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Really Atari ST?

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Re: Really Atari ST?

#51

Post by cmrdporcupine »

simonh wrote: post #10
rbanffy wrote: post #7

The one thing I like the most about the ST (when compared to, say, the Amiga) is its simplicity. It's vastly less capable, of course, but, in the end, the simplicity pays back by allowing easier expansion. The Amiga was a hard machine to evolve, something that cost Commodore a lot.

I got an Amiga and honestly while it was a great machine, a lot of games were written to support the ST as well so didn't use the Amiga's more advanced capabilities. If you were doing video production and graphics work it paid off but frankly I probably would have been just as happy with an ST. Also the ST gets dinged for being less powerful, but it was actually significantly faster than the Mac at the time and with…

ST and Amiga looked like competition to each other because of the wider market they were situated in but they really had different focus and points of success. The ST was a better DTP and general productivity machine and really was a "rock bottom price" competitor to the Macintosh; its gaming capabilities were nothing compared to the Amiga, but I am not sure that's where the Tramiels really wanted to focus anyways.

I never even had a colour monitor for my ST. The paperwhite monochrome screen was to die for back then, and sure beat the interlace hi-rez experience on the Amiga.

And the ST was a few hundred bucks cheaper. Price per mhz, it was a great machine.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#52

Post by Sodaware »

gallier2 wrote: post #43
thorianus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd argue about the music. The chiptune music from SID and YM has aged very well, while Amiga sounds horrbile without FM synth and 8-bit 11kHz samples. Also memory was much better organized than Amiga - without the speed penalty. And the simplicity of Shifter (the "GPU") allowed for really awsome 'beyond the dream' hacks, which were unavaliable on Amiga due to much more capable - but limited in 'hacking' video…

Atari STE had 2 channels 8 bit DAC à 25kHz on DMA. It was the Falcon who had incredible sound capacity with its matrix channel mixer and DSP.

I'd love to own a Falcon, but the prices on eBay make my eyes water.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#53

Post by Zenst »

prox wrote: post #31
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The floppy drive has a stepper motor that controls the placement of the read/write head above the disk. In the ST era, the control of that motor was directly under the control of the operating system. For an 80 track disk, the movement required to step between tracks was a certain known amount. If you formatted the disk with the tracks spaced closer together, by altering the stepper movement during that process, you…

Weren’t there special compression softwares that added even more capacity?

There was, can't recall the one that was popular prior to Microsoft adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace MSDOS 6.0

Re: Really Atari ST?

#54

Post by Miraste »

code_duck wrote: post #12
colejohnson66 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t grow up with floppies, so pardon my ignorance, but two questions: (1) which FAT? I figure it can’t be FAT32, but that still leaves FAT12 and FAT16, both of which Microsoft helped develop. And (2) since Microsoft helped develop it, were they just not following their own spec? Because that doesn’t make sense (not that you’re wrong).

Of course MS didn't care about their 'standard'. They assumed they're the only ones using it and/or don't really care about breaking other systems.

Sometimes they broke other systems on purpose, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#55

Post by andrewf »

bentcorner wrote: post #35
fullstop wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a tool that could be used to punch a hole in floppy disks in order to double the capacity. I didn't have such a tool, but I did have a cheap soldering iron. I ended up with a bunch of 3.5" floppy disks with holes melted through them. Thinking back on it now, I'm surprised that I didn't damage the disk with the heat of the iron. Then again, maybe I did and didn't notice because I was 12.

I've seen it used - IIRC the problem is that the media isn't rated for the storage that you're now asking of it, so while it may survive being written/read a few times, it'd fail sooner.

You're basically overclocking your storage medium.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#56

Post by cptnapalm »

aidenn0 wrote: post #26
Sodaware wrote: post #17

There are so many things the ST does badly - weak sound chip, screen memory laid out like a Venetian blind (to quote Jeff Minter I think), and a mouse that was designed in a universe where ergonomics did not exist. But I still love it. Without the ST I wouldn't have discovered programming and all the highs (and lows) that it brings. Looking back now, I'm surprised people were able to get as much out of it as they did…

Star Trek: The Rebel Universe looked far better on an ST than on a PC. [edit] Compare: http://www.atarimania.com/st/screens/star_trek_the_rebel_uni... https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/s/star-trek-...

I've never heard of this game before. Looking it up, its impressive considering the capabilities of then current hardware.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#57

Post by Zenst »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #48
prox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren’t there special compression softwares that added even more capacity?

I don't really remember any: my main recollection as an ST user was the format programs that let you increase the track count and the sector density. I recall the default format was 9 sectors, 80 tracks, 2 sides with 512 bytes per sector = 720KB, and you could push up to sometimes 82/83 tracks and maybe 10 or 11 sectors to get more out of a diskette. Actually, I think my ST originally came with a single-sided floppy…

The initial release of Atari's has single sided drives, I think the 1040ST had Double sided though, they did upgrade that shortly afterwards I believe to enable the marketing bods to show a larger number they could compare to the Amiga. So was only early 512STFM systems and those had a red drive light and the double sided had a green one if my memory holds.

Sad thing was, due to the early single sided models, many games would limit to 720k so as to not limit there market. That saw games that would happily fit upon a single double sided disc, cast upon two floppies forcing switching. So that small batch of single sided initial release systems, really did have a legacy impact that lasted for years and did it no favours.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#58

Post by thorianus »

gallier2 wrote: post #43
thorianus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd argue about the music. The chiptune music from SID and YM has aged very well, while Amiga sounds horrbile without FM synth and 8-bit 11kHz samples. Also memory was much better organized than Amiga - without the speed penalty. And the simplicity of Shifter (the "GPU") allowed for really awsome 'beyond the dream' hacks, which were unavaliable on Amiga due to much more capable - but limited in 'hacking' video…

Atari STE had 2 channels 8 bit DAC à 25kHz on DMA. It was the Falcon who had incredible sound capacity with its matrix channel mixer and DSP.

Well, that's the HW. As with video, the 16-bits went on further than just mere hardware limits.

When we talk software mixing, STE maxed out CPU at 8 channels 50kHz, here's an example: http://yerzmyey.i-demo.pl/YERZMYEY-Octopush_ATARI_STe.mp3

Even plain 520 ST can do a lot on this YM chip.

Amiga 500 on the other had could a bit of this but only with 12kHz samples, and no volume control per channel, also those pesky filters.

Amiga 1200/4000 could do same - as per much faster CPU, but... they still left the old audio 8-bit chip in it :/

Re: Really Atari ST?

#59

Post by Zenst »

foobarian wrote: post #22
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically your floppy disk is formatted on each side with a number of tracks, each containing a number of sectors of a given size. [1] The standard 720KB 3.5' floppy disk as used by the Atari ST used 80 tracks of 9 sectors. With these tools you could format with, say 11 sectors instead of 9 and boost capacity to 880KB (I think the Amiga was doing that as standard). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_dis…

On top of that some tools (I used fdformat) shifted the sectors to speed up sequential reads, i.e. have the first sector of the next track rotate in under the r/w head right as the head arrives. Edit: another unrelated practice was buying up cheap(er) single-density disks, which were distinguished by the lack of a marker hole opposite the r/o protection slider, and used only one side of the medium for data. By drilli…

Ah yes, interleaving of the sectors. More prominant with early HD's and using tools like spinwrite to optimise the interleaving. Today it's all 1:1 as processing from the heads just been fast enough for decades to handle the speeds.

Spinwrite still exists, though in the early days/versions it was the golden tool for tuning up a system and could make huge differences. Like double your drive speed and more in some instances, but talking late 80's early 90's here when interleaving was thing and mid 90's 1:1 became the norm and made it moot. https://www.grc.com/Spinrite.htm

Re: Really Atari ST?

#60

Post by thorianus »

aidenn0 wrote: post #26
Sodaware wrote: post #17

There are so many things the ST does badly - weak sound chip, screen memory laid out like a Venetian blind (to quote Jeff Minter I think), and a mouse that was designed in a universe where ergonomics did not exist. But I still love it. Without the ST I wouldn't have discovered programming and all the highs (and lows) that it brings. Looking back now, I'm surprised people were able to get as much out of it as they did…

Star Trek: The Rebel Universe looked far better on an ST than on a PC. [edit] Compare: http://www.atarimania.com/st/screens/star_trek_the_rebel_uni... https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/s/star-trek-...

Well, plain ol' Prince of Persia looked much better on ST - if you compare PC/Amiga ports. Look at the torch animation.
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