Been A Strange Few Weeks

Or months? I'm not really sure the time frame. One sec.

I bought the ST in April, it was delivered the 15th. Alright, so a few weeks it is.

I guess late March I must've been watching too much LGR, CRD & 8-Bit Guy cause this sneaky desire for some retro hardware was growing. It started with just kind of seeing what prices were on ebay. Amigas are crazy. Good to know.

I really wanted a unit with a keyboard built in. They're generally slimmer & my room is already pretty well packed with wonderful goofy shit.

I was very much, well I still do...want a Tandy HX1000. That's where I started. Then the Amiga desire that didn't last too long. Eventually a listing for an Atari ST 52O and SF354 floppy got posted. I wasn't interested at first. Feel like I've generally heard over the years they aren't bad per se but they didn't get the same attention in their hayday as other systems.

Must've not bothered me too much lol. Small bidding war commence! I probably paid a bit much. There were previous listing with monitor that sold around the same. At that point I was pretty dead set against a monitor (back to that space complaint).

This would prove to be a stance that caused its own headaches (still is as of me typing this from the bath).

Felt good. Minor boil. But now I'm on a ThinkPad lolol

Where was I...oh yeah ST. It eventually showed up, packaged well. Has that old tech stink to it. I had ordered a ST to VGA adapter knowing I had no way of getting video out and figured that would be my best bet. Lo and behold it actually came with one (it was mentioned in the listing I realized after checking later on).

I didn't think to open it and check for any bad caps or anything. Suppose I maybe got lucky in that regard. It powered on...at least so it seemed.

My original plan was to hook it up to this Kramer presentation switcher I bought a while ago so I could hook up my LaserDisc player to a newer TV/AVR. That...didn't pan out the way I hoped. Though frankly I'm not sure I know enough yet to say that confidently. The documentation is pretty lacking and I'm not sure how many have tried. I abandoned that quite bummed out.

I do however have a AOC 20" or so LCD I have near my server and it has a D-Sub/VGA port. Figured I didn't have much to lose. To my surprise it will display on the monochrome setting! I guess it's tolerant of its h-sync in that mode. It doesn't go low enough to support the low and med res resolutions unfortunately.

Given that most games for the system use low or medium resolutions, I had to find some way. I've heard of the RetroTink so I started poking around there. I found one used on Ebay (though I'm not sure how much this saved me). Ordered an ST to SCART cable from Portugal. Waited impatiently for them to arrive.

The RetroTink showed up first. I didn't have much to do with it however. My LaserDisc play is on the fritz (I suspect old grease, maybe bad belt). No other old consoles. No VHS player. Dire situation. I did hook it up and make sure it at least worked, just to be sure I didn't have to return it. Fiddled around with its on screen menu and then put it back away safely lol.

FINALLY the SCART cable arrived. I hurriedly hooked it all up and plugged it into my AVR. Nothing. Okay I see there are two SCART modes. Still nothing. Utterly gutted.

I fiddled and farted around with the menu a bit, wasn't much I could do on the Atari side...I threw my arms up and went to the RetroTink discord for some assistance.

Where I encountered some nice folk who definitely know a lot more about this than I. I posed a picture of the motherboard just to be sure. Apparently due to the early age of this model it doesn't have an RF modulator. Because of that, it doesn't have C-Sync. It is because of this that the signal wouldn't latch on the RetroTink (I forgot to mention I would get a half second glimpse of TOS every now and then).

They pointed me to a simple schematic I had actually stumbled on a few days before and didn't pay much mind to. A few diodes, transistors and resistors and you can derive the C-Sync and direct it out to the right pin (pins?) on the SCART.

I'm waiting for the parts to arrive, should be here Monday. Have to educate myself a bit more on where things go ofc and gives me an excuse to get out the oscilloscope. I'll definitely be sure to post any updates as they happen.

Oh yeah at some point in there a Floppy Emulator showed up as well. There was a small learning curve there. But some fancy software and a 14~ GB .zip file from Archive.org and I was quite set as far as software goes. I started using ST Writer Elite to journal and I think at some point I'll use it to rough these out. Probably just trying to justify it's existence currently lol.

I also bought Hunt for Red October on 720k floppy. Still haven't been able to try that out. Listing said it was working/tested. Hopefully my drive is lol.

So I've just been biding my time breaking linux and getting lost in iptables for extended periods of time. FUN :DDD