Mega ST : Revival pt.2

With a pristine, formatted 50Mb hard drive (see previous post), my first inclination was to fill it with games from the vast quantity that have been adapted to run from hard drives (and newer gadgets such as the UltraSatan or CosmoEx, neither of which I can quite afford at the moment, sadly)

But this urge had to be resisted (for now!)

Networking my Mega ST

First priority was to get my EtherNEC box working. The EtherNEC has been somewhat surpassed now by the NetUSBee, a neat little device that as well as an ethernet network connection gives a USB port so you can plug in a USB mouse. But, you can only work with what you have :) It seems the NetUSBee networking part uses the same drivers as EtherNEC, so it'll be the same process to set up if you have one of the newer devices.

The EtherNEC is a big black box containing an old ISA RTL8019AS ethernet card. It has a standard ethernet port on one end, and a ribbon cable extending from the side. On the end of this is an adapter that plugs into the Atari cartridge port. Thankfully it's clearly labelled so that you know which way round to plug it in.

EtherNEC - photo from http://www.atarikit.co.uk/ethernec/ethernec.html

As I was using the PARCP-USB adapter, my strategy was to download all the files necessary, get them unzipped and into the right places and edit the required config files on my Mac, before transfer to the ST.

I should probably also mention that my Mega has 4Mb of RAM - if you have less you may struggle, unfortunately.

STinG

First of all, I grabbed sfl.zip from Step Two here:
http://hardware.atari.org/sfl/
This is STinG, the ST networking stack. It's also available from the ST Essentials site, but the zip file above gave me just the files I needed (the full STinG package contains lots of other files which are unnecessary in this situation)

I extracted the following:

/XCONTROL.ACC
/CONTROL.INF

/AUTO/STING.PRG
/AUTO/STING.INF

/CPX/SERIAL.CPZ
/CPX/SERIAL.TXT
/CPX/STING.CPX
/CPX/STNGPORT.CPX
/CPX/STNGPROT.CPZ

/STING/CEN_PLEP.STY
/STING/CEN_PLIP.STY
/STING/DEFAULT.CFG
/STING/DIAL.INF
/STING/DIAL.RSC
/STING/DIAL.SCR
/STING/DIALER.APP
/STING/ICON.RSC
/STING/LCLTLK.STY
/STING/LOCAL.FEE
/STING/LOGIN.BAT
/STING/MASQUE.STY
/STING/MIDI.STY
/STING/RESOLVE.STX
/STING/ROUTE.TAB
/STING/SERIAL.STX
/STING/TCP.STX
/STING/UDP.STX

/STING/TOOLS/MASQLOOK.APP
/STING/TOOLS/M_MASTER.APP
/STING/TOOLS/PING.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/PING.RSC
/STING/TOOLS/SAVE_IP.GTP
/STING/TOOLS/SHUTDOWN.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/SYSINFO.TTP
/STING/TOOLS/TOOLS.TXT
/STING/TOOLS/TRACROUT.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/TRACROUT.RSC

/STING/DOCS/DIALER.TXT

/STING/DOCS/FEE.DOC

/STING/DOCS/KERN_UPD.TXT

/STING/DOCS/REM_CTRL.TXT

/STING/DOCS/RESOLVE.TXT

/STING/DOCS/SER_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/STING.HYP

/STING/DOCS/STING.REF

/STING/DOCS/TCP_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/UDP_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/UPDATE.TXT

EtherNEC driver

The next step was to grab the EtherNEC drivers (etherne.zip) from here:
http://home.arcor.de/thomas.redelberger/prj/atari/etherne/index.htm

There are a few files here and you need to pick the right one, depending on the processor and OS used.

My system is a stock 68000 processor with TOS 1.04, so the file I needed was enec.stx and this went into the STING folder.

Configuration files

There are a couple of configuration files to edit. I could have used Edith or similar on the ST itself, but for quickness I used my favourite text editor, Smultron (the free, open source version) on my Mac, before transfer.


First up is /STING/DEFAULT.CFG

Under NAMESERVER, I changed the line to point to the IP address of my router, so:

NAMESERVER  = 192.168.1.1

Everything else can stay as it is.


Next, it's /STING/ROUTE.TAB

This was the trickiest to get right. The lines to be changed are right at the bottom - all the rest is just comments.

The spaces between the IP addresses need to be tabs (only one and definitely a tab, not a space!)

I read some different opinions on what was required - some places specified two lines, but my configuration worked with only one (everything else should be commented out):


0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 EtherNet 192.168.1.1

The last number there is, again, the IP address of my router.

Strangely, the comments in the file say that the second set of numbers should be the netmask (in my case 255.255.255.0 but this didn't work - 0.0.0.0 did)

XControl configuration

Once those files were all copied over, I rebooted into TOS and opened up the 'Control Panel' desk accessory from the Desk menu.

Here there are two new options - 'STinG Internals' and 'STinG Port Setup'. I didn't touch STinG Internals.

'STinG Port Setup' is where the EtherNEC card is selected and the IP address of the ST set.

There are two dropdown menus at the top. The lower one should always be set to 'EtherNet'. The top one toggles between 'General' and 'Addressing'.

Under 'General' I was able to select the NE2000 hardware (the network card inside EtherNEC), and the MAC address was automatically detected and displayed.

Under addressing, I entered a static IP address and the subnet mask 255.255.255.0  The default MTU figure of 1500 worked fine for me.

Router configuration

Because of my setup I had to add the MAC address and IP address to my router's list of static IP addresses. Your Mileage May Vary :)

Pinging!

A quick reboot and I was able to run PING.PRG from within the STING/TOOLS folder.

It only accepts numeric IP addresses, so I tested it with 8.8.4.4, which is Google's public DNS server (and easily memorable)

It worked!

After quite a bit of fiddling, this is my venerable Atari Mega ST pinging the internet like it's the 21st century or something #atarist #atari #ping

A photo posted by @alectronic on Feb 9, 2016 at 9:01am PST

( If only it had been this quick - it took many reboots and much editing of the config files before I got to this point - you have this handy guide, so your pain will be saved :)   )

Apps

This post is long enough already, so next time I'll describe a couple of the apps I've been using, now my Atari Mega is successfully connected up to the net.

Let me know if you've found this useful, or if you have any tips for networking on the ST :)

Mega ST : Revival pt.1

This blog tends to randomly wake up and set off on new tangents, and here comes another one....

A few years ago I heroically saved an Atari Mega ST 4 from almost certain doom, as it was about to be disposed of from a huge uncaring bureaucratic institution where I happened to work. Getting it up and running and exploring what it's capable of in the 21st Century has been an interesting process, so the next few posts will describe what I've been up to, just in case it might be interesting and/or useful.

Growing up I cut my teeth (not literally, ouch) on an Atari STe, so I have a real fondness for the Atari platform. Letting the Mega go to waste would have been a crime! Plus, this machine came with a 50Mb Protar hard drive, which was the stuff of dreams back in the day.

Bringing it back to life was always going to be easier said than done. In the first rush of enthusiasm I cleaned it up, inside and out and it all appeared to be working fine. I bought an RGB to SCART adapter so I could hook it up to a modern(ish) TV, and invested in an EtherNEC box, which at that time appeared to offer the best hope for being able to easily transfer files to and from modern machines. However, this really required a hard drive - and my inherited hard drive had all of its partitions password protected and any people who might have originally known them were all long gone (not dead, just... not around any more)

So, my first attempts faltered. I had no way of accessing the hard drive and no drivers or tools to wipe it and start again. I found a few tools online that might have helped, but transferring them onto floppies was a painstaking process and when they didn't work my enthusiasm slowly ebbed away.

Fast forward to late 2015 and I decided it was about time to dig it out again and make a serious attempt at getting it all up and running.

Key to this process was my discovery, via AtariCrypt and the wonderful Atari-Forum, of Petr Stehlik's PARCP-USB device, which allows an ST to connect to a PC, Mac or Linux machine via USB and quickly transfer files back and forth.

After a long search this thread gave me the Protar drivers I needed for the ProGate 50DC. Using the PARCP-USB adapter I was able to transfer the utilities, update the driver and then format and re-partition the hard drive. I now had 50 whole megabytes of storage to play with! Unimaginable :-)

With that accomplished I had a few goals in mind. The first was to get the EtherNEC box working and find out whether a 30-year old Atari ST could connect to the internet successfully and do anything useful or interesting.

I also had a project in mind to back up a lot of old floppy disks that had been stored away since my STe days, before they succumb to bit-rot and the other perils of ageing magnetic media.

Plus, I also wanted to investigate a strange and intriguing expansion card that I found inside when I first opened up the Mega...

Over the next couple of posts I'll detail some of my experiences setting up the machine, getting it connected to the Internet, and beyond!