I am sharing here the system-levels tools I recovered from my old disks and which I found useful when rebooting my Atari STF and Mega STE in 2024, after 30 years of inactivity. (I am re-learning this as we go…)
SYSINFO (v8.3.6)
A (not so) little app that shows you a lot of information about your system configuration, hardware and software. I found it especially useful to check which TOS version I had…
I found that I had already upgraded my STF to TOS 1.04 a long time ago but that my Mega STE had TOS 2.05 instead of the “newer” and more stable 2.06… which I finally upgraded in 2024 ;)
Official Atari Hard Drive Utilities (v5.00, Dec. 3, 1991)
This is the official Atari HDD driver. This archive aslo includes a MUNGED version which can find non-contiguous ACSI controllers (for example having the HD at ACSI ID #3 and no ACSI ID 0,1,2 ).
ICD AdSCSI ST host adapter software, PRO version 6.5.5
Commonly referred to as the ICD HDD driver. In my opinion, this is is best, most stable HDD driver ever written for the Atari ST family, even to this day. It’s only drawback is that it doesn’t support huge partitions sizes allowed by modern SD cards and also doesn’t let you format TOS+DOS compatible partitions. But besides that, it’s really nicely done!
The PRO version used to be commercial software but it has been abandoned a long time ago…. As there is no official source to obtain it, I am providing a copy here. It’s on other sites too, but as we’ve seen hundreds of websites disappear in the last 25 years… I want to contribute to this not getting lost.
Fixes for TOS 1.04
Includes the following programs to place into the AUTOfolder:
FOLD100.PRG,SERPTCH2.PRG(fixes the parity/bit8 in case of 7-bit transmissions + flow control)TOS14FX5.PRG(fixes Serial RTS/CTS + AESshel_find())
XControl - Extensible Control Panel
Includes several .CPX modules. I have not checked yet if this is the latest version and if I sould add/replace some CPX modules.
Includes:
- ASCII.CPX
- CALENDAR.CPX
- CODE105.TOS
- COLOR.CPX
- CONFIG.CPX
- COOKIES.CPX
- DRIVERS.CPX
- FILEINFO.CPX
- GENERAL.CPX
- LET_CONF.CPX
- LIESMICH
- MACCEL.CPZ
- MODEM.CPX
- MULTITOS.CPX
- OPTIONS.CPX
- OUTLINE.CPX
- PRINTER.CPX
- SETENV.CPX
- SLCTCONF.CPX
- SOUND.CPX
- SYSTEM.CPX
- SYSTEM.INF
- WCOLORS.CPX
NVDI
This replaces the standard and quite slow VDI part of the GEM with an optimized version. The difference is GEM drawing onto the screen is noticeable, even on the desktop!
I didn’t remember feeling the difference so strongly at the time. But now that we’re used to fast UIs, upgrading a slow one to a less slow one really makes a difference, at least on the 8 MHz STF ;)
This also includes fonts. My version (v2.00), by default, will use a Mac System font. You can change the config.
This might still be maintained… Website is up but says “Last Updated 08/31/1999”. The site sells a super expensive (70+ € to be compared to the price of the machine…) v5, which might be useful if you want to be able to print nice fonts to various printers. But if you don’t care much for printing and just want to improve the graphics display on screen, much older versions will do wonders…