8 ms·

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 S

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
    My cousin had an Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. As a kid, I was so incredibly jelous. Everything was better, sound, graphics, the OS, the hardware itself. Even well into halfway the nineties we were messing with tire fires like VESA Local Bus on the PC side.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, Just like today's GUIs. They all look like Windows 1.0
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Not just Atari and Amiga. Apple and Acorn had excellent machines too. It was basically just the old 8-bit micros that kept IBM compatibles looking good.
  - 1y ago
mrandish 1y ago
> The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga I never really understood why people thought this was a big deal. I had my Amiga hooked to a DX7 synth with a serial to MIDI cable that had a couple active parts in it. MIDI is a serial protocol and the Amigas had full RS232 ports with hardware interrupts, +12v, -12v, as well as audio in and out on unused pins. The serial to MIDI In/Out cable cost around $15 more than two MIDI cables. You can still buy them today: https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interface-db25-amiga-500-600-1200-2000-3000-4000 https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interf....
- Aldipower 1y ago
  The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing. While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second. So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.

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
  My cousin had an Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. As a kid, I was so incredibly jelous. Everything was better, sound, graphics, the OS, the hardware itself. Even well into halfway the nineties we were messing with tire fires like VESA Local Bus on the PC side.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, Just like today's GUIs. They all look like Windows 1.0
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  Not just Atari and Amiga. Apple and Acorn had excellent machines too. It was basically just the old 8-bit micros that kept IBM compatibles looking good.
- 1y ago

mrandish 1y ago

> The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga I never really understood why people thought this was a big deal. I had my Amiga hooked to a DX7 synth with a serial to MIDI cable that had a couple active parts in it. MIDI is a serial protocol and the Amigas had full RS232 ports with hardware interrupts, +12v, -12v, as well as audio in and out on unused pins. The serial to MIDI In/Out cable cost around $15 more than two MIDI cables. You can still buy them today: https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interface-db25-amiga-500-600-1200-2000-3000-4000 https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interf....

Aldipower 1y ago
The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.
- mrandish 1y ago
  While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing. While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second. So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.