I have learned the hard way that you should never let go of old consoles. In this project I will share in my quest to collect old gaming systems, and some tips if I have any.
When I set up my own SD-HDD solution based on the wonderful ACSI2STM project, I found the hard drive was becoming corrupted pretty soon after setting it up. I thought it might have been my dodgy soldering or something funny about the way I had everything set up. Turns out I simply hadn’t heard about Bad DMA. A local Atari enthusiast meetup later and a solution was proposed; swap the 68000 chip for a newer, lower power and subsequently less noisy version.
It worked!
This is a neat device that allows you to connect bluetooth peripherals to your ST including modern mice and joypads. Out of the box it works well with joypads, but takes a little bit of software tinkering to enable mouse support.
A quick guide on using a Gotek USB floppy emulator in your ST, conveniently store all your floppy images on a single drive and never have to worry about worn out floppy drive belts again!
I never noticed it growing up but I see it now, TOS is profoundly flakey. My ST has a TOS 1.62 ROM built in and it does not play nice with hard drives.
There’s a simple solution to this, use the wonderful open source EmuTOS instead. Now I’m not resourceful enough to go writing EmuTOS to a flash ROM but my ST does have enough RAM that I can easily get away with loading it up from the hard drive.
This page documents some tips and tricks to help make the most of your ST.
How to modernise the Atari ST desktop environment, from upgrading to a more modern GEM environment to applying custom wallpapers.
Thirty years since first owning an Atari ST and I can’t shake my love for it. I recently acquired an STE and wanted to see how far I can push it. This project is all about that.
© Copyright 2025
Phil Watson
Last updated
Thursday, 29/May/2025 09:38 +1000