Official Ninja

Got an Epson SMD-300 today... cant use it as the head alignment is out. The drive is so cheaply made it looks to be impossible to fix as the motor is glued in place with no screws at all.... I was able to have it format ans read/write its own disks. The drive is compatible with the MSTE. Swapping disks works just fine.

Hunting around in my workshop I found an old TEAC FD-235HF. I forgot to write what revision it is. Its an older one that has a few jumper settings. I cleaned it up and set the jumpers. It works great with the MSTE, disk swaps are detected and it reliably worked all night, formatting, copying, playing games, swapping disks....

I had previously tried newer TEAC FD-235HF drives. These had no jumpers at all and they did not work well with the ST as far as disk swapping. I also found they were picky about using 720K disks.

Great solution to no auto boot games is to leave switch 7 off and then use the ENABLEHD.PRG DarkLord has attached in this thread.

I always loved using floppy disks. It's silly these days but it makes using these old systems feel very retro.
That's why I keep drives and disks for all my trs-80, TI, and Atari systems.
I do like using sio2pc on the Atari 8bit more than an actual drive. The way that system is designed it works just great.

ParanoidLittleMan, on Tue Feb 7, 2012 3:54 AM, said:

Frustrating part is having the system apart, floppy drive sitting out in the open and everything is working. Booting, swapping, HD, DD, formatting.....
Use the system for about an hour, playing games, copying files to the HDD....
Put it all together, tighten the screws and for some reason disk swapping stops working all together....

It is not the worst thing. The original DD drive works fine. HD would be nice for both MSTE computers I have... I hope the SMD-300 drive I'm getting from an ebay seller works and is "compatible"...

wood_jl, on Mon Feb 6, 2012 6:52 PM, said:

Yeah. I actually found a thread over at atari-forum that had some good info on the subject,..
I think what I'll do when I have some time over the weekend is open my other mste and play with that. See what happens, how it acts with these same drives.
Because of the inconsistent results I'm wondering if I should order an Ajax chip from BEST for this new MSTE of mine. How does it detect disk swaps reliably and then 2 hrs later not at all?

DarkLord, on Mon Feb 6, 2012 3:22 PM, said:

DL, using this app the system behaves just as if the switch 7 was on. So disk swapping stops working.

Edit: Well now I'm confussed. Now disk swapping doesn't work at all no matter what...
I don't know what to think... Maybe it is just random luck. Just like the autoboot games. Every once in awhile, they boot....