[Neil] from The Cave, a computer and console gaming museum in the UK, has a treat for vintage computing and computer gaming enthusiasts. They received an important piece of game dev history from [Richard Costello], who coded ports of Gauntlet 2, Mortal Kombat, and Primal Rage for Atari ST and Amiga home computers in the 80s. [Richard] brought them his non-functional Atari Mega ST in the hopes that they could get it working again, and demonstrate to visitors how game development was done back in the 80s — but sadly the hardware is not in the best shape.
The Atari ST flagged deleted files for overwriting but didn’t actively wipe them, allowing an undelete utility to work.
That doesn’t stop [Neil], however. The real goal is seeing if it’s possible to re-create the development environment and access the game assets on the SCSI hard drive, and it’s not necessary to revive every part of the hardware to do that. The solution is to back up the drive using a BlueSCSI board which can act as a host, scan the SCSI bus, and dump any device it finds to an SD card. The drive didn’t spin up originally, but some light percussive maintenance solved that.
With the files pulled off the drive, it was time to boot it up using an emulator (which begins at the 16:12 mark). There are multiple partitions, but not a lot of files. There was one more trick up [Neil]’s sleeve. Suspecting that deleting everything was the last thing [ ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
