One more geeky pic, and that's it for now...
This is the cleaned up motherboard. I have now replaced some, but not all, of the metal shielding. Certainly on the PSU for saftey, and also as the fan is required to cool the PSU on this model. I tried it without for a couple of mins and it gets HOT unlike the old STe, which is totally silent.
Its a bit annoying that the fans on this machine, are VERY loud. I decided that the hard drive fan (on the right) is not currently required, and I have ordered for about £2 some ultra quiet ones from our friends in China. 20 year old fans are not good! As a matter of fact, neither is a 20 year old hard drive. The Atari is fine, and boots from ROM into its 512k operating system, but I need to replace the drive with something that is perhaps less used mechanically for data safety, that plus it sounds like a jet engine. Options are CF Card, ZIP Drive or newer (less used) SCSI drive with a higher capacity. I have archived the old software from it and will post it up later. Ta for now
Monday, 21 March 2011
The gubbins bits
Some industrial alcohol and many cotton buds later! (",)
This is what cotton ear buds, and isopropyl alcohol can do for you. That is if you decide to try and restore a 20 year old plastic 32bit super computer made by a company made famous for games consoles. Unfortunately I did not find an Atari ATW Transputer workstation, but the next best thing... A stock Atari TT030 workstation, 32bit Motorolla 68030 CPU with MC68881 math co-processor and a Mega ST4 side by side. Also in the heap... An external whopping 40MB Ladbroke Computing hard drive (under metal shielding in centre) and a plotter (more on this later!!!). The MEGA ST has been used mainly for CAD (Computer Aided Design) with an Atari SM124 hi res monitor attached, and the external drive powering the plotter and as you can see, both have been subject to my screwdriver. The TT case should be light gray, but I will deal with this with some home made oxidising agent later on. First to get it running and see what this baby can do... Oh, i forgot to mention, under the TT, an Akai s2800 hardware sampler. Like the one used by The Prodigy!
So this is what it looked like when I got it!!
Hmmm. A bit of a dirty machine!! Been stuck in a factory powering a CNC machine. A factory run by Atari's, I hear you say? Yes indeedy (",)
But its a bit bloody dirty. When I turned it on, the fans (2 in back) were wedged tight with muck and its like that stuff you get in your belly button, but much more compact. Some sticky bits too!
2GB Barracuda ST32550W SCSI hard disk
This will replace the old 40MB hard disk (thats enough room for 40 floppy disks) with a whopping 2Gigabyte of storage!!
Funnily enough, the original drive from 1991 would have cost easily £1000 alone for a 40MB drive back in the day! (",)
The whopping 2GB unit is from a Sun SparcStation, and cost me around £10. This will provide ideal storage capacity and more than enough for a system where software is not "bloated" like modern windows software and programs are often written in assembly or pure C, i.e. An entire OS (Operating System) that can run a windowed filing system and SCSI hard disks, graphics and applications that is less than 256k in size!! (note that is one four thousanth of a Gigabyte. And windows typically takes up to 20 Gigabytes of space up on your hard disk!!)
This SCSI drive was good enough for Sun, so it should be good enough in a 1991 super computer made by Atari
I just picked up some COOL hardware!
These are beautiful old machines, and I used to use an Atari STe happily for may years. I intend to refurbish these machines, and put them to use, in a fabulous music studio of yesteryear. I have no doubt that these machines will be IDEAL for making current music and sounds, as they are still (some say) the best in the business, and I intend to find out what Fatboy Slim, The Orb, Moby, Queen, and all those old bands from the late 80's and 90's were raving about. Yeah they used this shizzle, and I've got an Akai S2800 to boot, which is going to pile out some crazy sounds once this lot is up and running again!!