Yes, it is true. I'm getting another Atari ST!

Someone was offering a free Atari STFM, which is the same as the one I originally bought in 1987, and which later expired when it couldn't cope with the presence of so many Amigas surrounding it (in the early 90's) and so did the gracious and honourable thing and set fire to itself and died.

I'm looking forward to getting hold of one again. Even though the Amiga is far superior in hardware terms, the ST does still have it's unique charms, design and features. And there is still a lot of unique software only ever released for it to be explored. Games, productivity software and demos. Plus having owned and used one for a couple of years as my main home computer it does still hold some good memories.

One thing I never explored on the ST was the demo scene. It appeared later than the Amiga's and really only to try and prove the ST was as good, even trying to copy some of the famous Amiga productions. But there are some unique productions worth watching and it will be a good opportunity to explore and see what they actually managed to squeeze from the ST's minimal hardware guts, running them on the real hardware (which is always nicer than emulation).

Time to dig out my ST rom collections and see how I can convert the images back to disk.
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There's loads of programs on the net that can do this.
The Atari ST disk format isn't too different from the PC's
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I knew ST floppy drives and the format isn't that different to the PCs, but do you know of a good Windows program that does this easily? Especially for demo and game disks?

I've been having a look around, and only found an old DOS one and one Windows one that looks quite old.
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I use FloImg .... you'll also need the FdInstall driver as well.
(can't remember where I got these from now)

The above program works fine on all versions of Windows I've tried it on (I use in XP)
Not tried it on Vista though (as my Vista PC doesn't have a floppy drive)

Obviously this'll only work on a normal internal floppy drive, not a USB one.
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Thanks. I will take a look at that one.
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It's nice to see that you are going to explore the world of demos on the Atari ST. Must admit I haven't watched many ST demos myself, but I believe there are some good ones. I've seen a couple I liked on YouTube.

If you get to watch some demos, it would be interesting to hear how they compared to ones on the Amiga.
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I will do a write up of some when I get chance to watch some. I will have to do some looking around the demo sites and see what the most recommended ST demos are.
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I've now got hold of a program called Floppy Image ST, which also seems to be able to read and write some other formats to 3.5" floppy disk too, such as ZX Spectrum and Sam Coupe.

It was quite hard to track down and find the download for this program, so I have attached a copy in case anyone else needs it, or would like to take a look.

This package includes FloIMG and FdInstall (which Woody mentioned above) and also includes an HTML help file with lots of useful screenshots.
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I had completely forgotten about how the ST crashes.

I'd just written a demo disk image to floppy and was booting it and was greeting with a black screen and a series of little bomb sprites. The memories came flooding back. So primitive compared to the Amiga Guru screens.
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If I remember correctly, the number of bombs is significant, and means something!
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