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Really Atari ST?

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Re: Really Atari ST?

#61

Post by thorianus »

gallier2 wrote: post #44
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.

Indeed. As a student (1987) I had an Amiga 500 and after a few months I sold it and bought an Atari Mega ST2 in its place. The Amiga was so unpleasant to use for programming. To be confortably usable it required at least 2 floppy drives (a 3rd one would even been useful) or a hard drive, expanding beyond 1 MB was also not cheap and the display was horrible. TV resolution 576i (PAL) is inadequate for editing text. On…

The Amiga's problem was expensive monitor, flickering screen and... with such great video chip - the default color palette was just abnomination. I know it was made for TV, but that was the problem!

Re: Really Atari ST?

#62

Post by alexisread »

thorianus wrote: post #58
gallier2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

There's a package EPSS for the STE which allows using its 8 channel DMA as a software synth, at the same time as running other midi channels in Cubase. Makes for a very tidy DAW:

https://youtu.be/OlspnqVcJho

Other packages (DBE tracker?) allow the STE to play 32channel mods albeit not at 50Khz

Re: Really Atari ST?

#63

Post by FilthyAnalyst »

Zenst wrote: post #53
prox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stacker was pretty common in the early 90s.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#64

Post by 08-15 »

So the theory is that MSDOS tried to detect if a bootsector contained executable 68k code, because if it did, the BPB was valid and could be used to locate the FAT(s) and the master directory?

That's triply dumb, because of the typo noted in the article, and also because executable Atari ST bootsectors had a checksum that should be computed instead of silly heuristics, but most importantly because most Atari ST disks had no executable bootsector, but the entries concerning disk layout were still valid.

It sounds exactly like the fractal of incompetence Microsoft would implement, and it would explain why we Atarians had to use disks formatted on a PC for data transfer, even though the formats were nominally the same. Funny to read about that, because back in the day, I thought the ST somehow formatted disks "wrong".

Re: Really Atari ST?

#65

Post by rjsw »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #49
icedchai wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Amiga was much more expandable than Atari. Just check out the variety of accelerator boards, RTG graphics cards, serial boards, HD controllers, etc. available. The Atari OS (TOS) was also very simple compared to Amiga OS.

I think that's oversimplified. TOS was single tasking but two things a) unlike the Amiga a proper 68000 syscall TRAP mechanism was used meaning the OS etc ran using proper supervisor / user separation and b) the application toolkit (AES) built overtop supported message passing and multiple application semantics and c) the graphics subsystem (VDI) was also in theory abstracted away from the physical. In fact the OS co…

The Atari ST could do the same kind of cooperative multitasking as GEM on a PC.

I built MicroGNUEmacs as a desk accessory so that I could run it at the same time as other programs.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#66

Post by simcop2387 »

Zenst wrote: post #53
prox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That'd probably be DoubleDisk or Stacker. https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/10401/software-spotl...

Re: Really Atari ST?

#67

Post by 6581 »

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…

Single-density is not the same as single-sided. There are single-sided double-density disks.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#68

Post by egypturnash »

thorianus wrote: post #58
gallier2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

All Amigas had a 6-bit volume control for each individual sound channel.

All Amigas except the A1000 could turn the high-pass filter off, and pretty much everything tended to do this.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#69

Post by CWuestefeld »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #11
colejohnson66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who didn’t grow up with many floppy disks, how was one able to format a floppy to have a different capacity? I know there’s different “formats” such as DOS, C64, etc, but I don’t understand why ? I have heard about how formatting a floppy involved placing the tracks and how modern hard drives have “hard sectors”, but for some reason, it’s not “computing.”

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…

I seem to recall having a program called "Twister" that could format disks like this.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#70

Post by rasz »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #13
colejohnson66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who didn’t grow up with many floppy disks, how was one able to format a floppy to have a different capacity? I know there’s different “formats” such as DOS, C64, etc, but I don’t understand why ? I have heard about how formatting a floppy involved placing the tracks and how modern hard drives have “hard sectors”, but for some reason, it’s not “computing.”

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…

>In the ST era, the control of that motor was directly under the control of the operating system.

No, it was under control of a stepper motor driver circuit located directly on a Floppy drive pcb. This driver in turn received instructions from a dedicated Floppy drive controller (WD1771 and compatibles).

> For an 80 track disk, the movement required to step between tracks was a certain known amount.

"certain known amount" being one step per track

>If you formatted the disk with the tracks spaced closer together, by altering the stepper movement during that process, you would 'magically' get more space.

Above is incorrect.

Its impossible to move HEAD stepper motor between tracks. Floppy drive has a STEP (/STEP) and DIRECTION (/DIR) pins. All you are able to do is pick direction and step one track at a time. Step distance is Fixed. The whole point of using a stepper motor is you dont have to worry about head tracking/alignment.

The only personal computer Floppy drives with flexible head positioning all used voice coil head actuator - Floptical, LS-120/240, Zip drives etc.

https://twtext.com/article/1263702402886057984

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