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I recently got my hands on an Atari 1040 STE from the early 90s. It luckily is in a very good (I would even say “mint”) condition and came with a monochrome screen and an additional harddisk. In this blog-post I want to give you a little idea about how this thing works and what you can do with it.
Setting up the Atari could not be easier. All you need is a mouse, the screen and some power cables.
TODO Bild Anschluss Bildschirm
Booting the device works with or without a floppy disk, however in the documentation it is recommended to use the “Atari Language Disk” to get basic capabilities for writing BASIC code. When booting the Atari will automatically execute all applications that are located in the “AUTO” directory of the disk.
The operating system that was present on my device is TOS (probably in a rather old version).
The Atari I have has a floppy drive that only works with double-density 3.5’ floppy-disks. They have a maximum capacity of 720 KB (or a bit more for not “DOS” formatted disks). The not-so-nice part of that is, that a cheap USB-to-Floppy drive won’t recognize these disks (at least the one I have only reads and writes HD floppies). So I had to use an old Windows98 PC (with a “real” floppy drive) to actually put files on floppies for use in the Atari. I had to do so for the ADHI drivers, which I didn’t have a disk for (see next section).
To use the hard-disk an additional driver is needed. There are multiple drivers available, but the one that is most commonly available is “ADHI” which was made by Atari Inc. itself. I am sure that the disk I got (with its whopping 48 MB of storage) had an old parition on it, but ADHI and other drivers I tried could not detect the partition. So I had to re-format the drive using the HDX.prg utility that comes with the ADHI disk. After a reset the harddrive is available as drive “C” on the desktop. To have the disk available at boot the ADHI disk has to be present in the floppy drive. To make the harddrive itself bootable, the mxinstall.prg utility can be used. This utility makes the harddrive bootable and puts the harddisk driver in the AUTO directory on the harddrive, so that the driver is loaded on boot-time.
I got lucky enough that I have access to quite a set of software disks that I got together with the Atari itself.
The most important tool for productivity is, in my opinion, Harlekin. The version I have is Harlekin III, a software suite that has many nice “productivity” features:
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