My first Atari ST! 1040STF

[zenassem]

HI,

 

I just received my first Atari ST ever. It's a 1040STF. It came with a monochrome Atari SM124 monitor, Mouse, Cables, and an Atari U.S.A. Language disk that I guess has the T.O.S. on it. This is my first ST so i'm not sure if the floppy has the whole OS or if it's just enough view the programs on the disk.

 

So I'm looking for any help and suggestions on what I should get for it. My first order of business is getting this thing hooked up to a color screen. I believe I've seen a cable that has RCA connectors, so I'm presuming I can get that to connect to my Commodre 1702 Video monitor. I believe I have heard that it's possible to connec the ST to an SVGA monitor. It would be nice to able to share my DELL Flatscreen monitor with my PC.

 

I have a Double Dragon 3 game that I would have liked to test out, I figured it would work on the monchrome monitor, but I guess I assumed wrong.

 

Thanks for any suggestions, website links, or general advice.

 

~zenassem

[oesii]

The 1040ST has TOS in Rom so you should be able to boot directly to your desktop without any disk in the drive. Although most ST's boot better with a blank formatted floppy in the drive at boot time, because TOS likes to triple check for a floppy in the drive or something. That language disk that came with your ST only has some utilities on it but doesn't have anything to do with the TOS on your computer.

 

You'll probably have to get an Atari color monitor because most if not all ST to VGA monitor adapters are for High resolution only which equals monochrome output. The low and medium resolution output in color. I haven't heard of anyone hooking up a ST to a C1702 monitor because the ST uses it's own monitor adapter and not RGB or RCA connectors.

 

And as you found out the majority of ST games were written for low/medium resolution and color monitors. The mono monitors and high resolution was for applications and business users.

[Inky]

Refresh my memory.. Can the STF hook up to a tv, or is that the STFM?

[oesii]

STFM

 

M is for the TV Modulator. F for Floppy Drive.

 

Good point though, check to see if it is a STFM.

[zenassem]

Thanks for the quick responses.

 

I'll have to download the user's manual.

 

It's definately a 1040STF no "M". The first few times I went to test it without a floppy in the drive, all I saw was a blank gray box on the screen, and It kept trying to access the drive. So I turned it off and put the language disk in, and up came the Desktop screen. So I just assumed it needs to have a boot disk. It might have something to do with the fact that my drive button doesn't latch well, so it might think that there's a disk in the drive. It booted fine with a blank floppy.

 

I'm not sure if my monitor is working right but the desktop doesn't utilize alot of the screen. Neither on the sides nor the top. So I have about a 1" 1/2 border on the top and bottom, and a 1" border on the left and right side. There are no adjustements that I can see on the monitor for this. Is this normal?

 

What monitor would you recommend?

 

I also have a Hard Disk connector. Any recommendations fot HDs.

Anything like the 8bit SIO2PC available for the ST?

 

Is the model I have considered a decent ST?

 

Thanks

[A2600]

 

Is the model I have considered a decent ST?

 

Thanks

 

Yes Indeed Eventhough I have a Mega STe now my first ST was a 1040STF which I still own!! and I love that machine I can wait to get it up and running again!!

[dark willow]

Thanks for the quick responses.  

 

I'll have to download the user's manual.

 

It's definately a 1040STF no "M". The first few times I went to test it without a floppy in the drive, all I saw was a blank gray box on the screen, and It kept trying to access the drive. So I turned it off and put the language disk in, and up came the Desktop screen. So I just assumed it needs to have a boot disk. It might have something to do with the fact that my drive button doesn't latch well, so it might think that there's a disk in the drive. It booted fine with a blank floppy.

 

I'm not sure if my monitor is working right but the desktop doesn't utilize alot of the screen. Neither on the sides nor  the top. So I have about a 1" 1/2 border on the top and bottom, and a 1" border on the left and right side. There are no adjustements that I can see on the monitor for this. Is this normal?  

 

What monitor would you recommend?  

 

I also have a Hard Disk connector. Any recommendations fot HDs.

Anything like the 8bit SIO2PC available for the ST?

 

Is the model I have considered a decent ST?

 

Thanks

 

If the drive is a bit dogey nd it won't boot without a disk in, that it will be a drive problem rather than anything wrong with the OS. As for monitors, I'm afraid I don't know as have onmly ever used my systems with VGA monitors, nto the orginal Atari ones. However on VGA monitors the screen does have a large unused portion, usually fiddling round with the monitor controls means you can fill things out a bit. As has been said, for games you will need a dedicated Atari colour monitor (the SC range). There are a few colour VGA adapters on the market so I'm told (LOW and MED resolution), probabaly the best place to try for them would be Best Electronics, I think they stock them. (www.best-electronics-ca.com)

 

As for hard disks, the built in port on the atari is Atari's own ACSI interface. You can only use Atari Megafile hard drives and a few other makes that made Atari dedicated drives (Supra and SyQuest made some I believe). However all these drives were made a olong time ago and so will have very small capacities. The Megafile itself came in 20,30 and 60mb falvours plus a special removeable drive one. The good things is ACSI drives are pretty much plug and play.

 

The alternative is to use a host adaptor that allows the Atari to accept SCSI or IDE drives. This allows you to use more modern quicker and bigger drives. I believe the standard ST early TOS versions may only allow for drives upto 2gb, but this is more than enough on an Atari.

 

As for connecting the Atari to the PC you don't need any fancy hardfware. You can just use a serial cable and transfer software like GhostLink (or terminal software) to copy accross files, or even just floppy disks.

[zenassem]

Thanks (oseii, Inky, A2600) for helping out an ST noob.

 

Dark Willow

Thanks for taking the time to provide an in-depth response to numerous questions.

 

~zen