ATARI n00b

[striderhiro]

hey guys, awesome website here.

Ive never considered myself a computer n00b until I got an atari, and now to be honest, I am def a n00b.

I bought a 520STfm recently off ebay, with the hopes of using the MIDI ports and doing some chiptune stuff!

however.... i have been unable to get any software on to my atari.

i have some old atari floppys and want to use http://dhs.nu/files.php?t=single&ID=61 as i have monochrome monitor.

the only computer i have lying around with a floppy drive is a win xp machine, when i tried doing the format a: /t:80 /n:9 thing (or however it goes) i just got track 0 bad.


im a total atari noob and could really do with a walkthrough for downloading software and putting it on floppy on winxp then to atari.

sorry for the long post hope someone can help!

[mal7921]

Hi and welcome to the Atari music scene.

The first thing to remember is that the 520ST series came with a double density drive as standard, so formatting a floppy in a modern PC or Mac is likely to be unreadable by the humble ST.

However a disk formatted in an ST can be read and written to by a PC (or Mac), so you need to format a floppy disk in the Atari first, download what you need and copy it onto the to the floppy once unzipped.

That's for starters, there a other things you can do but that means spending more money and looking for specific things on the likes of eBay. As a quick getting started though, the above should at least help.

[striderhiro]

Hi! thanks for your reply, im looking forward to gettin started.

my main problem is that I cant read the floppys on my PC so I have no way of transferring the files to my atari

I was wondering if you knew any lil insider work around for this

cheers

[mal7921]

Hmm, there are a few things that could be causing this, first thing to find out is which 520 is this? Is it an STfm or an STe? If its the former, you will need to format disks with a utility such as FastCopy to do a proper pc formatted disk. If its an STe, then we have a conundrum.


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[striderhiro]

its the STfm ill look into fastcopy now, cheers!!

[striderhiro]

FastCopy is an atari program right? how do i run fast copy and format a floppy do i need two floppy drives on the ST?

[mal7921]

Is your floppy drive built in to your PC or is it an external USB drive? If it is internal there is an article on the site which shows how to get modern windows computers to format Atari compatible disks, otherwise pm me your address and I can send a correctly formatted disk or 2 out to you.

[mal7921]

FastCopy is an atari program right? how do i run fast copy and format a floppy do i need two floppy drives on the ST?

Fast copy can run happily on the ST with either a single or double drive system, trouble we have right now is getting an st formatted disk.

[striderhiro]

YOU ARE THE MAN!! ill email you today, i cannot PM yet as im new to the forum!

its a built in floppy drive, Ive read the article on here and tried following it and it just doesn't seem to work for me, i keep getting an error message, something to do with track 0.

if you could possibly post a disk with xlr8 on it i would happily pay you for this!!! that's all I need to get going really =)

few more n00b questions, once I've started making chiptunes, where can i save the files? am I right in saying the atari has no built in hard drive?

[striderhiro]

quick update, I've managed to find a guy on ebay who is selling me fastcopy annnnnd the tracker on two floppys.

im on my way!!

right, for when fastcopy arrives, how do i run the program and format a floppy? surely fastcopy needs to run from a floppy? is this where i need a second floppy drive?

sorry about all this, the atari is a very different beast compared to these modern machines.

[mal7921]

Hi, sorry for the delay on this, did fast copy arrive and is everything ok? I've been a bit sidetracked and busy but will get some stuff sent out next week.