It Takes a Federation or The Tale of the Atari Mega STe
Hi Everyone, We have a new exhibit in the Mid Atlantic Museum at InfoAge. Here's the back story. A few years ago, Bill Lange was kind enough to reorganize the Atari collection in the warehouse. He also provided plastic bins for most of the equipment, inspiring the ongoing project to protect as many artifacts as possible in plastic bins. During his work, he found a lonely and dirty Atari Mega STe that needed some love and care. Bill repaired the machine and we put it on display in the museum, but something was missing... You see, we are always looking for ways to demo machines and especially ways that involve something other than productivity software and games. We were reminded that the Atari ST was well known for its MIDI prowess, having MIDI built into the core of its architecture. A music demo, now that would be cool... Lessons were learned along the way. The Atari ST can use a color monitor or a higher resolution B&W monitor. Some programs work properly only with the higher resolution B&W monitor, particularly Cubase, which was to be the highlight of the demo. Luckily, we have both monitors, so that problem was solved. It was fun trying to figure out which USB floppy drives played nice with the 720K FAT (MS-DOS but old school MS-DOS) file system. Oh, and Cubase is *really* picky about what directory it is installed in. Thus the quest was on to get the machine doing MIDI. An external Yamaha MIDI box was donated. A period correct Tandy speaker system (thanks to Dean Notarnicola!) was borrowed. And a live music demo was all but ready. We just needed music, or so we thought. Frustratingly, this was not to be as the hard drive decided it didn't want to play nice anymore. Ugh! In swoops Pete Fletcher, though, who took the machine home, repaired it, and moved heaven and earth to get a solid state solution (good luck getting an Ultrasatan from Europe these days, but a different solid state solution was acquired). Just this morning, Pete delivered the Mega STe in perfect condition full of all sorts of goodies for demonstration and we have the first external MIDI demo in the history of the VCF MA Museum. Stop by to see and hear it yourself. Send us your favorite MIDI file and we can put it on the playlist. Thanks to Bill, Pete, and Dean. All three of you helped create something none of us could have done alone. It truly takes a Federation. -Adam
Thanks so much to all of the folks that contributed to this! - Alex On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 10:05 PM Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
We have a new exhibit in the Mid Atlantic Museum at InfoAge. Here's the back story.
A few years ago, Bill Lange was kind enough to reorganize the Atari collection in the warehouse. He also provided plastic bins for most of the equipment, inspiring the ongoing project to protect as many artifacts as possible in plastic bins. During his work, he found a lonely and dirty Atari Mega STe that needed some love and care.
Bill repaired the machine and we put it on display in the museum, but something was missing...
You see, we are always looking for ways to demo machines and especially ways that involve something other than productivity software and games. We were reminded that the Atari ST was well known for its MIDI prowess, having MIDI built into the core of its architecture. A music demo, now that would be cool...
Lessons were learned along the way. The Atari ST can use a color monitor or a higher resolution B&W monitor. Some programs work properly only with the higher resolution B&W monitor, particularly Cubase, which was to be the highlight of the demo. Luckily, we have both monitors, so that problem was solved. It was fun trying to figure out which USB floppy drives played nice with the 720K FAT (MS-DOS but old school MS-DOS) file system. Oh, and Cubase is *really* picky about what directory it is installed in.
Thus the quest was on to get the machine doing MIDI. An external Yamaha MIDI box was donated. A period correct Tandy speaker system (thanks to Dean Notarnicola!) was borrowed. And a live music demo was all but ready. We just needed music, or so we thought.
Frustratingly, this was not to be as the hard drive decided it didn't want to play nice anymore. Ugh! In swoops Pete Fletcher, though, who took the machine home, repaired it, and moved heaven and earth to get a solid state solution (good luck getting an Ultrasatan from Europe these days, but a different solid state solution was acquired). Just this morning, Pete delivered the Mega STe in perfect condition full of all sorts of goodies for demonstration and we have the first external MIDI demo in the history of the VCF MA Museum.
Stop by to see and hear it yourself. Send us your favorite MIDI file and we can put it on the playlist.
Thanks to Bill, Pete, and Dean. All three of you helped create something none of us could have done alone. It truly takes a Federation.
-Adam
ASCI2SD for the win. Can't wait to see what Fujinet does though. - Ethan On Mon, 27 Jun 2022, Alexander Jacocks via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Thanks so much to all of the folks that contributed to this!
- Alex
On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 10:05 PM Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
We have a new exhibit in the Mid Atlantic Museum at InfoAge. Here's the back story.
A few years ago, Bill Lange was kind enough to reorganize the Atari collection in the warehouse. He also provided plastic bins for most of the equipment, inspiring the ongoing project to protect as many artifacts as possible in plastic bins. During his work, he found a lonely and dirty Atari Mega STe that needed some love and care.
Bill repaired the machine and we put it on display in the museum, but something was missing...
You see, we are always looking for ways to demo machines and especially ways that involve something other than productivity software and games. We were reminded that the Atari ST was well known for its MIDI prowess, having MIDI built into the core of its architecture. A music demo, now that would be cool...
Lessons were learned along the way. The Atari ST can use a color monitor or a higher resolution B&W monitor. Some programs work properly only with the higher resolution B&W monitor, particularly Cubase, which was to be the highlight of the demo. Luckily, we have both monitors, so that problem was solved. It was fun trying to figure out which USB floppy drives played nice with the 720K FAT (MS-DOS but old school MS-DOS) file system. Oh, and Cubase is *really* picky about what directory it is installed in.
Thus the quest was on to get the machine doing MIDI. An external Yamaha MIDI box was donated. A period correct Tandy speaker system (thanks to Dean Notarnicola!) was borrowed. And a live music demo was all but ready. We just needed music, or so we thought.
Frustratingly, this was not to be as the hard drive decided it didn't want to play nice anymore. Ugh! In swoops Pete Fletcher, though, who took the machine home, repaired it, and moved heaven and earth to get a solid state solution (good luck getting an Ultrasatan from Europe these days, but a different solid state solution was acquired). Just this morning, Pete delivered the Mega STe in perfect condition full of all sorts of goodies for demonstration and we have the first external MIDI demo in the history of the VCF MA Museum.
Stop by to see and hear it yourself. Send us your favorite MIDI file and we can put it on the playlist.
Thanks to Bill, Pete, and Dean. All three of you helped create something none of us could have done alone. It truly takes a Federation.
-Adam
participants (3)
-
Adam Michlin -
Alexander Jacocks -
Ethan O'Toole