10 ms·

So many missed opportunities with the ST, given the breakneck development speed. If the all-in-one design was used from the off (save on moulds and shipping di

So many missed opportunities with the ST, given the breakneck development speed. If the all-in-one design was used from the off (save on moulds and shipping disc drives) they could done a pro conversion kit: https://youtu.be/atw3FYKzog4 https://youtu.be/atw3FYKzog4 Also, move the joystick ports to the right rather than under the keyboard. A few tweaks here and there would have pushed it a lot more: Unified clocks for genlock and scrolling: https://youtu.be/yexNdSLEpIY?si=pa46sJOr_9Fin4LC https://youtu.be/yexNdSLEpIY?si=pa46sJOr_9Fin4LC Stereo output like the CPC464: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0yY4BlPfLf4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0yY4BlPfLf4 AMY included, along with a 1bit PWM on the DMA chip for DMA sound. The ST had a janky RTC anyway: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/303859-battery-pack-inside-520-st https://atariage.com/forums/topic/303859-battery-pack-inside... 3 button joypads from the start, using U+D and L+R combinations for 2 more buttons Double-sided drive from the start. Finally, they should have included the blitter socket and a full 2x32pin expansion instead of the cartridge port. The blitter socket especially would be handy to drive a T212 transputer in 87, when the blitter was available, instead of producing the ATW.

bravesoul2 1y ago
It's good enough for Fatboy Slim
- TacticalCoder 1y ago
  The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga (I think an Amiga with a stock MIDI port would have been a homerun). I saw Atari ST in music studios well into the late 90s/early 2000s because back then quiet beige PCs weren't a thing yet: PCs virtually all came with super noisy fans, which was a big no-no for music studios. A buddy would bring his Korg synth to my neighbour's house and hook it to their Atari ST. Another dude I remember would play drums from Dire Straits song from his Atari ST hooked to some MIDI gear and then he'd take his guitar and play Dire Straits songs. These were the days. I'm not surprised some musicians still use them. If I'm not mistaken Kavinsky (who became famous after the movie Drive came out but recently had renewed interest for he performed at the Olympics games' ceremony) started doing music at a late age, on an Atari ST a friend of his game him. As an anecdote PCs were so noisy that I asked my neighbour (an electrical engineer) if it was possible to come up with a system where the fan would slow down when the CPU wasn't too hot: and sure enough we were then modding our PSUs with "thermistors" and we'd be calibrating our tiny hack, no shit, with boiling water in the kitchen (ah clueless teenagers). Funnily enough about 10 years later every single PSU had variable fan speed. That's the thing: we were used to quiet 8-bit and then 16-bit computers and when we had to move to these piece-of-shit PCs (but with fast CPUs / FPUs and that were upgradeable), we had to endure these painful ultra noisy CPU/PSU fans (and HDDs). So the Atari ST just made sense. You could have these super fast (compared to Atari ST) PCs but they were noisy, fugly, piece of unbearable shits that the cool guys in music studios simply wouldn't tolerate back then. Now of course at some point PCs became just too good and several brands started focusing on quietness and it was then possible to have a totally silent PC, both looking cool and being literally cool (big heatsink, quiet fans, etc.). But yeah the Atari ST was and still is certainly for some a thing for creating music. Lots of respect to the Atari ST for his MIDI port (and that comes from a Commodore Amiga owner and fan).
  - Aldipower 1y ago
    And, just to add a third point, the Atari runs stable! I just tried to sequence with a SoundBlaster AWE32 and Voyetra MIDI Orchestra MIDI Sequencer under Windows 95b. For fun. I already recorded some MIDI tracks, then suddenly after 60 minutes Windows presented me with the famous bluescreen. Everything I've just recorded and didn't autosave lost. Haha.
    - grumpyprole 1y ago
      Absolutely, when I first tried Windows Cubase in the 90s, it wasn't long before it ate all my data. Even today's DAWs still haven't caught up with the original ST Cubase in terms of stability.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked. DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS. Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible. They were shit for games They were bulky They were slow They crashed all the time. They were ugly They were noisy. They were hard to manage (autoexec.bat, no OS in ROM, stupidly tricky partitioning tools, incompatible drivers for the same hardware but in different applications, etc) But IBM lost control of the hardware market so they became cheap, ubiquitous crap. And that’s literally the only reason we got stuck with PCs.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      The PC industry of the late 80s was a disaster. We had affordable windowing and GUIs on the Atari and the Amiga, with instant boot from ROM and tons of RAM. The Amiga had the beginnings of multitasking and hardware acceleration for graphics and sound. Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, with insanely unaffordable prices, crippled specs, bizarre semi-manual memory management, ugly hardware, and a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. Infuriating.
      - microtonal 1y ago
rbanffy 1y ago
> move the joystick ports to the right I think they’d be better on the back unless you are supposed to plug them out all the time. > Finally, they should have included the blitter socket That would be hard without having a functioning one first. The blitter would be also handy for a number of things, from PCM sound to network and disk transfers.
- alexisread 1y ago
  On the right (ie. Mirror of the STE 15pin ports) would mean that they could keep the electrical layout ie. Connected to the keyboard, and hence a separate keyboard unit. For 2 player games you would be swapping it a lot- there were adapters just to help with this. I agree it would be difficult to design a correct socket, but from interviews it was always the plan to have a blitter, and a socket as standard would have helped adoption. The main thing is that the T212 is a great coprocessor, faster than the 68881 fpu and with a 2k cache. Introducing the transputer as a coprocessor would potentially have changed the computing landscape
msk-lywenn 1y ago
U+D for a button means you can’t go up or down at the same or is there a trick?
- msephton 1y ago
  I think what was meant was using fire+directions to trigger additional virtual buttons. Many games did this in software anyway.
  - alexisread 1y ago
    Just that you can't go up and down at the same time, so it's a valid electrical signal for another button, and importantly standard so games would take advantage of it.
    - toast0 1y ago
      Sure, but if U+D is button 2, you can't register up or down and button 2 together. You need another wire, a serial protocol, or whatever sega did for the 6-button genesis/mega drive controller (i think a toggle?)
      - brulard 1y ago
        This would be my question as well. If i go up, and pressing this button 2, then the output signal does not know if i'm going up or down or none of those.
        alexisread 1y ago
        The code will be polling the input, so it's effectively quantized, and games can treat movement as a vector. Seems to work ok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHTzwcx4Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHTzwcx4Og Obviously it'd be better to have a protocol like the megadrive, but given the setup in the ST, this is a hack without having to change the ST hardware.
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
I mean the whole point of the ST was "rock bottom price" and a lot of the things you're talking about would have raised the BOM significantly, or delayed its introduction by precious few weeks or months. Beating the Amiga to market, and beating it on price were super important. But I do think there was a serious problem with follow through. The Blitter and GDOS and then the STe came too long to come after. The Blitter never became standard, and the games and software suffered for it. And updates on the operating system were slow and thin until it was way too late. I do agree that the cartridge port thing -- it being limited to 128kB expansion -- was needless. One more pin, even, would at least allow for a proper OS upgrade via cartridge port! Definitely one of the stupidest design decisions on the machine.
- alexisread 1y ago
  You have a point, but the ST bottleneck during development appeared to be the software, so there was possibly space for hardware tweaks. The BOM would go up slightly but remember they would have saved on developing and shipping a separate disk drive which would cover a lot of these changes. Realistically it's amazing the ST was as good as it was, given the 6 month development time and the kings of penny pinching at the helm :)
tom_ 1y ago
The tiny ST with the external disk drive had the joystick ports at the side - a far superior design. I quite liked the STe. The mono monitor was great, RAM upgrades were easy, and they'd improved some of the display hardware's worst limitations. Even though TOS was never especially good, they'd fixed all the worst bits by that point. Still could have benefited from some other extra hardware and OS tweaks though I think. - 800 KB disk format supported directly by the OS - blitter is not as useful as it could be, due to sharing bus time with the CPU. It should be able to use ACSI bandwidth if not in use/Shifter bandwidth during non-display periods, so it can run in parallel with the CPU - 256 px 5 bitplane mode (so still 40 words per line), probably an EHB kind of affair if 32 palette entries would be too much - something to improve endless scrolling? No carry out of bit 15 when computing Shifter address? You'd end up wrapping before the display period was finished if increasing the display stride, but you can work around that in software... - put the 9 pin joystick ports on the side - write signal for that stupid cartridge port that is almost (but not quite) useful for general purpose expansion
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

bravesoul2 1y ago

It's good enough for Fatboy Slim

TacticalCoder 1y ago
The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga (I think an Amiga with a stock MIDI port would have been a homerun). I saw Atari ST in music studios well into the late 90s/early 2000s because back then quiet beige PCs weren't a thing yet: PCs virtually all came with super noisy fans, which was a big no-no for music studios. A buddy would bring his Korg synth to my neighbour's house and hook it to their Atari ST. Another dude I remember would play drums from Dire Straits song from his Atari ST hooked to some MIDI gear and then he'd take his guitar and play Dire Straits songs. These were the days. I'm not surprised some musicians still use them. If I'm not mistaken Kavinsky (who became famous after the movie Drive came out but recently had renewed interest for he performed at the Olympics games' ceremony) started doing music at a late age, on an Atari ST a friend of his game him. As an anecdote PCs were so noisy that I asked my neighbour (an electrical engineer) if it was possible to come up with a system where the fan would slow down when the CPU wasn't too hot: and sure enough we were then modding our PSUs with "thermistors" and we'd be calibrating our tiny hack, no shit, with boiling water in the kitchen (ah clueless teenagers). Funnily enough about 10 years later every single PSU had variable fan speed. That's the thing: we were used to quiet 8-bit and then 16-bit computers and when we had to move to these piece-of-shit PCs (but with fast CPUs / FPUs and that were upgradeable), we had to endure these painful ultra noisy CPU/PSU fans (and HDDs). So the Atari ST just made sense. You could have these super fast (compared to Atari ST) PCs but they were noisy, fugly, piece of unbearable shits that the cool guys in music studios simply wouldn't tolerate back then. Now of course at some point PCs became just too good and several brands started focusing on quietness and it was then possible to have a totally silent PC, both looking cool and being literally cool (big heatsink, quiet fans, etc.). But yeah the Atari ST was and still is certainly for some a thing for creating music. Lots of respect to the Atari ST for his MIDI port (and that comes from a Commodore Amiga owner and fan).
- Aldipower 1y ago
  And, just to add a third point, the Atari runs stable! I just tried to sequence with a SoundBlaster AWE32 and Voyetra MIDI Orchestra MIDI Sequencer under Windows 95b. For fun. I already recorded some MIDI tracks, then suddenly after 60 minutes Windows presented me with the famous bluescreen. Everything I've just recorded and didn't autosave lost. Haha.
  - grumpyprole 1y ago
    Absolutely, when I first tried Windows Cubase in the 90s, it wasn't long before it ate all my data. Even today's DAWs still haven't caught up with the original ST Cubase in terms of stability.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked. DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS. Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible. They were shit for games They were bulky They were slow They crashed all the time. They were ugly They were noisy. They were hard to manage (autoexec.bat, no OS in ROM, stupidly tricky partitioning tools, incompatible drivers for the same hardware but in different applications, etc) But IBM lost control of the hardware market so they became cheap, ubiquitous crap. And that’s literally the only reason we got stuck with PCs.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    The PC industry of the late 80s was a disaster. We had affordable windowing and GUIs on the Atari and the Amiga, with instant boot from ROM and tons of RAM. The Amiga had the beginnings of multitasking and hardware acceleration for graphics and sound. Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, with insanely unaffordable prices, crippled specs, bizarre semi-manual memory management, ugly hardware, and a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. Infuriating.
    - microtonal 1y ago

rbanffy 1y ago

> move the joystick ports to the right I think they’d be better on the back unless you are supposed to plug them out all the time. > Finally, they should have included the blitter socket That would be hard without having a functioning one first. The blitter would be also handy for a number of things, from PCM sound to network and disk transfers.

alexisread 1y ago
On the right (ie. Mirror of the STE 15pin ports) would mean that they could keep the electrical layout ie. Connected to the keyboard, and hence a separate keyboard unit. For 2 player games you would be swapping it a lot- there were adapters just to help with this. I agree it would be difficult to design a correct socket, but from interviews it was always the plan to have a blitter, and a socket as standard would have helped adoption. The main thing is that the T212 is a great coprocessor, faster than the 68881 fpu and with a 2k cache. Introducing the transputer as a coprocessor would potentially have changed the computing landscape

msk-lywenn 1y ago

U+D for a button means you can’t go up or down at the same or is there a trick?

msephton 1y ago
I think what was meant was using fire+directions to trigger additional virtual buttons. Many games did this in software anyway.
- alexisread 1y ago
  Just that you can't go up and down at the same time, so it's a valid electrical signal for another button, and importantly standard so games would take advantage of it.
  - toast0 1y ago
    Sure, but if U+D is button 2, you can't register up or down and button 2 together. You need another wire, a serial protocol, or whatever sega did for the 6-button genesis/mega drive controller (i think a toggle?)
    - brulard 1y ago
      This would be my question as well. If i go up, and pressing this button 2, then the output signal does not know if i'm going up or down or none of those.
      - alexisread 1y ago
        The code will be polling the input, so it's effectively quantized, and games can treat movement as a vector. Seems to work ok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHTzwcx4Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHTzwcx4Og Obviously it'd be better to have a protocol like the megadrive, but given the setup in the ST, this is a hack without having to change the ST hardware.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago

I mean the whole point of the ST was "rock bottom price" and a lot of the things you're talking about would have raised the BOM significantly, or delayed its introduction by precious few weeks or months. Beating the Amiga to market, and beating it on price were super important. But I do think there was a serious problem with follow through. The Blitter and GDOS and then the STe came too long to come after. The Blitter never became standard, and the games and software suffered for it. And updates on the operating system were slow and thin until it was way too late. I do agree that the cartridge port thing -- it being limited to 128kB expansion -- was needless. One more pin, even, would at least allow for a proper OS upgrade via cartridge port! Definitely one of the stupidest design decisions on the machine.

alexisread 1y ago
You have a point, but the ST bottleneck during development appeared to be the software, so there was possibly space for hardware tweaks. The BOM would go up slightly but remember they would have saved on developing and shipping a separate disk drive which would cover a lot of these changes. Realistically it's amazing the ST was as good as it was, given the 6 month development time and the kings of penny pinching at the helm :)

tom_ 1y ago

The tiny ST with the external disk drive had the joystick ports at the side - a far superior design. I quite liked the STe. The mono monitor was great, RAM upgrades were easy, and they'd improved some of the display hardware's worst limitations. Even though TOS was never especially good, they'd fixed all the worst bits by that point. Still could have benefited from some other extra hardware and OS tweaks though I think. - 800 KB disk format supported directly by the OS - blitter is not as useful as it could be, due to sharing bus time with the CPU. It should be able to use ACSI bandwidth if not in use/Shifter bandwidth during non-display periods, so it can run in parallel with the CPU - 256 px 5 bitplane mode (so still 40 words per line), probably an EHB kind of affair if 32 palette entries would be too much - something to improve endless scrolling? No carry out of bit 15 when computing Shifter address? You'd end up wrapping before the display period was finished if increasing the display stride, but you can work around that in software... - put the 9 pin joystick ports on the side - write signal for that stupid cartridge port that is almost (but not quite) useful for general purpose expansion

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]