My name is Remon.
"Write more than a few lines about yourself" ... I'm not much of a talker, but I'll try.
First of; I live in the Netherlands, single with two cats, approaching my 50s and Covid (2019) brought to me a revival in Retro. What else to do when not (or barely) able to leave the house. Not just Retro, also Keebs. And not to mention hunting for Playing cards (both Poker and Canasta).
Let's start there. I have bout 300 unique sets of playing cards. Why? Well... It just happened. so; Why not
Enough about that, we're here to talk Retro.
So keebs then
I have 24 mechanical keyboards atm, 14 of which are Keychron K8 Pro. (Again; one could ask "why", but... just don't). Of course they are all unique. Switches, Keycaps, Stabilisers, different lubes, different padding/foam combinations. Each is a unique experience. My daily driver is a Meletrix Zoom 75. Wait ... That's not retro either ...(Now the good stuff)
I grew up in a Commodore household. (We got an MSX first, but it refused to load any software, so back it went and a C64c was in). Over the years we collected a few breadbins, a C128D and accessories. None of that survived. In the end they all broke and not knowing what a great hobby it would become 30 years later, we got rid of everything. (yes, yes, I know...)
So when I saw a Marktplaats ad for a fully recapped, retrobrighted and upgraded (cooling wise) C64c, I had to re-live that high. Got myself a ton of extra's in the first month (SD2IEC, Test harnesses, Power Cart, Final Cart 3, EasyFlash, and litteraly a dozen more.) Built myself a Pi 1541.
Yes, that is fun, but I craved more. So I started to collect more.
Long story short, I now have 5 perfectly working C64s, 4 1541's in excellent condition after repairs and calibrations, a 1541-II, 1571, 1581, all in original and perfect condition (with JiffyDOS added), and a Commodore Amiga 500 with 1084S-p1 and an Amiga 1200. The 500 needs a new case, but the rest is A+ grade.
Oh, wait... This is an Atari forum ... My bad.
What did Jack Tramiel do when he went from Commodore to Atari? He (as far as I know) spearheaded the Atari ST. (So does that make the ST a commodore machine??
sorry, joking. JOKING. Don't kick me out )A coworker of mine wanted to get rid of her ST and put it in the office as decoration. When our company went under, due to decline of work (thank you covid. ... not...) she said; you can have it.
It was stored in my closet till about a week ago. Vacation plans; Repair Retro.
So the ST got on the bench. A thorough inspection, a good clean and, well, now I have a great working 1040 STFM. But, the SM124 monitor didn't work. No image... (So how do I know the Atari is good? well, I planned ahead and got a DIN13 cable, hacked it up and now I have a Atari to RGBS/VGA (dual connector) with audio cable and It's working just fine on the 1084S as well as VGA via an Extron RGB-HDMI 300 (though audio seems not to work there, while the 1084s does... need to fix that...)
Back to the monitor; my father has spent over 60 years as an electronics repair tech, so I asked his help and we measured all kinds of things, I even reworked the schematic for it as it was illegible, you can find in on my github, same username, and on Archive.org as well. In the end, after about 2 hours the SM124 fixed itself ... (yeah ...) and now the set is complete.
That's where we are today.
Hopefully next week, I'll have a 4MB RAM upgrade (Thanks Mr Exxos, hopefully you'll ship soon
) and I also found a programmable cartridge (Sidecartridge) that looks fancy. Don't know if it's any good, but hey, gotta start somewhere. Oh and also a ROM emulator is underway... I could have just burnt 2 1MB ROMs with Rainbow TOS, but I like to over-do stuff.Well, there we are ...
Want to know more (can't imagine what or why ...); just ask
Oh, two questions... And I'll probably make a forum topic for it, if it's not already there;
1. What is the deal with all the disk formats.
360K, 720K, 400K, 405K, 800K, 810K, 880K...
This is the size of .st files I found, and when trying to write to disk with my GreaseWeazle build... WAIT, I didn't tell you; I'm heavily into electronics and 3D Printing ... You can find my junk on Thingiverse
(not all of it)... Getting sidetracked again ...Yes, .st files. (Focus, Remon, FOCUS)
GreaseWeazle has
atarist.360
atarist.400
atarist.440
atarist.720
atarist.800
atarist.880
So... Those 405K, 410K and 810K images ... with what profile should I write them? Spoiler alert; what I tried failed...
Out of 7 st files I tried, only 1 works perfectly, a 720K disk image with the atarist.720 profile ...
Any advise on writing images is welcome.
(This is one of the reasons I went for the SidecarT, so I can emulate the disks and have the cartridge sort it out, for now.)
2. My first security question on the forum was; "what do you not want to happen to your retro computer ? (HINT - Amiga accelerator creator)"
Well, there's a million answers to that, but "Blow up" was not correct. Curious to know the answer, because this question got be baffled.
(And I didn't get it back, the second try. Apparently the "F" in STFM does NOT stand for 'Floppy drive', which I am quite certain it does, but probably 'Floppydrive' or just 'Floppy' ...
Anyway, Love to read about thew happened to the Amiga accelerator creator his retro computer.
- Short circuit?
- Melt down?
- Explode?
- Yellow?
- Get stolen?
- Run over by a jeep?
- Trampled on by a herd of flocking Gallimimi...
Good Lord, look at the time... Gotta run, bye!
Remon.
