheap TOS1.06 ROMs and the cheapest 1MB of SIMMS off eBay for a grand total of £11.49 incl. delivery and wait a few more days.

In the meantime I scan the board in detail looking for signs of damage by the brass weight rattling and other than a couple of resistors and transistors at less than ideal angles (which may be even have been like that from the factory from what I gather) I see no other obvious signs of damage. I test the PSU and it seems to be ok and powers my STFM fine. I try the STE (with ROM and RAM) and the green keyboard light illuminates. So wait for the parts.

5 days later I have the missing parts plugged in. Power up and nothing works! Turns out I picked the wrong 50-50 option for the ROMs which came with no clues as which went where. After studying lots of mobo pics online I decided that I had them the wrong way round. Switched them over and after what seemed an eternity the green desktop minus icons arrived. Time to try and add the gotek. No bueno. The floppy cable was in a terrible state, no strain relief on drive end, and the lid on the soldered in end was missing and the ribbon cable lifting away from the IDC pins. Pressing down and fiddling with the mobo end of the cable would get the gotek seen, but not reliable enough to load any software.

So I decide that as it mostly works I'll give Exxos all my spare cash and start pimping this beasty out. 68HC000 cpu, STE TOS switcher and ROM, 4700uF cap, floppy socket to solder to board and a bunch of other bits for other projects and machines. So far only the CPU and floppy cable have gone in, and four cheap 1MB SIMMs from Germany (£7.50ish delivered). And using a spare PC floppy cable from my old PC stash I now have the STE up and running any game I've thrown at it so far.

Lessons learned:
- maybe only buy machines with boot screen at least demoed in the listing.
- don't browse Exxos store after a couple of beers, ended up spending more than machine cost!
- STEs are more rugged than I ever expected!
- STEs are a git to get that metal screening thing off the back so you can get the mobo out to work on!
User avatar
Icky
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 3986
Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 10:57 am
Location: UK

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by Icky »

Hi @bigbloke would be great to see some pics of your collection. I think you still have time to edit your previous posts to add them in.

EDIT: If you find time runs out for adding them to your posts just post the pics and the descriptions and a moderator can place them with each respective text in your posts for you.
User avatar
rubber_jonnie
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 10479
Joined: Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:40 pm
Location: Essex
Contact:

Re: bigbloke's big blog of beasts!

Post by rubber_jonnie »

Icky wrote: Sat Dec 18, 2021 12:28 am Hi @bigbloke would be great to see some pics of your collection. I think you still have time to edit your previous posts to add them in.
I'd second this 😁
Collector of many retro things!
800XL and 65XE both with Ultimate1MB,VBXL/XE & PokeyMax, SIDE3, SDrive Max, 2x 1010 cassette, 2x 1050 one with Happy mod, 3x 2600 Jr, 7800 and Lynx II
Approx 20 STs, including a 520 STM, 520 STFMs, 3x Mega ST, MSTE & 2x 32 Mhz boosted STEs
Plus the rest, totalling around 50 machines including a QL, 3x BBC Model B, Electron, Spectrums, ZX81 etc...
Post Reply

Return to “MEMBER BLOGS”