Retro Video Gamer

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Atari_1040STf.jpg/300px-Atari_1040STf.jpg)

I have to say I'm not a frequent "user" (ie they're still stored at my parent's house) but I do have an 800xl and a 65xe

yes..I was..got my ST in 1986 and used it nearly every day for 5 years, if it wasn't playing games, I was painting in Degas Elite , Cyber Paint and Neo Chrome, then doing my own Compacts, watching demos, from all the best demo makers of the time TEX, Lost Boys, The Union and allot fo Grazy's stuff, the ST holds for some of the best years of my life, from Pen Pal swapping to collecting LSD, Medway, FoFt and Pompey Pirate Compacts, this was the machine to have infront of your telly back then,

before that, I was a total Atari head, starting up from the Atari VCS, Atari 800, Atari 600xl and then 800x and the 130xe, and once we could afford a 1050 Disk Drive, the whole Atari 8bit scene opened up, as it wasn't long before I had a U.S. Doubler installed (very few people will know what this is) and with the ability to noch holes on the left side of a 5 and quater inch disk, I could use the back side of the disk, compression on this machine was simply awesome, with the U.S.Doubler, later on the "Happy Drive" you could have like 20 + games on each side of the disks, I think I left the Atari 8bit scene with over 2,000 games..mostly bootlegged  but I did have about 30 originals, and to this day, I completely regret ever selling them off..so yes Atari played a big part of my Computer experiences

Quote from: "The Laird"What the hell?  ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuQlD6Xxu-o (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuQlD6Xxu-o)

Quote from: "Greyfox"

Quote from: "The Laird"What the hell?  ;)

This made my day!!!!!  :D LOL!!!!!!

That's impossible. You must have but this made me spill my coffee. LMFAO.

Are yes I remember. It's your post that I made a thread. So you inadvertently did it.

This keeps getting better! LOL!!!!!!

zapiy says "Laird did you take the trash out."

Laird replies "You did before you split my post."

zapiy: Oh yeah!


LOL!!!!!!

As an Amiga, I looked on the ST as the nemesis.  Hehehehe.  Not really.  I did consider getting one before I got my Amiga.  In the UK, it came out before the Amiga and also had that massive games pack with it(I think it had IK+ and loads of other things).  I was also heavily into 'Gauntlet' at the time, and drooled over the US Gold conversion of it for the ST. 

It was loved by musicians, because of the built-in MIDI ports. 

Has anyone seen the 'Satan disk' for the ST.  It was basically an add-on to allow you to use a SD card as a hard drive.  It looked good.  I don't think that they are made anymore. 

I was an ST owner during the ST/Amiga wars (bought an A1200 years later) and whilst i prefered SID music to the Amiga stuff (and still do), the Amiga chip was so, so far ahead of the crap Atari put in the St, it's honestly like comparing chalk and cheese.

Clever folks got some decent stuff coaxed from the ST chip, but it really was a huge dissapointment in a 16 Bit machine.I'd rather they kept the A8 sound chip myself....

Anyone know why they changed chips?.

Didn't they do that with Atari STe Range with stereo sound?, I myself think the YM has. Great distinctive sound and adored it for so long before I got my Amiga, plus the tunez the ST demo scene were knocking out where incredible, I actually felt this chip was better than the a8 pokey, it was crisper and cleaner, yet the pokey had 4 channels vs the 3 channels the YM chip had..and to me at the time Atari seemed to be going backwards? But as Laird explained they had their reasons and mishaps with incompatible sound chips..either way we where all exposed to sound fantastic music from both chips and am eternally grateful to have experienced it

Quote from: "The Laird"Yep, they wanted the ST to have MIDI capabilities and the YM chip had that. It was a wise decision putting it in given how the ST became the choice of musicians everywhere and revolutionised the dance music scene.

Well, it was 'a wise decision' for some of the ST's userbase (and in helping attract certain types of user to buying an ST) but not necessarily for ST gamers.

As someone who used an ST primarily for gaming I'd much rather have had a computer with a better soundchip that rivalled the Amiga than the computer's MIDI ports which I seldom ever had cause to use.

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"I was an ST owner during the ST/Amiga wars (bought an A1200 years later) and whilst i prefered SID music to the Amiga stuff (and still do), the Amiga chip was so, so far ahead of the crap Atari put in the St, it's honestly like comparing chalk and cheese.

Clever folks got some decent stuff coaxed from the ST chip, but it really was a huge dissapointment in a 16 Bit machine.I'd rather they kept the A8 sound chip myself....

Anyone know why they changed chips?.

Yep, they wanted the ST to have MIDI capabilities and the YM chip had that. It was a wise decision putting it in given how the ST became the choice of musicians everywhere and revolutionised the dance music scene.

Originally the ST was supposed to have an AMY chip too (the replacement for POKEY said to be far superior to SID but similar in design) but the new Tramiel engineers could not get it working with the ST hardware so left it out. I personally think they should have bunged in a stereo alongside the YM rather than nothing instead.

Hmmmn.'wise' only from a marketing to a select % of your target market, more like.when your selling your computer as a games machine also, not so wise, to have your 16 Bit games computer having a worse soundchip, not only compared to it's rival, but also your 8 Bit machine it replaced, wisdom of Solomon was not.

Think  one of Oceans music people said the Speccy 128K soundchip was superior to ST's as it had a buzzer that could be used also.

Atari really should have done something better than just rush it out with cheapest thing that worked at the time.

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"

Quote from: "The Laird"Yep, they wanted the ST to have MIDI capabilities and the YM chip had that. It was a wise decision putting it in given how the ST became the choice of musicians everywhere and revolutionised the dance music scene.

Well, it was 'a wise decision' for some of the ST's userbase (and in helping attract certain types of user to buying an ST) but not necessarily for ST gamers.

As someone who used an ST primarily for gaming I'd much rather have had a computer with a better soundship that rivalled the Amiga than the computer's MIDI ports which I seldom ever had cause to use.

Mates and myself used to put music on in the background LOUDLY when gaming on ST games 95% of the time.Sure St games used samples, but that ate up CPU time and often samples sounded tinny and fuzzy.The ST chip sound FX in games always sounded very harsh on the ears.Of the 5 ST (well 4 and 1 STe-Snobby bastard) owners i knew as a teenager (and later 1 1040STFM owner, snobby 1 Meg bastard :-) ), none of us bought the ST for MIDI.

It'd be like us saying we bought a PS3 as it had that 'Folding' thing you could run when PS3 was'nt being used or...HOME, lol!!!!

Quote from: "The Laird"I split this topic off and moved it into the St thread where it its more suitible.


What you have to remember is DC that Jack Tramiel NEVER intended the ST to be a games machine, he was aiming it head on at the Apple Mac, hence why the computers early nickname was the "Jackintosh". So thinks like hardware scrolling and a kick ass sound chip were not priorities. The Amiga was originally designed to be both a console and computer so its design had games in mind from day 1.

That differs from story i heard about Amiga, lot of the mags i used to read back then were saying how odd it was CBM had designed what looked like the dream games machine (4096 colours, Blitter, powerful sound chip etc) and yet had it down as a buisness machine.Maybe CBM's marketing was off from the early days?

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... Of the 5 ST (well 4 and 1 STe-Snobby bastard) owners i knew as a teenager (and later 1 1040STFM owner, snobby 1 Meg bastard :-)  ...

Well, when the 520 STFM that I ordered from Silica Systems arrived by courier it was a 520 STE they'd sent me instead - the STE had only just made it to the UK so they sent me one instead in the presumption, they stated when asked, that because it was 'Enhanced' their customers would be delighted.

Because the STE (then) wouldn't work with Kick Off (most notably, as far as I was concerned) I had them exchange it for an STFM so to play Dino Dini's sublime masterpiece.

So what does that make me?  :4:

The Amiga main selling point was not games, but video desktop computer capable of creating visual elements for tv and multi-media and sound and animation and expected to be treated as an extra piece of kit at tv stations etc.. But they also envisioned it for educational and business , but thank to software companies at the time wanted to produce games on it too..so it all worked out fine in the end, it even had a midi add-on released to par with the ST, but didn't didn't fair out ..

Looking at issue 1 of TGM's feature The Duel (ST VS Amiga) they claim:

-Rumour had it the ST hardware design was underway when Tramiel arrived.

-When the Amiga arrived, CBM could'nt afford the up-front cash to market it as a mass market machine, so they decided to sell it as a mixture of buisness micro and executive toy.

-Within weeks of Amiga being launched Tramiel annouced ST-a direct and much cheaper competing piece of hardware and:

GEM was imported from IBM systems, TOS was just an old, crude 8 Bit O/S (bought off the shelf and only likes of Amstrad still used it), just renamed to add credibility.

Digital Research were originally asked to supply a BASIC programming language for the ST, but they could'nt get it done in time, so Atari had to use a rather shaky BASIC written by a Bristol student in his summer holidays.(This version then tided up by Digital  Research+Metacomoco, who wrote the Amiga's O/S).

Andrew Braybrook said the St's 512 colours don't include dark shades.

Any comment on above claims?

:-)

Quote from: "Greyfox"The Amiga main selling point was not games, but video desktop computer capable of creating visual elements for tv and multi-media and sound and animation and expected to be treated as an extra piece of kit at tv stations etc.. But they also envisioned it for educational and business , but thank to software companies at the time wanted to produce games on it too..so it all worked out fine in the end, it even had a midi add-on released to par with the ST, but didn't didn't fair out ..

Before you or anyone else mention 'Amiga used for Babylon 5 graphics' (TV show's CGI.Yes it was, but it was a high end Amiga with Video toaster card and said CGI only for parts of the pilot episode.....

:-)

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... Of the 5 ST (well 4 and 1 STe-Snobby bastard) owners i knew as a teenager (and later 1 1040STFM owner, snobby 1 Meg bastard :-)  ...

Well, when the 520 STFM that I ordered from Silica Systems arrived by courier it was a 520 STE they'd sent me instead - the STE had only just made it to the UK so they sent me one instead in the presumption, they stated when asked, that because it was 'Enhanced' their customers would be delighted.

Because the STE (then) wouldn't work with Kick Off (most notably, as far as I was concerned) I had them exchange it for an STFM so to play Dino Dini's sublime masterpiece.

So what does that make me?  :4:

With the STe-It makes you the owner of a machine, which if i go by stuff my mate had, played host to some fab.P.D demo's, but as far as retail games went, only Captive seemed 'enhanced' (more colours, better sound) and you'd be lucky if a lot of the St games your mates had worked on your ST.

With the souped up ST-Know of sound enhancement carts (Monster and did'nt Ubisoft's B.A.T have cart that doubled as anti-piracy dongle and stero sound thing?), but how much did the enhancements cost and did you get your moneys worth?.

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Looking at issue 1 of TGM's feature The Duel (ST VS Amiga) they claim:

-Rumour had it the ST hardware design was underway when Tramiel arrived.

-When the Amiga arrived, CBM could'nt afford the up-front cash to market it as a mass market machine, so they decided to sell it as a mixture of buisness micro and executive toy.

-Within weeks of Amiga being launched Tramiel annouced ST-a direct and much cheaper competing piece of hardware and:

GEM was imported from IBM systems, TOS was just an old, crude 8 Bit O/S (bought off the shelf and only likes of Amstrad still used it), just renamed to add credibility.

Digital Research were originally asked to supply a BASIC programming language for the ST, but they could'nt get it done in time, so Atari had to use a rather shaky BASIC written by a Bristol student in his summer holidays.(This version then tided up by Digital  Research+Metacomoco, who wrote the Amiga's O/S).

Andrew Braybrook said the St's 512 colours don't include dark shades.

Any comment on above claims?

:-)

The ST hardware was apparently being designed at Commodore and the Tramiels took it with them, I believe Commodore tried to sue Atari over it too.

HiSoft did the ST BASIC so not sure about that story.

TOS was just a disk operating system, did not need to be fancy. GEM however was very advanced for the time as far as an OS goes. The ST was actually supposed to ship with Windows originally but MS couldn't get it ready in time!!!

Of course the ST has dark shades, what utter nonsense.

Well, Braybrook did say he found the Amiga's 4096 colours a bit limiting....

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Greyfox"The Amiga main selling point was not games, but video desktop computer capable of creating visual elements for tv and multi-media and sound and animation and expected to be treated as an extra piece of kit at tv stations etc.. But they also envisioned it for educational and business , but thank to software companies at the time wanted to produce games on it too..so it all worked out fine in the end, it even had a midi add-on released to par with the ST, but didn't didn't fair out ..

It might have been in the early days but the A500 and A600 were definitely games machines and pretty shite for using as anything else.

Lot of budding artists from that era might have something to say on that.....

Re:Braybrooks ST comment, it does appear he might have been refering to no shades of grey....quick google search threw up sites saying ST in High res can only do a white or black pixel.Any 'shades' you see are just an effect created with different pattern fills.

I only used mind for gaming, so clueless, but does seem to be a lot said about it out there.

Quote from: "The Laird"Yep, they wanted the ST to have MIDI capabilities and the YM chip had that.

Incorrect. The Atari ST's YM2149F PSG had nothing to do with the MIDI other than one could
write code that would receive MIDI data from the ST's MIDI In port and play the tunes on the
YM chip. All the YM was capable of is 3 voice sound, and some I/O ports for RS-232 and Centronics
parallel printer port type stuff.

The ST used a MC6850P ACIA chip which was specifically designed by Motorola to do MIDI and special
similar communications between computers at high serial speeds(for that day). In fact, just about
every function in the ST, pretty much had its own chip. This is why the ST dominated for a long time
in the music industry, IN SPITE of Atari's dropping the ball on supporting the machine as Apple and
Commodore did. The Hardware for musicians was definitely superior in just about every way.

[align=center:vbj5ap9g]The Computer Chronicles - Atari ST (1989) (//http)[/align:vbj5ap9g]

I was given an Atari 1040STe by one of my customers. Only thing is it didn't comes with a mouse or any leads. Anyone got any spares kicking around? (mouse/power/rf?). Do these run via rf?

I've never owned one previously but played the odd occasion on my mates back in my high school days (I'm mow 38). We used to play Lotus. Can't remember which one but it had the light popping out the bonnet animation.

I remember the time the Atari 130ST was first announced, dropped, 260ST was announced delivered in short quantities, dropped. Atari 520ST announced and then the best one arrived: Atari 1040STF. I finally bought one for about 2000 DM including monochrome monitor. Great deal for a great device. Perfect device for programming, source code editing etc and in comparison to my Amiga 1000 (which was very expensive at the time I bought) a real professional machine with professional tools.

The only bad thing was the split of the user groups due to color/monochrome monitor. In europe the community used the Atari with monochrome monitor, in other countries the color monitor was sold in larger quantities. And exactly that was a big problem. If you develop software as I did it was a mess dealing with games in monochrome AND color. The problem expanded as accelerator cards arrived and newer models which splitted the existing base into smaller fan groups vanishing to history finally. No wonder an Atari ST is only $20 worth these days. I have plenty in my garage but do not use them at all - only for collector purpose.

Finally the Atari was a business/programming/music machine in germany where as the Amiga dominated the gaming universe. For business purpose the Amiga was too bad with it's highres flickering output.

Finally I owned an Atari 520ST, Atari 1040STF, Mega 1, Mega 4.  The Mega ST were sooo nice, too. Blitter Chip, great design and plenty of memory. Then the Atari TT hit the street with it's ugly housing and PC's finally dominated the offices.

The great software on Atari ST allowed me to convert source code very quickly. I loaded the assembler/basic sources from Amiga, PC etc. into the top window and rewrote it to C in realtime at the bottom. Then I copied it on disk and moved to my PC or Amiga to compile and link it with my highspeed I/O functions. Then starting testing on the target device. Scary but required as PC have had no GUI and limited software and Amiga monitor lacked any health requirements with it's awful highres mod.

[align=center:322newoh]This is seriously impressive!!!!

Atari ST hicolor video - Tokyo HDR Timelapse (//http)[/align:322newoh]

Another amazing little demo, this time for the "Silly Venture 2014 scene event"

[align=center:30bzq7xv]www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJHiLCaC_dQ (//http)[/align:30bzq7xv]

Hard to believe the power of the ST sometimes with amazing stuff like this.

Quote from: "The Laird"It might have been in the early days but the A500 and A600 were definitely games machines and pretty shite for using as anything else.

Oh Rly  :4:

Dont worry, I'm not into Atari vs Amiga - I like both machines.

I would like a ST at some point I think, I always liked the fact my school had them in its music department (I wont mention the A500 in the Art dept lol)

Good machines, ST and Amiga.

That SillyVenture video is pretty cool!

I'm putting some serious thought into buying an STE.  Been pining over ebay all week 

Can't believe i let one slip through my hands early last year for a steal as well.. Never mind.

I've been looking at the 1040 STE with around 4MB of RAM and TOS 1.6 (I think). They tend to go for around £70 though.

I'll keep that in mind, keep seeing 4MB pop up but if its pointless will save a few quid!

I thought I mentioned to you about 1mb being enough? Yes as no games took advantage of this extra ram because of the extra cost to customers, so everything settled on 1mb instead, same with the Amiga stuff.

Loads of game on the Amiga benefit with extra RAM, especially if you go down the HD route.

So what are some of the best games for the system to hunt down? I quite fancy Manchester United Europe but I doubt its one of the big hitters 

Yep but need more titles 

I got my 520STE (with 4MB) around 1990, and my primary use was for MIDI / electronic music - running Cubase.  But of course, I got into games and other things (like the BBS scene) with the machine.  And while there weren't that many STE-specific games out there, the ones that were available were excellent.

Games like Obsession Pinball Let's Compare: Obsession - Atari STE vs. Amiga 500 (//http)

...and Stardust Let's Compare: Stardust - Atari STE vs. Amiga 500 (//http)

...looked and sounded amazing.  The STE's DMA stereo sound was fantastic (I had a massive collection of .MOD music files), and it included the "enhanced" analog joystick ports, so certain games allowed you to use a Jaguar controller.

Later, I moved up to a 14MB Falcon030, running Cubase Audio.  I had the Nemesis accelerator board installed, making the machine a joy to use.  And there were a small number of excellent Falcon-specific games too.

My Falcon eventually died, but I still have my STE.  It's not currently set up, but I think that's going to have to change after talking about it...

Well I'm in! Outbid on a few auctions today but finally managed to grab a boxed STE with a pile of games, joystick etc for just £45.  Can't wait

ahh delighted for considering the 2p killjoy..what STe did you get the 1040 or 520? And what's the games?

Ah I'm not worried about 2P, I don't know anyone that'll play retro games with me

It's a 1040  STE with Outrun, Asterix something called Arcade Force Four and a Soccer game compilation box.

Arrived today

http://youtu.be/IoqYSI3hv5c (//http)

Wonderful..sitting in now to have a watch

Very nice!  That box had plenty of stuff in it?  Was it like the TARDIS, bigger inside than outside?

I wish it was 8)

I've been noseying around the OS and I should probably read the manual. Why is there 2 floppy disk icons? 

Some of the anti piracy measures you get in these games are nuts. Just look at this beast, its not even for a good game:

[align=center:1hb9si14](http://i293.photobucket.com/albums/mm55/Lorfarius/photo_zps097a9d25.jpg)[/align:1hb9si14]

What the frack is that?!?!

The worst part is the printing is really low quality so the reds and browns appear almost identical!

Quote from: "Lorfarius"The worst part is the printing is really low quality so the reds and browns appear almost identical!

Can you imagine is someone who was color blind had to select one of those to be able to play the game?

There's a guy at work who is colour blind, I'm going to ask him tomorrow 

Quote from: "Lorfarius"There's a guy at work who is colour blind, I'm going to ask him tomorrow  :21: