Atari ST (1989) Computer System Review
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- čas přidán 4. 06. 2024
- It's no secret that I love the Amiga, but how will I rate its arch-rival, the Atari ST?!
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The ST with Cubase was unbelievably solid, and was the industry standard well into the 90's. I didn't stop using mine until 1999!
Allan Holdsworth (famous influential guitarist) used Cubase on his Atari ST right up until his death in 2017. He said they were just reliable and were bulletproof.
The Atari ST 1040 and the Amiga 500 were both fantastic machines.
Being an Atari 800/130XE lover I wanted an Amiga for my next computer but didn't have the money so I went with the ST. It at least got me through 3 1/2 years of college.
The game Bolo was better than Doom and Halflife combined.
Yes, both are good but when I want to replace my aging C-64 I'd compared both of them mostly in sound and graphic department and I give my due to Amiga 500. Maybe that's just me though. Although that Amiga 500 long gone but I did acquired a dead A1000 and C-64 for nostalgic purposes.
@@MHMajid-yi8iu that is if you(we) had the luxury to spend the extra money. Coming from the 8bit era everything appeared "good enough" compared to our previous machines. At hindsight, sure Amiga is superior....but STs were more than good enough.
@@bjbell52 Atari 8bit -> Amiga was the most reasonable path since they both were the most innovative machines in their categories and period. The 8bit Atari got its recognition only recently mainly due the work of the homebrew community but Amiga also had a rough 2 years before managing to draw the attention of game developers.
I happen to own all those machines and I've found out that real world specifications do not really have an effect on our childhood "Indoctrination".
I daily prefer and fire my Atari 8bit over my 16bit machines, my cpc and c64.
So I think that computer users who grew up during that period don't really care about technical comparisons, but which of those machines can take them back in time.
I was one of those guys who got an ST for Christmas, and of course school was a steam of continuous "banter" between Amiga and Atari users. However as much as I love the ST, of late you can can consider me equally impressed by the Amiga. I had no idea the Amiga is still being tweaked and upgraded long after the Atari. Guys still developing newer versions of workbench, third party PC style cases etc etc. That's admirable.
Cool story. Was using ST in my school and at home to compose a music with Emagic Notator/Logic.
my mates were into STs there was a HUGE scene in Scotland.. it was quite mental.
Yay! An ST Video from Kookytech!. I'm actually an original ST user (1986 on), machine I grew up with after the Atari 8bit. I started exploring Amigas last year and now have a 500 and 1200. Just a couple of comments on the video -- Great video, very fair comparison. The Hard disk port was DMA (fast) and came standard on all STs -- even the 1985 520ST. Also, The other main reason MIDI took off on the ST was ironically TOS -- being a single tasking user interface, timing on MIDI was quite good on the ST. The cheap but excellent high resolution monochrome monitor (640x400, 72 hz) was a great way for low cost productivity on this machine as well. Being here in the US, I just wish we could cheaply get a 520/1040STE -- they're extremely rare over here.
They both beat PCs from the time. Both great machines in different ways. I am 27 and owned an Amiga 500.
+Matthew Richards Back in 1988 I even would have preferred a Commodore 64 over our VGA 386. Most games were CGA and had beeper sounds. Seriously 4 colour CGA with pc beeper sounds is volatile for your senses
+Ricdeau VGA did come out about 1987 but it was not until 486SX based PCs arrived that they were of any use anyway for arcade games. Even in the 90s games are best played on Amiga for Europeans and some US titles like Rocket Ranger/It Came from the Desert/Defender of the Crown II etc as they all stuck with EGA graphics for XT or AT class PCs.
+Matthew Richards I had a fair bit of fun and success running PC-DOS emulators on the ST. It rather shows us how much more powerful these platforms were - and makes me regret that neither the ST nor the Amiga managed to follow up successfully with 32-bit incarnations.
A great era.
+Matthew Richards The Amiga and Atari were also "PCs", just not IBM compatibles.
+xyz12345 thanks I was referring yo IBM PC.
Great story. I love the ST/Amiga story. Also I loved the playground rivalry. I remember defending the Master System against 16 bit machines, then the ST against the Amiga, then the Amiga against everything else! Apparently my allegiance was somewhat fickle. I bailed on the ST as ST Format was becoming unnervingly thin on pages.... then the same started happening to Amiga Format :O
One thing I loved doing on my ST (and still do on my PC, old habits die hard) was rename the trash can to Amiga.
GASP ! An Atari ST ! - you are the anti-Christ !
@@me0262 If only CZcams showed us the number of thumbs down on a comment ;) :P
Thats some rank partisan bs right there lol.
,;)
@@QuasarRedshift Dan-tichrist
I left high school in '98, I always remember my mate making music on this machine, using a monochrome crt and using the music software you have shown. The ST was also hooked upto a 386 I believe using some kind of midi interface. There was also a high end music keyboard hooked up, in which he made his own custom effects and loops. He made some very good techno and hard house style music. I still remember to this day the music room filled with people amazed at the quality of the sounds in which came from this machine.
Thank You for taking the time to review this!
I'm taking a bold guess at the Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus or ASR-10 then! ;) Midi is a wonderful invention.
Early 90's I started programming music with an ST, Cubase V1 (shown in this video) and a Roland D-10. Been using Cubase for 30 years and it all started on an Atari ST
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
Any 68000 based system is pretty cool :)
Agree and wish the two companies were still going
QL too ? XD
@@TheLemminkainen except for the horrible color (colour) scheme Sinclair used... I mean FFS talk about color clash. It was better when it was just black+white (ZX80/1)
lactobacillusprime except for Macs which had no hardware assist for game play
@@TheSulross Neither did the ST's until they added a blitter chip.
i had one in my younger days absolutely loved it, finally got an Amiga last year and yeah the sound is so much better on the miggy but they are two fantastic machines and personally think everyone should have a go on one before writing it off
The ATARI ST had a lot of really great productivity software, and if you hook either an MT 32 or Sound Canvas 55 using MIDI, then it's pretty fantastic.
We had an Atari 1040 STE with 4MB and a SCSI hard disk - it was amazing at the time. I was studying music at the time, so the built in MIDI was useful for plugging in a synth. The RCA jacks meant that everything sounded amazing on the stereo and having 4 joystick ports was great for multiplayer fun. My dad used it for word processing and seemed to like it (got the hi res monochrome screen, but we used a TV for gaming). My school built a music studio without about 10 Ataris and plugged them into Korg X5 synths for music production. Good times. I believe The Prodigy also used them for their music.
I just got an Atari 520STE for free today. :). It came with 200+ disks, two mice and a joystick/game controller. Along with the other needed cables. Apparently it has had a double memory upgrade too.
brought back happy memories watching this, i was a proud owner of an ST complete with a 170MB Hard drive that was about 2 foot square.
170mb back then?! That's like storage royalty! The best it got for me was a 2.5mb STFM (solder in upgrade from Power Computing) and later a 4mb STE and the use of a RAM drive... damn you, volatile memory!
20-40 MB was the standard HDD size in 1990 so I doubt you had 170 MB.
YES! another review! I am decently new and have wstched your reviews numerous, numerous times! woo! love them!
There is beauty in those YM-2149 chip tunes. Proud owner of an Atari 520STE from 1991 until 1996. Despite hours of use each week she never once let me down.
Another great video! I, like you grew up with an Amiga and got into a few Amiga vs Atari debates at school! Funnily enough our school library had a number of Atari STs in them. I, and some friends used to play Carrier Command on them. It was a fantastic game! I have been wanting to add an Atari ST to my retro collection, and your video has convinced me to get one ASAP :)
Dungeon Master, first LAN parties with MIDI cables and Midi maze and the superb sharp mono display on the proper monitor was just gorgeous. The functions keys could be a pain though it being easy to press two instead of the one you wanted to press.
Was always an Amiga fan, but the ST certainly deserves its place in the history of home computing of that time.
I got a 520ST+ with an external floppy dirt cheap from ebay 3 years ago when nobody actually wanted them still. That was one of the best buys I've ever made. A must have for Amiga 500 kids that always wanted to know what their Atari ST friends were talking about back in the day. Replacing the broken floppy drive wasn't easy though due to the strange disc change detection mechanism of the ST (similar to that of the 1541).
The Atari ST was the pioneer for Midi music and 90's dance music being the first computer with a built in Midi Port and the first to have CUBASE. Many famous tracks were composed on it.
I still rock my Atari Teenage Riot T-Shirt.... Atari St was huge in the electronic music scene, like you said.
The best piece of software on the ST was a DTP program called Calamus. To date I've not found anything on the PC that comes anywhere close.
great video - as always Dan. I was Amiga all the way since i was a kid in the 80s, and a member of a demo group on it. Recently decided to take the plunge and got a 1040 Ste and kitted it out with an HXC Floppy emulator and an ultrasatan hardrive in order to have access to the whole ST demo scene. Obviously not as good as the Amiga demo scene, but there are some gems on the ST. Like you, glad i got one to compliment my amiga 500 and 1200
I'm not knocking the games, but if you REALLY want the best from your STe, you need to hook up some sound sources to the MIDI ports. The MIDI ports wasn't the big deal for me, the stability of the MIDI ports was. Rock solid timing, comparable to sync units worth $1000s
Well Dan i think you said you got your first Amiga for xmas in 1991. Well that same xmas i got the STE ... really wanted the Amiga but my parents could not afford it. I really enjoyed using my ST ... had many a laugh with it over the years. Got my first Amiga for xmas in 93. I still use both machines on an almost daily basis ... great times. The sound did let the Atari down ... but in some ways i liked the Atari sound. Turrican 2 and Cannon Fodder and Epic had great intro tracks and the demo scene was just as active as the Amiga scene and still is to this day.
I think the ST had an adequate sound chip. Granted it’s not as impressive as the Amiga’s 4 channel pcm sound. Still the ST had a nice, straightforward architecture that was much more affordable than the expensive Amiga and it was quite a capable machine at the time. It brought 16 bit computing into many homes that would not have had such a machine at the time if their choice were only an Amiga. The ST was certainly superior to the less powerful and less capable cheap XT clones that were floating around at the time and the price was often higher than for The ST. For the price it was a good value for money. The PC world still had a massive software library that the ST didn’t have which is important but the ST eventually had it what needed. I always like that it had the built in MIDI which made the ST a great affordable music computer for musicians with no need to purchase extra midi interfaces and deal with driver conflicts and extra expense like it would have been on a PC at the time or even on the Amiga.
My amiga did Midi just fine. It wasn’t built-in but was easy to add. (And for most users, the built-in music of Amiga was good enough to compose music.)
Very cool video mate thanks for making it. I was an ST owner as a kid and bloody loved it. So it was good to hear some honest opinions from an Amiga fan, and not just slating the computer. Some fair and valid points there. I would like to see a video on attaching that drive to it if you get chance as I know a few of my original disk have stopped working and its always nice to play the games on the original platform rather than PC emulator. Cheers ;)
That is a fantastic intro into the Atari ST from a retro perspective. I've been pottering along slowly by myself figuring things out, so this has been quite informative. Thanks for the overview of the Gotek, that's something I definitely want to add, since I have an STe with a duffy floppy disk drive, I think you've pointed me to the best approach to get it into a retro-gaming ready system. thanks! Also, the comparisons with the Amiga helped. I grew up with neither, so it helps fill the gaps to where each system excelled.
My dad was much into music when he was young. I was told he used to own an Atari ST at one point. I guess he replaced it with a PowerPC mac, wich is the first PC I remembered as a kid, before he eventually switched over to PC in 2000.
I had the Amiga 500 back in the day and still have it. The Amiga was a massive step up for me after having the zx spectrum till the end of its life. The Atari was a very capable machine and after seeing your comparisons with the Amiga. I am tempted to give this a try one day. Thank you for the great review.
The ST wasn't just about having the MIDI built in for musicians, it was also the high resolution flicker free monitor, and PC compatible floppies. I have Amiga's too which I love, but when it comes to professional software, the Amiga could not touch the ST's monochrome resolution for stability or speed. Obviously the Amiga was better than the ST in general sound and graphics and media graphics, but the Amiga was never going to beat the ST/E/Falcon with Midi music as it used hardware interrupts for control so it never goes out of sync, and the high res on the ST wins for things like CAD and DTP.
the 68000 triplets break down like this:
ST =Music
DTP = Apple
Amiga = Video
I got one when I bought my Amiga 500 a few months ago (job lot) and I was quite impressed, it took me ages to find the joystick ports someone must of got sacked due to that decision, great vid as always m8
my favorite channel dan wood..thanks .
I would love to see a video on. How to set up a Gotek for the Atari ST.
I live in the states where both Amigas and Ataris were rare, but my uncle had a 1040ST and that was my first PC in the mid nineties that was mine alone. We had a family IBM, but I would spend hours playing my uncle's massive game collection in my room. Gunship was my favorite game!
The STE has more or less the same functions as the Amiga had. Hardware scrolling and blitter chip. Not many games use this since they wanted to make as much money as possible so they made the games to work on the lower ST model. Two games I always liked was Pacmania and Giana sisters. They are not so great on the ST model so a few years ago I redid them for the STE and besides the music, it's the same as the Amiga versions.
Pacmania: czcams.com/video/07MIDzSEp58/video.html
Giana sisters: czcams.com/video/fy1bbymVuZ4/video.html
Used to go to computer club at primary school in the evening and it was either NES or Master System, and Atari ST or Amiga. Always preferred the look of the ST but ended up getting the Amiga 500+ in late 1991. Just before it all went down hill. Happy memories.
I moved up from a ZX Spectrum 128 to an Atari STFM and within a few months started coding in assembly. I experienced a little fame with my Atari activities :). I bought an Amiga A500 and for a while coded on my Atari and sent the executable code to my Amiga via a dev system my mate wrote but I found the Amiga more challenging to code for so in the end used it for games only. I wish Atari had sorted the sound chip out on the ST and STe. I bought an Atari Falcon which as the 68030 in (I still have it) but it was too little, too late.
great video as always. I have also just bought a 1040 atari st. very pleased. Did you prep the gotek yourself or buy it pre flashed?
Great Video! I am an Amiga guy also, having an A500+ and then an A1200 in my youth! Like you I purchased an Atari ST a few years back just out of curiousity and was pleasantly surprised! Like you say, its not quite an Amiga, but its a great little machine that I don't regret buying!
Excellent video as always! I own 2, my original STFM which is expanded to 4 meg Ram and a second STFM which I picked up off the carboot for 20 quid, I love them. I owned one before my Amiga, very fond memories of playing Lemmings until 3a.m!
I remember the sound being the only thing that made the Amiga better (and 32 colours on-screen) but I spent many an hour in Degas Elite, pixelling my little heart out on pieces that were destined to be lost to time, but it was every bit as much fun as working in Dpaint. I have to get myself a gotek for one of them now. :)
I'm an Amiga head, but had an ST/FM first. They are lovely machines. Up till then, I had always used my c64/speccy for games only. The ST introduced me to painting, music making fractals etc. ..and the B.IG demo! and it was affordable with loads of free games and software.
I had an ST before my Amiga 500 and then 1200, good times.
Admin of Commodore Amiga here - Good vid fella, my mate had an Atari ST and to be honest I've enjoyed using them both, the Amiga and the Atari
i was firmly in the atari st camp growing up. lots of love for the atari but i was always secretly impressed when i went to me mates house and had a go on his amiga!
Dan !!! - Thank you for all of these miracle stories about our miracle typewriters !!!!
I got an Amiga back in 1990 and still own it today. Ive been through some rough times financially, but never sold it. Its a part of computing history and my childhood and even after 28 years it works perfect. Just wish I never got rid of my beloved Spectrum 48k and Commodore 64... but needs must. Oh and great video! **thumbs up**
I had an ST back in the day but I wasn't really even aware of the Amiga for a long time until my cousin got one I never knew anyone else with one. The STFM has a hard disk port also. I just got one off ebay and have just got sooo many extras for it. Loving it. In the expansion port you could put a robot controller card I have one also today you can put things like a lan/usb adapter, hard disks (sd card) or even USB power adapters.
Thanks for the review. I actually need to get an ST as it has some decent yamaha DX7 editors and librarians. I may use it for sequencing too. Having MIDI built in from the start is a massive bonus to have.
There were quite a few games which sounded horribly, however if you let the Atari st connected to a midi keyboard, some games would detect the keyboard and re route the sound notes throughout the keyboard so you would have 16 channel orchestra and the quality would depend on your keyboard and amplifier. I had a Roland E5 at that time and the effect was stunning
In my view the age-old argument between Amiga and Atari ST bears more than a passing resemblance to the modern-day arguments relating to Apple Mac vs. PC and iPhone vs. Android.
Back in the day when I had just finished university, having graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, I scrimped and saved for an Atari ST.
While my peers were pissing around on their Amigas playing games I was running a CP/M emulator on my ST and learning applications such as Ashton Tate dBase, WordStar and SuperCalc and also developing electronic circuit analysis programmes in the C programming language. This knowledge secured my first job in the developing CAD industry and led to my making a lot of money over a long and successful career as an industry leader in that field.
While now in semi-retirement I am keeping my brain active by constantly learning new skills on the PC using world-class open source software and selling my services as a freelancer, while my Amiga friends have moved on to giggling at face-swap apps on their iPhones and spaffing money they can’t really afford on placing orders for this years batch of the latest iPads and Apple watches using their beloved Amazon Prime accounts. They also aspire to be one of those idiotic “priority boarders” you see standing in a queue for half an hour before each flight at most airports these days.
It’s funny that when you see a physics professor explaining quantum computing or the inner workings of the universe they tend to be using a PC, probably running some Linux or BSD variant but when you have some bubble-headed moron with a shiny new media studies degree fucking up a news or documentary programme on TV they’re sitting in front of a MacBook Air.
It’s also interesting to note that while many well-known musicians, even to this day, still use Atari STs as part of their music production workflow, you never hear of anyone still actually using an Amiga for anything.
In my experience there are two types of computer owners: those who use them and those who play with them. I’ll leave you to guess which is which.
I was one of those Atari lovers and still feel loyal to the ST. I owned an Atari 520 ST(FM) due to my parents not prepared to shell out £500 for an Amiga 500 - back in 1989.
I was gutted but loved my Atari. I didn't play many games (had lots of them) but for me, the Atari had STOS (later became AMOS for the Amiga) and this was the programming platform for me. They were lots of 3rd party extensions out there and loved to write my own games, programs and utilities, such as converting PC images to Atari format.
I really like your review of the old faithful Atari Dan - thumbs up.
A big difference between ST and Amiga MIDI is the ST's Midi works on Hardware interrupts so the timing is rock solid, whereas the Amiga is software bases so the timing was frequently out; sort of like the Amiga having hardware Genlock which the ST did not have until the STE; the DMA for hard drive was on every ST based system except the Falcon. Oh and the Cart port was never intended for software, just dongles for Midi and a sneaky way to add MAC OS ROMS. The ST Mouse / Joystick ports underneath were done to save cost as the keyboard controller (On the Keyboard PCB) does the signal processing for them, if they had them on the motherboard like the enhanced Joystick ports, then they would have had to have another cable going back to the motherboard, or have the keyboard controller on the motherboard and have a larger cable going to the keyboard; the ST keyboard cable is very much like USB with only Ground, +5V, TX and RX; the Mega STE / TT keyboard used the same keyboard controller, but instead of the ports being underneath, put one port at each end of the keyboard.
The STE's enhancements include: 4096 Color Pallet, Hardware scrolling, Blitter Chip, 2 channels of DMA sound at up to 50 Khz (6 Total Channels with Stereo Mixer IC and 2 x RCA Audio Jacks.) 4 x SIMM Memory sockets for PC like RAM expansion, 2 Enhanced Joystick Ports. Has hardware Genlock for Video and a couple of other smaller updates.
Very nice---great to see you getting stuck into yet more machines of intrigue and hopefully there'll be more further action to come showcasing this and that for the ST. I know the Atari homebrew community has done some things, and there's the whole FireBee project out of ACP---but I'm betting you could key everybody into some of the high points comparable to your general Amiga coverage. Heh, I still say the deep end of the MSX scene's pool is one that stands a good chance at being of interest---the community is strong and varied in their ongoing accomplishments, has a colorful hardware timeline...I suppose had you came up a bit further east on the old spinning globe it just might've been your alt universe Amiga.
Great video!
Perhaps posting a follow up about how you setup that gotek with the HxC firmware would be really nice..
I'm about to do that myself actually and I'd appreciate a vid showing the whole operation.
Thanks:)
Great video. Enjoyed the whole thing.
I had an Atari ST 520 and absolutely loved it. The games you could get for it were absolute classics. I am only sorry I don't have mine anymore. By the way, you are absolutely right about the fierce rivalry between ST and Amiga owners. It was FIERCE, truly. There was no middle ground. No give and take.
You were either an Amiga fan or an Atari fan and that was it. I, being an Atari ST user, was obviously [ and still am] a massive fan of the ST. I didn't even consider for one second, moving over to the Amiga. I was ST and that was it, I wasn't budging. Lol.
Great video. Played on the st back in the day. My uncle was the only one that had a st. Most had a amiga. Nice machine hope to add it to my collection sometime. Would like to see a video about setting the gotek for use in a st.
My dad hooked mine up to a synthesizer once too, I remember that too!
We had Atari ST at high school and it as a good computer it did the job for what we needed it for plus we had the Acorn BBC microcomputer as well
Amiga Format was Amiga ST Format before they split and became two separate magazines. First issue of Amiga format when they split had New Zealand story as a demo on the disk.
Nice vid. Just a note It was the SW that made the ST musician`s preferred choice..nothing on Amiga could even dream of competing with Notator, Cubase, etc...and the steady hires picture of monochrome monitor was a big plus too.
I enjoyed the little bit of computing history in this video. Subscribed. :)
Oh, the memories.
I mainly used programmes like Hyperpaint and ST Writer. I played games sich as Monty Python, Lotus Elite, Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Archons, etc. There was an alternate language for the ST, GFA Basic. I have the disks for GFA Basic V 2.0 and GFA Basic System 2. My ex had a dream of writing games. Now, I have a whole lot of obsolete Atari stuff, my sons are grown up and have no interest.
In Gunnersbury school in very early 90s, in the CDT block, in the wood work teachers office was an Atari ST. A few of us were aloud in at lunch to play on it. We'd play a golf game on it.
Had an ST and an Amiga back in the day and loved them both.
I worked all summer to buy a 1040e ST and I was a few dollar short. I was so determined to buy a computer that day I purchased the computer sitting next to it an Amiga 500. All my friends had ST and I only knew PC and ST. I wasn't familiar with the Amiga. That day changed my life and I became a die has Amiga fan. :)
Still using this beast to make music! Amazing machine....
Great video and i also always was an Amiga fanboy and did not own an Atari ST until last year. I also was impressed by it's capabilities and enjoy playing games and share the same positive and negative things you mention.
I started off on a bbc model b and wrote some some very beautiful looking programs using the structured BASIC available on the computer. Around about 1990-I started making electronic music using the Atari ST and Steinberg Cubase. The whole idea of moving music and cutting and pasting blocks of MIDI instructions like a word processor was the future of music, or so we thought anyway. You still needed lots of outboard gear so we along with others, joined music collectives where you all clubbed together to create music studios which then rented the time back to us cheaply. If you wanted to use audio in the cut and paste mode you needed an outboard sampler with little more than 30 seconds sampling time in total. Time stretching required quick mental arithmetic! Oh, and for some reason, Cubase sped up the music during during fade out slightly! Great times though, and the creative atmosphere in these project studios and rehearsal complexes will never really be bettered. And yes, people did smoke dope in the studio to aid the creative juices!
+ Dan Wood. do you have a link to download the floppy software you showed ?
I was always an Amigaphile myself, but I have to admit the ST's casing was nicer looking. I like those slanting function keys.
+Evil Twin I'd like to see a return to using slanted function keys!
+Evil Twin and slatted disk drive button!
+Evil Twin I always thought that Atari was amazing for making music, And amiga was better for gaming, I remember where they had MOD's that amiga people created to hate on Atari lol, fun old days
+Toxix hehehe - I'm sure the opposite was true too! Compared to the good old days the PC v Mac debate is just a lover's tiff!
+GamleErik100 Ha! That'd be a great way to confuse people! I say go for it!
I wrote my graduate thesis on the Atari ST using WordPerfect. Unbeatable.
Still have my Atari 512ST ... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, BBC Model B.
All fully working with software and additional supporting kit.
Still got my original Atari 2600 console.. Boxed with games.
Panasonic 3D0 boxed with games.
Original Playsyation.. The one with all the ports in the back... Boxed with games.
All fully working in 2020.
The cartridge port was actually well used and catered for, but only with hardware upgrades, e.g. Steinberg MIDEX+, Ultimate Ripper, Atari Diagnostic, Aerochopper, Wizztronic adding more cartridge slots, Atari Robokit, realtime clocks, deskcart, CLAB MIDI stuff, video digitisers, audio sampling even 16-bit, disk duplicator, Ethernet LAN, IDE interface, hand scanners, EPROM programmers, Apple Mac emulators, Multiface game state saver...........the list goes on and on!
Really enjoyed this video.. Recently I have been a bit nostalgic for the old 16-bit gaming machines, and as an STE owner as a kid this brought back some memories for me. I also lived through the great ST-Amiga war. Agree that the Amiga slightly edged the ST for games but it was still a great machine. I learnt to code in GFA Basic on my old ST, and used to love games like, Civilization, Lemmings, Elite II, Seinsible Soccer, Legends of Valour and afew others. Maybe I'll will try to get hold of an old A500 to see what could have been!
Let me clean some errors:
- Amiga&Atari deal happened before Tramiel bought Atari. After Tramiel left commodore, he started which started developing ST. Around the same time, Amiga guys were looking for money, and Atari (owned by Warner) lend them 500k USD, which, if not payed in time, would give whole Amiga IP to the Atari. Just After that, Tramiel made a deal with Warner and bought all Atari assets related to home computers and started Atari Corporation (at the same time, Atari Inc., owned by Warner still existed and made coin-op games). Few days before deal went live, Amiga guys got money from Commodore, and payed back the loan.
- GEM was originally written by Digital Research for PC (8088), and they were not interested in porting it to 68000. Atari did the port by itself.
+Adam Klobukowski Yeah, ST was made by some ex- commodore staff, and Amiga by some ex- atari engineers. Swap time!
+crouchypony The ST operating system was handled mainly by ex-Atari Inc staff so in truth, both the ST and the Amiga are children of the original Atari. In hindsight, both platforms should've been merged once the lawsuits between Atari and Commodore were settled after 1987. Had that happened, we might still have that combined platform as a commercial option today.
+Jeremy Holloway : Well said (for the merge). It never would have happened in our universe simply because Jack Tramiel effectively funded Atari Corp. in order to "kill" Irvin Gould, his former associate at Commodore, that succeeded to seize the company that Tramiel originally funded in the 60's.
And then IBM won..... (ok the Mac is still here but they are actually x86 PCs now whereas IBM definitely sold its personnal computing division to Lenovo a long time ago)
When the Amiga developers tried to get a deal with Jack Tramiel, Tramiel tried to screw them over for the Amiga. It was bottom dollar. No hiring them for future work or anything. Jack Tramiel screwed himself by this. He always screwed himself by screwing others, including the consumer.
Thanks for great history lektion!
Thanks for the video :) I would have loved to see more about the operating system. Is there a Workbench-like thing for Atari ST? What does it look like, does it have a shell interface, what programming languages where used, etc?
I never owned an Atari ST (until now) and I got my Amiga late , probably in 1997 or later. I grew up playing with my friend's STE and that was enough to make me prefer it over my "late'' Amiga.
I found that same Amiga "dead" during the 2020 lock downs and it was my first repair, restore and upgrade project on a retro machins (2020) so now I am proud and I feel attached to that specific machine.
Two years later(This month) I bought an 1040STE and..... I subconsciously treat it as a superior machine ( best spot on the bench among the rest of the 8bit and 16 bit machines), hooked on the best Trinitron CRT, the only one protected from the elements of the room (cats and dust)!
So when we deal with things that are tied to our childhood period....all objective criteria goout of the window.
Sure the scroll on the ST is jerkier in most games, the colors on screen are less, the sound is poor but... my amygdala doesn't agree.
Why you didn`t show a demos specially made for ste :) ?
Yes, please do a video of the Gotek when you can. Great video.
Hi, there Dan you deserve a pat on the back. You and Terry Stewart do the best computer reviews on You Tube.
Great video Dan. I too remember the days when fights broke out at my school over with computer was better: Amiga or Atari ST. Unfortunately, I wasn't a part of that as I was still on the ZX Spectrum +2A 128K!
Both 16-bit machines had their pros and cons, but from what I can remember, it was summed up by: Amiga for games, ST for music production.
I did borrow a ST from a friend for a while, and the machine was alright. It had it's own way of working and the games were on par with that of the Amiga.
But having used and played on an Amiga, my heart belongs to the Amiga.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
We made MIDI dongles for the Amiga back in those days 😀 goes into the serial port, just wo level converters. Bars&Pipes!
The reason for the weird joystick port locations is that the ST was originally designed without a numeric keypad, which was added as a last-minute decision. The joystick ports are part of the keyboard, so the bottom was apparently the only place they could go. Maybe they were originally thought to go to the top or side maybe?
I had both systems as a kid; technically the ST was my brother's, but we all shared. The one huge advantage the ST had in terms of gaming, was that it had Dungeon Master, which was easily my favourite game of all time at that point. For that game alone, it was well worth investing in an ST. Oids was another classic that was not available on the Amiga at the time, although it was ported a couple of years ago.
Then you add to it the MIDI capability. I used to play the keyboard and we had our Yamaha connected to the machine so I could live out my Pet Shop Boys/ New Order fantasies. The Amiga really couldn't compete with that.
So, overall, certainly the Amiga was a superior gaming machine. Great games such as Speedball 2, Kick Off 2, hell, even Xenon 2 were just fantastic, and superior to the ST versions. But my number 1 16-bit game of all time was only available on the ST. And the fact you could make music with it meant that it was fantastic having both computers in our household growing up.
Hi, FTL's Dungeon Master was definitely available on the Amiga. Released in 1988, the Amiga port was developed by Phil Mercurio, I believe on a contract basis. When I joined FTL in August 1989, my first task was to fix some obscure issues with version 2.x of the Amiga port, as nobody remaining at FTL was an Amiga developer.
We subsequently released DM:Chaos Strikes Back for both ST and Amiga at the end of 1989.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I guess in those days and that age, the many months between the ST release and an Amiga port would have felt like an eternity. Thanks for the info!
Christopher Lancaster - Dungeon Master remains the only game that's made me get a system (ST) just so that I could play that one game.
I hear you, Jay. What a time to be alive!
I seem to recall that dungeon master needed an Amiga upgraded to 1mb to run, something a lot of people didnt have when the conversion was released. The Atari one ran in 512k.
Yes! Validation!! Twenty-something years too late for those playground amiga-atari fights but still, thank you for the fair and interesting comparison and analysis. Have never lost my fondness for my old childhood buddy, the Atari 520 STe.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
I bought an Atari 520ST back in 1987. I had a really nice setup. Both the color and mono monitors, an external SCSI hard drive array, modem, and a big load of peripherals! Tons of software, and I upgraded my 520ST to 4MB of RAM late in 1987. It was, and still is my most beloved computer I have ever owned.
I started my computer geek-ism with a Tandy Color Computer Model 1 back in 1982. Then went to an Atari 800XL, then the ST. But, I also owned an Amiga 500 in 1989 as well. I liked it, but I was about to switch to PC's the same year I got the Amiga, and then in 1990 I went completely PC and have been ever since. But, I miss my Atari 520ST, and wish I had one today. I have STeam Atari ST emulator, with just about all the software I had back then, so I can enjoy the software, but I miss the hardware!
I went from a vic-20 to an ST in 85. Mind=Blown. The ST lost out in '91 to a 486. Nothing has ever equaled that ST experience.
I've done the inverse way than you Dan .... Atari ST in my youth and now Amiga 500 :)
Hi, I have a bit offtopic question. Is the buzzer on the Gotek a homebrew mod or is it officially available?
I have A500 with Gotek HxC (fw: 3.0.6.6a) and only thing I miss is the fdd head sound (the silence is unbearable :).
There is no info on official HxC site about it, please make my day and guide me how to set this up.
As for the vid, great as usual. I was Amiga boy back in the day, but ST was always sort of seduction for me, and is to this day. Please bring more (maybe look at the ST demoscene).
Well done Dan that was a good review ;) You certainly know your stuff!!! I am more an amiga fan but like you i have an atari ste with 4mb installed and every so often i'll dig it out and have a play but you can sure tell the difference between the amiga.
But every machine have there pro's and con's
Both Are awesome machines, i got a 520STF back in the day, then sold it a few years later to get an Amiga 500+. The sound was better of course, but always had a preference for the ST, nostalgia maybe. The ST was an inferior machine, but the programmers were more skilled (especially on the demo scene) because they had to deal with the limitations of the hardware but they achieved outstanding results : border removal techniques and so on. I'm now a proud owner of a Falcon 030 and of an Amiga 1200. You should review the Falcon by the way, they are really cool machines.
Excellent video Dan! I live in America, but I've been told on the Atariage.com forums, that if you use an Atari monitor, you can play PAL ST games just fine. So the ST definitely interests me.
That is absolutely correct. With any ~15KHz RGB monitor that supports 50Hz--not just the Atari ST RGB monitor.
My first computer (the ST). It's a great machine.
As a matter of fact, because of higher resolution (though grayscale), if memory serves, I think the Atari was also picked up by newspapers and publishing houses for desktop publishing, particularly because of Calamus, which was custom-built for the ST. Later versions were ported to Apple, and from there-on Apple machines kept hegemony in the newspapers. Until this day, actually.
I miss Captain Blood on Amiga. I didnt have any friends that had AtariST*, but many had Amiga. Thank you for great review, i allways have been curious about AtariST*
One of the few games that was better on the Atari ST, which it was originally developed on. The Atari ST was more popular in France than any other market.
Great review Dan, it's really refreshing to see an Amiga user giving praise to the humble ST. I'd also suggest playing some of the ST exclusive games such as Oids, Midi-Maze and Starioland.
I loved the exclusive hi res "Mac-lookalike" games from a company in Germany, don't remember the titles though but they were awesome. Maze type games, I think I saw three different ones, OIDS or similar, XOIDS or so? I really must find them again.
Oids was class.
generally speaking, do you need to use the keyboard to play all or most of the games for the Atari ST computer? I know you can use different joysticks on it, and also the jaguar controller. But just wondering if the games were mostly programmed to work with keyboard and or the joysticks if they were plugged in too?
With built-in MIDI I/O, how many games support MIDI music if you connect up a synthesizer?
Some things i want to mention.
- The external hard-disk port is called DMA- or ACSI-Port They are present on all ST machines. It's designed to mimic SCSI with less hardware. There is Hardware to make it a full SCSI Port.
- The digital Joystic/Mouse ports are on the bottom because they are connected to the Keyboard-Controller. The ports are on the underside of the keyboard PCB to save costs.
You are quite wrong about the cartridge port, this was very much in use. Not for games but also in the music industry.
All kind of samplers and other devices for music production were available for it. Some where really nifty. My friend who was a music producer has a STE with a sampling cartridge that was capable of 24bit and 48khz. It also included a dsp that made performing actions on the samples blinding fast (well, for that time ofcourse, we're talking the 90ties here).