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Scored an Atari 520ST

Now I'm getting my conversations as well as threads mixed up. Sorry Ahm.

My terminal cartridge came in today, I'm goign to hook up to the '95 laptop with terminal and just bask in it, heh heh. Whenever I can get to do anything with the fdd controller I also got a cable for a second floppy and will actually transfer something.
 
Nathan. You have to have a disk with a working program on the ST end.
Altho GEM and TOS are in your ST ROM I can't believe any cartridge can do anything without a working ST. You can boot from an external B drive but that must be a valid boot or else the cartridge must supply an address where it can supply the needed information to TOS. I've never heard of any cartridges that either have TOS on them or don't direct the ST to a ROM such as in the Magic Sac or as with PC Ditto. There were several OS for the ST that bypassed TOS but none I know of that treated the ST just as a Dumb Terminal. You've got to bite the bullet and get a working fdd before you can access the magic of TOS and GEM. And a SSfd just cant cut it.

Lawrence
 
The 520ST that I have has tos in rom. I plugged in the terminal cart and hooked up the nill modem cable and they were off! I had them hooked eogether and they were working. The 520 I have is an early one, and based on my reading the early st's had tos in rom, like this one that I have. I can't transfer anything cause there's something wrong with the controller on the atari (among other things). But yeah, I just got iff the st and I was talking with terminal just now. I think there was a miscommunication. The st has the tos in rom and boots without a fdd. It can't do much, but it'll boot and give me the green desktop. I definitely am in the process of biting the bullet (delorme searching) but I think I wasn't being verry descriptive.

The term cart works with the st's rom and makes it a terminal and can go back to desktop mode with the cart on the desktop as little "c". This thing is neat! It has the manual and everything. I wonder if it'll talk to a unix machine...?

And about this ST. The keyboard needs to be replaced SO bad. It's lived a long, hard life and it needs love. The keys on all the left side are very sticky and you have to hit them like stubborn buttons. The top half of the case has small caracks in it, there are three keys missing off of it, one of the screw sockets(?) is broken by the power led so it comes up. All the connectors are a little bit rusty in the back and it has a bunch of scratches on it. Not a good fetch if I were to buy it. This was given to me.
 
Oh yeah, the cart is cool. It leaves ram alone, it seems to have its own, not that it needs much. I'm still playing with it and am getting used to it. I have PC/InterComm on floppy but it doesn't do me much good.

Next thing is to get an IC puller good for that chip that's inside of the ST. I can lilve with the keyboard like it is (crappy) but I wanna get a floppy working. Maybe two or three.
 
I use a Syquest EZ135 zip disk with an ICD Link adapter. I also have an Iomega Parallel port Zip which I use with several other computers with small HDs. In wondering about whether there had been any Atari developments to allow using the Atari PP since my ST heyday, which somehow might have overcome this limitation googling "Atari Iomega" I ran across some stuff you might find interesting.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul01/articles/atarinotes.htm

http://www.seimet.de/atari_english.html

Uwe Seimet developed the HDDriver program which overcame some of the ICD HD driver's limitations. There's also some excellent links.

Lawrence
 
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