Another small delivery today. Since I only had a few zip disks I figured it would be best to have a little bit of stock. They seem pretty easy to obtain still at the moment but the same could be said about 720k Double Density floppy disks a few years back and now they are a pig to get hold of (luckily I purchased 5 sealed boxes of those a while back too)
So here we have 13 zip 100 disks, a few of them used, some “new” and some still sealed in their plastic wrapper. Should keep me going for a while!
The Atari ST has been on obvious omission from my collection for a while and it was time to address that issue. I’ve been looking around for one for some time but wasn’t really in any rush as I don’t have a space to set it up at the moment and building a new display unit has been delayed due to covid (Wickes for some reason have stopped selling oak effect wood at the moment).
But over the weekend I saw an auction for an ST on eBay with no bids. The photos looked ok but the description was simply “Powers on, mouse works” not exactly the greatest of adverts. The seller also only had a feedback rating of 3 so I guess this put most people off. However, the item didn’t say it was un-tested or spares or repair or anything so I figured it was worth a shot and the buyer protection would almost certainly cover me if it was a lemon.
So £78+p&p later, the guy sent it our via parcel force and today I took ownership of a good condition fully working (including the floppy drive) Atari 520STFM.
So what are the next steps? It needs a good clean and the case is a bit discoloured so it will be going for a hydrogen peroxide bath within the next week or so.
I have also ordered another gotek drive to flash with the flashfloppy software so I can load the software from USB pen drive rather than having to deal with floppy disks all the time.
I will document these processes when I do them so if you want to see how it works out, be sure to subscribe for email notifications 🙂
So since having the Iomega Zip drive I’ve had one missing component. A PC with a parallel port! Nothing modern comes with them anymore and it appears that PCI-E parallel cards just don’t like the Zip Drive. I have tried running VM’s etc but no matter what I did I couldn’t get it working.
I did have one hope, and that is an old Shuttle XPC computer I have running an AMD Sempron processor. This PC is my Retro PC which I keep around since it has a floppy drive too. Unfortunatly although the motherboard does have a parallel port, it was an optional extra connector which can no longer be purchased. Looking inside it looks like an IDC connector but has a smaller pin pitch. After much browsing on eBay I found a Lenovo PC which seemed to use the same connecter so I gave it a shot.
And the result is!!!
IT WORKS 🙂
Now I can get on and stick all my Atari Portfolio software onto a zip disk rather than having to send it across serial cables!
If you want to keep informed about what retro related stuff I am buying or playing with then I have added the option to subscribe for e-mail alerts.
With these enabled any time I add new content to the site you will get an e-mail alert letting you know whats going on so you can come back and check it out 🙂
Simply enter your name and email into the widget and you will recieve a message to confirm your address. Then just sit back and wait for me to spend some more money 🙂
Note: Subscription option should not be used by my wife for monitoring how much I spend on retro goodness each month!
So I remember wanting one of these so badly when I was younger but couldn’t afford it. I am fully aware now that the game is most likely terrible, but the advert at the time was awesome!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqfv4f-G-Ro
Anyway someone offered me one of them fully boxed and complete so I just couldn’t resist. It’s finally time to discover how bad (or good?) the game actually is 🙂
It’s 1994 and I am fed up splitting files across 1.44mb floppy disks to transfer them between PCs. There has to be a better way?
Well here it is! The Iomega ZIP drive. 100MB of storage on a single disk!
Now I never had one of these back in the day as they cost a fair amount of money and I don’t think the media was that cheap either. But I just picked this one up for £15 so that seems a bit more reasonable to me 🙂
The best thing is during the facebook conversation somone annouced that these drives could be made to work with the Atari Portfolio too!! (Thanks Gavin). So with a bit of configuration I can get the entire portfolio of Portfolio software (see what I did there?) onto a single ZIP disk.
I am going to do a write up of this process soon and will add it to the modifications section when it is done. I may do a little video about it soon too.
I have just added the first page under the modifications section of the site. I hope to fill this section with guides about how to do some of the hardware modifications I have done to the consoles and computers in my collection.
My first guide is the menu system I created using a Raspberry Pi to program the Jaguar Skunkboard flash ROM cartridge.
I backed this little (and I do mean little!) device on Kickstarter a while back and today they delivered!
This small hand held measures just 4.5×4.5×1.5 cm and yet still manages to emulate systems up to and including the orignal Playstation.
Now this is obviously not going to be your main emualtion device but its a really cute thing to have attached to your keyring for those times times when you’re sat in a clothes shop waiting for the wife to try on everything in the store 😛
More information can be found here and pre-orders are now live.
