Atari TT030 install media...

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon May 10 10:37:23 2004

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 23:39, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> The Atari TT030 is a *VERY* cool machine. The OS is in ROM, and it
> is able to use standard SCSI drives (mine has a 1GB drive), and it
> can be hooked up to a VGA monitor.

I've got an 80MB drive from a Mac LCIII lined up to replce the 40MB
drive in there with the bearing fault... assuming that SCSI drives for
use with Apple machines work with everything else...

> It uses FAT formated floppies, and IIRC, some or all have 1.44MB floppy drives.

I dropped the machine off at the museum and then forgot to bring the
hard drive back home with me to hook up to the Linux system and see if
it has a FAT filesystem too - d'oh!

> What do you mean by install media? Is some kind of software needed
> to get it to recognize the HD?

I'm not sure where the split is between what's in ROM and what's on the
hard drive. When it starts up, it mentions loading the hard disk driver
- which is presumably in ROM :-) Then it boots into a windowed
environment (GEM?), but I'm not sure if that loads off the hard drive
(in which case I'd like to get install media for that) or if that's also
in ROM.

I would have expected (particularly as it seems possible to run NetBSD
on these things) that the OS was more character-based and primarily a
collection of ROM-based library routines, and the desktop environment
was loaded from disk, but I could easily be wrong there. Also when the
hard drive was present but not spinning properly, the machine just sat
there with a white screen - implying that it expected/needed the hard
disk in order to boot into the window environment.

What about formatting a new hard drive? Is the formatter in ROM? (In
which case is there a low level setup type of routine in ROM I somehow
access pre-boot?) Or is there a seperate floppy (which I don't have)
which contains hard disk formatter / partitioner etc.?

> As you mention, they aren't that common, and do fall between the ST
> and the Falcon. The Falcon has the advantage of supporting more
> colours, but the TT030 is about twice as fast.

I am quite keen to get BSD on this. Not sure if that'd also allow me to
also use the LAN port to connect to an Apple network or not, but there's
always PPP over a serial link I suppose.

Wonder if they can be dual-booted into BSD and a more traditional
desktop enviroment....

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon May 10 2004 - 10:37:23 BST