Im glad we got all this stuff before the reign of the mad emperors started, otherwise we might be stuck watching the methadone metronome being brainwashed into thinking the world is van maerlant totte kustze while stuck in a hole thats two streets wide where salems lot meets van hier tot nievekeirken ...

Might be the last time or one of the last times the addamses make it to France , the old man hasnt been getting younger fast lately id say so i thought if i risk this its best to do it now, there's at least a few spare metres in this dilapidated shack , b/c if i have to do this in the 3x2 borg cube thats full already im bound to break something

First childhood friend after the cats was a c64 but after that one broke i was allowed to buy one (with my own savings) and it was a second hand ST(f) from one of the old mans trader friends (not wall street ... it was just a regional hobby ... not dreughs, DREUGHS IS BAD! )

And afterwards (that one broke too) got a 1040 STE so the dream machine was first an STE with 4MB and a hard drive and later a Falcon, none ever got acquired, titties 'n beer arrived in life and computers went to the background ... got an Atari Jaguar while working nightshifts in Tupperware but when that broke bought a PC, a pentium 60 for what was then about 110% of my monthly wage at tupperware nightshift chaingang work after playing lots of a game called warlords 2 back then (i think that was bluebyte, not SSI but not sure) and also Panzer General and ofcourse DOOM on his old mans 486 PC (which THAT guy probably must have bought for over 100000 francs back then MAN that shit was expensive like nvidia GPUs back then)

SO, almost 40 years later, we already had a new old c64, best buy ever, a machine that looked like it got taken out of the box once, which we bought not b/c VICE isnt good enoug but because we wanted to write a little demo, which the kid always wanted, like LOOK THEY HAVE LINES OUTSIDE THE BORDERS and stuff, but never got further than some messing around in memory replacing sprites, scrolltext and sinetables with a KCS power cartridge in the monitor ... did a lot of BASIC though but there is no such thing as IT back then, i remember running away from high school to the state center where the guy almost bit my head off when i said i wanted to do computers instead , THATS FOR PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE A UNIVERSITY DEGREE WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU DROPOUT NOBODY ... and forced me into the Tupperware nightshift (at 90% the wage because i got a bootcamp (in putting boxes in bigger boxes) for 3 days which counted as education so they were allowed to pay me 10% less for their magnanimous benevolence in teaching me crucial job skills

government consultancy in the 90s ... hasnt changed much huh ?

o yea : we actually got the "realhw" c64 because the sid music sounded differently on VICE than it did in the tracker and when we checked it actually sounded differently in sidplayer as well soooo , Fast Tracker being one of our best memories on the P60 .. we kinda were like BUT HOW DOES IT SOUND and thats why when we saw the supersweet deal we bought it and no regrets there, the mister FPGA is the best allround gamebox ever, and one of our favourite machines but if you are an 80s kid and the c64 was your childhood friend ... the only thing missing next to the 9pin joystick with no lag is the sound of a 1541 going prrrt tzzz tik tik tik tik tik ...

and yea it sounds different on the real machine too but thing is back in the 80s we were playing (mostly) and programming (basic mostly) and hacking away with that KCS freezer on a hand-down 1970s mono tv via the RF connector and i HAVE TO SAY

that colour bleeding tubey goodness ???

cant find that anywhere ... not that we could afford it in today's today but HOW COME no one has picked up an old tube factory and is making tubes for those rich youtube basement nurds who actuallky never DID leave home ? but they do have sometimes 100000s of dollars, maybe up to a million worth of gear in the back of their vids that get like 100 likes or something lol ???

WHY DOES NO ONE MAKE THESE THINGS FOR LUL ? i mean they're all stinking rich, right ? no one has picked up a floppy maker machine either, i mean WOULDNT YOU WANT FRESH FLOPPIES TO SAVE YOUR COLLECTION ??

that drive sound, man !!!!!

something the mister is missing too on most computer cores imo : a real accurute drivesound ... VICE has it

anyway

Got STE again, but one has BAD DMA where the sound wont work and the other BAD DMA classic (its something they've been debating for 40 years but even the teknomages havent fully figured it, but in the end its something Atari did : they put half-assed machines on the shelf instead of taking out the faulty ones so even in the 90s you could buy a brand new one who had this)

And waited ... b/c so far soldering experience is limited to fixing a mister FPGA power button and found this :

that's €12 without p&p , comes from Spain so no santa taxes

Thats also sour-funny : how we are used to paying Santa tax for i cant remember but in the US its hawt, right ? ... cant say "used to" its just euhm well

i dont see how this is helping anyone but amazon and bol.com

which we thought was a replacment but actually ITS A CONVERTER, you have to put this in TOGETHER with the flawed chip.

so let the screwing begin ... ironice how we went from computers to screwing

girlfriends and now are back to computers, only

screwing them too

Here we discover what looks like a lucky .. for once, we have a mobo where the chip isnt soldered but socketed, HALLELUJA we think ... put it in, LUCKY we read the pdf that comes with it, as it turns out we have to put the chip on top of the converter, we thought it was a replacement, but the IC just rewired the thing ... you can read the whole theory on bad dma if you like but

unless you're wozniak or exxoss or lotharek ... or a tekno-mage from B5 ...

https://www.chzsoft.de/site/hardware/new-atari-ste-bad-dma-investigation/

(documentation of the IC : this is a pdf download)

https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=17461.0;attach=33532

(correction : the price today says €41 ... im sure it wasnt that much when we got it tho now im not sure it was €12 either, at any rate it was overly affordable)

you might need some dafalgan afterwards

---

Because we are lucky enough to have a revision of the STe board that has a socket its more or less easy to place, you just have to be very gentle (in case you didnt know, retro-computers are female and they need gentle prodding lol)

Then it looks like this : the chip on top of the green IC is the dma chip, the two in front are TOS 1.62 chips which i found on ebay and used to replace the tos 1.06 chips. In most cases if you get a box from ebay you'll be very lucky if it looks like this on the inside, the guy we got it fro back then must have gone out of his way to clean it when he refurbished the capacitors , this board looks like its just washed out of the factory really

then the boot :

Excelsior!

we says ... even for 3 seconds we get that feeling we havent had in years ...

the check : theres only one thing here, the machine runs Overlanders First love demo perfectly before that, to check the DMA data transfer + sound we use a scene demo called "Bad Apple"

And whaddya know, for the first time the thing plays ! , see on THIS machine bad apple would give four bombs, on the other one it runs but with no sound ,

As much as we would LOVE to have a real 90s hard drive, its kinda not viable as a 40 year old platterbox has a very low chance of still being alive and without errors at hardware level ... Ultrasatans and all that go close to €80 - €100 so this ACSI2STM board (you can find on github to make yourself if you're skilled, but we got one on ebay, also pretty cheap but no casing or nothing right but as we are Locutus of Borg , we prefer cables over wi-fi and nicely printed cases are the very last of our priorities)

Runs like a charm BUT

after a reboot, without having touched ANYTHING it doesnt ... strange b/c we booted 3 or 4 times, then ran the demo completely, went to the kitchen to prepare the bread dough for tomorrow, as it ran

then after a reboot it simply wouldnt work anymore, REALLY sure we didnt fry anything we didnt even touch it in between reboots , what we GET is actually what you get with "BAD DMA" .. its reads the Gemdrive badly and it screwed up the partitions on the other two SD cards ... that moment of exhilaration that lasted 3 seconds turns into a ##¼@#¼#¼@#¼!!!é"'' for a second

BUT ... (this is something we should have checked from the start but as we have never done this before i'll blame it on beginners crud and oversight) .... the other machine has working DMA, it just doesnt play sound (it doesnt give errors btw and if you hook up and amp and crank it to festival level you can fainly hear the DMA sound, so its not like the hardware bugs out, its something between that and the output, THATS ABOVE MY CURRENT LEVEL), so ... not completely tired yet, we open up the other and lo and behold

IT ALSO HAS A SOCKET CHIP ...

so we didnt need the converter ... is what we think and indeed, we dislodge it, take the flawed chip and converter out of the machine with working sound , slot the DMA chip from the other one (which strangely has the same model number only 3 different ones in the back, its not the model name i see listed on DMA-issue forums) and THEN

The ultimate 2025 Atari STE-test and benchmark : "Coders Guide to the Demoscene" ... which more or less shows off (DEMOnstrates) how an STE could be close to a CD32, its a 2024 scene demo that used high quality streamign sound if you have a fast enough hard drive (and a working DMA chip lol)

and all is good ... (except the rest of the world and our future but bem)

Sadly we didnt backup the 4GB sd card because we thought it was fixed with the first attempt and the partitions on those seem to be screwed , ...it was a lot of sorting (try finding 4gigabyte of stuff to put on your ST ...) but we havent programmed that much and there should be a backup of anything up until the last few sessions, we didnt get to tracking b/c the DMA sound didnt work together with the SD drive so the only thing lost there is time sorting, im sure i can re-partition one and find the files again xept some of the programs we wrote as exercise

We kinda wanna do an ST game (STE game in this case ofcourse) but we wanna program it on the real machine b/c as a boy we never got to do that and frankly

using compiled GFA with libs from sunnyboy/paradize and spriteworks i think the GFA ide/editor is pretty cool for a 90s tool

so ofcourse

we clean up the mess

those things ... we couldnt afford another one in the present day and state of the state and they're getting impossible to find, even these had flaws in it

you cant FIND a falcon or sharp anymore even if you had the €15k to fork over either

so i dont wanna leave it open and uncovered over night

the living room was available it was the right time, usually this is occupied by the elders and we are up in the borg cube, it sounds like some otaku who never left the basement but its quite the opposite and

the only reason im in this town is because im stuck in it ... and i dont think this life will present an opportunity to get out anymore , giving our physical condition, financial situation and the state of the state and world

lasciate ....

BUT HEY, we got a fully working STE now !
the other one is basically as good a fully working STf with a 4096 colour palette on which a hard drive wont work ... everything else runs fine

and THAT


was our saturday

while we should have watched football and smoked some crack

this just feels better