Just got an Atari 1040st with no disks.. What to do?

[+eebuckeye]

Where should I start with no disks? I would like to try something on it now until I get mass storage.

It takes about 45 seconds to boot into TOS. Is that normal?
Thanks!

Edited May 23, 2014 by eebuckeye

[IainGrimm]

If you have a floppy drive (internal is preferable) you can write a few .st images back onto disk using Omniflop. If you have an external USB floppy drive, depending on the controller it uses you should be able to write the 720k discs but nothing above or below that. Its how I started out until I got my USD, I have an Iomega external USB floppy drive and can write the 720k images, anything below 720k (single sided stuff) just won't load on my ST, anything above 720k and it can't write the full image.

 

If you have an internal floppy drive you will be able to write any size disc just fine with Omniflop or ppera floimg (I personally prefer Omniflop)

 

You can also try grabbing a few of the DBug and ppera hard drive adapted games (720k or less in size, format the disc on your ST) and just copy and paste them onto a 720k formatted disc, Windows will try and tell you to format the disc but just cancel that off, once copied over you can run quite a few of them direct from a disc, just make sure you look at the ram requirements, anything above your 1mb won't work.

Edited May 23, 2014 by IainGrimm

[Rybags]

Format a blank floppy from the Desktop then use it, should reduce startup time to ~ 5 seconds.

Not that you can do a great deal with no software to run.

 

ST can read/run software from PC formatted 720K disks (format ST itself uses normally is slightly different).

 

The modern-day problem though is finding 720K drives for PCs, and proper DD only disks (ie not 1.44 Meg ones with the second hole).

1.44 Meg floppies can be used by taping the hole but are unreliable to the point of not being trustworthy... the actual media deposition is too thin.