After slowly getting back into retrocomputing with my Atari 800XL (and now 130XE), I decided I also wanted to re-acquire an Atari ST. In early 2021 I started by first looking where anyone might: eBay.

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Right off the bat, I noticed that there just were not a lot of STs for sale in the US. I first was looking for a 1040STe, but those are practically non-existent here. On occasion I would see one but they would go for $600+, a bit high for my first ST retro purchase.

There were plenty available in the UK, but shipping to the US would be expensive and risky. Not to mention the different power requirements that complicate things. The 1040ST has an internal power supply and it is not a switching power supply. So the UK ones work on 50hz. In order to work here, the power supply needs to be replaced or the entire system has to be run through a bulky transformer. In addition, the keyboard and OS are slightly different.

Then about a year ago I was looking through Facebook Marketplace and an Atari 1040ST with mouse and monochrome monitor showed up for sale not far from me. I contacted the seller and drove the 2.5 hours the next Saturday. It turns out the guy ran an antique store in a barn. He didn’t even know if the ST worked. I gave it a quick look and offered $200 for the untested system which he accepted.

The machine was incredibly dirty, but not too badly yellowed. Once I got home, I opened it up. It was also very dirty on the inside, which was not surprising. The bottom case no longer had the 1040ST label, which was a shame.

What was more surprising was a strangle ribbon cable that ran out from under the power supply to a socket outside the RF shield. It had a ROM chip plugged into it.

I posted on the Atari ST subreddit and the knowledgable folks there guessed that it was a battery-backed clock of some kind. I was able to confirm this, although I could never get it to work reliably. The battery had to be long dead and software to work with it was not easy to find. I ended up removing it.

After cleaning everything and re-assembling, I hooked it all up and to my surprise it actually worked! I was able to verify the disk drive worked with an old 3.5” PC disk I had lying around

Sadly the computer had a bit of a musty smell, probably from sitting around wherever it was stored for too long. The smell was more pronounced when it was turned on. I think the smell did dissipate after a while so it was probably due to stinky dust on the power supply being heated up and eventually burned up.

With a working ST, I now started on making it more useful.

• ordered some ST disks on eBay

• USB 3.5” floppy drive

• ordered TOS 1.4 (6-chip set)

I was able to use the USB floppy with my PC to format ST-compatible DS/DD disks. I could then download ST software from the internet, copy it to the floppy and then use it on the ST.

The ST uses DS/DD 3.5” disks which are actually pretty hard to find these days. Sure, you can find the HD 3.5” disks but in order to format those as DS/DD you need to tape over a small hole on the disk. I found this was not always reliable.

Since this machine had TOS 1.0, I knew I needed a more recent version. TOS 1.4 was the newest it could run without board modifications needed for later versions such as 1.6 or 2.06.

The TOS 1.4 chips were easy enough to install, although the entire computer had to be disassembled again, including removing the power supply because that’s where the ROM chips were on the motherboard this 1040ST had. TOS 1.4 is much nicer, more reliable and also has better support for hard drives (and eventually the UltraSatan hard-drive SD card emulator)

Meanwhile, I was still watching eBay for STs at this point, hoping to maybe find a deal on an ST in better condition. Eventually an auction came up for local pickup in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This was for a 1040ST, a color monitor, a monochrome monitor and lots of software. I ended up winning the auction for $300. This was a pretty long drive at about 4 hours, but no shipping!

This 1040ST was in better condition in some ways and worse in others. It was incredibly yellowed and had a missing ALT key. The disk drive was more reliable and it had a different (not sure if it was newer) motherboard design. The earlier 1040ST had the TOS ROM chips under the power supply. This one had them to the left of the motherboard, under the keyboard.

In the end, I combined the two units to make one good one. I took the bottom case and internals from the Cape Code ST and used the top case and keyboard from the barn ST.

The Cape Code ST came with Cubase Notator, which I had no use for so I sold on eBay to help recoup the ST’s cost.

The rest of the software was some games and other music-related things, which I still have here, at least for now.

It also came with an actual ST mouse, a second mouse (GoldenImage), and a Monitor Master for switching between the color and monochrome monitors.

Having a real color monitor was useful because now I could actually try out a few games. The 1040ST I had in 1989 had an RF modulator so I could hook it up to a small TV to get color and play games (so technically it was a 1040STfm). These two ST are just 1040STf and do not have a built in RF modulator, so the monitor is a must. The kids have complained that the color monitor emits a high-pitched whine, but I’m old and can’t hear it so it doesn’t bother me.

I’d still like to find an STe, preferably a Mega STe, but even though I see them from time to time on eBay, the prices are always much more than I’m willing to pay.

I have since picked up an UltraSatan SD card hard disk emulator, which I will be writing about in an upcoming post.