The ATARI ST was great because....

I expect youve come in laughing and ready to rant and tear this machine to shreads but..
What (if any) were the joys of our inferior machine?

My praises are:

I didn't own one
Not many of my friends did

What pleased you......?

EDIT: The title of this thread was merely an attention grabber

[RCK]

<< The ATARI was great because.... >>

great games !
great chip tunes !
great demo community !

like the Amiga one.

[Drake1009]

Never had an atari or knew anyone who had an atari but it made for a lot of jokes in the computer mag, like "I love Atari owners. I just don't know how long to boil them" and "Little peter was riding the train when suddently it derailed, ran down the hill, through a forest, past a lake and then all the way back up on the rails again. When some personell passed Peter he asked why they had derailed. The man answered that there were an Atari owner standing on the tracks, to which Peter asked why they didn't just run him over. The response was 'We did, but we didn't get him until down at the lake'" and plenty of other jokes down that lane.

[Dastardly]

Originally posted by Jim

I expect youve come in laughing and rea..........

Whoa Deja Vu. They must have changed something in the matrix.

(I am flattered)

[Oscar Castillo]

I never owned an Atari after the 800XL, but after the Falcon was introduced I looked at the specs and thought it to be a really decent machine. I wouldn't mind trying out an Atari Falcon system.
I was just disappointed in the 520, which seemed incomplete and rushed to market.

[Amiga1992]

- In-built MIDI ports
- IF programmed right, the YM FM chip could pull some MAD chip sounds (Roland TB303-like sometimes!).


Jim, you sellout! I noticed you will take adam's AtariST! After all the bashing!

I bet that was a strategy to clean all possible candidtes and getting it just for you :P

Originally posted by Akira
Jim, you sellout! I noticed you will take adam's AtariST! After all the bashing!

Errrrrrr. Maybe you should re-read that thread !!

[Chris]

The Atari was great because...

...it really made me appreciate how good my Amiga was!

[BippyM]

Everyone in school had one, and I had an Amiga so I felt superior (It's great cuz it made them inferior )

[Amiga1992]

i misred it Jim There's nothing bad in getting an ST anyway! I was just joking

I just noticed too, that this thread says why the ATARI was great. I renamed it, because everyone is talking about the ST, but I was tempted to talk about the Atari 400 etc. :P

[Chris]

Aah, the Atari 800XL, now that was great!

Apart from the 45 minute loading times, obviously!

You could go out and have a game of footy before anything had loaded!

[scifi]

The Atari was great because...

It had the ports for the joystick and the mouse under the keyboard!

Think all of the excitement, when you were playing Combat School or World Games and the joystick was pulling out of the slot.

My friend was pretty smart... he taped the joystick and the mouse on the ports with sticky tape and he put a rubber between them as a wedge!?

To cut the crap I think that Atari ST had the potential to create great music if it is programmed correctly (Captain Blood Theme - Jumping Jackson)

I agree people's opinions on atari 800XL, another machine that Jay Miner developed! And my very first system No other atari home computer made it to Turkey, just no one bothered importing it, just like the miserable console named "snes"

[MOS-6581]

I like the ST, but ST owners are strange... Does anyone know why Atari decided to use the AY chip, not their *own* and way superior POKEY chip?? I know the POKEY did more than just Audio, so maybe they couldn't use it because of the extra stuff? Other than that, I think the ST was a good machine for what it was. I know it's crap against an Amiga, but that's because the ami took about 3 and a half years to make, while the ST was designed in just under a year! Crap as it is, to build a whole 16-bit computer in that time is pretty impressive! Maybe the ST would have been better if it weren't for Jack Tramiel trying to get revenge on Commodore. Jack eventually got his revenge by getting the ST out before the Amiga, but was it worth it...?

[MOS-6581]

Yeah, the 800XL is a great machine! (also have a 65XE) I got one recently with a 1050 Disk drive and the 1010 tape drive, plus a whole bunch of tapes, but only a few disks. Unfortunately the 1010 doesn't work properly, so I can't load any games! I've got another tape drive, but I stole the SIO cable to make a SIO2PC cable! Oh well, it was worth it in the end...

[dir_marillion]

The Atari ST family was great because:

a. it had 640*400 resolution at 72KHz in 1985 (first production) and a stable desktop operating system, when Amiga was not in production yet. Only the desktop Amigas with graphic cards could have (after 1989) a resolution like that (of course more expensive).

b. it had Calamus that was and it is still (in PC platforms) the greatest DTP professional program ever created (could create a whole newspaper with a machine that had total of 2MB memory and a floppy disk capable of 720 KB). Until today, Amiga has nothing to show in this category as PageMaker has still many bugs and it is an ugly and unprofessional program.

c. it had Cubase and two build-in midi ports. Midi on Atari is still the best in the world (it is still using on Music Studios for timing and controlling Synthesizers) as the operating system on Atari is single-tasking and has no midi timing errors. Cubase is used also in mac and pcs. Amiga has not any serious Midi-Sequencer, even Bars & Pipes used only by hobbyists.

d. it had millions of text editors with "truetype fonts knowledge", as Amiga started developing programs such like Final Writer and Wordworth (they are already dead) very late. Papyrus and various German text editors are still in production in Atari platforms.

e. it had great databases since the first day. There are still many databases under development today, for Atari. Check for instance the Hisoft's TWIST. Amiga had only one professional database: The Superbase. And by the way, Superbase start developed on Atari since 1986.

f. all models had great design in difference with Amiga early models that were ugly, until the approach of A1200 and A4000 (this is my personal opinion). Check Atari TT and Amiga 3000 for instance and you will understand what I mean.

g. Atari ST was the first 16bit system that had Macintosh emulation (under macos system 6), in 1986-87. The program had the name: SPECTRE and could handle by hardware real mac roms.

and final h. it can handle X-Windows on Debian with the Build-In Graphic Card. AGA and ECS cannot :-)



I like Amiga like you !! Atari people is just like you :-)

[sarek2k]

c. it had Cubase and two build-in midi ports. Midi on Atari is still the best in the world (it is still using on Music Studios for timing and controlling Synthesizers) as the operating system on Atari is single-tasking and has no midi timing errors. Cubase is used also in mac and pcs. Amiga has not any serious Midi-Sequencer, even Bars & Pipes used only by hobbyists.

I think From Within might disagree on this one specially the end bit about Bars & Pipes!

[pbareges]

Originally Posted by dir_marillion

The Atari ST family was great because:

a. it had 640*400 resolution at 72KHz in 1985 (first production) and a stable desktop operating system, when Amiga was not in production yet. Only the desktop Amigas with graphic cards could have (after 1989) a resolution like that (of course more expensive).

b. it had Calamus that was and it is still (in PC platforms) the greatest DTP professional program ever created (could create a whole newspaper with a machine that had total of 2MB memory and a floppy disk capable of 720 KB). Until today, Amiga has nothing to show in this category as PageMaker has still many bugs and it is an ugly and unprofessional program.

c. it had Cubase and two build-in midi ports. Midi on Atari is still the best in the world (it is still using on Music Studios for timing and controlling Synthesizers) as the operating system on Atari is single-tasking and has no midi timing errors. Cubase is used also in mac and pcs. Amiga has not any serious Midi-Sequencer, even Bars & Pipes used only by hobbyists.

d. it had millions of text editors with "truetype fonts knowledge", as Amiga started developing programs such like Final Writer and Wordworth (they are already dead) very late. Papyrus and various German text editors are still in production in Atari platforms.

e. it had great databases since the first day. There are still many databases under development today, for Atari. Check for instance the Hisoft's TWIST. Amiga had only one professional database: The Superbase. And by the way, Superbase start developed on Atari since 1986.

f. all models had great design in difference with Amiga early models that were ugly, until the approach of A1200 and A4000 (this is my personal opinion). Check Atari TT and Amiga 3000 for instance and you will understand what I mean.

g. Atari ST was the first 16bit system that had Macintosh emulation (under macos system 6), in 1986-87. The program had the name: SPECTRE and could handle by hardware real mac roms.

and final h. it can handle X-Windows on Debian with the Build-In Graphic Card. AGA and ECS cannot :-)



I like Amiga like you !! Atari people is just like you :-)

from a professional standpoint i guess you're right. i owned an ATARI 520 ST before switching to AMIGA and i personnaly think that what it was lacking most is fun (which in a sense is consistent with all what you said)... the graphics were poor (B&W in the super hires mode you're refering to), the sound chip was awful and scrolling/sprites were such a mess compared to the amiga that any ludic experience on both machines definitely happened to be much better on the amiga side!!

[Anubis]

a. it had 640*400 resolution at 72KHz in 1985 (first production) and a stable desktop operating system, when Amiga was not in production yet. Only the desktop Amigas with graphic cards could have (after 1989) a resolution like that (of course more expensive).

You calling TOS an operating system???

Atari was fine machine, but not much comparable to an Amiga.

It had some nice specs, but overall I have never seen an single game that overperformed Amiga's version of the same game.

[Photon]

I had an Atari 520 ST for a brief period before I saw the light. Fine for dirt cheap MIDI sequencing, but the Amiga came out so soon after and was so much better in all aspects that the somewhat lower price didn't help.

Some hilights include Super Off-Road Racing/Rally which I though was a little better on the ST. And a Star Wars scroller demo that I liked. Don't remember the group. Apart from that, games and demos on the ST just let you down. That's the biggest reason I switched: I had a bunch of games that *should* be better than on the C-64, instead I got better graphics with fewer(!) moving objects, laggy scrolling and Spectrum-like sound. I suddenly realized that most all ST games were gonna be like that.

I guess Atari made a miscalculation and tried to make a serious machine and wouldn't put proper graphics and sound chips in it. God forbid that someone would scroll inside a window in TOS!!

But apart from the drab games, I think what did ST in for me was that fucking toy keyboard and the Tower of Shit that was TOS.