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Inside the 1040ST

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Re: Inside the 1040ST

#61

Post by nuancebydefault »

tomxor wrote: post #44
thom wrote: post #11

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which…

Same here, some of my earliest memories were of interacting with the GEM desktop on one of these when my Dad wasn't looking so that I could load up robocop :P then he caught me and was like "how did you figure out how to do that". Silly little things like the bee are now permanently etched in my mind. https://www.dwitter.net/d/19166 I even embedded it as a cursor for some of my internal pages at work :P cursor: url(d…

The busy bee, much nicer to look at than Microsofts hourglass

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#62

Post by prox »

thomasfl wrote: post #26

An Atari 1040ST i combination with a sampler, like Akai S-900 or Roland W-30, and a synth with keybs, was a gret combo back then. As the first computer with built in midi-interface, it became very popular with musicians.

It was pretty much the only tool in studios and those who were serious about midi. Cubase was the the de facto music program.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#63

Post by thomasfl »

j45 wrote: post #53
thomasfl wrote: post #26

An Atari 1040ST i combination with a sampler, like Akai S-900 or Roland W-30, and a synth with keybs, was a gret combo back then. As the first computer with built in midi-interface, it became very popular with musicians.

What’s amazing is how capable that setup would still be today

Yes. The only important inventions since the 1980'ies in music technology is synthesizer emulators and autotune. Most of the techno music that has become popular lately, could easily be made with vintage gear from the 1980'ies.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#64

Post by alexisread »

lproven wrote: post #34
alexisread wrote: post #18

A fantastic machine, could have been so much more though: 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 A…

All excellent points. It does seem to me that Atari did very well with the use of COTS hardware and software to get a usable machine out at such a low price. It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping. But it did need both a lot more upgrades and expansions as time went on, as you point out, correctly IMHO. Secondly, I think Atari should ha…

Agreed. The Falcon started down this route with IDE, SCSI2, localtalk, chunky VGA (props to Richard Miller), but Atari cheaped out as they had already decided to leave the computer market and were really just clearing stock.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#65

Post by nuancebydefault »

thom wrote: post #11

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which…

Keyboard and machine in one, was also very nice. Currently, in the same genre, there are raspberry pi keyboards. I remember running around at brattaccas and being frustrated each time it crashed when i found all evidence envelopes... But what i loved most was GFA basic, a basic that was fast enough to compete with C, but much more convenient to use.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#66

Post by nuancebydefault »

j45 wrote: post #52
thom wrote: post #11

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which…

Same here. It was like visiting the future a little early. The IBM XT it sat next to looked depressing in comparison. And there has never been a game like Revenge of the Mutant Camels since. Or a tweener that was as simple and powerful as the one I used then. And.. I think I’m off to go look for an emulator.

There were also plenty of drawing apps, very sophisticated for that time, a poor man's mac, i've heard it being called.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#67

Post by chris_j »

j45 wrote: post #52
thom wrote: post #11

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which…

Same here. It was like visiting the future a little early. The IBM XT it sat next to looked depressing in comparison. And there has never been a game like Revenge of the Mutant Camels since. Or a tweener that was as simple and powerful as the one I used then. And.. I think I’m off to go look for an emulator.

Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.

If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.

And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].

[0] https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/

[1] http://www.avtandil.narod.ru/tose.html

[2] https://aranym.github.io/

[3] https://www.atari-forum.com/

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#68

Post by empressplay »

kqr wrote: post #7

I grew up on a 1040ST that was -- according to the previous owner who used it to make music -- upgraded with 4 MB of RAM and two mysterious switches on the back that controlled... something during boot, but I don't remember what. Was it common to modify them these ways? I was too young to understand much of it beyond the amazingness that it allowed me to play video games and make graphic designs.

There were upgrade boards that let you have multiple TOS ROMs so that you could keep TOS 1.0 (which was compatible with more games than 1.4 etc)

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#69

Post by snvzz »

lproven wrote: post #34
alexisread wrote: post #18

A fantastic machine, could have been so much more though: 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 A…

All excellent points. It does seem to me that Atari did very well with the use of COTS hardware and software to get a usable machine out at such a low price. It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping. But it did need both a lot more upgrades and expansions as time went on, as you point out, correctly IMHO. Secondly, I think Atari should ha…

>It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping.

Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Much more of it even (256KB ROM).

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#70

Post by [deleted] »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #9

I didn’t heard of it until years later but I think it’s the computer I would have wanted (best value 32-bit, “hi-res” graphics, floppy storage). Especially when writing compilers for Z80 and 6502 I longed for something as beautiful, powerful, and regular as the m68k. However I don’t think there was any way I could have afforded it at the time.

[deleted]
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