Atari 1040STF White screen on SM124 when internal Floppy is connected.

  • Hi,


    I just tried to start my old Atari 1040STF again, after about 30 Years of "Downtime"


    The Internal Power Supply starts, ant the voltages are 4.75 V on the 5 V Rail and 12.3 Volts on the 12 V rail, so nothing to write home about, but should work, at least it does not blow anything.


    Connecting my SM124 (which also still works) and powering everything up, only a white Box is shown on the SM124....


    So, open everything up and reseat all socketed ICs...


    Now TOS is booting and shows a screen - wait, I forgot the diskdrive.... Power down, re-connect the drive - the white screen (Box) is all It does now again....


    But anyway, I already got a gotek drive with flash-floppy installed - put that in and when it is jupered correctly, also the white box is shown and tos is not booting.... jumpering the gotek to S1 (or S2) and TOS boots again without issues, but no Disk Drive is shown at all.


    It is sufficient to detach the data cable of the floppy - does not matter if it is the original Floppy drive or the gotek.... so I don't think power is the issue.


    Even "warming up" the powersupply and give it a reset after a couple of minutes does not change anything..


    Does anyone know this behaviour?


    Don't know why initiliazing an (even dead old) floppy should freeze the system like that....


    Cheers


    Ford

  • Did you connected the floppy cable upside down / wrong way? Some drives have the connector upside down.

    No, I double checked that a couple of times.


    When using the gotek drive, it lays upside down because pin 1 is on the other side of the original ST drive.

    What I reconed was, when i jumper the gotek drive wronh (M0 / S1) it boots right up to tos but does not find any drive.

  • Ah... bummer....


    I simply had to *wait* 40 Seconds or so, after that TOS came up and it detects the gotek drive as well as the mechanical floppy drive....


    Now I only have to figure out how to get images in the gotek format...... AFAIR the ST had standard DOS 720 K disks, or didn't they?


    Cheers


    Ford

  • I flashed my gotek a couple of months ago with "flashfloppy", but it seems the HxC Menu System works as intended, at least I get a menu.


    Now I have to figure out how to convert stx / st files to a "plain" img file.... :)

  • It is impossible to reconvert STX files to HFE images or real floppy disk. STX images only can be used in a few emulators like STEEM.


    You can use ST and MSA images, on a traditional HxC floppy emulator you need to convert them to the HFE raw format, I think a GoTek with HxC or Flashfloppy firmware is much more powerfull and can use ST images directly. For MSA I am not sure, maybe you have to convert them to ST format.

    1ST1