Atari ST; Was Re: VERY good weekend

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Thu Jun 13 15:50:49 2002

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Jeff Hellige wrote:

> I believe it depended on the ST model. My MegaST came with
> 1.02 and I upgraded it to 1.04. It was two socketed chips. If I
> remember correctly it would have taken an adapter of some sort to go
> to a higher version than that in it. How did you boot 2.06 off of
> floppy?

  Yes, v1.04 was available both as 6-chip (192k) and 2-chip (256k) sets.
I _think_, from the little reading I've done, that since you have a
2-chip board, you can just replace the ROMs.

Disclaimer:
  It appears that use of any of the TOS ROM images without owning the
actual ROMs is, while common, still verboten. The following description
is solely intended for informational purposes. :^P

  To boot from floppy, I would install STEEM on the Linux PC, find a
valid ".st" disk image, format it in the emulator to 360k, and run
"credisk" from ftp.atari.st on it. credisk puts a bootblock and
MTOSBOOT.SYS on the "floppy". Then I would copy "tos206us.rom", also
from ftp.atari.st, onto the floppy. The credisk README warns that
you'll get a ROM CRC error at boot, but AFAICT, it shouldn't affect
operation. It does eat 256k RAM, since the OS is running in volatile
memory.
  STEEM doesn't write to floppy very well, but you could simply dd the
finished 360k .st image to a SSDD floppy. If you didn't want to fool
with all that, someone who legally owned the v2.06 ROM might ascertain
that you legally own the v2.06 ROM, and email you the dd image.

  You _should_ be able to use credisk on the actual ST, but it won't run
on mine. I can't remember the error, but I think it relates to the
early TOS version. In fact, I don't remember the whole process real
clearly, because I did all this right after some very ex[p|t]ensive
dental work.

        Doc
Received on Thu Jun 13 2002 - 15:50:49 BST