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Buy/sell/swap Atari things BBS
| Re: STM & External Drive |
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Posted by: Shalroth
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Aug,17.2013-16:01
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You're absolutely right - the STm is a rare beast. It's likely to be territory-specific - so an STm designed for the UK won't work in the USA.
As far as I recall, Atari started putting an RF TV Modulator in the ST after they noticed the ST was a decent little games platform, and to broaden their target market a bit (it's a bit rubbish having a decent gaming platform that will only work with an RGB monitor). It was the second kind of ST to be sold, before the STF and STFM with their built in floppy drives.
I think I'm correct in saying that every STm had TOS in ROM... The earlier 'vanilla' STs had to load TOS from diskette because it wasn't ready in time (shades of the Sinclair QL) but I don't know if every pre-STm ST had this issue...
I have a UK STm in good condition, with a 1MB upgrade board and TOS 2.06 switcher, with a dual external disk drive. I never use it, of course, (prefer my Falcon, Mega 2 and STe) but it's certainly an interesting curiosity.
As to the sordid topic of coin... Depends on your intentions. As a museum-piece, it certainly has value and a collector would most likely snap your hand of for it.
For production use - I see people trying to sell STe and STFMs on eBay for £100 to £150 regularly, but I'd never pay more than £40 for a second hand STFM (£50 for an STE) - the eBay community seems to have worked out that these machines are old and fragile and if someone has a genuine need for a replacement (something business critical) they can charge what they like.
So let's be honest. It's almost certain to have 512K of RAM and TOS 1.0 unless you've done some upgrading. TOS 1.0 was horrible, only 1.2 was worse because of the faulty HD access routines. Depending on when you got it, the external drive might not even be double-sided, so what you've got is a very limited computer, in practical terms. There.s very little productivity software that will run in 512K, so unless you plan to sell it as a basic ST for really primitive gaming upon, your best bet is to try and sell it to the collectors. It's rarity, I'd say, to the collectors makes it worth about £200+... But if you're trying to sell it as a "working ST" you'd be lucky to get €40.
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