There were 40,994 views and 158 comments made on the video prior to the refresh on 13th-October, 2023. Those comments appear below...
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
My Atari 1040ST(FM). A retro-review in this YouTube video.
@AndreFachat
10 years ago
Ah yes, the Atari ST. I got a 260ST - a 520ST with the operating system on disk, which I later replaced with a set of ROMs.
Because these machines were basically unexpandable (only a ROM port, no expansion port), I had to later solder an extra 2MByte RAM.
And after that, I removed the ROM expansion plug and soldered in a cable to run my own extensions on it - with reading a specific 256 byte address range to output a byte (instead of writing to a single port).
From the famous German c't magazine I got an interface to attach an SCSI floppy. 80MB, which I still have, now attached to my selfbuilt 6502 machine :-)
But I guess my soldering skills and maybe the quality of the PCB weren't compatible so at some point it became quite flaky and finally died.
I probably got lured into buying the Atari because of the C64 experience - OS in ROM, but games etc mostly still taking over the whole machine. I wasn't really aware how the OS would become more and more important. Also even though the hardware was not as good as the Amiga, the OS was simple - but kind of stable.
I had my good time with the Atari, and I could use it for work and some development. But for my interest in computers, I was quickly growing out of it. At some point I even developed a device driver for the Amiga ... which at that point had become a much more interesting machine... But then the PC revolution had already started, and Linux was getting momentum...
@JacGoudsmit
10 years ago
At the school where I studied computer science, they had several 520ST's and 1040ST's in one of the labs and the students generally regarded them as useless, so we called them "irritaris". The keyboard felt cheap, the machines were unstable and stopped working regularly and pretty much the only thing they had going for them was that they used MS-DOS compatible diskettes so you didn't have to waste an entire disk on just one lab assignment.
@blakespot
10 years ago
1084ST?
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Yea..lol. Where did I get that from??
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Corrected
@MichaOXS
9 years ago
Hatte ich weil er Midi hatte.
@googaagoogaa12345678
8 years ago
***** maybe he got mixed up with the commodore 1084s monitor for the A500
@JacGoudsmit
7 years ago
Ray N it may well have been that the machines had some bad memory chips or bad power supplies or something. After all, they were in a computer lab and they probably were powered on 24/7 and not treated very well by students.
@eila2088
7 years ago
+Ray N Wasnt Amiga more powerful just also more costly?
@dlfrsilver
7 years ago
+Ray N : the A500 has always been superior to the STF never mind the STE. And this independantly of the CPU clocking. There are Arcade PCBs which have lower CPU clock and 3 times more able than an STF or STE. The power lies in the custom chips. You can do more with a 7mhz CPU with hardware assistance than with a single 8mhz CPU with absolutely no hardware assistance at all. It's just a logical fact.
@markwiygul6356
6 years ago
Nice TEN-FORTY-ST!!
@mspenrice
5 years ago
*Thousand and forty ;-)
Well, OK. (One-thirty, two-sixty) Five-twenty, Ten-forty, and indeed Twenty-Eighty and Fortyone-Sixty. That carry-over numbering scheme from the XEs (and effectively the consoles) really was something else.
But not one-oh-four-oh anyway...
@TimHeinz-htimba
8 years ago
Dungeon Master was a really fun game for it's time. You could have up to 4 different characters in your party arranged two in front and 2 in back. The characters in back would usually receive less damage from attacks unless you were being attack from behind. Characters would level up over time and enemies would often drop weapons, food, or even torches. Some area were dark and required at torch to see where you are but would burn out over time. There were secret rooms and hidden treasures similar to Wolfenstein 3D. It was a very advance game for it's time. There is also a sequel called Chaos Strikes Back. I never played that one but I would love to though.
@bukster1
7 years ago
+Tim Heinz I played both Dungeon Master and its sequel for ages in the 80s and early ninties. They were some of the best games of the 80's
@vwestlife
10 years ago
It's funny how "Computers for the masses, not the classes" does not rhyme when said in a NZ accent. :-) My Atari XEGS came with stiffer springs under the keys than my ST, slightly improving the typing feel. Best Electronics sells an Atari ST keyboard upgrade kit containing these springs. The later STE and Falcon models moved the mouse and joystick ports to the side, and had improved graphics and stereo sound, but were not 100% compatible with older ST games and software.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
Actually the mouse and joystick started out on the right hand side, under where the floppy drive is on the F(M), E and Falcon models (and where it isn't on the older external-drive ones). They must have not been quite able to fit the ports underneath the floppy for some reason, even though it stands a long way proud of the motherboard on quite tall legs and the entire machine could easily have been lower-rise.
The main mouse and digital joystick ports still live underneath the keyboard on the E and Falcon in fact - what's on the left hand side are a pair of 15-pin analogue joystick and paddle (and Jaguar-compatible game pad) ports, which add back the extended functionality seen in the 8-bits and the Amiga but missing from the ordinary STs. Hardly anything was ever made to plug into them, and the games and other software that acknowledge them in any way are extremely limited. You can't plug normal sticks and mice into them, even through an adaptor, and hope to have them work. There are actually more games that support the addition of two additional digital sticks through an adaptor that plugs into the printer port...
@kyle8952
8 years ago
Terry it's Ten-Forty EssteeEffEm
@qbertqbert2
8 years ago
you forgot to show the high res monochrome screen mode (VGA compatible). That is what made it a strong competitor for the Apple Mac.
@tezzaNZ
8 years ago
Yes, that's true. It looks very crisp in mono.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
Well, if he hasn't got one, bit hard to do that :)
It's only marginally VGA compatible btw, actually more like SVGA, and you need a reasonably forgiving multisync monitor to actually display its mode. It scans at a higher frequency than VGA, so you get 400 lines at 72hz, with quite a lot of blanking (maybe to allow a lot of manufacturing tolerance, or maybe they originally meant to use a higher active line count but couldn't afford to reserve enough screen memory until the design was far too finalised to change anything?), vs the equivalent VGA mode that runs at 70hz with about half as many blank lines per frame (or of course 60hz with 480 active and slightly more lines total). It's one of those oddball alternative modes like what you get on the AT&T computers plus the PC98 and other Japanese offerings, and has a rather good excuse (same as the Amiga!) for not being directly compatible with either VGA or SVGA in that it came along long before either of them were produced by IBM, and instead was probably more an attempt to give roughly twice the horizontal frequency of MDA and more than twice that of CGA...
@CaminoAir
9 years ago
Jack Tramiel survived a Nazi concentration camp, while his family didn't. Personally, I believe that accounts for a lot of his ruthlessness at Commodore (although Texas Instruments aggressive tactics towards Commodore obviously didn't help either). When business is already conventionally cut-throat, having an extreme background like he did does seem to explain a lot. The unfortunate truth is that behind the design, production, marketing and distribution of 1980's computers is a history of very unpleasant (being kind) human behaviour in business.
@LudicInterface
7 years ago
I ran into a guy still using one of these as a midi sequencer less than a decade ago. Amazing...
@mspenrice
5 years ago
Why fix what ain't broken? It's not a job that needs a huge amount of processing power or memory, if the computer itself isn't holding samples or the like. And in fact the ST had enough computrons to happily host additional MIDI-outs through an expansion cartridge (or the serial port, like what the Amiga and soundcard/gameport-less PCs had to for any MIDI output)... And you could hook up SCSI hard drives to it, and Zipdiscs, CDROMs even, as well as bang data in and out using the serial or even MIDIs, so the floppy drive need not be too much of a handicap... though the ST will happily read PC-standard 720k's formatted in a USB drive, so you can continue to communicate with it in the modern age through what are essentially slow, low capacity, oversized SD cards.
@1337Shockwav3
9 years ago
Fun fact: The high resolution mode is fully VGA compatible - only possible issue is that it runs at 72Hz which some LCD displays may not support. Schematic here: http://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_10_2010/post-6701-128665872766.gif
@mspenrice
5 years ago
...which means it isn't "fully" VGA compatible. Its horizontal scan frequency is actually more like that of SVGA or XGA (plug a bog-standard 31khz VGA monitor into it and it might go bang), and the vertical is higher than almost anything else available (for a sensible price, anyway) on PC until the end of the 80s/early 90s. Plus the line count is a thing all to itself. And the monitor port itself is totally weird. The only really "compatible" thing is that it happens to provide both H and V sync at levels and pulse lengths PC monitors can understand, which is not something all old computers do.
Thankfully modern "VGA" monitors are actually all multisyncs that just use the VGA socket standard (...unless they've moved to DVI, HDMI, Displayport etc), so as long as yours is suitably forgiving and happy to sync to anything from 449-line at 70hz (= 31.5khz horizontal) upwards - and particularly the NEC ones that can go down to 25 or even 15khz seem to be easygoing in that regard - then it should be able to lock on to the ST signal.
(ST Hi is 500 line at 71.5hz, or 35.7khz horizontal; VGA sits at 31.5k with 449 or 525 lines, SVGA at 35.5khz with 625 lines, XGA at 35.1khz with 819 lines interlaced... so there's no direct match there at all. And of course Low/medium is 263 at 15.8khz or 313 at 15.6khz, double scanning instead of interlacing)
The other issue you'll probably face with LCD monitors and TVs rather than CRTs is the pixel sampling clock. PCs use a certain set of clocks at those low resolutions, none of which match closely with the ST's (almost exactly 8 and 16mhz in Low and Medium, almost exactly 32mhz in High), so unless you can find some way to tweak it to be a good match (giving 508/1016 or 512/1024 samples per full scan line for the colour modes (NTSC, PAL), and 896 samples per full scanline in mono) the image may look somewhat horizontally smeared and/or the victim of a bad MS Paint resizing job, even without the possible problem of vertical rescaling...
@dvamateur
9 years ago
Back in the day, we Atari ST owners, were notoriously bullied by Amiga owners. But, the ST had always been closest to my heart, and stays to this day. I recently acquired SM124 monitor, as well as Steinberg Cubase (x2, big blue American box, and black German box) and C LAB Creator.
@weeardguy
5 years ago
I was too young at that time, but my dad bought an Atari 260ST, expanded the memory (a huge amount of money at that time) got a better floppydrive (you got your pockets emptied again) and eventually paired it with a modem (*kaching* AGAIN) and connected to his office from home: on several severe winterdays with lots of snow, he worked from the home. At some convention (he would rather stay away from just because of what he would encounter) for computer-owners he was looking at all the guys bragging about their specs when it came to memory and such while he wasn't saying anything, until one of the other guys asked what his setup was."I have an Atari 260ST...' "Haha, that's a game or MIDI-machine! It lacks all sufficient capacity for anything serious. What the hell is that good for?""Well, there's a modem attached to it and via landline I dial in to a special telephone-number at my office so I can work from home if necessary." The crowd went dead silent and just gazed at him in awe ;) I did experience the 260ST by the way and still have it (I just gave it a testrun to see if my new (well, second hand) computermonitor would be able to display it, as it features analog-video inputs (BNC connector). There's probably a timing problem: I get a white-screen so the monitor does understand there is some signal (opposed to just displaying the blue 'no signal' screen) but that's it. Funny thing is that I got a monochrome result with a ST to VGA converter on the VGA input of the monitor.Once it has to display more than a certain amount of colors, it fails: you can see the desktop, but you can't run games, it reverts back to the desktop after attempts to load the game.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Thanks Dan. I think it's important to understand the historical context around a particular machine rather than just the specs. It just makes it more interesting and meaningful.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Yes, Lemmings is one of my favourite games but I didn't discover it until about 1992....and that was on a PC so I was well behind!
This huge disk stack I've got does have some painting programs in. I need to check them.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
The one problem with Lemmings on the ST was the single mouse-capable port. It might have been possible to write programs that could understand the signals from a mouse plugged into the joyport (as the light sensors just used the cardinal directions, and the left button used the fire button pin), but no-one ever did to my knowledge, and there was a small problem in that the right mouse button shared an internal line with the joystick fire... that tiny bit of cheaping out by Atari made for a lot of problems in terms of capability (couldn't use 2-button sticks, or 2 mice...) and of course cheating by the mouse player in games where you could use a mouse and a stick for different players. Player 2 already had it hard enough by having to use a stick to control the cursor, but also had to trust that Player 1 wasn't going to be an asshole and start randomly hitting the right button to make them "click" at the wrong times...
On the Amiga you could just hook up two mice, and I think there was an option for similar in the PC, if you actually had two mice and two serial or bus ports to plug them into of course. But even if you were stuck with mouse + stick on those, or even mouse + keyboard, at least the PC stick was itself analogue, and in neither case was there crosstalk between the mouse and the other device...
@DanRamosDR
4 years ago
You can say it... Ten-Forty STfm... repeatedly saying one oh four oh is so weird to hear for a classic Atari owner like me. :P
@spinnetti
4 years ago
When this came out, I thought it was the best of Mac and PC... loved mine...
@elguinolo7358
6 years ago
Rana Rama : Praise Kek !
@RetroGamingWorld
7 years ago
can never forget that green Gui and the bee icon when double clicking
@gregnicenh
8 years ago
So many hours playing Dungeon Master on my STs.
@martingoldberg2237
8 years ago
Jack didn't purchase Atari Inc., he purchased the assets of its Consumer Division. Atari Corporation was a renaming of his company TTL not Atari Inc. Likewise he did not sack Atari Inc.'s staff, again he only purchased a division's assets and people don't come with assets purchases. The entire rest of the company was immediately renamed to Atari Games Inc., and anyone not hired to Jack's separate company was dismissed by Warner (they got their final checks from Warner as well). Atari Games Inc. was eventually paired down to just the Coin Division and had majority ownership sold to NAMCO, at which point it was renamed to Atari Games Corp. Additionally, the ST (or RBP as it was known at the time) was started before the purchase.
@MechaFenris
9 years ago
Oh man, I loved Dungeon Master. I played it so much that I stuck little stickers with the spell names on the side of the monitor. :)
I had the Amiga version, though. ZO KATH RA!
@KarlUKmidlands
9 years ago
Nice video my first 16 bit pc here in the uk, then I got the STE and then moved over to the dark side Amiga owning A600 and A1200 until PC got gfx cards.
@tezzaNZ
9 years ago
Thanks. Yes, there was definitely an Amiga vrs Atari ST thing going on there in the late 1980s although at the time (being a boring PC-clone guy in my late 20s) I was completely unaware of it!
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
The FDD is probably not 100% as I've noticed programs do take a long time to load.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
It might also just be a thing of old, somewhat worn, single-sided discs with simplistic formats that mean they can only load one half-K sector per spin (so a blazing fast loading speed of... 2.5 kilobytes per second) and lose a lot of time to advancing the head every 9 sectors. As well as maybe having to re-read sectors here and there if they're on the borderline of becoming corrupt.
Later, more advanced sector-skew formats on double sided discs with 10 or even 11 sectors per track could push that peak speed to 3 or even 4x (and I think in some cases even the Amiga-like trick of reading an entire track in a single rotation - only used for commercial, read-only discs, though, there wasn't much hope of actually modifying the data on your home machine rather than with a professional duplication rig), and read a good 20~22 sectors' worth before having to move the head, making for much quicker loading. You can quite literally hear the difference, in how the head steps much more rapidly on some discs than others, the slowest being unskewed double siders and the fastest being skewed or full-track single siders. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrr...tick, whirrrrrrrrrrrrr...tick, vs a quite quick tup-tup-tup-tup-tup over a whirring background note.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
The 1040 STFM version has an RF modulator built in, unlike the 1040 ST.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
The other odd thing about them is that the originals, including those with disc drives, don't even have composite output (unlike the CGA PCs, and e.g. the Amiga where you could have at least monochrome composite out and used a separate modulator plugged into either that or the monitor port to hook up over RF). Didn't learn that you needed a modulator onboard for that until after trying both a composite cable and trying to add a discrete RCA socket to my non-modulator model... thought I'd broken the machine :D ... instead, it's just a case that the video system is literally too simplistic to have such a feature. Atari evidently thought that composite and TV-out were old news and the future was in direct monitor connections, until market response told them otherwise.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Umm...Well the System 80 is a nostalgic favourite but only because it was my first computer. The ones I value the most are those all-in-one units that look uber-retro. If there was a fire I'd probably grab the Commodore Pet first. The Apple Lisa and TRS-80 Model 4 would be high on the list too. Then maybe the IBM 5150 and the Apple Macintosh 128...then the Apple II+..the TRS-80 Model 1. Heck, I wouldn't want to lose any of them.
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
One last thing ;) The FM stands for 'Floppy, Modulator', in effect. I have an Atari 520ST, no F, no M, the first 520 model. No built-in floppy drive, and no internal modulator. Also, no ROM-based OS. This ST needs the OS loading from disk. And it has a large, heavy external power brick. The computer case was smaller, rather like the difference between an Atari 600XL and 800XL. That's enough Atari ST for one night... I'm off to bed. Oh look, it's 2am...
@mspenrice
5 years ago
That's unusual, being a 520 and not having ROM OS. They rather quickly took to rebadging the disc-load models as the 260ST for 512kb RAM (including many that were upgraded from having just 256kb) and 520ST+ for 1mb, to differentiate how they didn't have the full amount of memory available when running GEM. So yours must be a really early model! :-)
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Just the way I see the numbers I guess (-:
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
I've sent you a link to PDF scans of all 13 issues of ST Amiga Format, a UK magazine that covered both computers. Well worth a look; you'll read about the other FTL game, this time ST-only, Oids, thoroughly recommended.
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
The mouse game could be 'Mouse Trap', if it's a platformer. There were a few tank games on the ST: Conqueror, Sherman M4, and maybe Battle Command (sequel to Carrier Command) all spring to mind.
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
That's handy; my 1040 STe is in pieces, taken apart over a year ago, and I'm sure the guide will be handy to help put it back together. ;)
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
The two additional joystick ports on STe models (at least the 1040 STe I have here) on the side are compatible with the Atari Jaguar controller. They aren't 9-pin like the traditional Atari ports, though. The regular 9-pin ports are still under the ST's right corner.
@Wondermike42
10 years ago
The good old Atari ST....I had one of the first 520 STs with additional 512 MB soldered piggyback on the first 512 MB. Being almost 20 back then, i liked the ST more for its crisp monochrome Monitor for "serious work" (but i got it upgraded to display all three resolutions later on). The Amiga 1000 and Macs were way too expensive and the DOS clones too boring for me (and not much cheaper anyway). I still own my ST and even my Megafile 30 still spins up (it did some time ago when i last tried).
@misjahnner
10 years ago
What I like about Atari is that you can write floppies with regular PC machine (even with win7) which doesn't work for Amiga. I tried several games and some music software, such as Cubase... but never tried MIDI which was my main goal... Yes, it was really popular in Europe, especially here in CS. Thanks for another great upload. A lot to learn from you and a lot of good old memories brought back.. :)
@TadRaunch
10 years ago
My first computer! So much nostalgia in that GEM desktop
@electricadventures
10 years ago
Another good machine overview. The Atari ST was my main home work machine, using the high resolution monochrome display for desk top publishing and word processing. It had a newer version of Word than the Macintosh did & worked quite well.
The frequency of the monitors can be a bit of a pain however, but you can get a really good picture using a scart cable available from the UK. Allows high resolution colour mode as well.
@mspenrice
5 years ago (edited)
Well, the SCART doesn't. And depending on your actual machine variant you may need a different cable even for colour (still SCART, but wired with different resistors and even capacitors in the plug space) because they put different voltages down the line, not all of them compatible with all TVs...
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Ah, ok. I'll correct that in the video.
Wow, you would have used that keyboard a lot then. I guess one could get used to it. Definitely cheaper than a PC!
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Thanks. Yes, I agree. Even the C64 was better and that's saying something!
@mspenrice
5 years ago
Ooh, it's a bone of contention. The Yamaha chip technically has more simultaneous channels, particularly if you bring the envelope into play as its own thing rather than merely a cheap bit of ASDR... and the ST can do some additional tricks using the system timer and so-on... but it still has a fight on its hand vs the SID, thanks to the additional waveforms, the filters and ring modulator, all of which give you additional flexibility without any additional CPU load.
If only they'd managed to get the AMY ready in time (which was essentially a super-SID, 8 channels I think with even more waveform flexibility), instead of abandoning the project and selling the rights to Ensoniq...
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Yes, games often stretched the boundaries. Some of the TRS-80 Model I/III/IV stuff was amazing considering there was no built in sound chip and the graphics were so crude. I've also seen some amazing demo stuff lately on the 8-bit commodore 64. You could never have imagined it could do that!
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Much obliged for the support. I really missed out entirely on that era as by 1987 I had a family, little money and was working hard to get ahead in my job. I should seek out some of those ST and Amiga Mags to get a feel of 16 bit culture.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
You're welcome. Yes, it would have been great to have some equipment to demonstrate the MIDI in the video. At least I found a shot of it hooked up to some gear.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Thanks. Yes, development was amazing fast. I did find some interesting stories about just how hard Tramiel rode his staff. I was going to mention them but decided to leave them out. I like to keep the videos to about 20 mins if I can.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
They got lucky with Digital Research having a freshly 68k compatible version of GEM that they wanted to show off to the world, really, rather than the system being saddled with something rather more staid like CP/M or even Basic. Without a GUI, even if it ended up being a disc-load one (as it was in the very earliest models), the Amiga would have totally taken it to the cleaners.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
LOL! With my boring business monochrome XT clone, I missed the "Amiga vrs Atari" fan-wars but I read that things could get hostile (-:
@lactobacillusprime
10 years ago
Excellent machine. I used computers for 'boring' stuff myself but always was drawn to playing games on the machines as well. Often the innovations thought of in games really push the machines beyond their boundaries.
@mspenrice
5 years ago (edited)
Funnily for the ST and Amiga, it was more the discrete demoscene that ended up feeding back into games and making them more impressive, particularly where sceners ended up forming a game company, like Thalion and Team 17. A lot of the tricks you see in the more graphically impressive games (and art packages...) on both systems were pioneered first in demos... And the machines attracted people who wanted to push those boundaries, as their processor and built-in graphics and sound capabilities were already reasonably good.
Bit of a different state of play on the PC because the hardware just wasn't really suitable for fancy demo effects, and the CPU was a bit poor, so not that interesting for all but the most hardcore sceners. But games companies of course were sort of forced to get the best they could out of the machine, and ended up pulling some very impressive tricks out of the bag (especially Apogee) on the otherwise somewhat hamstrung 8088-and-CGA/EGA, soundcard-less, small-and-segmented-memory systems.
@CaminoAir
10 years ago
I had a 1040 STE model. The keyboard was exactly as you described, Terry. Just by looking at the keys, you could tell how it would feel. I like the case design (including a flap over the floppy drive door) and it reflected the machine: straight-forward and easy to use. I never used hi-resolution (only had a TV). The discs were PC format thankfully (although not 100% compatible). It's a solid all rounder and not really a direct competitor to the Amiga. No basic manual though.
@mspenrice
5 years ago
Essentially, they concentrated on doing the core, basic things really well ... and then stopped there. If only they'd bothered making any kind of worthwhile and affordable upgraded model before the half-assed Falcon (the STe doesn't really count, as it was essentially an attempt to not-quite catch up with the A500), things may have gone better for them in the early 90s, when the hardware started to look more competent-but-slow-and-limited rather than cutting edge like it originally was.
There was an idea mooted in a TV show interview with Tramiel that their philosophy for the ST range was that the computer would be just another part of a system of parts connected by interface cables, hence why it was largely non-upgradeable internally, and it had so many built-in external expansion ports which were often missing or less comprehensive on the 8-bits (and even the Amiga didn't quite match), and indeed on a lot of machines like the Apple II and IBM had to themselves be added with internal cards. If you wanted to upgrade anything from the power supply on upwards (floppy, hard disc, printer, modem, ROMs via the cartridge port, even the sound hardware via MIDI, changing the monitor or adding a TV modulator, maybe even CAD-level graphics terminals) you could just swap it out as simply as unplugging a set of old headphones from a stereo and plugging in a new pair. If you wanted to upgrade the computer , in terms of memory, processor, or any other core part including the built-in video... you bought a new one. From Atari. But at a rather more affordable price than it would otherwise have been to get one with a lot more stuff built in. And you'd just unplug all those cables, including for the power brick and floppy, toss the old machine (or more likely part-exchange it), and plug them into the new one.
Problem being, they never offered the upgraded machines, the ROM port quickly proved to be too small in address range for the intended use (GEM wouldn't fit without banking, and about the only other thing other than some types of BASIC that came on ROM carts were the OS chips needed for Mac emulation; everything else used it as a kind of cut-down ISA slot), and the market for MIDI sound expansions floundered when no company offered any for an affordable price (e.g. the Roland MT32 was nice, but deadly expensive), and Atari ended up building in the PSU, floppy and modulator anyway...
@lambrosgeo
1 year ago
Keyboard IS awful indeed.
@CRAZYHORSE19682003
2 years ago
Question, what computers did you grow up using? My first computer was the Atari 800.
@lisboagarage3300
3 years ago
Amazing how this machines work after 30 years.
@1960ARC
3 years ago
Nice video! I typed hundreds of reports on my Atari ST. I found it very easy to type on even compared to the IBM XT at work. Also later on when IBM switched from 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 in floppies they worked just fine on the ST and could easily take files into work.
@jsj01999
4 years ago
Who's watching this in 2019!
@matthewwallis794
4 years ago
What cable/adaptor do you use for the monitor? VGA colour/monochrome or component cable?
@tezzaNZ
4 years ago
I'm just using an old TV. Output is via the RF modulator. Not ideal.
@thealaskan1635
4 years ago
Just selling Atari home entertainment division to Jack Tramiel was a bad move.I wish Warner hung onto Atari and released the Amiga computer , because I think it could've blown away the less powerful Apple Macintosh or the overrated IBM compatible computers.Also Atari owned a few very valuable parents.
@BB-ce3bj
4 years ago (edited)
I polished RAM expansion for ST to a perfection. Given four 1MB SIMM sticks for a PC, few resistors, a few 100nF caps and few wire bits, I could do very nice 4MB expansion for it within an hour, without a PCB or anything else.
ST could also be:
- overclocked, usually up to 2x system clock, especially with PC's fast DRAM and good, fast FLASH - this enabled it to be able to run colour output on ( some)VGA instead of PAL - FDC chip could be exchanged for a small board that would enable you to run HD ( 1,44 MB+) disks - small overscan generator enabled one to expand useable screen area over borders ( often expanding original 640x400 mono to 800x600 etc on overclocked machines) - TOS 2.06 + IDE expansion would bring IDE disks to the table, which was cheap and AWESOME - FPU could be added, which greatly speeded up some CAD software...
@BB-ce3bj
4 years ago
I repaired many 1040 ST(FMs by replacing the HV cap in the PSU. I laso did IDE card for it and the turbo ( switching the 68000 to 16MHz wehile inactive on the bus - this speeded up longer operations like MUL and DIV).
Atari's strength was fast monochrome ( 72Hz), DMA capabilities and unimpeeded CPU ( 0WS), uniform adress sapce ( no fast and slow RAM), weakness was just about everything else.
Best ones for me were MEGA models ( Mega ST, not STE etc crap). Everything else, from Mega/STE to TT and Falcon was utter crap.
@Synthematix
4 years ago
Wasnt the atari STE the more desirable one?
@em00k
4 years ago
Seriously? The keyboard? Amiga and ST were bliss to use.
@ronnyb5890
4 years ago
the main thing for using the atari 1040fm is music,an advantage with the midi ports already on board,you just needed a music keyboard,and the old steinberg cubase program i only had steinberg cubasis,cubase was too costly,as it was for professional musicians,but i had a lot of fun with it
@ritsukasa
5 years ago
nice. Like how it looks. And also the logo and the name "Atari" there looks precious too.
@CRAZY6256
5 years ago
Which is better... 1040ste or 1040stfm?
@tezzaNZ
5 years ago
The 1040STE, being a later model, had better hardware. According to Wikipedia It wasn't compatible with some older software though and not many programs were written to take advantage of the improved hardware of the STEs. So I guess it depends on your definition of "better".
@IsaacKuo
5 years ago
Ah, when you said there was ONE game you had heard of, I was immediately wondering - Was it Dungeon Master? Maybe Carrier Command? As expected, Dungeon Master! It was really a "wow" inducing game at the time. The drag-and-drop interface really worked well and intuitively, which was a HUGE contrast to a ton of games that tried and failed miserably to use the mouse.
It also had this really interesting 2x2 party formation mechanic. Unlike other games that just placed your party members in a row or used a combat mini-map, Dungeon Master placed your 4 party members in a 2x2 formation directly in the main maze map. This avoided breaking up the action pace into a combat mini-map, while also giving you options to place melee characters in front and support characters behind. However, monsters attacking from the side or rear would be attacking them!
I remember Dungeon Master was one of the few Atari ST games (maybe the only one) which gave Amiga gamers feelings of envy and awe.
@mspenrice
5 years ago (edited)
Heh, the Language Disk. You're more right about it being optional than you probably realise, I think I only ever loaded ours two or three times max. In fact revisiting it recently there was a lot of stuff on there I'd plain forgotten about. The main useful thing on there was the Control Panel accessory, which took about five seconds to copy onto any other disk you wanted to use it on, along with other accessories from different sources, so you didn't have to swap discs back and forth to load up a favourite program along with a suite of suitable accessories available.
The terminal emulator was of absolutely no use to us whatsoever, not having a modem or any kind of other serial device (including e.g. a "headless" professional/industrial computer), and the OEM ST Basic was notoriously terrible... we used other programming languages for tooling about with, including FaST Basic which actually came on a cartridge (! - one of the very few programs to ever do so, probably intended for the swiftly abandoned tiny-memory 130 and 260 models), but never really that version. It didn't add anything to the actual operating system itself (any non-self-boot disk you put in would make the desktop appear within a couple seconds, and all the parts of GEM you see with the Language disk in the drive are accessible even if you leave it to load up without a disk).
Odd that you found the drive a bit slow, it might be something specific to Dungeon Master (it would, of course, be a single sided disc given its age, which means more head seeks for the same amount of data), maybe it's formatted in a strange way... I always found the ST drive about as fast as using the same 720k discs on a PC, much quicker than any 5.25" discs, as well as 3.5"ers on the Amiga, but of course a bit slower than high-density PC types. Certainly it wasn't sluggish enough to drive us to buy a hard drive or any of that - kept using it as a twin floppy system right through until replacing it with a full CDROM equipped multimedia PC. Games and other programs on better formatted discs (double sided and with a good bit of "skew") could load up remarkably fast in comparison to the 2+ minutes you had to sit (...which still beats that of the C64 and Atari 8-bits, never mind tape, and is more like what I've experienced waiting for Amiga games to load :)
Think I heard of but never saw RanaRama before... very odd. Hopefully you can find some better ones to use with it :)
Also ours came with two ringbound manuals - that shorter one you show off, and a rather more comprehensive one, which goes into more technical detail about the machine itself.
Fair play on the keyboard though, we did do some word processing but and DTP with it but it was a touch mushy, the separate one for the Mega was somewhat better, and could be upgraded with clickier keycaps for a more professional feel. That default sharp-angled, low dpi mouse was universally reviled and always replaced by much better third party ones... which is probably why you can find so many OEM ones these days, because they would have had so little use and thus outlived all their replacements.
@vinceg6925
5 years ago
Great video Terry, thanks again
@tezzaNZ
5 years ago
You're welcome Vin!
@jack_knife-1478
5 years ago
Can you get a scart lead for this atari st mate because im thinking of getting one. I never owned one as a kid had commodore 64. Anyway, was just wondering if you can use a scart with this atari st to get a better picture on a tv..
@bjbell52
5 years ago
and yet one could put the OS from an Mac into an Atari cartridge and turn your Atari into a FASTER Mac.
@seongjep
5 years ago
Hi, does Atari ST have a lot of games? If so, I'm interested in purchasing one
@tezzaNZ
5 years ago
It does. Mine aren't for sale though.
@ewythr
5 years ago
Thanks for making this. I had a 520STFM that I upgraded to 1M using four 256K x 4bit DRAM chips. I ran MiNT with TOSWIN, which provided simple multitasking for TOS programs.
@Gunstarrhero1
6 years ago
what dlfsilver is saying is run time is always faster than comp and run. arcade boards are run time and clock proficient. this means 7 mhz is 7 million instructions a second. on a comp board the clock is now how many cycles per iteration at what instruction per every integer pass.
@chadcastagana9181
5 years ago
Gunstarrhero This is interesting! Does this explain why people no longer describes a computers speed in Mips but Mhz instead?
@noeuro
5 years ago (edited)
You can still use MIPS, but a IPC has to be taken into account when making straight speed comparisons with older hardware.
@markwiygul6356
6 years ago
the Atari TEN-FOURTY ST ...a great computer
@andywainwright209
6 years ago
The Atari is much more a Sinclair than Atari, and was actually developed using the Sinclair QL- the main differences is a faster processor, more memory and half decent disk drives. Like Sinclair machines it lacks sophisticated sound and graffic hardware, with the CPU having to generate spites, scrolling and so forth. Essentially it's a sixteen bit version for the humble Spectrum and was the logical upgrade for Sinclair users.
@tezzaNZ
6 years ago
This is the first I've heard of any formal developmental relationship between the Sinclair QL and the Atari 16 bit machines (apart from both using the Motorola 68000 chip)? As far as I know they were developed quite independently. Do you have any links to articles or references to back up this assertion?
@andywainwright209
6 years ago
Terry Stewart TOS/GEM68 was indeed developed on a Sinclair, although it bears little relationship to that machine's hardware. Some of the full 68000 QL clones, such as the Thor series actually are closer to the ST than the QL and can run the software of both with little emulation. I believe due to the enhanced video giving 250 scan lines, it is fairly easily to accurately emulate as QL on an Amiga. Hope that helps.
@wolfgangtrubshaw5549
7 years ago
Very fortunate visual product design, down to the tilted floppy drive covers, the mouse, even the manual. Pity that they yellow/green so horribly. If they had introduced a keyboard the quality of the Mega STE's way earlier, and if Tramiel had cooperated more with DRI in spite of looming lawsuits regarding GEM (who would then have been aimed at DRI, anyhow), the ST would have done much better as a platform than historically it did. Commodore had been successful because of Tramiel. Once over at Atari, they were successful in spite of Tramiel. Sinking Atari like the Tramiels did was quite a feat, really.
@tezzaNZ
7 years ago
Thanks for the comments Wolfgang
@johncarrasquillo4429
7 years ago
good computer.
@josephholliday4476
7 years ago
If you're not interested in that copy of Dungeon Master that you have, would you be willing to sell it?
@tezzaNZ
7 years ago
+Joseph Holliday Don't want to sell it thanks Joseph.
@kernelab
7 years ago
dont know much about them, but i had an atari st at 15 and in Australia there was literally 5-6 games on the shelves in shops to buy, but Amigas had 100+. Also hardly anyone had STs so i ditched it, and got an Amiga, and it wqas loads better for copying /swapping games....al be it illegal, i was 15
@rabscots910
7 years ago
Very few programmers used these systems well. Programming was still catching up with what the hardware could do. I don't think that potential was every fully released from the Atari ST or even the 8 bit Atari computers. Your system - never had its full capabilities realized. Damn shame. Imagine if Atari had put two 68000 chips in the ST?
@johneygd
7 years ago
Just an awesome machine.
@rabscots910
7 years ago
Sound chip could have been improved.
@rabscots910
7 years ago
The amiga was overrated. ST - could do everything the amiga could. With some effort.
@dlfrsilver
7 years ago
+Ray N : you can't compare a CPU driven computer like the Atari ST, with the Amiga, which of course use its CPU as well, but many things were discharged from the CPU on the amiga thanks to the custom chips, means the CPU had more free time to process other things, that you'd have to do in software on the ST. This was the main difference, and lately some coders (the ones who made Shockwave, scorpion and another one just said they had to cancel the ST versions of their games because the ST was unable to push the games at 50 frames per second. For Power Drift like games, it kills completely the pleasure you can expect from such software.) The ST was good for half 8 half 16bits games with small sprites.
To answer what you said, the amiga CPU clock is a bit lower than 8 mhz, but the custom chips just allow the computer to get better results than any software engine running on an ST @8 mhz.
Many programmers just explained that for games you get the max out of the ST very quickly, and the 8mhz clock on the CPU doesn't help when you want to do some "magic".
@franwex
8 years ago
Aaaack! There's a high frequency pitch noise in the intro! It gets better as the video goes on, I guess it's a mic thing
@tezzaNZ
8 years ago
franwex Yes, it quite a few of the non-HD videos there is poor sound from the camera microphone. Sorry about that. Luckily most of the audio is done through a headset.
@unebonnevie
8 years ago
Thanks for the video. I have a 1040STF and I bought a composite video cable to hook up to the TV. Anyway, I checked that the 1040STF has the TOS built-in ROM, which means that it does not need a system disks to boot. Still my 1040STF can't book. I don't have even a ST mouse, but I don't think I need that to boot up the system? Thanks for any tips.
@tezzaNZ
8 years ago
unebonnevie Yes, I don't think a mouse is needed. I don't know what might be wrong? Some mainboard or ROM problem perhaps? I've never had to fix mine.
@earx23
7 years ago
+unebonnevie without a disk, the 1040 will take approx 30 s to boot. mouse is not necessary indeed. you can use alt+cursor keys / insert to control the mouse pointer..
@slaterm611
8 years ago
Great Video!! Brings back some memories for sure. I have just bought one of these on ebay (1040 stfm) and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. I'm not sure where i can obtain any game disks, but ill work on that once it arrives :)
@mikekaraoke
8 years ago
liked watching this video, the 80's were a good decade
@vasileios6301
8 years ago
Cheers from Greece,great videos Mr Terry
@rickymalheirosify
8 years ago
Thinking my thinks as per usual, I came to the conclusion that this looks like a herringbone pattern. As I have not viewed the "" to the end, this is my only comment.
@okhouri
8 years ago
Thank you so much for these amazing videos! They really are very well done, entertaining and informative.
@tezzaNZ
8 years ago
okhouri Thanks for the positive feedback. You're welcome!
@Loggins1969
8 years ago
ST = Sam Tramiel?
@DrShawqee
9 years ago
Thanks a lot. Job well done!
@mundousb9280
9 years ago
you need to review the STATE OF THE ART. atari falcon 030 with ct060 acelerator,i change my wife for a falcon !!
@davereen5103
9 years ago
Great Review! :) If you have the time you could try these ST games here, as they use the graphical capabilities of the machine pretty well:
There was a pretty good game called The New Zealand Story which appeared on the Amiga as well as the Atari ST.
@tezzaNZ
9 years ago
I haven't heard of that one. If you have a link to a disk image or game ROM I'd love to take a look!
@jamiey5779
9 years ago
Terry Stewart I found a copy of the Amiga version below in an ADF inside a zip file. I have the retail Hit Squad version myself which was a cheaper budget version of the original release. The game was originally made Taito.
@Desmaad
9 years ago
Acorn's A series also had their OS in ROM, as did the Mac Classic.
@tezzaNZ
9 years ago
Indeed they did!
@Desmaad
9 years ago
Mind you, you had to do a special trick to get at the Classic's one, and it was only System 6, and a hard drive was available, making it redundant.
@WiggysanWiggysan
9 years ago
I loved my old 1040. Great bit of kit.
@TahreyUK
10 years ago
Nice rundown, though a shame there wasn't time to get into the software other than the (really bad) bundled BASIC and a glimpse at a couple of games (barely past the title screen of a quite complex and engaging classic, and ... some very odd thing I never heard of before :D). Most of the "proper" games were near Amiga level (well, except for the sound fx!), and... just... so many top quality productivity apps, inc excellent DTP and WP
(BTW, DM really should load faster'n that! Is your FDD OK?)
@sologals361
10 years ago
The mouse and joystick ports were placed in a bad place and led to problems. You could buy extensions which removed the problem.
@Drachenreiterklaus
10 years ago
Thank you for your answer, but i haven't see the RF Modulator. I will show again.
@Drachenreiterklaus
10 years ago
I wondered to see an 1040 stf pluggen in to a standart tv, how did you made it? Thx for your answer.
@elblanco5
10 years ago
Great video! It always seemed to me that the ST held its own against the Amiga, even without all the specialized support chips. I only wish the audio of the system had been a bit better.
@C64Queeg500
10 years ago
Hi Tezza, it seems you are lucky enough to own quite a large collection of retro micro computers. If you had to pick a favourite, which micro would you choose ? Thanks.
@MarkTheMorose
10 years ago
Interesting that you call the 520ST the 'five-twenty', but the 1040 'the one-oh-four-oh', rather than 'ten-forty'. :)
@SpectrumFourEver
10 years ago
the STE model still had the joystick ports under the computer. i have one sitting in front of me lol
@chairuser4
10 years ago
i agree i love these machines as much as you,such fond memories,i owned some of them,i had atari,amiga,apple IIc,mac se,commodore,sinclair,its important to know the history to know how its all evolved,but i love the uniqueness that we had then in computing.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
LOL! Yea, it doesn't rhyme when speaking our dialect as an "l" in front of an "a" changes the way we pronounce it.. I've run it in my head with an American accent and yea, it rhymes better.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Thanks. Yes, I've still got a few models to cover.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Thank you. Much obliged.
@tezzaNZ
10 years ago
Yes, it was good to find a manual. I like to have manuals where possible for all of my machines.
@chairuser4
10 years ago
i love your history lessons
@TheFlyingScotsman
10 years ago
I do look forward to these videos. I like how you tell the story about how the machines came to be and how they did in the marketplace, and any controversies that were caused during their development. Thanks a lot and please keep up the good work.
@tribalmasters
10 years ago
Atari ST rocks! Aaah the memories! The Atari twist comes to mind as sometimes the solder on those underside ports would go bad! Good thing they fixed that on the Atari STE and moved the ports to the side! Lemmings was my favourite, a mouse game and a tank game but I forgot what all the games were called! Mine had TOS 1.62. Try some of the painting programs, it's great fun to play about and make pictures on the ST and also music programs like Quartet
@spoodleboof
10 years ago
Actually, the shielding is thin steel plate, not aluminium. Also it is not hard to remove, you just have to straighten the little tabs that hold the sections together, then it comes apart easily. Use small pliers to twist the tabs.
Despite the horrible keyboard, I used mine as a freelance translator to translate several books. The key points for me were that it was faster and cheaper than a PC, it could use PC format disks, and it had the MIDI interface. Every music studio in Sweden had one.
@spoodleboof
10 years ago
Actually, the shielding is thin steel plate, not aluminium. Also it is not hard to remove, you just have to straighten the little tabs that hold the sections together, then it comes apart easily. Use small pliers to twist the tabs.
@lactobacillusprime
10 years ago
Hewson created a ton of amazing games. Very high production and gameplay value.
@maboroshi1986
10 years ago
As always excellent video, I think if I was to try what you do I would go on for hours.
The Atari st was designed to be cheap and brought to market quickly, if I recall correctly all development occurred in a year to undercut commodore.
The problem is in my opinion it shows, graphics and sound suffered In comparison to the Amiga, the sound chip was the same as the PC Jr and Sega master system. The MIDI ports and the fast processor (10MHz for the st vs 7 for Amiga) really saved it.
@EgoShredder
10 years ago
Tezza have a look at this YouTube video on how to disassemble your ST or STE.
/yNc1_kUdNYg
@EgoShredder
10 years ago
Easy fix to the port problem, just plug in some extension cables and leave them in all the time. You then plug your mouse and joystick into the extension that hangs out. I have a few of those and also one that takes both the mouse and joystick in one port, and auto switches between them when you move one of them.
My Atari 1040ST(FM). A retro-review in this YouTube video.
Because these machines were basically unexpandable (only a ROM port, no expansion port), I had to later solder an extra 2MByte RAM.
And after that, I removed the ROM expansion plug and soldered in a cable to run my own extensions on it - with reading a specific 256 byte address range to output a byte (instead of writing to a single port).
From the famous German c't magazine I got an interface to attach an SCSI floppy. 80MB, which I still have, now attached to my selfbuilt 6502 machine :-)
But I guess my soldering skills and maybe the quality of the PCB weren't compatible so at some point it became quite flaky and finally died.
I probably got lured into buying the Atari because of the C64 experience - OS in ROM, but games etc mostly still taking over the whole machine. I wasn't really aware how the OS would become more and more important. Also even though the hardware was not as good as the Amiga, the OS was simple - but kind of stable.
I had my good time with the Atari, and I could use it for work and some development. But for my interest in computers, I was quickly growing out of it. At some point I even developed a device driver for the Amiga ... which at that point had become a much more interesting machine...
But then the PC revolution had already started, and Linux was getting momentum...
Well, OK. (One-thirty, two-sixty) Five-twenty, Ten-forty, and indeed Twenty-Eighty and Fortyone-Sixty.
That carry-over numbering scheme from the XEs (and effectively the consoles) really was something else.
But not one-oh-four-oh anyway...
The main mouse and digital joystick ports still live underneath the keyboard on the E and Falcon in fact - what's on the left hand side are a pair of 15-pin analogue joystick and paddle (and Jaguar-compatible game pad) ports, which add back the extended functionality seen in the 8-bits and the Amiga but missing from the ordinary STs. Hardly anything was ever made to plug into them, and the games and other software that acknowledge them in any way are extremely limited. You can't plug normal sticks and mice into them, even through an adaptor, and hope to have them work. There are actually more games that support the addition of two additional digital sticks through an adaptor that plugs into the printer port...
It's only marginally VGA compatible btw, actually more like SVGA, and you need a reasonably forgiving multisync monitor to actually display its mode. It scans at a higher frequency than VGA, so you get 400 lines at 72hz, with quite a lot of blanking (maybe to allow a lot of manufacturing tolerance, or maybe they originally meant to use a higher active line count but couldn't afford to reserve enough screen memory until the design was far too finalised to change anything?), vs the equivalent VGA mode that runs at 70hz with about half as many blank lines per frame (or of course 60hz with 480 active and slightly more lines total). It's one of those oddball alternative modes like what you get on the AT&T computers plus the PC98 and other Japanese offerings, and has a rather good excuse (same as the Amiga!) for not being directly compatible with either VGA or SVGA in that it came along long before either of them were produced by IBM, and instead was probably more an attempt to give roughly twice the horizontal frequency of MDA and more than twice that of CGA...
Amazing...
Schematic here: http://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_10_2010/post-6701-128665872766.gif
Thankfully modern "VGA" monitors are actually all multisyncs that just use the VGA socket standard (...unless they've moved to DVI, HDMI, Displayport etc), so as long as yours is suitably forgiving and happy to sync to anything from 449-line at 70hz (= 31.5khz horizontal) upwards - and particularly the NEC ones that can go down to 25 or even 15khz seem to be easygoing in that regard - then it should be able to lock on to the ST signal.
(ST Hi is 500 line at 71.5hz, or 35.7khz horizontal; VGA sits at 31.5k with 449 or 525 lines, SVGA at 35.5khz with 625 lines, XGA at 35.1khz with 819 lines interlaced... so there's no direct match there at all. And of course Low/medium is 263 at 15.8khz or 313 at 15.6khz, double scanning instead of interlacing)
The other issue you'll probably face with LCD monitors and TVs rather than CRTs is the pixel sampling clock. PCs use a certain set of clocks at those low resolutions, none of which match closely with the ST's (almost exactly 8 and 16mhz in Low and Medium, almost exactly 32mhz in High), so unless you can find some way to tweak it to be a good match (giving 508/1016 or 512/1024 samples per full scan line for the colour modes (NTSC, PAL), and 896 samples per full scanline in mono) the image may look somewhat horizontally smeared and/or the victim of a bad MS Paint resizing job, even without the possible problem of vertical rescaling...
At some convention (he would rather stay away from just because of what he would encounter) for computer-owners he was looking at all the guys bragging about their specs when it came to memory and such while he wasn't saying anything, until one of the other guys asked what his setup was."I have an Atari 260ST...'
"Haha, that's a game or MIDI-machine! It lacks all sufficient capacity for anything serious. What the hell is that good for?""Well, there's a modem attached to it and via landline I dial in to a special telephone-number at my office so I can work from home if necessary."
The crowd went dead silent and just gazed at him in awe ;)
I did experience the 260ST by the way and still have it (I just gave it a testrun to see if my new (well, second hand) computermonitor would be able to display it, as it features analog-video inputs (BNC connector).
There's probably a timing problem: I get a white-screen so the monitor does understand there is some signal (opposed to just displaying the blue 'no signal' screen) but that's it. Funny thing is that I got a monochrome result with a ST to VGA converter on the VGA input of the monitor.Once it has to display more than a certain amount of colors, it fails: you can see the desktop, but you can't run games, it reverts back to the desktop after attempts to load the game.
On the Amiga you could just hook up two mice, and I think there was an option for similar in the PC, if you actually had two mice and two serial or bus ports to plug them into of course. But even if you were stuck with mouse + stick on those, or even mouse + keyboard, at least the PC stick was itself analogue, and in neither case was there crosstalk between the mouse and the other device...
I had the Amiga version, though. ZO KATH RA!
Later, more advanced sector-skew formats on double sided discs with 10 or even 11 sectors per track could push that peak speed to 3 or even 4x (and I think in some cases even the Amiga-like trick of reading an entire track in a single rotation - only used for commercial, read-only discs, though, there wasn't much hope of actually modifying the data on your home machine rather than with a professional duplication rig), and read a good 20~22 sectors' worth before having to move the head, making for much quicker loading. You can quite literally hear the difference, in how the head steps much more rapidly on some discs than others, the slowest being unskewed double siders and the fastest being skewed or full-track single siders. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrr...tick, whirrrrrrrrrrrrr...tick, vs a quite quick tup-tup-tup-tup-tup over a whirring background note.
If only they'd managed to get the AMY ready in time (which was essentially a super-SID, 8 channels I think with even more waveform flexibility), instead of abandoning the project and selling the rights to Ensoniq...
Bit of a different state of play on the PC because the hardware just wasn't really suitable for fancy demo effects, and the CPU was a bit poor, so not that interesting for all but the most hardcore sceners. But games companies of course were sort of forced to get the best they could out of the machine, and ended up pulling some very impressive tricks out of the bag (especially Apogee) on the otherwise somewhat hamstrung 8088-and-CGA/EGA, soundcard-less, small-and-segmented-memory systems.
There was an idea mooted in a TV show interview with Tramiel that their philosophy for the ST range was that the computer would be just another part of a system of parts connected by interface cables, hence why it was largely non-upgradeable internally, and it had so many built-in external expansion ports which were often missing or less comprehensive on the 8-bits (and even the Amiga didn't quite match), and indeed on a lot of machines like the Apple II and IBM had to themselves be added with internal cards. If you wanted to upgrade anything from the power supply on upwards (floppy, hard disc, printer, modem, ROMs via the cartridge port, even the sound hardware via MIDI, changing the monitor or adding a TV modulator, maybe even CAD-level graphics terminals) you could just swap it out as simply as unplugging a set of old headphones from a stereo and plugging in a new pair. If you wanted to upgrade the computer , in terms of memory, processor, or any other core part including the built-in video... you bought a new one. From Atari. But at a rather more affordable price than it would otherwise have been to get one with a lot more stuff built in. And you'd just unplug all those cables, including for the power brick and floppy, toss the old machine (or more likely part-exchange it), and plug them into the new one.
Problem being, they never offered the upgraded machines, the ROM port quickly proved to be too small in address range for the intended use (GEM wouldn't fit without banking, and about the only other thing other than some types of BASIC that came on ROM carts were the OS chips needed for Mac emulation; everything else used it as a kind of cut-down ISA slot), and the market for MIDI sound expansions floundered when no company offered any for an affordable price (e.g. the Roland MT32 was nice, but deadly expensive), and Atari ended up building in the PSU, floppy and modulator anyway...
ST could also be:
- overclocked, usually up to 2x system clock, especially with PC's fast DRAM and good, fast FLASH
- this enabled it to be able to run colour output on ( some)VGA instead of PAL
- FDC chip could be exchanged for a small board that would enable you to run HD ( 1,44 MB+) disks
- small overscan generator enabled one to expand useable screen area over borders ( often expanding original 640x400 mono to 800x600 etc on overclocked machines)
- TOS 2.06 + IDE expansion would bring IDE disks to the table, which was cheap and AWESOME
- FPU could be added, which greatly speeded up some CAD software...
Atari's strength was fast monochrome ( 72Hz), DMA capabilities and unimpeeded CPU ( 0WS), uniform adress sapce ( no fast and slow RAM), weakness was just about everything else.
Best ones for me were MEGA models ( Mega ST, not STE etc crap). Everything else, from Mega/STE to TT and Falcon was utter crap.
i only had steinberg cubasis,cubase was too costly,as it was for professional musicians,but i had a lot of fun with it
It also had this really interesting 2x2 party formation mechanic. Unlike other games that just placed your party members in a row or used a combat mini-map, Dungeon Master placed your 4 party members in a 2x2 formation directly in the main maze map. This avoided breaking up the action pace into a combat mini-map, while also giving you options to place melee characters in front and support characters behind. However, monsters attacking from the side or rear would be attacking them!
I remember Dungeon Master was one of the few Atari ST games (maybe the only one) which gave Amiga gamers feelings of envy and awe.
The terminal emulator was of absolutely no use to us whatsoever, not having a modem or any kind of other serial device (including e.g. a "headless" professional/industrial computer), and the OEM ST Basic was notoriously terrible... we used other programming languages for tooling about with, including FaST Basic which actually came on a cartridge (! - one of the very few programs to ever do so, probably intended for the swiftly abandoned tiny-memory 130 and 260 models), but never really that version. It didn't add anything to the actual operating system itself (any non-self-boot disk you put in would make the desktop appear within a couple seconds, and all the parts of GEM you see with the Language disk in the drive are accessible even if you leave it to load up without a disk).
Odd that you found the drive a bit slow, it might be something specific to Dungeon Master (it would, of course, be a single sided disc given its age, which means more head seeks for the same amount of data), maybe it's formatted in a strange way... I always found the ST drive about as fast as using the same 720k discs on a PC, much quicker than any 5.25" discs, as well as 3.5"ers on the Amiga, but of course a bit slower than high-density PC types. Certainly it wasn't sluggish enough to drive us to buy a hard drive or any of that - kept using it as a twin floppy system right through until replacing it with a full CDROM equipped multimedia PC. Games and other programs on better formatted discs (double sided and with a good bit of "skew") could load up remarkably fast in comparison to the 2+ minutes you had to sit (...which still beats that of the C64 and Atari 8-bits, never mind tape, and is more like what I've experienced waiting for Amiga games to load :)
Think I heard of but never saw RanaRama before... very odd. Hopefully you can find some better ones to use with it :)
Also ours came with two ringbound manuals - that shorter one you show off, and a rather more comprehensive one, which goes into more technical detail about the machine itself.
Fair play on the keyboard though, we did do some word processing but and DTP with it but it was a touch mushy, the separate one for the Mega was somewhat better, and could be upgraded with clickier keycaps for a more professional feel. That default sharp-angled, low dpi mouse was universally reviled and always replaced by much better third party ones... which is probably why you can find so many OEM ones these days, because they would have had so little use and thus outlived all their replacements.
If they had introduced a keyboard the quality of the Mega STE's way earlier, and if Tramiel had cooperated more with DRI in spite of looming lawsuits regarding GEM (who would then have been aimed at DRI, anyhow), the ST would have done much better as a platform than historically it did.
Commodore had been successful because of Tramiel. Once over at Atari, they were successful in spite of Tramiel. Sinking Atari like the Tramiels did was quite a feat, really.
Your system - never had its full capabilities realized. Damn shame.
Imagine if Atari had put two 68000 chips in the ST?
To answer what you said, the amiga CPU clock is a bit lower than 8 mhz, but the custom chips just allow the computer to get better results than any software engine running on an ST @8 mhz.
Many programmers just explained that for games you get the max out of the ST very quickly, and the 8mhz clock on the CPU doesn't help when you want to do some "magic".
As I have not viewed the "" to the end, this is my only comment.
If you have the time you could try these ST games here, as they use the graphical capabilities of the machine pretty well:
Chaos Engine Chaos Engine (Atari ST) - Part 1 of 2
Lethal Excess Lethal Xcess - Atari STE
Rod Land (Stunning st version!) Atari ST Longplay [004] Rodland
Rainbow Islands Rainbow Islands Atari ST gameplay video
Arakanoid II Atari ST Game: Arkanoid - Revenge of DoH
Gods Gods - Atari St ,
Space Ace SPACE ACE - ATARI ST 1040
IK+ International Karaté + - Atari ST [Longplay]
Captain Dynamo Retro Game View - Captain Dynamo (Atari ST)
Magic Pockets Magic Pocket - Atari ST
Xenon 2 Megablast Let´s Show Xenon 2 Megablast (Atari ST) - Vorstellung des Shoot em Up Klassikers von 1989
Another World Another World (Atari ST)
Wings of Death Wings of Death | Atari St | Suomi selostus