exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Reluctant16bitter wrote: 07 Aug 2025 14:36 BTW I had typed a much longer intro, but this forum seemed to think it was spam.

Hi all!

I appear to have bought an Atari STE. It was sold to me without any guarantees about whether it would even boot, and without any software, cables or mice.

Since I got my first computer, an MSX1 (MSX was big in the Netherlands), I’ve been upgrading to MSX2 in the early nineties and to MSX2 quite recently, and have been enjoying an enormous collection of 8-bit games and a great community that puts out new games and hardware faster than I can order them.

In other words, while the rest of the world got Amigas and Ataris for their birthday, I stuck to my MSX. Who'd need 16 bits anyway?

My father, who was a teacher and a musician, used an Atari STFM with a program called Notator Alpha, which looked really professional (because it was). I also liked the clean look of GEM, not to mention its busy bee mouse cursor. I knew there were games that were ported to that machine that weren’t available on my MSX, like Lemmings and Prince of Persia, but the Atari's monochrome monitor wouldn’t allow my brothers and me to play them and we knew nobody else with an Atari. So even if we had recognised the RF modulator for what it was, we probably wouldn’t have been able to obtain, and play, any games.

(Actually, I had one classmate with an Atari. But I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my father’s computer. Notator Alpha had this copy protection scheme that used a cartridge that needed to be inside the cartridge port for it to work. My classmate was trying to get me to lend him this cartridge, so that he could, as he told me, open it to see if he could make a copy of it. He promised me my father wouldn’t notice a thing.)

I do remember trying the BASIC that came with it, but it was too unstable. I also got GFA BASIC with some magazine's cover disk. That BASIC was not only stable, it also had an API to use the GEM's GUI elements. I don't remember anything I created using it, though.

Having ample experience with computers from the eighties, and, again, no guarantees from the seller whatsoever, I didn’t dare trying to boot my new STE when I received it last week. Instead, I opened it for an inspection and saw two ICs labelled TOS 2.06 (yay!) and a very original PSU that I decided to replace before even turning the thing on. So for now, I’m waiting for both a PSU from SidecarTridge and an RGB⟶SCART cable to arrive.

I hope it'll boot.