This time we move our spotlight over to someone who's work is only know by far too few people in the Atari scene. He deconstructed, reengineered, documented and gathered schematics and information for a lot of hardware for our beloved 16 bit systems - so that it ultimately is preserved and can be reconstructed by people like us. The person we are talking about here is...
Olivier Gossuin.
When I discovered his website five years ago, he was still running a little shop that offered a plentora of sound cartridges (Atari Replay 16, Replay Pro and the like), but also e.g. a full Atari Test Enclosure, VGA adapters, Eiffels... you name it. Having an interest of undisclosed origin regarding Atari ST sound sample/replay hardware, I was about to order a few (well, make that a "few") - when I discovered some schematics on his site.
At first glance, the usual schematics: 1040STFm, PSU etc.
But then, scrolling down, there was a table. It sported dozens of schematics of rather "obscure" hardware extensions - and most of them seemed to be reengineered or at least had completely re-drawn schematics. And most of them with neat top/bottom PCB shots.
Why is this so great, you ask? Well, while the hardware itself gets scarce, the means and knowledge to produce said hardware gets even more scarce. Both to a level where preserving said hardware gets almost impossible as a task. Having the means to understand and reproduce them is an invaluable in that regard.
All of the almost 50 schematics on there are meticulously redrawn - and judging by the quality of the devices he reproduced, I'd trust them to be accurate.
Which means that the hardware on this list is not forgotten and can live on, even when the last original device falls victim to some eBay scam or some other dumpster fire.
Reengineering (and in extension recreation) of original devices is (to me at least) one of the epitomes of "saving the scene". It expands the impact of our platform and the notion of what was possible back then. Want to see how bad DOS stuff was bit on your own ST - come on in, take a seat and some paper tissues, please don't cry onto the carpet. Ever wondered what video digitizing felt like on an ST - have some glasses, you'll need them. And last but not least: what did people do for better sound back then? I for my part never had those awesome sound modules (well, except one MPH printer port module that they sent me for testing - thanks MPH!) so I had to code against them "blind", just going by ripped examples and badly inaccurate docs. Oliviers reengineering skills gave me the chance to actually test that code against real re-created hardware - only 30-odd years later. Awesome.
So, Olivier, thank you a lot for being a pioneer and your hard work - work that motivated other people to follow your footsteps in reengineering as well as in gathering information about hardware add-ons.
🔗 Treasure trove of Olivier's schematics (scroll down to "Schematic about other hardware for Atari")
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