[HN Gopher] Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
___________________________________________________________________
Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
Author : rbanffy
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-06-01 11:01 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.goto10retro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.goto10retro.com)
| rbanffy wrote:
| Someone should make the Atari ST Max built into that keyboard.
|
| And with emulated VME graphics, with an HDMI output and a USB-C
| port. And 3-button mouse. Able to run Atari Unix.
| alexisread wrote:
| 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 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
|
| Stereo output like the CPC464:
| 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...
|
| 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 wrote:
| It's good enough for Fatboy Slim
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| danieldk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > a command line interface that was basically CP/M but
| not as good.
|
| I hate to go to bat for MS-DOS, but it had at least one
| real advantage over CP/M: a single disk format. As doomed
| to failure as the various non-PC DOS machines (e.g. Tandy
| 2000 and DEC Rainbow) were, they could at least share
| disks.
| rjsw wrote:
| You could have a GUI on a PC as well. I developed GEM
| applications on an Olivetti M24 before I got my first
| Atari ST.
|
| The Olivetti had a B&W 640x400 monitor and a Logitech
| mouse that plugged into the back of the keyboard. You
| could replace the 8086 CPU with an NEC V30 for a bit more
| speed.
| spankibalt wrote:
| I hope someone will write an entertaining satire about
| the sometimes almost PTSD-like bitterness and bizarre
| selective perceptions of the "anti-PC" crowd, especially
| in the Amiga space. :D
|
| Please don't take it too harshly, but your list of
| grievances is almost _radically_ different to my
| experiences of personal computing in the late Eighties to
| mid-Nineties... to me somewhat of a _faszinosum_ all on
| its own. In my litle corner of the world the Amiga was
| virtually nonexistant [1], largely undesireable, and
| prophesized to be a corpse already as early as 1991.
|
| I'll give you one thing, tho: A mostly non-plastic,
| compact keyboard computer case (Amiga 600-like) for a
| suitably powerful IBM compatible would've been awfully
| nice. _Still_ would be, for a vintage bird that is. We
| only got "Schneiderplastik", the _Euro-PC_ to be more
| precise [2], and that one wasn 't updated in a satisfying
| fashion.
|
| 1. The only people I knew that had Commodores were two of
| my best friends, one with a Commodore 64, the other with
| a 128. The demosceners I grew up with were Atari ST guys,
| all of them (becoming) musicians.
|
| 2. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC]
| mrandish wrote:
| Sure, there is clearly some "rose-colored memory" effect
| going on - how could there not be? As someone who used
| Amigas, Atari STs, Macs and PCs back in the day - and who
| still owns over a hundred unique models of vintage 80s
| and 90s computers, they ALL suck in many annoying ways
| AND most had some unique strengths. We all learned to
| live with what we had and how to make it do what we
| needed done.
|
| People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they
| used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the
| power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was
| unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in
| the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-
| powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading
| competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0
| CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's
| rapidly expanding library of business software
| applications and hardware expansion options in the form
| of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple
| II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST
| never really had and only the "professional" series
| Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000).
|
| Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC
| couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a
| given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there
| weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs
| as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of
| course, this power balance was largely addressed by the
| mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then
| extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.
| gapan wrote:
| There were others too. At least the Olivetti Prodest PC1
| [1], which I had, and the Sinclair PC200 [2], which a
| close friend had. Other friends had the EuroPC, some had
| the Amstrad 1512 and other different PC compatible boxes.
|
| I remember my PC1 fondly. Well, I still have it. I
| learned to code in GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal and C (in that
| order) with it. I was using it for a long time, until
| 1997, for serious work (coding and university
| assignments), when I finally had the money to upgrade to
| a Pentium PC.
|
| As much as my world was PC-centric, the first time I saw
| an Atari ST and what it could do, my jaw dropped. I knew
| of the Amiga from magazines, but the first time I
| actually saw one was several years later, after I
| acquired my Pentium PC and I admit it wasn't that
| impressive then. But still I couldn't help but think:
| "wow, you had that in 1989?". There was no comparison
| with the PCs of its time.
|
| [1] https://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/prodestpc1.html
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_PC200
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I was predominantly a PC user. In fact I had a side
| hustle repairing PCs in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't fun
| but it was tax free pocket money.
|
| Every time I got to play on non-PC home computers I'd be
| blown away by how much better those machines were.
|
| These days I collect retro hardware and the Atari STs and
| Amigas are still easier to maintain.
|
| So my opinions aren't that of a Amiga fanboy. PCs in the
| 80s were really that shit.
|
| I do think a lot of the problem was Microsoft though. I
| never liked any of Microsoft's software even back then.
| And that was long before they gained the reputation that
| so many older timers like myself still remind people
| about. I actually wrote my own windowing system in Pascal
| because I was fed up with early Windows. It wasn't a
| patch on GEM but back then I didn't know you could run
| GEM on a PC.
| tom_ wrote:
| Cheap and ubiquitous is what people want, and if PCs
| became successful because people other than IBM started
| producing the same hardware, then perhaps Commodore
| should have done that too. Software seems to have proven
| itself the better moat, and so maybe AmigaOS could have
| been the thing that would tie this hypothetical Amiga-
| compatible market together, keeping Commodore alive.
|
| They'd have to have been a bit more careful about it than
| IBM were.
|
| I am confident it would still feel like everything is
| terrible.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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-interf....
| Aldipower wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, thanks for the good write-up, maybe you're right
| and there's also some Atari marketing FUD. The Amiga
| was/is definitely an impressive machine too. That is
| given. :-)
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| U+D for a button means you can't go up or down at the same or
| is there a trick?
| msephton wrote:
| I think what was meant was using fire+directions to trigger
| additional virtual buttons. Many games did this in software
| anyway.
| alexisread wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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.
| tom_ wrote:
| You can't go up and down simultaneously on a joystick anyway!
| The stick can't go both ways at once. So this gives you the
| option of reusing these signal combinations for other kinds
| of input.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I meant pressing the u+d button and actually going up
| (pressing just u, which means not d) at the same time.
| tom_ wrote:
| Oh, good point, yes. It's just a combination of inputs
| rather than some kind of stream of states isn't it. I'm
| rusty.
|
| The 9 pin pinout has 2 spare button inputs anyway. Maybe
| it'd be feasible to use those.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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
| zabzonk wrote:
| I had a 520ST back in the mid 80s. I would have killed for a Mega
| ST, but I couldn't afford one and realistically needed an IBM-
| compatible PC, which I eventually got.
|
| Things I remember about about the 520ST:
|
| - Those horrible diagonal function keys. There was no reason for
| them to be diagonal, rather than normal keys as they were on the
| IBM. But I've always hated function keys.
|
| - Games like Dungeon Master (really still quite a good game
| today).
|
| - Not a bad C compiler, but I can't remember who by -
| LightSomething?
|
| - The GEM GUI was not so bad, but using it with a floppy disk
| was.
|
| But all-in-all I was quite happy to get my PC-compatible to do
| serious work with.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Those function keys were bad but why have the joystick and
| mouse ports underneath in that location? Awful.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yeah, I forgot about that. But I suppose you didn't need to
| replug them very often, and it wasn't much worse than
| plugging into an IBM PC before USB came along. And at least
| the Atari had lots of useful ports.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Ironically, speaking as an Amiga guy, those diagonal function
| keys were an aspect of the ST I really liked!
|
| I don't know if they were consistent with the other keys in
| terms of feel, but they were a striking, unique design
| feature that instantly identified the machine as being Atari
| without compromising practicality.
| doop wrote:
| Laser C or Lattice C maybe?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Atari vs Amiga was such an interesting time in computing history.
|
| When I see generations that grew up with game consoles, and talk
| about the current uptake on desktop games, they really have no
| idea what they missed out in home computing and the first wave of
| indie game development, from bedroom coders .
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _they really have no idea what they missed out_
|
| Tangent: the older I get, the more it annoys me that this
| expression kind of implies a failure of young people to study
| history, when I feel like it's more the responsibility of
| previous generations to preserve and pass down history for them
| to learn from. Especially because it's usually people in power
| in some form who are trying to keep the newer generations naive
| here so they can be fooled again.
|
| Not saying that this interpretation was your intent (in fact I
| suspect it's the opposite), just directly expressing my
| annoyance at the expression itself.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I never thought that statement was actually about having an
| "idea", but more about not actually having lived through the
| experience. Quite the opposite from your belief, no amount of
| study would allow them to understand what is was like.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Understandable, hence why many of my comments kind of look
| like mini-history lessons, and I tend to be pedantic.
|
| However curiosity also plays a big role.
|
| If I know so much about computing history since the 1950's,
| is because I do my research, and take advantage of all
| archives that have been placed online, certainly I wasn't
| around to live all of it.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > when I feel like it's more the responsibility of previous
| generations to preserve and pass down history for them to
| learn from
|
| But everything _has_ been preserved and passed down. The
| entire home computing phenomenon has been archived and is
| available on the internet thanks to the rampant 'software
| piracy' which was common at the time, and detailed schematics
| and manuals coming with the computers (which have all been
| digitized and are available on the internet). Even my obscure
| KC85 games I wrote as a teenager and 'distributed' on
| cassette tapes by snail mail are available as download
| because some kind person(s) digitized all that stuff during
| the early 90s and put it on some 'underground' game download
| portals.
|
| The 80s and early 90s home computer era will be better
| preserved than anything that came after it.
| mrandish wrote:
| > The 80s and early 90s home computer era will be better
| preserved than anything that came after it.
|
| Indeed. Sadly, many more recent games will probably be lost
| to time forever due to DRM, online service components going
| offline or never being distributed on physical media in the
| first place. As someone into vintage computers and
| preservation, I worry that future generations may look back
| and see the late 2010s and certainly the 2020s as a 'dark
| age' when surveying the history and evolution of digital
| gaming. All we'll have are YouTube videos (assuming those
| survive future business model tectonic shifts) but no
| ability to actually experience the game play first-hand.
|
| Recently I've been exploring the back catalog of more
| obscure PS3 and X360 games via emulation and have found
| some absolutely terrific titles I never even knew existed.
| Some of them were only ever sold through the console's
| online store and never available on physical media. With
| the XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii stores now long offline, only
| the PS3 store remains available - and who knows for how
| much longer, since Sony already announced its closure once
| and then changed their mind. There's now a race to preserve
| many of these titles
| mrandish wrote:
| > a failure of young people to study history
|
| The good news is that not only was almost all of it
| preserved, teenagers today are really interested in retro
| gaming. My 15 year-old daughter, who's not into computers
| more than any other 15 year-old girl, just asked if she could
| go with me to the vintage computer festival this Summer. She
| tells me her friends at school are all interested in running
| emulators to play classic games from arcade to SNES to PS2
| and N64.
|
| I guess the 'dark lining' to that silver cloud is that this
| interest from teens in retro gaming is partly thanks to the
| increasing downsides of modern gaming (cost, DLC, ads, hour-
| long download/installs, etc). While game graphics continue to
| get more and more impressive, stuff like real-time path
| tracing doesn't seem to excite teens as much as does me.
| Ultimately, it's about game play more than visuals. Lately
| I've been exploring the immense back catalog of N64, PS2, PS3
| and x360 games via emulation and there are some incredible
| gems I never even heard about back in the day. It's
| especially great now thanks to the huge variety of mods,
| enhancements, texture packs, decompilations/recompilations
| and fan translations. And current emulators can upscale and
| anti-alias those games even on a potato desktop or laptop
| with a low-end discrete GPU.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The Mega ST (not the Mega STe) is the best _quality_ machine of
| the series. Mechanical cherry keyswitches on the keyboard. Easy
| access in the case to expand (though the Mega STe /TT had
| standardized VMEbus and the Mega ST was its own custom thing).
|
| The Mega STe had a funkier case, VMEbus, and upgraded specs, but
| mushy rubber dome keyboard, more brittle plastics.
|
| I like to collect the Mega as the best of the bunch, personally.
| Ozarkian wrote:
| I owned one of those! I sold my 1040ST to my friend to get some
| of the money for a Mega 2.
|
| I liked how the keyboard was detachable and the hard drive was
| the same size at the motherboard case, so you could stack them.
| Aldipower wrote:
| I own 4 Mega STe and I am using them almost daily. One of them,
| the rest is spare parts. Producing music with it. The Atari is my
| MIDI master clock and central piece of MIDI sequencing together
| with Cubase 3.1 for the Atari. Seriously the MIDI timing is
| unbeaten until today! The MIDI ports are directly attached to the
| CIA chip which is again directly connected to the Motorola 68k
| CPU. Runs absolutely stable even 35 years later. No crashes what
| so ever and also no distractions by updates or "phone home
| applications". It just works, distractless! Shame on the "present
| future".
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Seriously the MIDI timing is unbeaten until today!_
|
| Is this in any way related to the general _" speed is going up
| but latency is getting worse"_ phenomenon of hardware in the
| last decades?
| Aldipower wrote:
| Yes, I think this is a on point statement. :-)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Yes, back in the days, I/O was often really low latency
| because memory and therefore buffers were expensive and gate
| count was limited, it meant more direct connections, which
| meant low latency.
|
| The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the beam",
| updating the image while it was being drawn on the CRT
| monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than frames! It
| was necessary because the console didn't have enough memory
| for a framebuffer.
|
| The Atari ST is special for the inclusion built-in of MIDI
| ports, and it was made cheaply, which at the time meant
| direct connections and it resulted it low latency.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can have low latency and low jitter today, but you will
| need to use a microcontroller not a general-purpose CPU.
| The old 16/32 bit retro machines are essentially
| microcontroller architecture devices with general-purpose
| computer peripherals, for pretty much the reasons you
| mention. But there are many cheap microcontrollers
| available today, such as the Raspberry Pico series.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| And when you factor in FPGAs, you can get down to the
| microsecond or less. Low latency is possible, it is just
| that priorities are often elsewhere.
|
| We like being able to plug everything anywhere. And I
| admit it is damn cool being able to connect a display,
| most kinds of storage devices, keyboard and mouse, all
| while charging my laptop on a single port, at any time. I
| may even be able to disconnect my laptop and put my phone
| instead and it will do something sensible. If you did
| that back in the day, there was a good chance for one of
| the devices to turn into a smoke machine.
|
| It comes at a cost though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > If you did that back in the day, there was a good
| chance for one of the devices to turn into a smoke
| machine.
|
| Back in the day, you would not have been able to do any
| of this with one port. Each type of device had it's own
| uniquely shaped connector/pins combo. You were not going
| to connect your SCSI devices into the VGA monitor port
| accidentally. Closest I ever saw was someone attempting
| plug in a Mac ADB cable to the S-Video port, but that
| just resulted in bent pins. It just so happened those
| pins were on an Avid Film Composer dongle instead of a
| replaceable cable.
| YZF wrote:
| I think modern general purpose CPUs are perfectly capable
| of low latency and jitter. The problem isn't the CPU, the
| problem is stuff around the CPU (mostly the operating
| system). The less deterministic aspects of modern CPUs
| (branch prediction, speculative execution, caches etc).
| happen at timescales much smaller than what you usually
| care about (and possibly smaller than the jitter specs on
| microcontrollers).
| Lerc wrote:
| A rp2350 with psram and microsd could probably do a
| commendable job at pretending to be an entire Atari ST
| while providing a bootload of extra low latency goodies
| at the same time
| bitwize wrote:
| I refer to the RP2xxx chips as "headless Amigas" because
| their PIO modules essentially function like Coppers: they
| are simple state machines that offload I/O functionality
| off the CPU.
|
| I think there's a very strong future in emulation of
| achieving FPGA-like latency by using a Raspberry Pi
| Pico/Pico2 to emulate each of the target machine's
| subsystems/chips.
| Lerc wrote:
| Have you seen https://github.com/floooh/chips A bunch of
| PIO linked chips using these interfaces would feel like a
| weird blend of software and hardware that stands
| separately to the FPGA world. I have wondered if it would
| actually work as a larger scale paradigm. Imagine a
| single piece of silicon with a bunch of RP2xxxx level
| processor/ram blocks with PIO links between them all. I'm
| not sure how it would come out compared to FPGAs for
| balance of flexibility/cost/power consumption/etc. but I
| suspect it could find a niche.
|
| antirez mentioned running some of these on RP2040's
| nailer wrote:
| > The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the
| beam", updating the image while it was being drawn on the
| CRT monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than
| frames!
|
| Oh wow! I remember hearing that oculus were doing this on
| their devices and thinking it was new.
| weinzierl wrote:
| This is true, but in my opinion also misleading. Speed and
| latency are fundamentally different. Speed would be a
| _Performance Feature_ in the Kano model, meaning there is
| usually a linear relationship between speed and user
| satisfaction.
|
| Latency would be a _Basic Feature_. Once you cross 7 ms (or 5
| ms, or even 3 ms if you absolutely insist) you 're happy,
| above that everything is absolutely unusable.
| Aldipower wrote:
| You are missing out the jitter. This is often the worst
| part of modern implementations. If there is a jitter of 4ms
| and peaking sometimes with 20ms, then a 5ms latency is
| still bad. This implementation is basically unusable. Like
| many modern USB ones..
|
| The Atari has an absolute stable and extremely low jitter.
| Some guy measured it to 1us. Cannot find the link though,
| sorry.
|
| So the Atari has low latency around 2-4ms with an extremely
| low jitter. This is execatly what you want from a MIDI
| clock and sequencer driving multiple MIDI devices.
| deng wrote:
| How do you think any professional works nowadays with
| MIDI? A good, modern USB interface (from Focusrite or
| similar) has a jitter well below 1ms, usually in the
| range of 200us. If that is too much, simply sync your DAW
| with an external, dedicated clock, which will usually
| give you a jitter in the single us range.
| Aldipower wrote:
| I have a Focusrite and the MIDI timing is terrible. Sure,
| there is more to it then just the interface. With USB you
| just cannot guarantee a stable midi timing, because there
| is no good midi buffer implementation for it. Technically
| it would be possible, but no one cares.. Professionals
| using something like MIDI to audio converters via an VSTi
| plugin that takes midi signals, modulates them onto a
| audio signal (which can be easily buffered) and some
| dedicated outboard equipment converts this back to MIDI.
| If you are working with hardware synths, etc. this is the
| only option you have nowadays with non-vintage hardware.
| A lot of producers do not work with midi anyways, they
| use plugins, that's why it is some kind of a niche
| problem and there's not much talking about it.
| deng wrote:
| First off, I'm assuming of course we are talking Mac
| here, because Windows is unusable for MIDI. If you have
| terrible MIDI timing with a Mac, then yes indeed, you'll
| need to sync via audio, but there are nice and
| inexpensive solutions for this, for instance the
| Midronome.
|
| Look, I'm not trying to convince you to get rid of your
| Ataris, quite the contrary. I'm just disagreeing that
| it's impossible to have low jitter nowadays, but I fully
| agree that things used to be simpler before everything
| was done via USB.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Agreed. It is of-course not impossible, but it is almost
| impossible out-of-the-box (literally ;-)) I have a USAMO
| (Universal Sample-Accurate MIDI Output) device, but do
| not use it, because as I said, Atari is king here. :-)
| Not sure how the Midronome can solve the problem of midi
| notes coming inaccurate from a modern DAW? But maybe I do
| not understand it completly. Need to have a deeper look.
| Since some years I am using Linux with a Focusrite for
| mastering and audio tracking. Midi was bad with Linux and
| Windows since I got my first USB interface and went away
| from PCI interfaces. But this shouldn't matter too much.
| :-)
| brudgers wrote:
| Not really.
|
| MIDI is a serial protocol.
|
| At any given time only one message can be sent down the wire.
| [1]
|
| So on the beat, an implementation can send either the clock
| pulse or note on or something else. [2]
|
| If you send the clock everything else has to wait. If you
| send something else, the clock has to wait.
|
| Now with modern computers, you are also dealing with USB
| which is a low priority parallel protocol and has to
| coordinate with everything else a modern kernel does.
|
| Music is hard.
|
| [1] premium hardware sequencers sometimes have two or more
| Midi Out to reduce contention.
|
| [2] Midi Time Code solves this by encoding monotonic time
| into Midi and is how serious sync is done over Midi, e.g. in
| Hollywoood
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I have the equivalent of a $500,000+ studio from my childhood,
| all in my laptop.
|
| You are concerned about a 9600 baud protocol.
|
| There is zero 'shame' on the 'present future' when it comes to
| music production tools. It is like one of the hugest bright
| spots/biggest equalizers. Best thing I did was go ITB. No
| headaches. No hardware maintenance on obscure hardware. No MIDI
| limitations or even considering of my MIDI chains. Just music
| making.
| bitwize wrote:
| Some musicians still like to play instruments -- for them and
| their listeners, ITB production is seen as a cheat and not
| real musicianship -- and for them the lack of a stable MIDI
| clock on today's hardware absolutely does matter. A trained
| musician can _feel_ time difference as small as 1 ms. Any
| latency or jitter greater than that and a perfect track could
| be ruined.
|
| As an aside, all-digital workflows take the joy out of music
| being made in the moment, by ear and by feel. There is no
| replacement, for example, for a professional sound engineer
| adjusting a mix strictly by the sound in their headphones and
| the feel of the sliders under their fingers.
| an_aparallel wrote:
| I really wish you could easily get somwthing like the Myster ST
| clones...seems like supply is spotty, and price seems pretty
| high. Id love an original if they were less marked up too...
| msephton wrote:
| The Atari ST was foundational for me. I loved it so much, learned
| a great deal, discovered and played many great video games,
| designed page layouts, made my own software and games. In
| December 2023 one of my recent games was listed in Ars Technica's
| "Best Games of 2023" alongside Super Mario Wonder and I can draw
| the line right the way back to my time on the Atari ST.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936
| layer8 wrote:
| The positioning of the cursor keys on the Atari STs is
| interesting [0]. It arguably makes sense for the cursor block to
| be located more in the vertical middle rather than at the bottom
| edge of the keyboard.
|
| [0]
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Atari_10...
| j45 wrote:
| The Atari's still look like they're a great first computer for
| kids.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I did prefer the Amiga, but I still got an Atari ST for an very
| obvious reason: It had MIDI DIN port and was way cheaper than
| most digital sequencers at the time.
|
| It's funny how some young producers today wonder "how did people
| do it without a computer before the 2000?"...well guess what, we
| did used computers! I cannot however remember what software
| sequencer I was using, I know it had MIDI effects (like MIDI
| echo), that's all I remember.
|
| And by 1998, Logic was fairly advanced anyway and even had plenty
| of plugins.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >I cannot however remember what software sequencer I was using,
| I know it had MIDI effects (like MIDI echo),
|
| Possibly/ probably Cubase. Anyone remember the Mike Hunt
| version? I'm still using cubase on a nice pc, but I miss the
| stability of the atari.
| bartread wrote:
| I have to say, I _love_ the industrial design of these 80s
| machines from Atari, and also from contemporary Commodore
| offerings. As an example, the original Amiga 1000 is _beautiful_
| , and I'd be incredibly happy to have a machine with that form
| factor, but equipped with modern internals, today.
|
| Honestly, I don't think even Apple could touch the best of Atari
| and Commodore industrial design in the back half of the 1980s. To
| be blunt, the early Macintoshs simply weren't practical in their
| design: for starters, a tiny monitor - that was originally black
| and white (which in 1984 was already kind of a joke) - and very
| limited upgradeability, relatively poor multimedia capabilities
| (speech synthesis was no more than a gimmick that was also
| available on other platforms), and then the whole aesthetic just
| wasn't _that_ pleasant.
|
| And I say this as someone who, personally, has only owned Apple
| machines for the past 15ish years, so I'm not exactly coming at
| this from a "not a fanboi" perspective. I'd still take 1980s
| Atari or Commodore aesthetic over modern Apple, or modern
| anything else for that matter[0].
|
| Also, as an aside, I really enjoyed seeing "Atari Means Business
| with the Mega ST" as the top headline on Hacker News in 2025.
| Even on a Sunday when content typically tends to be more varied
| and interesting this was still an entertaining surprise.
|
| _[0] I suspect the reality may be that I 'm an "anything but
| Wintel" kind of person, although not at any cost, because I did
| run PCs exclusively for 11 or 12 years. They never really helped
| me enjoy computing in the way the other machines have though._
| icedchai wrote:
| I always felt the Amiga 3000 was Commodore's high point in
| terms of industrial design. Still, the keyboard garage in the
| 1000 was neat!
| II2II wrote:
| The industrial design of PCd may have been lacking in beauty,
| but it was almost always practical.
|
| For example: I cannot think of any desktop models that lacked
| internal expansion. They may have used a riser card to stack in
| two or three slots sideways, but the slots were there. The
| design may have been crude, but at least your desktop wasn't
| turned into a disaster every time the technological landscape
| shifted: when hard drives became affordable, the world switched
| to 3.5" floppies, if you decided to use online services or send
| faxes directly from your computer, get a CD-ROM, or cable
| Internet.
| b800h wrote:
| Every time I see anything about the varieties of ST, it gives me
| PTSD over the woeful keyboard. It was like a trampoline made of
| fudge.
|
| This says that the keyboard on the Mega ST was better. And yet
| still not good enough. Egads, that ST mess was a terrible
| keyboard.
| hashmash wrote:
| The main problem with the keyboard was the non-standard size of
| the kepcaps. The standard distance between keycaps is 0.75
| inches, and the standard top width is 0.5 inches. The Atari ST
| keycap distance is standard, but the top width is 0.625 inches.
| Because of this, if your finger isn't exactly centered over the
| top of the key, it hits the adjacent key too, leading to key
| jam.
| whobre wrote:
| Well, my first computer was a 48k ZX Spectrum, and after that
| experience Atari's keyboard looked like heaven.
|
| Still liked the Speccy better...
| rjsw wrote:
| The Mega keyboard was good, comparable to a current mechanical
| one.
| jlokier wrote:
| Wow, there are a lot of C compilers for Atari ST!
|
| I was astonished to find about 22 distinct C compilers, including
| their own libraries, assemblers, linkers etc. for the Atari ST
| and its successors. That's not counting separate versions, just
| distinct products from different vendors.
|
| From what I can see now looking at archive sites, there was a
| huge amount of activity in developer tools on the ST back in the
| day. Much more than I thought at the time. It might have been a
| serious contender for the dominant architecture (along with the
| m68k CPU), if IBM PC-compatibles and x86 hadn't won.
|
| Recently I looked for Atari ST C compilers, out of curiosity to
| test portability of a C program I'm working on.
|
| I've been testing C code for diverse Unix systems.
|
| As I used to own an Atari 520ST (with 1MB RAM beautifully piggy-
| backed and hand-soldered on the existing RAM chips :-), it seemed
| like a good idea to peek at C on an ST emulator. I didn't use C
| when I had a real Atari ST (no C books in my local library), so I
| expected to find one or two C compilers, not 22!
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Atari "means" business..? I can't get over the present tense in
| the heading. I double-checked if they had actually released
| something new. It feels like clickbait, and I wish it weren't.
| predictsoft wrote:
| I once played Ultima 6 from a RAM disk on an ST with 4MB RAM.
| Game install from 'Hard disk' to RAM disk - it didn't realise.
| And then I used bigger size floppy disks (940KB I think) and a
| fast copy utility to get those 3 disks to start the game and when
| done, save the game and save it all off to 3 floppies. It was
| totally fast!
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