5 ms·

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure ab

by zabzonk 7mo ago

> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master. I think many others may have similar thoughts.

sys_64738 7mo ago
GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System.
- empressplay 7mo ago
  Not Jack, his son, Sam.
  - manytimesaway 7mo ago
    None of these are true. It's "The Operating System" according to era documentation.
TMWNN 7mo ago
> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
- zabzonk 7mo ago
  Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
  - ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
    > Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
  - lproven 7mo ago
    > who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good I dunno man. I came from a ZX Spectrum (via several other machines, it's true) and compared to that, the ST keyboard was great.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
  I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
  - TMWNN 7mo ago
    >I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all. Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
    - cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
      It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late. https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php
      - TMWNN 7mo ago
        Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n83/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero. Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.
car 7mo ago
Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones. As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
  Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle. Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
  - msephton 7mo ago
    The dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale.
    - cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
      Yes I am aware of this, and read the HDL to understand what they did. But they are hardware only. The point is to run in emulation.
  - car 7mo ago
    Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
    - car 7mo ago
      Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently. And then this blew my mind: https://re-falcon.com https://re-falcon.com Quite the underground scene: https://indyclassic.org https://indyclassic.org
rjsw 7mo ago
I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.
bregma 7mo ago
I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment. Between DM sessions, of course. Or Time Bandits.
steve1977 7mo ago
There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Even though dongles were a popular copy protection. Then again, software like Cubase didn't use much of GEM IIRC and did their own graphics.
- bitwize 7mo ago
  > There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Hence why Gerhard Lengeling put at least as much time into the design of the dongle as he did Creator/Notator itself.
  - steve1977 7mo ago
    I remember these things for all the dongles. I think C-Lab had something similar, not sure anymore though (was using Cubase at the time). https://axelhartmanndesign.com/steinberg-midex/ https://axelhartmanndesign.com/steinberg-midex/
zoenolan 7mo ago
Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) was on the Retro Hour talking about the Atari ST at the start of the year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-UOBjJjGuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-UOBjJjGuM

by zabzonk 7mo ago

sys_64738 7mo ago

GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System.

empressplay 7mo ago
Not Jack, his son, Sam.
- manytimesaway 7mo ago
  None of these are true. It's "The Operating System" according to era documentation.

TMWNN 7mo ago

> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

zabzonk 7mo ago
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
  > Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
- lproven 7mo ago
  > who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good I dunno man. I came from a ZX Spectrum (via several other machines, it's true) and compared to that, the ST keyboard was great.
cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
- TMWNN 7mo ago
  >I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all. Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
  - cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
    It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late. https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php
    - TMWNN 7mo ago
      Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n83/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero. Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.

car 7mo ago

Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones. As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.

cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle. Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
- msephton 7mo ago
  The dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale.
  - cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
    Yes I am aware of this, and read the HDL to understand what they did. But they are hardware only. The point is to run in emulation.
- car 7mo ago
  Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
  - car 7mo ago
    Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently. And then this blew my mind: https://re-falcon.com https://re-falcon.com Quite the underground scene: https://indyclassic.org https://indyclassic.org

rjsw 7mo ago

I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.

bregma 7mo ago

I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment. Between DM sessions, of course. Or Time Bandits.

steve1977 7mo ago

There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Even though dongles were a popular copy protection. Then again, software like Cubase didn't use much of GEM IIRC and did their own graphics.

bitwize 7mo ago
> There was a lot of piracy with MIDI software, at least in Europe. Hence why Gerhard Lengeling put at least as much time into the design of the dongle as he did Creator/Notator itself.
- steve1977 7mo ago
  I remember these things for all the dongles. I think C-Lab had something similar, not sure anymore though (was using Cubase at the time). https://axelhartmanndesign.com/steinberg-midex/ https://axelhartmanndesign.com/steinberg-midex/

zoenolan 7mo ago

Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) was on the Retro Hour talking about the Atari ST at the start of the year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-UOBjJjGuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-UOBjJjGuM