hi, sent you a email with some link. Also your Mega is missing the BLiTTER. As first try to re-seat both squared PLCC chips, they do sometimes jump out of the socket during the transport. The GLUE is above the RAM chips close to PSU and the MMU is under the ROM chips. Yes, ST had more "custom chips" then Amiga....
Love these videos Neil, thanks! Amazing detective work on recovering those files, and what a find! When I graduated from my C64, I couldn't afford an Amiga, so went for a 520 ST, but always looked enviously at the Mega line! I really enjoyed the 520, with the crisp high-res output on the mono monitor or gaming on my TV. Rainbird in particular made some amazing games, I fondly remember Carrier Command... I actually wrote my third year project at University in C++ on my 520 ST to model a Lorenzian waterwheel! A chaotic model which bifurcates. Fun times! When i started at PCW magazine I became obsessed with SCSI, but some of those drives sounded like a cross between a chainsaw and an F14 at the start of Top Gun.
This is probably the best video ever. I can’t wait to see what is found. As a software developer I am always amazed at what was accomplished by old school (it doesn’t seem that long ago but I guess it is) developers, true magic.
14:30 - The moment when you realise that you can actually *see* the progress of the last 35+ years: A 64GB SD card next to a 49 MB Hard Drive... not only is the size just a tiny fraction, but its capacity is more than 1000x higher. And while the hard disk itself probably was around 800 Euro in today's money, the SD Card is less than 15 Euro. Mindboggling, if you think about that. Thank you for these videos. I was an Amiga fanboy back then, but I love what you do in order to preserve "ancient" IT history!
I did work experience in a building with a cray supercomputer I've often wondered how large it's storage was. plus the giant room full of magnetic tapes
Indeed. My thought went to using the Pi as the disc access controller. Easily capable of replicating the entire machines functions either 1000's of times faster or 100"s of instances at the same speed. All from something that costs less than a chocolate bar today.
yeah but if you put the progress of past 10 years against the progress of 10 years before that, to 10 years before that, it starts to look like a downer for progress.
Wow, what a blast. I worked for years at Probe Software with Fergus, and later HotGen, and I did the PC version of Terminator 2 The Arcade Game at Probe.
Thanks Neil! I always look forward to your vids, since they are so well researched and explained. You always seem to find new stuff to share with us, which is such a joy. I hope to be able to visit the cave some day and get the full experience of your impressive collection. Thanks from Denmark 👍🏻😃
Just got my STGA card and ET4000 on my mega, I built a TF 536 for it as well. A few months ago i made a SCSI tower with CD and zip drives for it. Now I'm working on an MP3 player and ethernet.
Fantastic! Great work on getting the data off that old scsi disk and how cool is it that you managed to restore all the deleted files too (the really interesting stuff!!!). Really looking forward to part 2. Well done you ;)
I recently had to get a drive working by taking lid off and spin the spindle and nudge the arm. Was a last ditch attempt and it worked! Drive was a 2007 era sata drive so nothing like the old scuzzi, but still, mech drives can be robust when they want to be! 😄
Wow! Always nice to see the ST get some love....and what a reason to plan a visit in the future and see it in the flesh (or should that be 'in the silicon').
amazing video. i hope you can get the system up and maybe even find a way to release the game. btw: what always works for me for old stuck hard drives is a a small hammer with rubber knobs, the ones doctors used to test your knee reflexes. just never hit the top plate of the old hdd, always hit the left or right side!
I wiped the rest of the board, but left that list on purpose - it is “that time” after all - well spotted. My Mums phone number is also on the Atari box, I buried that in the boot sector of Gauntlet 2 around the same time as I took out my pension.😅
Seeing mr Ritenour in the ad ( 2:13 ) brought memories… I used the Mega ST for music (work) and DTP (hobby) in 1987-88. We had used Gerhard Lengeling’s C-64 sequencer prior to this, and the move to Creator / Notator was epic! As a “real grownup” (at 22, sure…), those efforts landed me an in-house engineering position the year after. SSL desk, Studer A-80’s and… an Atari ST that stuck with me until late 1994. New era was coming, we’d soon start stuffing digital audio in the box as well as MIDI. By y2k the transition was over - we’re still in the box, I guess…😅
I've never had the privilege of even seeing an Atari computer let alone play with one. Something to add to my list of things to do. 😎 EDIT: I did use GEM Desktop on my Amstrad PC1512, so I guess I had a taste of what some of it may have been like ;)
You should re-test the 12V output with the power supply connected. Without proper loading on the 5V output, 12V output may drop. This is an effect of the supply only regulating the 5V output whilst the 12V output goes along for the ride. As more current is run through the transformer's primary to satisfy 5V load, the 12V secondary's voltage will go up.
Third Coast Technologies hard drives, I had one of those, it looked almost identical. They were based at Standish just outside Wigan. A friend was working for Wayne Smithson and they used PDS but didn't have PDS at home so they made up something similar where you wrote on one machine and sent it to the other. If your code crashed, you didn't have to boot your source machine. I still use that today, I can even assemble on my ST and send it to an Amiga (well if I could find the Amiga floppy disk that had the loader).
Fantastic video Neil, and I'm so pleased to see that Ramrod is close to being saved now. Many of us grew up seeing the screenshots in magazines back in the day. If you need any more information about the development and why it was cancelled, we have a page up on the Games That Weren't site with some tidbits from Richard. He had a few floppy disks with some builds of it that needed preserving (ST wise) - but had lost one of them for the Amiga build. May not be needed now due to the source code being recovered :)
Here's a trick for dealing with spindle 'stiction' as it was officially called in the early 90s: Hold the drive firmly and give it a quick rotating flick around the spindle's axis so that the spindle mostly stays put thanks to lack of momentum, and you rotate the housing around the spindle as the bearings turn. A 90 degree flick (ideally in the direction of rotation) as you power the drive up is usually enough to start it spinning.
I had a FAST harddrive which used an ICD ACSI-SCSI adapter, also used a Seagate 5.25" harddrive (60MB in my case). They were notorious for suffering from "sticktion" where the bearing oil solidified.
I have several MEGA computers, got a job lot a zillion years ago from a school that was upgrading and kept a few, and this is the first time i've ever seen one with shielding :D
Miraculous finding a never released game on be hard drive (after a bit of biffo). I had a Mega STE 2MB with a hard drive as my final Dev and workstation. Not that I ever finished any ST games, but I definitely wrote my first book and ran a magazine using one :)
As an ex-Amiga owner (and fan boy) is refurbing the ST going to be a Trash to Trash episode? 🙂 Only joking... I love all your content and especially the rebuilds and refurbs irrespective of what the machine/computer is. I'm just glad that you resurrect so much of this old tech and get it working again.
@@davidrenton Ha ha - well shortly after buying my first A500, I bought the cheapest (Casio?) keyboard I could which had a midi port (think it was from a local Dixons?) with the intention of then buying a midi adaptor. Though for some reason I never did. 😞 However, I then discovered Aegis Sonix, which was a great tool for making music (albeit with samples and chip tunes.)
@@fredsmith1970 to be fair, had an Atari ST, never used the MIDI port, but by jolly i will use it to lord over you Amiga people, ah wait i got 20 free games with it inc buggy boy , so the Atari had that as well i mean faster cpu, graphics, better OS is ok, but not better than buggy boy ST wins :)
I had a MegaST2 and a MegaFile 60 - absolute luxury at the time. Also fun to see Andy Green's name on the email - I know many of the ex-Gremlin guys (the ones form Derby, from Gremlin to Core and beyond), and worked with Rob, Chris, and Andy here in California for a decade, so I know Andy very well. He's back in the UK now retired and living on a narrowboat somewhere.
The hard drive almost certainly had stiction where the heads stick to the platter if it's left for too long without use. On many drives of that era the motor flywheel was actually outside the case at the bottom and could be seen in the gap between the bottom of the case and the PCB - on those you could use a small screw driver inserted from the back between the PCB and the bottom of the chassis to gently turn the platter via the exposed flywheel to break the stiction, then just plug it in and power it on. My first PC was a cobbled together 286 made from old parts and one of the hard drives (full height 3.5" 20MB) had stiction and would need this doing every few days to get it going again let alone if it was left for months or years...
thats the fun with devkit hard drives, devs rarely did anything to actually get rid of the files after the last job was done, delete or factory reset sure, but in most cases that really doenst do anything if no one does anything with the machine ever again, i got lucky with an xbox, it had been factory reset but it fell into the hands of a display/shelf collector who proceeded to do nothing wiht it for the next twenty ish years and i was able to pull an intact game build off of it.
I have an Atari Proline ASCI hard drive set up for an Atari ST, the power supply, control card and fan all work, the hard drive itself has the sticking on the bit that needs taping problem. 1. I want to rescue the data on the hard drive with Blue SCSI, I was using the Atari STE to DTP newsletters with digitised video still images for my moutainbike club in the late 1980's. 2. The hard drive case and components might be usable as a donation if the one you have isn't salvagable.
WOW ! Love the Blue SCSI Trick ! - I have one but never knew it could do that, I keep a Linux box with a 50 PIN SCSI Card and use dd to grab a disk image. I bought an Amiga A590 20Mb SCSI Drive from Ebay and was able to image it and send it to the seller along with a PC Amiga Emulator (It contained a lot of work his late father done in the 80s) so it is nice to be able to preserve the contents of these old disks. RE the BlueSCSI I found it transferred about 6 Mb/s on my 2000/060 (Blizzard 2060) but my SCSI2SD v6 transfers almost 9 Mb/s which is fast, but it is great to have these as good 50 PIN SCSI Drives are virtually non-existant
Man, I remember when Atari STs were only suitable for the "cupboard" in what is now the recreated shop 👅 On an entirely different note, why does "Hi" on the logic probe point towards the tip? Who the hell is going to be using the thing with the tip pointing up? A car mechanic who finds a logic board on the bottom of the engine?!
Don't judo chop such drives, just turn it fast in your hand to get the platters loose. Just hardened grease. You run the risk of "chopping" the heads onto the platters, bad times! Thanks for bringing these back from dead and sharing.
Very cool! Very much looking forwards to the software part, hopefully there are some secrets in there that can be shared. :) I find the choice of machine a bit weird though. If his focus was compiler performance, you'd think he'd go for a 68020-based Amiga 2000 back in '88. That'd run circles around this ST. Maybe he was tied to the ST for some reason, or maybe he just didn't like Amigas, haha. Either way, going to enjoy this series. I haven't seen much of the MegaST so a thorough restoration will be very fun! Cheers Neil.
You dont know much about HW, maybe thats why you had Amiga... 🤗 This MegaST had 16MHz 68000 with a cache, so it was plenty of fast compared to 68020 based A2000 for fraction of money. In fact if he would run 68000 16/32bit code, it would be faster then the A2000+CSA00992B 68020 card @14.3MHz. Also the keyboard on the Mega is one of the best keyboards of the era, way better then A2000 keyboard, very important for someone writing a lot of code.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Interesting. Not arguing with you just trying to understand. I don't see how a 68000 would be anywhere near a 68020 in performance, cache or not. The '020 card I checked ran at 28MHz too, not 14. The keyboard is definitely a valid opinion btw, I didn't think of that. :) Cost is obviously a concern too, sure. But he said it was the best thing available, and while I concur it's a great machine, I don't understand how it can be considered the fastest compiler available at the time.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Which is why I bought the Atari. Plus, at the time, in the UK. Atari’s were everywhere and we only had the Amiga A500 & A1000. I hated the Amiga’s OS too.
@@richardcostello7709 it is hard to explain to Amiga fanboys, even today after all those years. Look how they flagged my previous comment full of technical info. They still think that the one who bought ST over Amiga did it only since he could not afford the Amiga. Every ST owner I knew back then could afford A500, but chose ST due to fact that it was a better computer. Its hard to explain to die hard Amiga fan who does not understand the hardware and other use case scenarios then arcade games. The very bad GUI of WB1.x (which actually isnt even a full GUI) was not a problem for them, since they didnt even know what WB is, they loaded a game floppy and turned on the Amiga most of the time....
Not sure about the MST, but most of the Atari PSU like many older PSU have their feedback tied to 5V rail, and without any load on the 5V rail, switching is not reaching optimal modulation to provide 12V. MSTE PSU are even pulsing without load. It’s BY DESIGN, no-load test is NOT reliable on those. I’d recommend to tweak the VR201 Potentiometer to adjust 5V under load and test again. Trick: I have a blinker bulb as a load, thicker filament on 5V, thin filament on 12V. Perfect load, and immediate visual feedback!
Thanks for watching! If you enjoy what we do then please support the channel and the museum at patreon.com/rmcretro
Neil
hi, sent you a email with some link.
Also your Mega is missing the BLiTTER. As first try to re-seat both squared PLCC chips, they do sometimes jump out of the socket during the transport. The GLUE is above the RAM chips close to PSU and the MMU is under the ROM chips. Yes, ST had more "custom chips" then Amiga....
Finally, some more Atari ST love on the channel !!!!
I'm fascinated by this system. It was used for sequencing in a lot of early underground dance music.
@@rjonzun5828 According to wikipedia, Fatboy Slim used one, and Darude made Sandstorm on these machines.
Listen to that drive go!!!!! Such a nostalgic sound.
Love these videos Neil, thanks! Amazing detective work on recovering those files, and what a find! When I graduated from my C64, I couldn't afford an Amiga, so went for a 520 ST, but always looked enviously at the Mega line! I really enjoyed the 520, with the crisp high-res output on the mono monitor or gaming on my TV. Rainbird in particular made some amazing games, I fondly remember Carrier Command... I actually wrote my third year project at University in C++ on my 520 ST to model a Lorenzian waterwheel! A chaotic model which bifurcates. Fun times! When i started at PCW magazine I became obsessed with SCSI, but some of those drives sounded like a cross between a chainsaw and an F14 at the start of Top Gun.
This is probably the best video ever. I can’t wait to see what is found. As a software developer I am always amazed at what was accomplished by old school (it doesn’t seem that long ago but I guess it is) developers, true magic.
14:30 - The moment when you realise that you can actually *see* the progress of the last 35+ years: A 64GB SD card next to a 49 MB Hard Drive... not only is the size just a tiny fraction, but its capacity is more than 1000x higher. And while the hard disk itself probably was around 800 Euro in today's money, the SD Card is less than 15 Euro. Mindboggling, if you think about that.
Thank you for these videos. I was an Amiga fanboy back then, but I love what you do in order to preserve "ancient" IT history!
and how that is lost on a lot of people.
I did work experience in a building with a cray supercomputer I've often wondered how large it's storage was. plus the giant room full of magnetic tapes
Indeed. My thought went to using the Pi as the disc access controller. Easily capable of replicating the entire machines functions either 1000's of times faster or 100"s of instances at the same speed. All from something that costs less than a chocolate bar today.
yeah but if you put the progress of past 10 years against the progress of 10 years before that, to 10 years before that, it starts to look like a downer for progress.
@@dazaspc that's rather fancy chocolate bars if they're more expensive than a pi or even a pico
Wow, what a blast. I worked for years at Probe Software with Fergus, and later HotGen, and I did the PC version of Terminator 2 The Arcade Game at Probe.
Thanks Neil!
I always look forward to your vids, since they are so well researched and explained. You always seem to find new stuff to share with us, which is such a joy. I hope to be able to visit the cave some day and get the full experience of your impressive collection.
Thanks from Denmark 👍🏻😃
Thank you! I hope to see you some day 👍
This is amazing. PC HW and SW archaeology! The work of a true museum.
Just got my STGA card and ET4000 on my mega, I built a TF 536 for it as well. A few months ago i made a SCSI tower with CD and zip drives for it. Now I'm working on an MP3 player and ethernet.
Fantastic! Great work on getting the data off that old scsi disk and how cool is it that you managed to restore all the deleted files too (the really interesting stuff!!!). Really looking forward to part 2. Well done you ;)
Always cool to see the ST line getting some love, here
Fantastic, love to see some ST content having had one back in the day. The BlueSCSI thing looks like a really handy piece of kit.
"And there's a filthy fan!" I think we all dream of coming across one of those...ah reminds me of the groupies from my old band! ;-)
that is such a powermove of the bluscsi! I did not know this! I guess I know what to do the next weeks
The Judo Chop worked 🤣 amazing, 10/10, no notes ❤️
Gotta spank the naughty drive to make it work again
I recently had to get a drive working by taking lid off and spin the spindle and nudge the arm. Was a last ditch attempt and it worked! Drive was a 2007 era sata drive so nothing like the old scuzzi, but still, mech drives can be robust when they want to be! 😄
Excellent! Looking forward to the rest of the series. Getting all those files back was awesome!
Wow! Always nice to see the ST get some love....and what a reason to plan a visit in the future and see it in the flesh (or should that be 'in the silicon').
very interesting! Although Neil does seem to change into a chipmunk during the PCB Way segment at 4:08
That's what happens when you forget about the pointy logic probe in your pocket and you lean over the wrong way.
Another brilliant video. Can't wait to see part 2
Love this type of stuff. Great video. Wish I lived in the UK, I'd love to come to the cave.
Love any Atari ST content you can provide! Very neat how a Mega4 can push code to an attached Amiga, though it does seem a tad blasphemous.
amazing video. i hope you can get the system up and maybe even find a way to release the game.
btw: what always works for me for old stuck hard drives is a a small hammer with rubber knobs, the ones doctors used to test your knee reflexes. just never hit the top plate of the old hdd, always hit the left or right side!
Great find, esp. some very nice GFX too !!
Well done sir! I love doing the undelete as often as I can, sometimes there are treasure to be found.
The old guard is getting old but still going strong. Btw the third voice in his Todo list on the board is "pension" 😅
I wiped the rest of the board, but left that list on purpose - it is “that time” after all - well spotted. My Mums phone number is also on the Atari box, I buried that in the boot sector of Gauntlet 2 around the same time as I took out my pension.😅
Seeing mr Ritenour in the ad ( 2:13 ) brought memories… I used the Mega ST for music (work) and DTP (hobby) in 1987-88. We had used Gerhard Lengeling’s C-64 sequencer prior to this, and the move to Creator / Notator was epic!
As a “real grownup” (at 22, sure…), those efforts landed me an in-house engineering position the year after. SSL desk, Studer A-80’s and… an Atari ST that stuck with me until late 1994.
New era was coming, we’d soon start stuffing digital audio in the box as well as MIDI. By y2k the transition was over - we’re still in the box, I guess…😅
I've never had the privilege of even seeing an Atari computer let alone play with one. Something to add to my list of things to do. 😎
EDIT: I did use GEM Desktop on my Amstrad PC1512, so I guess I had a taste of what some of it may have been like ;)
neal you're a genius! finding all that stuff wow. i would have gave up!
This was fascinating. I love when old games and correspondence are found.
What an amazing episode! I look forwards to seeing the next one.
Awesome work Neil! Hoping we might be able to finally get to see Ramrod in action or at least get to marvel at the sprites and backgrounds! 😃
You should re-test the 12V output with the power supply connected. Without proper loading on the 5V output, 12V output may drop. This is an effect of the supply only regulating the 5V output whilst the 12V output goes along for the ride. As more current is run through the transformer's primary to satisfy 5V load, the 12V secondary's voltage will go up.
I had no Idea Primal Rage Released on the Amiga. You Live and Learn!
Third Coast Technologies hard drives, I had one of those, it looked almost identical. They were based at Standish just outside Wigan. A friend was working for Wayne Smithson and they used PDS but didn't have PDS at home so they made up something similar where you wrote on one machine and sent it to the other. If your code crashed, you didn't have to boot your source machine. I still use that today, I can even assemble on my ST and send it to an Amiga (well if I could find the Amiga floppy disk that had the loader).
This was so cool. Love this digital archaeology. :D
That is a very cool piece of kit.
Fascinating - looking forward to seeing more progress with this one!
This is fascinating! Thanks and good luck.
This is a fantastic video. Can't wait for further updates.
Fantastic video Neil, and I'm so pleased to see that Ramrod is close to being saved now. Many of us grew up seeing the screenshots in magazines back in the day. If you need any more information about the development and why it was cancelled, we have a page up on the Games That Weren't site with some tidbits from Richard.
He had a few floppy disks with some builds of it that needed preserving (ST wise) - but had lost one of them for the Amiga build. May not be needed now due to the source code being recovered :)
I’ve always had the source code for everything :-)
@@richardcostello7709 Ah apologies Richard - Had assumed that the sources were saved for the first time from your HD.
Here's a trick for dealing with spindle 'stiction' as it was officially called in the early 90s: Hold the drive firmly and give it a quick rotating flick around the spindle's axis so that the spindle mostly stays put thanks to lack of momentum, and you rotate the housing around the spindle as the bearings turn. A 90 degree flick (ideally in the direction of rotation) as you power the drive up is usually enough to start it spinning.
man wish i could afford a mega st lusted after one when i had an st as a kid.
The hot trick is something I really appreciate you for learning me this. 🤗
Heck yeah, treasure from a preservation angle! :D
And hmmmmm, Atari goodness!
The familiar sound of a seagate HDD spinning, on the smaller 3.5 Seagates of that era a tap on the side with a screwdriver often worked.
What a hidden treasure. This is the retro stuff we dream of doing.
I had a FAST harddrive which used an ICD ACSI-SCSI adapter, also used a Seagate 5.25" harddrive (60MB in my case). They were notorious for suffering from "sticktion" where the bearing oil solidified.
I have several MEGA computers, got a job lot a zillion years ago from a school that was upgrading and kept a few, and this is the first time i've ever seen one with shielding :D
@9:04 that stack of floppies is juuuuuuust hanging on there!
Miraculous finding a never released game on be hard drive (after a bit of biffo).
I had a Mega STE 2MB with a hard drive as my final Dev and workstation. Not that I ever finished any ST games, but I definitely wrote my first book and ran a magazine using one :)
As an ex-Amiga owner (and fan boy) is refurbing the ST going to be a Trash to Trash episode? 🙂
Only joking... I love all your content and especially the rebuilds and refurbs irrespective of what the machine/computer is. I'm just glad that you resurrect so much of this old tech and get it working again.
hows your MIDI :)
@@davidrenton Ha ha - well shortly after buying my first A500, I bought the cheapest (Casio?) keyboard I could which had a midi port (think it was from a local Dixons?) with the intention of then buying a midi adaptor. Though for some reason I never did. 😞
However, I then discovered Aegis Sonix, which was a great tool for making music (albeit with samples and chip tunes.)
@@fredsmith1970 to be fair, had an Atari ST, never used the MIDI port, but by jolly i will use it to lord over you Amiga people, ah wait i got 20 free games with it inc buggy boy , so the Atari had that as well
i mean faster cpu, graphics, better OS is ok, but not better than buggy boy
ST wins :)
@@davidrenton Touche!
Amigans and vegans. Every time.
Peter G. Neumann, somewhen in the 1990s in comp.risks: "Stiction? What is stiction? I think I need a stictionary!"
Amazing content! For so many reasons.
I had a Third Coast hard drive bay - they were the dogs gonads
I had a MegaST2 and a MegaFile 60 - absolute luxury at the time.
Also fun to see Andy Green's name on the email - I know many of the ex-Gremlin guys (the ones form Derby, from Gremlin to Core and beyond), and worked with Rob, Chris, and Andy here in California for a decade, so I know Andy very well. He's back in the UK now retired and living on a narrowboat somewhere.
Good ol' percussive maintenance!
Love these videos true restoration preservation AND narration ✌🏻
Ol' bit of percussive counselling never fails.
The hard drive almost certainly had stiction where the heads stick to the platter if it's left for too long without use. On many drives of that era the motor flywheel was actually outside the case at the bottom and could be seen in the gap between the bottom of the case and the PCB - on those you could use a small screw driver inserted from the back between the PCB and the bottom of the chassis to gently turn the platter via the exposed flywheel to break the stiction, then just plug it in and power it on.
My first PC was a cobbled together 286 made from old parts and one of the hard drives (full height 3.5" 20MB) had stiction and would need this doing every few days to get it going again let alone if it was left for months or years...
thats the fun with devkit hard drives, devs rarely did anything to actually get rid of the files after the last job was done, delete or factory reset sure, but in most cases that really doenst do anything if no one does anything with the machine ever again, i got lucky with an xbox, it had been factory reset but it fell into the hands of a display/shelf collector who proceeded to do nothing wiht it for the next twenty ish years and i was able to pull an intact game build off of it.
What a fantastic discovery!! :-D
I have an Atari Proline ASCI hard drive set up for an Atari ST, the power supply, control card and fan all work, the hard drive itself has the sticking on the bit that needs taping problem.
1. I want to rescue the data on the hard drive with Blue SCSI, I was using the Atari STE to DTP newsletters with digitised video still images for my moutainbike club in the late 1980's.
2. The hard drive case and components might be usable as a donation if the one you have isn't salvagable.
If this was a unrealsed Nintendo game the Ninja's would be round house kicking down the door...
Fantastic video!
Great video!
Lovely video, thank you. I wonder if there are many more lost dev systems to be found for the ST and Amiga in the wild?
Absolutely fantastic this.
I must dust off my Mega - although the only game I recall playing on it was Asteroids!
WOW ! Love the Blue SCSI Trick ! - I have one but never knew it could do that, I keep a Linux box with a 50 PIN SCSI Card and use dd to grab a disk image. I bought an Amiga A590 20Mb SCSI Drive from Ebay and was able to image it and send it to the seller along with a PC Amiga Emulator (It contained a lot of work his late father done in the 80s) so it is nice to be able to preserve the contents of these old disks. RE the BlueSCSI I found it transferred about 6 Mb/s on my 2000/060 (Blizzard 2060) but my SCSI2SD v6 transfers almost 9 Mb/s which is fast, but it is great to have these as good 50 PIN SCSI Drives are virtually non-existant
Be so cool to see a video on when it works and see him messing with it
Fantastic watch this ..thank you
Nice to see some Atari ST stuff
Man, I remember when Atari STs were only suitable for the "cupboard" in what is now the recreated shop 👅
On an entirely different note, why does "Hi" on the logic probe point towards the tip? Who the hell is going to be using the thing with the tip pointing up? A car mechanic who finds a logic board on the bottom of the engine?!
Judo chop's are actual magic!
I donated a Mega ST with monitor and HDD back to Neil many moons ago. Mine had none of the history though 😂
Very impressive getting deleted data off a dead drive and there maybe a new game to come out of it 👍👍
We had the same black hard drive bay cover with the green LED in our 286! 😀
I'm guessing PCB Way sell helium too by the sounds of it? ;-)
Down there next Saturday :)
what a treasure trove!! be nice if that game could be bought to life it looks cool from what i saw so far
I had an STFM and an STe. Bothe had the power supply built in. Unlike the Amiga A500.
Don't judo chop such drives, just turn it fast in your hand to get the platters loose. Just hardened grease. You run the risk of "chopping" the heads onto the platters, bad times! Thanks for bringing these back from dead and sharing.
I’ll remember that for next time thanks. Failing that a roundhouse kick?
This is all so cool
Sprite conversion by Gary Liddon!
That's so cool.
Shocked to see you work on another st 😅
Always makes my day, thanks dad❤
Was interesting to see Probe software mentioned. I wonder if the dos port of Mortal Kombat was derived from the Amiga code.
No it wasn’t.
@@richardcostello7709 Thank You!
Very cool! Very much looking forwards to the software part, hopefully there are some secrets in there that can be shared. :)
I find the choice of machine a bit weird though. If his focus was compiler performance, you'd think he'd go for a 68020-based Amiga 2000 back in '88. That'd run circles around this ST. Maybe he was tied to the ST for some reason, or maybe he just didn't like Amigas, haha.
Either way, going to enjoy this series. I haven't seen much of the MegaST so a thorough restoration will be very fun! Cheers Neil.
That would’ve cost significantly more. Plus the RAM was the most expensive part.
You dont know much about HW, maybe thats why you had Amiga... 🤗
This MegaST had 16MHz 68000 with a cache, so it was plenty of fast compared to 68020 based A2000 for fraction of money. In fact if he would run 68000 16/32bit code, it would be faster then the A2000+CSA00992B 68020 card @14.3MHz. Also the keyboard on the Mega is one of the best keyboards of the era, way better then A2000 keyboard, very important for someone writing a lot of code.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Interesting. Not arguing with you just trying to understand. I don't see how a 68000 would be anywhere near a 68020 in performance, cache or not. The '020 card I checked ran at 28MHz too, not 14.
The keyboard is definitely a valid opinion btw, I didn't think of that. :)
Cost is obviously a concern too, sure. But he said it was the best thing available, and while I concur it's a great machine, I don't understand how it can be considered the fastest compiler available at the time.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Which is why I bought the Atari. Plus, at the time, in the UK. Atari’s were everywhere and we only had the Amiga A500 & A1000. I hated the Amiga’s OS too.
@@richardcostello7709 it is hard to explain to Amiga fanboys, even today after all those years. Look how they flagged my previous comment full of technical info.
They still think that the one who bought ST over Amiga did it only since he could not afford the Amiga. Every ST owner I knew back then could afford A500, but chose ST due to fact that it was a better computer. Its hard to explain to die hard Amiga fan who does not understand the hardware and other use case scenarios then arcade games. The very bad GUI of WB1.x (which actually isnt even a full GUI) was not a problem for them, since they didnt even know what WB is, they loaded a game floppy and turned on the Amiga most of the time....
Wow, is that Sidewinder source code? I've been looking for that for many years!
No. Its one of the sub games from Ramrod (it has 4).
I have an ATARI PC. I have not turned it on in 20 years or more.
Very good vid! 🎉
Not sure about the MST, but most of the Atari PSU like many older PSU have their feedback tied to 5V rail, and without any load on the 5V rail, switching is not reaching optimal modulation to provide 12V. MSTE PSU are even pulsing without load. It’s BY DESIGN, no-load test is NOT reliable on those. I’d recommend to tweak the VR201 Potentiometer to adjust 5V under load and test again. Trick: I have a blinker bulb as a load, thicker filament on 5V, thin filament on 12V. Perfect load, and immediate visual feedback!
Y'all need to get a PlayStation 1 Dev Kit. And make PS1 style games. People love that generation and making games from that Generation would be huge.
I’m curious what the jumper wires on the board are for? Are they standard or do they enable something weird and wonderful?
Neil immediately donning the gloves for a dusty fan but more than happy to repeatedly dip bare fingers into battery compartment "juice" 😆
Juice on skin
That’s my thing
Dusty old fans
Cover those hands
Just as my teacher taught me
Ah of course, that handy old mnemonic! :D
Too many big games on Amiga suffered from being ported from the least common denominator: the Atari.
really great stuff
Wonderful! ❤
does this 68000 speedup circuit work on the amiga as well?