Atari Adventures II: The Adventure starts (slowly)

Since I now have a working Atari ST, I started to search for software. Ebay, local flea markets and so on will be the tools of my choice to find it. (And with it I mean games.)

So you can look forward to me searching for such "gems" as

DAS REICH, a historical strategy game? Well, if I find it we will find out what it is.

Universe 2, an old, obscure space strategy sim. By the way, the Atari ST has had quite a few of those, apparently.

And if I can find out how to grab images from my old TV and transfer them to my PC, we might even see some screenshots! But first off: The search for software.

Luckily, I already found some promising stuff on Ebay. Now I only have to buy them, wait until the discs arrive and hope the discs are actually still working.Wish me (even more) luck!

Atari Adventures I

Now that I bought a SCART-cable and a coaxial-cable to circumvent my lame-ass monochrome monitor, it seems the project Revive the Atari slowly gains ground.

Funny enough, it also seems scart is only a viable option if I want my TFT-Television to play Atari-Monitor-Lord. My coaxial cable on the other hand gives me a nice, crispy picture in colour, even on my old TV.

The disc drive also works, at least now. I cleaned it a bit and tried a brand new disc instead of the old ones I got with the system. And what do you know? A short formatting later I have a working disc. Another short disc test later shows the drive can at least read the old discs after I formatted them again. So maybe the old discs were the problem all along?

Still, a new (reserve) disc drive and an additional external one for my PC is on my shopping list for next month. And I have to get a new Atari mouse. The old trackball I got instead is horrible and ungainly. It feels like I have to roll a bowling ball around to move my cursor.

For now, I test the around 40 old discs I have lying around to see what the fuck is on them. Since I'm not crazy, I will format them if I need them, not one day earlier, though.

Oh, and I guess I should screw the case back together and try to find a better place for my monochrome monitor then my living room carpet.

I'm not dead yet.

It was a while, wasn't it?

Well, I just hadn't had the time to write. And I was lazy. And had better things to do.

Now I'm back and for the beginning I'll try to keep up a pace of at least a post a week or something. Let's see if it works out!

This week: I'm repairing an old Atari ST 1040 STF. The transport to me has destroyed parts of the case, but most of it works. The only things left are now to replace the shitty trackball it came with, to replace the damaged disk drive with a working one and to see if the new scart-cable I bought can allow me to get my old reserve-television monstrosity out and have pretty pictures in color. (The Atari-Monitor it came with is just monochrome.)

And of course, finding software. Especially games. To spare me headaches I plan on getting on of those nifty external floppy drives I can connect via USB to my PC. This way, I can search for old Atari ST games that have turned into abandonware or something, transmit the data to my Atari-formatted discs and try them with the new (old) computer of mine. If it is possible, I'll try to get originals, of course. But we'll see.

If my ST starts working properly, maybe I'll make a series of blog posts about it.

Next week: Maybe the start of actual content?