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by kqr
1234 days ago
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I grew up on a 1040ST that was -- according to the previous owner who used it to make music -- upgraded with 4 MB of RAM and two mysterious switches on the back that controlled... something during boot, but I don't remember what. Was it common to modify them these ways? I was too young to understand much of it beyond the amazingness that it allowed me to play video games and make graphic designs. |
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Basically, grounding a pin of the external floppy drive connector (if memory serves) would make the ST read the OTHER side of the single-sided floppy disk of the INTERNAL drive.
This is because some floppies were formatted in single-side mode, and as a result using half of the maximum possible space. Think B-side of vinyl disks, literally.
The switch let you use the other side, provided you formatted it (and beware of the switch position to not mess up at formatting time…)
Many commercial softwares (incl. games) were using that single-side mode for backward compatibility reasons: I believe an early version of the ST serie was using an internal floppy drive only capable of single-sided usage. Hence the legacy.
My switch was really a simple switch I had around, combined with an hairpin directly plugged into the connector.
First hardware hack!