Can this Amiga guy fix this Atari STE

44 thoughts on “Can this Amiga guy fix this Atari STE”

• You do make one mistake, TOS is the part of the OS that contains the main basic functionality of the system but the desktop is called GEM. So when you closed the game with the asterisk key you were returning to GEM not TOS.

• I still am an Amiga guy and look at the Atari line as an attempt to beat the Amiga to the 16 bit era with a lesser and compromised machine.

  I was going to suggest using ring connectors for attaching to the power supply heat sink to avoid future solder joint crackingsepartion.

  I have found the blue topped Gorilla glue superglue to be very good if you are interested. Sets with seconds and is similar to superglue of the 90s and has the strong vapours.

• Cooler than amiga? Maybe his accent threw me. I know he didn't say that. Or maybe he was brainwashed. Poor guy.

• Atari, nah, never try to repaire this… 🙂

• Awesome vid m8, how do I contact you about repairing 2 x A2000 motherboards?

• Lol love the thumbnail

• why cant he fixit , bith are electronics, title is rubbish

• Interesting. Always used monochrome HiRez Mode; never tried running any games on it. Color output looks horrid at such low resolution and huge icon/text size. OEM Ext HDD was clunky, but it worked fine back in early 1980's, decades before the GoTek and SSD solutions. BiaB was the MIDI play toy a few years later. There was a non-polarized cap in the B&W monitor vertical circuit that required frequent replacement. Good times! Thanks for this repair blast from the past video!

• For some reason the comment I wrote when this was released was never posted so here goes: I don't know about DIY hard drive solutions but in the Atari ST Sales group on facebook there's a guy from Luxembourg who sells a cheap hard drive solution which uses micro SD cards and it has an option for an RTC. So it's an alternative to the UltraSatan. I might get an UltraSatan too for my Atari 1040 STf but I'm good as is. My however has a faulty floppy drive so I need to figure that out. I also need to get the soldering iron out and upgrade the RAM to 4 MB. And finally, I also need a ROM upgrade, so for the STf(m) version 1.04 is the optimal version IIRC. As for all those partitions, I think that's down to the games and I also think that some other games complain if the partition is larger than 128 MB. So worth keeping an eye out for. I would love to get an STe too for those enhancements even if they're not really being used except for those demos.

  It was good seeing Dave on the channel. Although as usual, Dot steals the show. 🙂

  EDIT: Also, The Secret of Monkey Island on the ST sounds not too dissimilar to the Tandy 1000 version. But the 2149 and TI SN76489 are quite similar chips.

• Nice video and good job!

• Oh interesting video! Never seen Atari in action, never seen a motherboard! This is just nice video about it! It is interesting computer, nice chips on motherboard! Sound in game Secret of monkey island is better on Amiga 500!

• Cat spotted at @2:40!

• The best thing for it is to throw it in the bin after removing the CPU to use in a better computer. 😜

• Nice to see you getting to grips with the STE! I had one as a kid and it's a bit of a bittersweet machine really. So capable and competitively priced but too little too late and with next to no developer support. Pretty much sums up all of Tramiel-era Atari, unfortunately. I can highly recommend the modern STE native port of Wolfenstein 3D – incredible to think what could have been!

• Also an Amiga guy here. I got a 4MB Atari 1040 STe a few years back and it's quite a good machine. Star Dust for the STe is almost identical to the Amiga version. Still though, the ST highlight for me is FTL's remarkable game Oids.

• Originally there were more differences between the 1040 and 520stfm. The 1040 had a double sided disk drive and the 520 single sided. As introduced the 1040 had no tv modulator and was the 1040stf

• Shame you didn't try the hi-rez mode. You had the software, you had the dongle, and yet you missed out…
  You even could have discovered that The Secret of Monkey Island also worked in hi-rez mode too.

• Y'know.. I saw you touching it in this video.. you'll need to wash your hands thoroughly after touching it. The crying and scrubbing yourself whilst rocking violently in the corner of the shower is … well.. all perfectly normal Atari owner behavior. (Just sayin..)

• I liked the zak MacKraken game

• The MMU chip inside must have reseated in shipping.

• Great job Glen!!!!

• Just love the intro Glen😂

• There was something wierd going on with TOS version numbers. There were only five 1.x versions released – 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, and 1.62. However, TOS 1.2 was sometimes presented as TOS 1.02, 1.4 sometimes presented as 1.04 etc. I always assumed there was some kind of BCD encoding with two bytes issue where for some reason with 1.2 was encoded as 01 and 02, and sometimes the leading zero of 02 was displayed but sometimes not, then when they got to 1.62 it only fitted as 01 62 so there was no leading zero to (sometimes) display. Anyway, TOS 1.06 = TOS 1.6 which was the first STE version of TOS IIRC, and the difference between 1.6 and 1.62 are bug fixes. There's a program STE_FIX.PRG you could get to patch the bugs in 1.6 at a fairly small cost (I guess some RAM to store the patched ROM functions, plus the time to run the program). TOS versions 2.02, 2.04 and 2.05 (I assume also presented as 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5 though I don't know for sure) were released for Mega STEs, but also still worked for basic STEs and I think STFMs, but I don't think they were widely used other than for those quite rare Mega STEs – maybe there are some software compatibility issues?

• Yup, another video enjoyed Glen!

• Great video and repair! I think the harddisk connector normally doesn't have a plastic cover like you glued in there. At least my STE doesn't have one either. The problem is that the pins of this "self made" adapter for the Ultrasatan are thicker than on normal DB connectors. That can cause the issue you showed in the video with bend back pins. My Ultrasatan-Mini uses the same pins and I also have to be very careful putting it in!
  According TOS: V2.06 (the latest) is the most comfortable when using GEM-Desktop. In the configuration you showed in the video, you don't have to close and then re-open the window from another drive, just press Control plus the drive letter and the new drive opens in the same window! Or like with the Amiga you could put (links of) programs directly onto the Desktop etc. Only for compatibility reasons with very few demos and games I also have TOS 1.62 in my machine, switchable (Dual-TOS)!

• I think the best looking ST is the original with the external power supply and disk drive.

• The STe is wonderfull. if you want to see more what it can do we did a few demos for it as well. just search for example DHS Cernit Trandafir.

• Great video. As an Amiga user I've never see the insides of an STe… so it was very informative. Is there a specific reason why you don't seem to clean up the flux residue after soldering?

• This is now an Atari ST channel. Congrats! /|

• Loved the video, nice to see Dave from This Week in Retro imparting his Atari knowlage 😊… makes me want to find an ST!

• So many thanks to you Glen for agreeing to look at my beloved ST! I've got so used to referring to the machine as a "1040", since that model was the minimum for running Steinberg's Pro24 or Cubase MIDI sequencers. I have had issues with the UltraSatan in the past, so extra thanks for spotting the issue with the ACSI port. My thanks also to Dave – even though I've been using an ST since the 1980s I learned a few things from his expert advice in this video.
  I had originally considered including a full set of the books about the Atari ST that were published by Abacus in the parcel, but sadly the shipping cost would have been astronomical. Those books, particularly the one that describes the internals of the ST and how to communicate with them, helped kick start my programming career. That's why that first partition on the UltraSatan also includes Lattice C compiler and possibly the DevPac assembler, which were my gateway to more than just typing in BASIC programs from magazine listings.

• Have 520 STEs even existed? I thought there were only 1040 STE models.

• Desktop environment is called GEM. TOS is the operating system, GEM is the Graphical interface..
  No in the '90 it was also mainly just banter.. I had an ATARI collection starting with a 400.. A friend of mine had a Commodore/Amiga collection.. Basically the both of us where always finding points to "outdo" the other machine… Basically in the end we decided that we both had the computer that was the best at what we used it for.. I'm a musician, he's a graphical designer…

• Ugh.. chopping up a case for a gotek…. Never understand that.

• there are keyboard shortcuts to move the mouse in the GEM os. You can hold Alternate and use the arrow keys to move the pointer, Holding shift either makes it move quicker or slower (I forget which way around). Ins will do the mouse click, I think home is right click.

  The Amiga has a similar combination too for workbench, I know the shift key is the opposite to the Atari. You hold the left Amiga key and use the arrow keys. I think left alt is left click (while holding the amiga key)

  For years as a kid I use the keys on both machines (since I didn't have a working mouse). Can't remember how I came about knowing this.

• I still love happy hardcore and listen to it a lot! A shame they don't make much music like that anymore.

• My only enemies back in the 80s was the Atari owners!

• "I suppose it has a certain amount of… charm" ;-))))

• Take a look at the 'sea of colour' demo. That's another great looking and sounding STE demo!

• I have three STs in various guises. As an Amiga owner first, I know how hard it not to be bias. Still, can't say I've had the urge to repair one yet… 😆

• Привет! Некоторые квадратные чипы имеют плохой контакт. Иногда, когда случается, что атари не стартует помогает просто надавить на чип или вытащить и вставить на место.

• The cartridge is the copy protection dongle of Steinburg Pro 24 midi sequencer software

• The capacitors in the PSU all look to be cooked, and the diode leg – soldered onto aluminium? Perhaps spotwelded, but either way, a terrible idea 😀

• Define fix? put it in a skip bin? then sure go ahead, fix it

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