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Milwaukee, WI

Hi friends.  I have an opportunity to purchase a nice 1040STe with TOS 2.06 and 4 megs of RAM already put in for a VERY(!) good price!  Of course I am very tempted to buy this but I have a few Q's before I take the plunge.  First off, it has no keyboard!  So does anyone in the states have a spair they could send me for cheap?  If not I have an idea where I could get one cheap, but maybe one of you friends could help me out. wink  Secondly whats the monitor situation with these?  I have a PS1 LCD but preferably a VGA adapter + monitor would be ideal.  I'm in NTSC land if that helps.  The VGA adaptors I've seen appear to only be monochrome.  Maybe this would be a good solution?

http://www.amigamaniac.com/RGB_to_PAL_NTSC_adapter.html

Lastly what would be my best option for backups?  I don't really have the cash to build an Ultrasatan right now and the HxC floppy emulator certainly doesn't look ideal.  Would I be fine sticking with floppies until I upgrade to Ultrasatan?  (If anyones curious my ideal setup would be an internal HD and then something like an SD card slot for data transfers.)

Sorry if the answers are really obvious.  Thanks for any and all help!  smile

Last edited by Theta_Frost (Sep 18, 2010 8:38 pm)

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Theta_Frost wrote:

NTSC land

Were... were you reading my Amiga thread? XD




Well, the following is my notes on what I do, not a comprehensive list of all options:

I've got a 1040STE as well (that I upgraded to 4mb RAM and TOS 2.06 myself). I use a color Atari monitor. Quality is great, but they can be expensive, especially to ship. I also have an RGB>composite cable that I built myself. Doesn't the STE have an RF output at the back? I don't have mine with me at the moment so I can't check. Still, RF sucks. It would be better to build or buy an RGB>composite cable. Composite isn't great either, but it's better than RF. I don't think the adapter you linked to would work. The Atari monitor port is a round 13-pin DIN connector, different from the Amiga monitor port connector.

Floppies are totally fine. The other options are very cool but expensive conveniences, not necessities. UltraSatan is a hard drive emulator. HxC is a floppy drive emulator. I have an UltraSatan.

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Milwaukee, WI

Thanks for the help!  I actually wasn't reading your thread. haha  I may just use a small TV with composite. hmm

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Milwaukee, WI

Well I bought it and it arrived so that's cool.  However I can't seem to get it to work using the coaxial output to my TVs antenna input using an adaptor.  What am I missing?

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New York City

You probably have to fuck around a lot with the tuning.
If you are trying this on a new TV, good luck, you may never be able to tune in to the computer. I recommend old, analog tuning TVs.

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Milwaukee, WI

It's a small CRT monitor so I figure it would work, but I'll see what I can do.  I got the same lines on a super old TV as well though...

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New York City

I have an old CRT TV but it still is hard to tune many devices, specially my Intellivision and Atari 2600. My parents very, very old TV in storage does the trick though.

Don't discard an RF Modulator fail, though. Many times those things just go to silicon heaven.

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Milwaukee, WI

Hmm, well I do have a replacement RF modulator, hopefully it could be a pin by pin replacement!  Either this or I will try a composite adapter.