Inside the 1040ST

And a 68000 processor (at 8mhz IIRC) AND AN ENTIRE MEGABYTE OF RAM!!!!!

A couple years later we bought an extension board for it with a NEC V20 that allowed it to function as a CGA-equipped MSDOS PC, and that's how we got started developing for the PC.

It's odd that two game developers and demosceners from late 80s to mid-90s never owned an Amiga. :)

Basically, grounding a pin of the external floppy drive connector (if memory serves) would make the ST read the OTHER side of the single-sided floppy disk of the INTERNAL drive.

This is because some floppies were formatted in single-side mode, and as a result using half of the maximum possible space. Think B-side of vinyl disks, literally.

The switch let you use the other side, provided you formatted it (and beware of the switch position to not mess up at formatting time…)

Many commercial softwares (incl. games) were using that single-side mode for backward compatibility reasons: I believe an early version of the ST serie was using an internal floppy drive only capable of single-sided usage. Hence the legacy.

My switch was really a simple switch I had around, combined with an hairpin directly plugged into the connector.

First hardware hack!

TBH I think bigger impacts would have come from a few tweaks to the ST hardware: Autocad started life on the ST with the Cyber series of products - including a full expansion port as the cartridge port would allow for high-colour videocards, which the lack of forced them to migrate to other platforms. Similarly for DTP which was huge on the ST at launch.

The AMY chip was pulled at the last minute, but having an 8 channel stereo synth capable of mp3-style playback, alongside a DMA channel (1bit PWM on the DMA chip) would have changed the face of computer audio for 15 years. Even putting stereo output for the YM, and the 1bit PWM on the DMA chip would have been enough to raise the sound bar at the time (vs c64).

Unifying the system clocks like the STE would have allowed the ST to genlock, which together with the expansion port, stereo and midi ports, might have tempted Newtek to do an AV workstation ie. Move professional video production to the platform.

Moving TOS to accommodate large rom sizes could also have changed things, in that MINT (and multitos) were available before linux, and being POSIX compatible (bash, rpm, multiuser etc), it would be similar to having OSX in rom in 1991.

Writing network drivers for the midi ports into TOS would have been beneficial for small businesses, with support for 16 networked machines, and fostered much more collaborative software like lotus notes.

The ST can actually support 7 button joy pads through use of impossible combinations eg. Left+right simultaneously as a fire button. Had Atari sold joypads from launch, that would have benefitted the Amiga as well (it can support even more stuff).

Including the blitter socket as standard in every ST would have allowed Atari to use the T212 transputer instead of the blitter chip in 1987 (the blitter was only available then). In terms of raw power that is roughly equivalent to having a SuperFX2 chip in 1987, but it would potentially change GPU architecture completely as the next generation (T414 in a 32bit) machine would be able to cluster the coprocessors similar to Intel's Xeon Phi, but better.

The ST can do 4pix hardware scrolling and overscan by abusing the shifter (https://youtu.be/hpUbWZWTOiw), there wasn't enough documentation to discover that quickly though. The main thing lacking throughout the ST's and Amiga's life was support of the platform- ship the hardware, make as much money as you can and move on to the next platform, hence lack of development of TOS, no SDK, OCS lasting Commodore until 92. PCs had a much easier time taking over the space thanks to this.

I think, of all the computer companies, the amount of engineering talent that went through Atari Corp was unmatched (ST, EST, ATW, Portfolio, Atari book, CDAR604, TT, Falcon, Lynx, Jaguar, JagVR). I can never understand how it all came to nothing.