Finally Got My STacy

I remember knowing about the Atari STacy when it was released in 1989. I had owned a 520ST since I had gotten out on my own and could afford it in the fall of 1987, and was still running my original Atari 800 from 1980 right beside it, at the time. Although I always kinda wanted one of the Atari portables, the ST’s MIDI performance made it popular with musicians, and the built-in hard drive and monitor of the STacy models even more so… even during the time I was amassing the bulk of my Atari collection, no one was parting with a STacy at what I thought was a reasonable price.

As has been documented elsewhere, I’ve been going through my old machines to see what’s working and what isn’t. A parallel interest of mine  is retrogaming and emulation, and while I’ve been peeking through old hardware, I’ve been poking around new software and emulating some of the things I’ve been doing on the real things.

As far as STs go, I’ve been working with Hatari for emulation. It comes with EmuTOS, a reverse engineered publicly distributable version of Atari’s TOS operating system for the STs, TTs, and Falcons, and the ability to emulate different configurations of hardware. So the fun for me has been recreating some of my actual hardware setups in Hatari. I got it displaying the way I wanted, then starting playing with the hardware emulation configuration to recreate my original 520ST as I actually used it, upgraded to 2.5 megs of memory. I found images of the actual Atari TOS ROMs, and starting running TOS 1.04 rather than EmuTOS. As of today, I got one type of hard drive emulation running, and Hatari is reading a folder of my Mac SSD as its C-drive. As I was wandering around the house with the computer, I realized that in some ways, I finally had my STacy.