Task: Purchase an UltraSatan Hard Drive Emulator for the Atari ST Computers
Needed: UltraSatan, SD Card, Atari ST Computer
Time: 15-30 minutes
Introduction
An essential accessory for any retro computing system is an SD card device that emulates a hard drive. There are several options available for the Atari ST line including the UltraSatan from Jookie that connects to the Atari Computer Systems Interface (ACSI) port. The UltraSatan is easy to use provided you have a hard drive image file that can be imaged onto an SD card. This project is to purchase and UltraSatan and boot it using an already prepared image file freely available for download. Creating your own image files requires special software drivers.
Instructions
First, purchase an UltraSatan from an online source. I got mine from Lotherak for about $100. Note there is now a mini version that takes a microSD card.
Second, download an image file. Here is an example 512KB file with three partitions and a game (Lemmings) and app (NEO) to try. Here is a post on an Atari Forum with links to some additional images to download with lots of games to try. There might be others out there. I have not done an exhaustive search. One I found that claimed 1000 games had a dead link.
Third, image an SD card. I found that small SD cards (e.g. 1GB or 2GB) work the best. You can get these smaller cards for about $5 each on Amazon. My 32GB+ cards did not work. I use the Raspberry Pi Imager for this this purpose. Simply select the .img file as the OS and select your SD card and hit go. I used the 1GB card for the 512 image referenced above and the 2GB card for the single 1.6GB image also referenced above.
Fourth, connect your UltraSatan to the ACSI port with the ST computer off. Insert the SD card and power the UltraSatan on. Now you are ready to power on the ST. Below is my EmuTOS desktop with three hard drive partitions from the 512KB image. Shown below that is the TOS desktop with the 1.6 GB image that is loaded with games.
Comments
I am new to the world of Atari ST and am figuring all this out as I go. The ST community is not as big as the Amiga community, for example, and thus there are far fewer documentation materials and tools available to learn from. Hopefully you will find my posts useful.
The SD cards are supposed to be hot swappable. Further, you can mount two different cards at the same time which is cool.
I have a new ACSI device based on the ACSI2STM project on order and will post about it when I receive it. Hopefully these are a little bit easier to use. As a bonus, they are about half the cost.