Hi from Northamptonshire
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2018 8:35 pm
Hi all
My name's Pete and I'm living in Northamptonshire, originally from Brentwood, Essex (home of TOWIE but don't hold that against me!)
I'm old enough to have owned an ST when they were new. It was the first 16 bit computer I owned having gone through an Atari 800xl, Commodore 64 and finally a Spectrum +2. All of these were bought because other kids at school had them and back in the 80s, playground piracy was the norm.
I can't remember exactly what made me get an ST, but a few friends at school had them and once I saw the graphics and the fact that you didn't have to wait 15 minutes for a game to load, I had to have one!
I got a 520STFM and after a year or so upgraded it to 1mb. This was at a time when RAM was really expensive due to some global shortage - the upgrade cost me about £130 for 512kb, if I remember rightly. That was a lot in 1988, but at least then I got to listen to the 'Beat Dis' track in the Union Mega Demo
More recently I've got back into restoring some retro systems. A friend of mine gave me a dead 48k Spectrum which I got working again and connected to an sd card loader to play games on. That then spurred me on to buy a cheap Amiga 500 (don't hate me), fix that up, retrobright it and connect up a gotek drive. In the early 90s, the Amiga 600 was the machine that briefly followed my ST before I went to university and started my life with PCs instead, so I fixed up an Amiga to relive my memories of that time.
Then followed buying a very down on its luck Spectrum +2 and fixing that up, but I knew what I really wanted was to get an ST again.
My original plan was to buy a 520STFM like the one I had before, fit a 1mb upgrade and a gotek drive. But then I came across this site and my plans have changed slightly...
I still have a 520STFM, but I'm fitting 4mb rather than 1mb. I also plan to fit a 16mhz accelerator board and fast ROM. From the ST games I've tried so far on my basic system, they're good but not as good as I remember, so a little more speed on some of the titles that struggle a bit compared to the Amiga will help.
I also plan to link the Amiga and ST together via a null modem cable like I used to with a friend back in the day - networked Stunt Car Racer is good fun!
So that's my plan. I've ordered the 4mb RAM upgrade from Chris. I've also started a blog which I will post in the blog section (one day someone might read it!)
Thanks
Pete
My name's Pete and I'm living in Northamptonshire, originally from Brentwood, Essex (home of TOWIE but don't hold that against me!)
I'm old enough to have owned an ST when they were new. It was the first 16 bit computer I owned having gone through an Atari 800xl, Commodore 64 and finally a Spectrum +2. All of these were bought because other kids at school had them and back in the 80s, playground piracy was the norm.
I can't remember exactly what made me get an ST, but a few friends at school had them and once I saw the graphics and the fact that you didn't have to wait 15 minutes for a game to load, I had to have one!
I got a 520STFM and after a year or so upgraded it to 1mb. This was at a time when RAM was really expensive due to some global shortage - the upgrade cost me about £130 for 512kb, if I remember rightly. That was a lot in 1988, but at least then I got to listen to the 'Beat Dis' track in the Union Mega Demo
More recently I've got back into restoring some retro systems. A friend of mine gave me a dead 48k Spectrum which I got working again and connected to an sd card loader to play games on. That then spurred me on to buy a cheap Amiga 500 (don't hate me), fix that up, retrobright it and connect up a gotek drive. In the early 90s, the Amiga 600 was the machine that briefly followed my ST before I went to university and started my life with PCs instead, so I fixed up an Amiga to relive my memories of that time.
Then followed buying a very down on its luck Spectrum +2 and fixing that up, but I knew what I really wanted was to get an ST again.
My original plan was to buy a 520STFM like the one I had before, fit a 1mb upgrade and a gotek drive. But then I came across this site and my plans have changed slightly...
I still have a 520STFM, but I'm fitting 4mb rather than 1mb. I also plan to fit a 16mhz accelerator board and fast ROM. From the ST games I've tried so far on my basic system, they're good but not as good as I remember, so a little more speed on some of the titles that struggle a bit compared to the Amiga will help.
I also plan to link the Amiga and ST together via a null modem cable like I used to with a friend back in the day - networked Stunt Car Racer is good fun!
So that's my plan. I've ordered the 4mb RAM upgrade from Chris. I've also started a blog which I will post in the blog section (one day someone might read it!)
Thanks
Pete