Really Atari ST? • Hacker News Board

Re: Really Atari ST?

#91

Post by cmrdporcupine » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

car wrote: post #87

simonh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a Mac ROM cartridge for the ST, which basically turned it into a Macintosh. And Atari had a 640x400 monochrome monitor that looked just like a Mac - an awesome hack.

Yep long before there were official Mac clones (remember those?!) the ST was an unofficial one in the form of Magic Sac / Spectre GCR. Never had it myself, but what a glorious hack indeed.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#92

Post by icedchai » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

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…

I think AmigaOS felt more sophisticated to an end-user: preemptive multitasking, shared libraries (Atari didn't get these until very late, right?), loadable filesystems, autoconfig / plug-n-play type device drivers, command line / shell. I'm sure TOS could get many of these things with add ons.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#93

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #32

aidenn0 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Everything that supported graphics looked better than CGA. Even monochrome Hercules graphics. Although to be fair CGA wasn't intended to be used on monitors. It was intended to be used on smeary composite video sources where you could expand the palette using artifact colors. Even then the graphics were terrible, but you could at least get a green.

But by '87 EGA cards existed; it's just they never bothered to port it to EGA.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#94

Post by chris_j » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

car wrote: post #86

Question to the Atari brain trust: which ST emulator is the most accurate one? I have an old ST app I wrote, which prompts a weird message about ‘getting original roms’ or some such before it quits when run on Hatari. I found a printout of the source a couple of years ago in some forgotten basement, and there is a check for Xbios(2/3) or similar before this prompt. No clue what this was about, after 35 years of writi…

Are you using an original TOS image or are you using EmuTOS (which comes with Hatari)? I have run a few old games on Hatari and have found that many of them fail to run on top of EmuTOS but no idea which OS calls are the problematic ones.

Re: Really Atari ST?

#95

Post by rjsw » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #88

rjsw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always found it odd that the GEM environment supported this kind of cooperative multitasking by default only for desk accessories. The API support for doing it more broadly was there, but the desktop and all the applications were written so they would not be. So even when we got proper multitasking support under MiNT there were few/no applications that behaved well in this scenario. I never saw uemacs compiled as a…

It wasn't a trick to compile mgemacs as a desk accessory, it took a bit of work. I still have the SH204 HD from back then so have the source code, just don't have a ST to read it.

I chose the MicroGNU variant as it did parenthesis matching better than the alternatives. I ran it alongside Franz Lisp that I had also made into a GEM application.