6 May
2004
6 May
'04
11:40 a.m.
I know very little about these machines, but one just turned up on the
doorstep for the museum. Power supply checks out, I get a white display
(so something useful looks to be happening in the video circuitry), but
I get no spin-up from the hard disk (A Seagate ST-157 SCSI drive) and a
steady floppy drive light.
I'm not sure if the hard disk is fixable yet - no idea if it's a head
crash or whatever. There seems to be little about these drives on the
web, but I did see one comment that they were famous for stiction - in
which case maybe I can give it a hand in spinning up...
Does anyone have install media if it comes to that though? I can always
drop a different SCSI drive in it (I think I have a spare 160MB drive
somewhere), but I don't have any floppies for this machine and I gather
they never were particularly common, sitting somewhere between the ST
and the Falcon...
cheers
Jules
6 May
6 May
12:29 p.m.
On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 20:40, Jules Richardson wrote:
I get no spin-up from the hard disk
never mind - stiction it is... I got the bottom board off the drive and
managed to free up the spindle by hand, it now seems to spin up properly
by itself...
Now I have a booting machine :-) Unfortunately there isn't much in the
way of data on the drive - terminal program, spreadsheet and not much
else. The drive's suffering from a few bad/marginal blocks it seems, so
I'll have to figure out a way of backing it up (I'll at least grab a raw
40MB image of the drive by sticking it into my desktop PC)
Anyone got any pretty audio or video demos which will work on the TT030
machines? (probably not...) Were any games ever produced for them?
(Again, probably not :-)
cheers
Jules
2:39 p.m.
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.
It uses FAT formated floppies, and IIRC, some or all have 1.44MB floppy drives.
What do you mean by install media? Is some kind of software needed
to get it to recognize the HD?
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.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
10 May
10 May
6:37 a.m.
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
7:27 a.m.
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...
I think Apple just added to what was there, I've used a 20MB Apple
SCSI drive on a PDP-11 when I needed a drive that was physically
smaller than 30MB to transfer some data.
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.
The GUI and all of the basic OS are in ROM. I'm assuming that you
can have some kind of OS extensions on the HD. Not really to sure,
I'm not that familiar with TOS.
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.?
Good question, this is what I'm wondering myself.
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....
I'm guessing that BSD is started from TOS on these systems somehow.
I never got around to trying to install BSD or Linux on mine. IIRC,
the Serial ports are wicked fast, you'd want to hook them up to
something like 16550 UART's on a PC. There was a project to adapt
the SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters for the Mac to work on these a few
years ago, I don't know whatever happened with that.
I truthfully can't see a good reason to install Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free. Besides, how much RAM does your TT030
have?
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
7:49 a.m.
On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 16:27, Zane H. Healy wrote:
if it does turn out to be FAT on the hard drive too then it's not a
problem, as again I can use a Linux system to format a drive as FAT.
Whether it'd be a PC-style partition table is another matter though!
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.?
Good question, this is what I'm wondering myself. I truthfully can't see a good reason to install
Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free.
It's just nice as a museum exhibit though, if we're able to show it
running both a windowing environment and a real Unix with networking
too.
Worst-case I assume the system boots from SCSI target 0, so I could have
both an internal and external disk hooked up, one with the standard TT
filesystem on it and one with BSD - then just have a switch which is set
prior to turning the machine on which decides which is target 0 and
which is (say) target 1.
Besides, how much RAM does your TT030 have?
Ahh, 'only' 4MB on this one I think. Just enough for running BSD I
believe though. I did come across some info on the web on how to
increase the memory in them, but there's too much work to be done on
other things to justify spending a huge amount of time messing around
with this!
cheers
Jules
10:28 a.m.
I truthfully
can't see a good reason to install Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free.
It's just nice as a museum exhibit though, if we're able to show it
running both a windowing environment and a real Unix with networking
too. Besides, how
much RAM does your TT030 have?
Ahh, 'only' 4MB on this one I think. Just enough for running BSD I
believe though. I did come across some info on the web on how to
increase the memory in them, but there's too much work to be done on
other things to justify spending a huge amount of time messing around
with this! 
11:44 a.m.
You might want to go here and email them :) they might have TT030 install
diskettes :)
http://elfsoft.home.mindspring.com/
11:59 p.m.
On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 19:28, Zane H. Healy wrote:
But if you want to use the system as a museum exhibit, wouldn't it be
best to show it running it's original OS? I can see loading Unix if
the OS wasn't available, but for the TT030 it is.
Oh, absolutely. And when just left running on display for people to play
around with it would be.
Many of the public we get coming round have heard of Unix but associate
it with big powerful machines locked away in a server room somewhere -
it'd be nice to be able to also show it running on a small plastic-cased
desktop machine :-)
cheers
Jules
I truthfully can't see a good reason to install
Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free.
It's just nice as a museum exhibit though, if we're able to show it
running both a windowing environment and a real Unix with networking
too. 
2:07 p.m.
I truthfully can't see a good reason to install
Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free. Besides, how much RAM does your TT030
have?
Zane
The TT is expandable to 10Mb of ST RAM plus 16Mb of FastRAM.
Likewise, there was a licensed version of Unix V developed for it.
12:17 p.m.
On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 03:37:23PM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:
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...
I have seen Apple-ROMmed ST1480s and a few other SCSI drives that were
once required when you used Apple formatting tools, but the drives
still responded to the usual geometry inquiry packets. The typical
problem was that you couldn't put a Seagate or other OEMmed drive in
your Mac unless you had a patched formatting tool or used a 3rd
party tool. Apple-branded drives always worked in other machines.
-ethan
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