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(I'm the author of the long post below, and it's been a while since there was any new discussion on here, so I don't feel bad about suffixing this; it sort of counts anyway).
One: What exactly are the resolution and timing specs of the ST's high rez mode, and/or the SM124? I've had multiple responses come back when trying to look this up. It's 70Hz... no, it's 72Hz... no, it's 71.2... It's got a 31.5kHz line rate, a 35.8kHz one... and no-one, but no-one knows how many lines actually make up a full vertical scan including the blanking period, even though it's reasonably well known for the colour modes, at least for 50Hz (313 or maybe 315).
It doesn't make a great deal of odds, but I was trying to find it out for some of my own daydream doodling and found that nobody, not even some quite detailed technical references, actually knows for sure. It's not in Atari's own internal documentation, it's not in the SM124 manual, it's not anywhere.
From my own attempt at figuring it out from first principles... 71.2Hz sounds just about overprecise enough to be believable, and as the shifter's data rate is in lockstep with the CPU, it should pump out twice as many pixels per second as in medium rez, four times that of low. It has twice the usable vertical rez but the same horizontal, which suggests twice the line rate (31.3 to 31.5kHz depending if you base it off PAL or NTSC; given that it's an American machine, probably the latter)... which along with the increased refresh gives us an overall progressive frame of 442 lines. Plenty enough for a decent top/bottom border and Vblank/Vsync (480i within a 525 frame leaves 45 blank lines... 486i leaves 39), but not enough for 480, 448 or even 432, which may also explain the limited vertical rez in colour modes, as they tried to keep the video RAM area the same size throughout for simplicity.
Which all sort of fits, but I have no way to be sure short of hunting out an SM124 of my own and then grabbing an oscilloscope from somewhere and bodging up some way of sampling it. And there's no references of course so it's hard to cite in-article.
Please, does anyone know this information more concretely?
Second question... just what is the shifter rate and memory access interleave, for real? The information further down this thread (and I think in-article too?) says it's 1:1 ... the CPU/etc get a turn, then the shifter gets a turn, etc. But the available video modes and some other timing charts (which say, e.g., a PAL ST has 512 cycles but 128 "NOPs" per line, with four pixels per NOP (4 pixels x 4 bits = one 16-bit memory word)) suggest more of a 3:1 CPU:shifter relationship (2Mhz / 4MBs for video, not 4/8), and it presumably isn't a problem of the shifter sending an address to the RAM and then being made to wait for a cycle, as the Amiga uses a similar 1:1 scheme when operating purely from "Chip RAM" (witness the boost in processing speed when non-vidchip-accessible "fast RAM" is added), but can dump approximately twice as much visual data to screen per second (i.e. at 640x200, it can show 16 colours, not 4, and the ECS allows a 1280-wide, 4-colour mode with very little change to the architecture).
What exactly is going on, here? Is it possible, with some twiddling about and replacement of ROM routines (and maybe soldering a wire here and there) that the ST could be granted a 16-colour medium resolution mode? (4-grey hi rez or 256-colour low rez would need rather more work than just doubling the data rate and allowing all 16 registers to be used with a 640-pixel display) ... Or is there something fundamental I'm just not quite getting? 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 13:44, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
In response to points raised on this page (i have done a bit of editing on the main article page but have both got tired, and think the following thoughts are too informal/inappropriate/unfounded to go on there):
Thanks for your patience... I had a lot to say... I really liked that old thing, and I've just realised, as it's been sat in my cupboard gathering dust (needs the joystick socket re-soldering), I missed it's "20th birthday" due to work pressures and other such chaos :( (it would have been 20th November 2005 - going by the license date in it's TOS "About" screen)
--- Tahrey1043 --- (yeah.. i'm also a VW fan, thats a handle from a Polo messageboard ;)
I think there are a couple of mistakes on the page:
I noticed that the image is of unknown status. I'm pretty sure its a copyvio from Atari advertising. In any case, I own an STfm so I'll take a photo of mine and upload it under the GNU FDL.
The Atari ST was used in the ICS computer music course until PC soundcards gained in capability and popularity.
The ICS course included the ST, a MIDI keyboard and music software. The ST was dropped for a PC as ICS expanded their PC courses with 80286 and 80386 based computers.
ICS, or International Correspondence Schools, originated in 1891 as the Colliery Engineer School of Mines expanded its courses beyond the fields of mining, railroads and ironwork/construction.
I haven't been able to find more about ICS other than at some point in its early history it was based in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
If anyone can find a current website for ICS or a decent history of the school, please add the info.
I commented out these sentences from the opening paragraph:
This is a plausible explanation, since the Atari ST also used a bumblebee as the busy mouse pointer image, which might be a reference to Jack's birth name (although the phrase "busy as a bee" was probably the more likely inspiration).
I have a few problems with this block of text:
In other words, it's a huge big mess. If there's a real explanation here, let's write it clearly, and move it to a "naming" subsection rather than leading off the article with it.
Also, the only source I could find for the theory that ST stands for Sam Tramiel is — you guessed it — Wikipedia. Can someone find a real reference that this belief had at least some traction? Otherwise, we should delete it as original research. Nandesuka 21:03, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I can't provide documentation, but personal recollection indicates that we hypothesized ST and TOS expanded to "Sam Tramiel" and "Tramiel Operating System", mostly as a joke, back in the day (the day here probably being 1987 or 1988). -- Metahacker 23:35, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Need more info on the ST overseas, especially Europe, as they did way better than in the U.S. Pelladon 22:11, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
Also needs to discuss the DRAM shortages and tariffs that limited availability of the ST computers in the U.S. (STs were built overseas). The tariffs were to counter the Japanese dumping DRAM chips into the U.S. market. To counter the tariffs, Atari planned to open a US manufacturing plant, but the DRAM shortage delayed this. Atari did file suit against Micron Technology for price gouging. Europe didn't have this problem, so they had no shortage of computers and accessories. This was around 1988. -- Pelladon 18:45, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
The article is currently worded to suggest that Tramiel seriously considered using the Amiga technology, and was upset when they couldn't. I can't say for sure, but I don't believe this is the case.
I believe Tramiel bought Atari largely for its name, distribution and manufacturing. When he took over he fired practially everyone in the engineering and programming teams, ending development of all the Warner-era products. One of these was the advanced 68k-based workstation project.
I also believe that he basically saw Atari as a shell that he could dump his surviving Commodore people and recreate the company as Commodore II. "That'll show Gould!!". I'm not sure he even knew what projects Atari had on the go at the time.
Consider: if he really wanted to use an existing design for his 32-bit entry, he could have used the other workstation being developed. Alternately he could have just not pissed off the Amiga team. Does anyone have any reason to suggest that he could not have used the Amiga for his next machine, if he had wanted to?
No, I think he sued Commodore over the Amiga because he could. If you follow the logic above he was still furious over being ousted from Commodore, and this was simply one more way to piss them off.
Maury 12:39, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
RJ Mical is well known among Atari historians as big a huge source of missinformation, who came on later in the design life and had personal gripes with the Tramiels because of the whole Handy/Lynx issue. There have been plenty of interviews and records on the Atari Inc. side (please don't confuse the contract with Atari Inc. to have been with Atari Corp./Tramiel - another of RJ's missinformation), and the suits and purchases are a matter of public record and were reported in newspapers, business periodicals, etc. of the time. -- Marty Goldberg 19:49, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
The sentence in brackets wondering why the ST didn't recieve many megadrive ports seeing as the systems were so similar, specifically mentioning them having the same Yamaha soundchip is erroneous and misleading.
Whilst The systems share the same 68000 CPU, thats about where the similarities end. The megadrive had relatively advanced 2d sprite, playfield and scrolling hardware, as well as a far higher on screen colour palatte (64 colours, although as this was made up from 4 16 colour palattes, each having to share one transparant colour, the practical total was 61 colours)
Regarding the soundchip, whilst both system have chips of yamaha design, they are totally different models with vastly different specifications. The Megadrive soundchip is a 6 channel FM synth of the sort commonly used in arcade machines and synthesisers in the 80s, where as the ST has a 3 channel PSG, of vastly inferior specifications (infact it's the same soundchip used in the 128k spectrums, and the amstrad CPC series)
The ST would be no more capable of running 'megadrive ports' with little coding effort than it would a port from any late 80's arcade hardware. Everything the megadrive does in hardware, the ST developer would have to kludge in software, and still require cpu time left to run the 68000 code of the megadrive original.
When you go beyond the fact the cpu is the same, and the soundchip was designed by the same company, there is little wonder that the ST was incapable of running megadrive or even amiga games towards the end of it's life, it simply was an inferior design when it came to running games. The amiga ended up being a more robust gaming platform and survived a few years more, although it too struggled to quite match the megadrive perfomance in certain types of 2d game, where the megadrive had the advantage of arcade style sprite/playfield handling.
As such i've removed that comment, as it directly contradicts the previous statement, and incorrectly suggests the megadrive and ST were relatively comparible in 2d game performance, so as to make a megadrive port a trivial thing.
I found a photo of Jack Tramiel signing autographs at an expo in ally pally in prob 1988.
Shouls I scan it and post it here ?
robin48gx.
where? also... NEOchrome RULES!!! I loved that program... its far superior to any (affordable) pc equivalent. Umm, yeah. WookMuff 08:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
I have had a close read of this section and can't see anything that is portraying a particular POV. Tag removed.
Personally, I believe that listing examples of the ST memory as 512 kilobytes but 1 mebibyte (rather than 1 megabyte) to be confusing. Although Italic texttechnicallyItalic text 1024kb is a mebibyte (that's 1024 kibibytes, not 1024 kilobytes), this is a naming convention that's not used as often as megabyte. Certainly in the original days of the ST, it was marketed with memory listed in megabytes, and to me it's rather pedantic to list memory in mebibytes here (especially as the kilobytes here are still kilobytes, and not kibibytes).
Will anyone be offended it the "MiB's" are changed to "MB's"?
I've done some minor cleanup, but I'd like comments on something a little more major.
As the article was before my edits, the "debut" section of the history included not only the debut, but a sort of rambling description of some of the follow-on models. Much worse, the Description section switched back and forth between historical details of the machine's introductions, as well as a description of the systems themselves.
I propose this should all be collected into the history section. That is, following Debut, there would be sections for the STfm's, the Megas, the STE's, and finally the Falcon. The description section would then discuss the "baseline" ST, with much-reduced subsections for the differences in the STE's and Falcon.
What say you all?
Maury 20:18, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Atari had originally intended to include GEM's GDOS (Graphical Device Operating System), which allowed programs to send GEM VDI (Virtual Device Interface) commands to drivers loaded by GDOS. This allowed developers to send VDI instructions to other devices simply by pointing to it.
What are the 'other devices'? What is this the main/preferred device? This section has been modified and now it is unclear. In a previous version the last sentence was actually this:
This allowed developers to export high-resolution graphics to printers, plotters and other peripherals.
This sentence seems very useful, as it captures the idea that the 'graphics display' was somehow retargetable (something of which I was unaware). Shouldn't this idea be incorporated somehow?
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Another removed sentence is this:
This ment (sic) that using GDOS generally required a reboot in order to load it into the operating system.
I thought this was true. Is it? Isn't this seeming inflexibility of TOS mildly interesting?
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
And another removed sentence:
Performance problems in GDOS were supposed to be addressed by the BLiTTER chip, a hardware-based BitBlt implementation. This too was unavailable at launch, and would not appear in any of the ST designs until years later.
Isn't this (somewhat?) true? It at least seems plausible.
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, kinda difficult to countersue when Commodore didn't own Amiga at the time (Tramiel discovered the contract before the Amiga/Commodore deal). Citation needed. Also, parts of this section reads like original research. — Pelladon 05:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Regarding not owning Amiga, your statement is not exactly true. The purchase was announced in June of '84, money was exchanged, and the sale completed that August after approval by the board. Jack Tramiel discovered the contract after the Amiga/Commodore deal was announced and after his engineers were sued in late July (which included an attempt by Commodore to get an injunction on the production of the ST). He had in fact considered buying Amiga that previous April/May under his TTL company, and had meetings with the executives and engineers (Jay, etc.) but they decided against it after realizing he'd be dismissing most of them. At the time he knew nothing of the Atari/Amiga deal. (This is where a lot of the confusion comes from, most of it trumpeted by RJ Mical). He then moved on to discussions with Atari Inc., which were on and off again through May/June before Warner/Atari finally approaching him again and completing the sale. After moving all Atari Consumer properties (which included the buildings, projects, etc.) under Atari Corp., they immediately froze all projects pending evaluation. As stated (and I personally conducted the interview with his son Leonard), it was not discovered until Leonard and another employee were going through the records all during late July/early August to see what they had "inherited" in buying Atari Consumer. It was then Leonard discovered the cancelled check and terms. The "countersue" was a tactic pursued to do the exact same thing - stop Commodore's purchase of Amiga and in effect freeze its access to the Amiga computer to get Commodore to drop their suit against the Atari Corp. engineers and the feezing of the ST. Much of this material was also published in "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall. -- Marty Goldberg 19:44, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Pelladon a) I'm not a newbie to Wikipedia, and I'm not prone to contributing "speculation". b) I'm a well known researcher and writer in the video game history arena and the video game industry in general. Much of what I shared in the rewrite is from personal interviews with the people involved over the last 6 years for a book that's being written and was also shared in interviews published online as well as the previously mentioned Commodore book. Curt Vendel also has most of the paperwork involved in the original Atari Inc./Amiga contract (as well as a plethora of other important paperwork). The one cited in this entry that appears on his site is simply the one he's put up so far. However, the suits you want citations on are a matter of public record. As far as the Amiga purchase being announced in July, here's an example: http://www.amigau.com/aig/2ndamiga.html. As far as the suits - From the August 21st New York Times at the time: "In July, in a separate court action, Commodore obtained an injunction against four former Commodore employees recruited by Mr. Tramiel. The injunction bars them from disclosing Commodore trade secrets in their new jobs at Atari." From the 06/20/85 San Jose Mercury news : "Both sides are claiming victory after a U.S. District Court judge in Philadelphia ruled that four Atari Corp. engineers wrongfully took confidential information when they left their jobs at Commodore Business Machines Inc. of West Chester, Pa. In an opinion filed Wednesday, Judge John P. Fullam ordered that the material be returned to Commodore. But he also cleared the four of charges of stealing secret computer tapes from Commodore". Likewise according to Leonard when I spoke to him (which was also backed up by other employees and paperwork), the ST was 95% done by the time his father bought Atari Consumer from Atari Inc. (the OS was the main part of the development left), which was bought for manufacturing and shipping rights. (Because of the time frame, this also strongly suggests that Shiraz did take the work he had been doing on a 68000 system with him from Commodore, which is also mentioned in the Commodore book). They had no clue about the deal ahead of time, Leonard still has the stamped (cashed) check he discovered in fact during the search through all of July (the freeze of all projects was done July 3rd). When the deal was discovered in late July his father used it as leverage (citing the chip issues published at the time in the New York Times article I quoted from) to get Commodore to back off in typical Jack style. The idea that they were to rely on Amiga technology for the ST was actually what was speculation (and the New York times correctly puts "and by some accounts" when mentioning it rather than presenting it as fact like other newspapers did), and further propogated by the spin put out by RJ. Everything I've said is substantiated, if you don't believe me then talk to Curt - as the largest Atari collector, archiver, and historian, he's always willing to help people out. -- Marty Goldberg 16:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
No, there you go again. "Strongly suggests" was in reference to a side note I was mentioning about Shiraz during this "debate". Why present it as evidence that everything else I'm saying is "analysis" when they had nothing to do with each other? Unless you're here just to argue. This is not based on "analysis" (as some of the Wall street journal articles you seem to want to quote was). It is not a "proposed theory", these are things stated by the individuals involved in interviews. Likewise, its also been published in the previously mentioned Commodore book already. I've given way to much time to this and gone out of my way to give several references already and leads if you want more, I'd be happy to take this to wiki admins if you want to continue this route. -- Marty Goldberg 17:06, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
It was also the first home computer with integral MIDI support.
What about the Yamaha CX5M - this had a midi port and I am sure was launched in 1984. It was an MSX compatible. CX5M Info
Peter 81.99.41.208 21:50, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The problem is that the CX5M was specifically a Music Computer and targeted as a music device only, and was only promoted as such (in fact it sold only though Yahama music equipment dealers). As you quoted, the ST was a "home computer". It was a general purpose computer designed for home use that also entered the music device market (as well as other markets). -- Marty Goldberg 22:06, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Just being curious, when was the Atari ST released, and how does this compare to the Amiga 1000? The article says September 1985 for "full retail sales", whilst the Amiga 1000 has July 24 1985 for "introduced", with shipping also being in September. Does anyone have more exact dates for either of these machines? Mdwh 01:22, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I will be in the future write about the speed of the ST graphics hopefully soon.
I will be showing some examples and comparisons to the Amiga hopefully soon.
I made a few, mostly minor, technical corrections. I also removed two full sentences:
"It had an innovative single-chip graphics subsystem (designed by Shiraz Shivji) which shared the full amount of system memory, in alternating clock cycles, with the processor, similar to the earlier BBC Micro and the Unified Memory systems that have become common today."
The above is a very nice looking paragraph, but there are more wrong statements in it than right ones. With so many wrongs and inaccuracies, I don't know how to replace the sentence with something correct in a similar "spirit". So I removed it.
"To make matters worse, the built-in floppy disk drives could not read as many tracks on a floppy disk as the built-in floppy disk drives on older models. While this was not a problem for most users, some games used the extra tracks as a crude form of copy protection and as a means of cramming more data onto the disk, and formatting as many as 86 tracks on an "80-track" disk was a common space-expanding option in custom formatting utilities".
The issue of how many tracks some ST drives supported, is not specific to ST vs STe. This topic has no place in that section. Ijor ( talk) 01:37, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I think it's important to talk about the memory in the ST. It gave a clear advantage over other computers including the Amiga. A 1 or 2 megabyte ST for example could use all of it's memory for graphics or sound with no wait states because 8 Mhz Ram went to Video, and 8 Mhz Ram went to the processor. This caused problems for accelators but made the ST a very fast 8 Mhz computer.
Rowbeartoe ( talk) 19:07, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Memory in ST is 4MHz (3.5Mhz in Amiga) not 8MHz. "Even memory accesses are given to CPU/Blitter/DMA while odd cycles are reserved or used by Shifter". ~CK 9:51, 5 Mat 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.41.251.15 ( talk)
Most of these seem to have been deleted with the like subsequently taken out by some autobot. They are mirrored here and the page looks much better with them. Anyway they can be restored? 212.159.69.172 ( talk) 21:31, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
In the 7th paragraph of "Amiga contract".
Could that be right? Surely "Amiga" should be "Atari" DHR ( talk) 17:46, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
In the last paragraph of "Amiga contract".
The supporting reference says "may very [sic] have been systems far superior to the ST's and the Amiga's were already completed". That hardly justifies the definite statement of superiority in the Wikipedia article.
My feeling is that the Atari ST was a very good design ("superior") because it was so minimal and yet powerful. Anecdotal evidence: when I bought one early on (1985 or 1986) it was perhaps half the price of an Amiga and actually superior for my applications (due to the mono monitor).
Changing the claim to "technically more advanced" is more plausible but there is precious little support for even that claim.
Since the team or teams that designed these prototypes were apparently dissolved, the chances of actually producing them quickly would seem low. DHR ( talk) 18:02, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
The Amiga had sample-based synthesis, not wavetable-based. Totally different, only Creative started to mix these up for marketing purposes when they came out with AWE32. 178.48.242.69 ( talk) 19:11, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
This is clearly not true, unless you somehow exclude the Macintosh Plus which was released before the 1040ST (on January 16, 1986).
The cited BYTE article doesn't make this claim, but does support the $1/kB claim
--- Agree, the cited BYTE article is from March, and touts it as "upcoming". Not to mention, hadn't IBM made 1 MB standard in the PC-AT 5170 by then? This has been an unsourced claim for over 2 years, I'm removing it. 2601:1C2:1200:2E16:4862:4154:8A6E:E263 ( talk) 07:57, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
Hello I would like to bring to the attention of the author/s of the Atari ST article that the statement obtained from reference 19 is incorrect. The source referenced (Infoworld) actually states the complete opposite of what is written in the Wikipedia article - the Atari ST is NOT a Tramiel corner cutting product.
Thank you 217.65.57.154 ( talk) 03:23, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
Hi, sorry but the Atari ST sales of 2.1 million units is wrong. There's an article from ST Format magazine issue 20 (March 1991), page 7 where Atari announced it has sold 2.5 million ST-computers worldwide by the end of the year 1990, and 500 000 of them were in the UK at the time.
Also an article from ST Format issue 49 from 1993 writes that there are over 3 million Atari ST -computers in Europe. Also in issue 48 is mentioned that of those over 3 million, there are 950 000 ST machines sold in the UK.
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-020_7.jpg 84.231.221.42 ( talk) 07:43, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-048_104.jpg
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-049_27.jpg
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(I'm the author of the long post below, and it's been a while since there was any new discussion on here, so I don't feel bad about suffixing this; it sort of counts anyway).
One: What exactly are the resolution and timing specs of the ST's high rez mode, and/or the SM124? I've had multiple responses come back when trying to look this up. It's 70Hz... no, it's 72Hz... no, it's 71.2... It's got a 31.5kHz line rate, a 35.8kHz one... and no-one, but no-one knows how many lines actually make up a full vertical scan including the blanking period, even though it's reasonably well known for the colour modes, at least for 50Hz (313 or maybe 315).
It doesn't make a great deal of odds, but I was trying to find it out for some of my own daydream doodling and found that nobody, not even some quite detailed technical references, actually knows for sure. It's not in Atari's own internal documentation, it's not in the SM124 manual, it's not anywhere.
From my own attempt at figuring it out from first principles... 71.2Hz sounds just about overprecise enough to be believable, and as the shifter's data rate is in lockstep with the CPU, it should pump out twice as many pixels per second as in medium rez, four times that of low. It has twice the usable vertical rez but the same horizontal, which suggests twice the line rate (31.3 to 31.5kHz depending if you base it off PAL or NTSC; given that it's an American machine, probably the latter)... which along with the increased refresh gives us an overall progressive frame of 442 lines. Plenty enough for a decent top/bottom border and Vblank/Vsync (480i within a 525 frame leaves 45 blank lines... 486i leaves 39), but not enough for 480, 448 or even 432, which may also explain the limited vertical rez in colour modes, as they tried to keep the video RAM area the same size throughout for simplicity.
Which all sort of fits, but I have no way to be sure short of hunting out an SM124 of my own and then grabbing an oscilloscope from somewhere and bodging up some way of sampling it. And there's no references of course so it's hard to cite in-article.
Please, does anyone know this information more concretely?
Second question... just what is the shifter rate and memory access interleave, for real? The information further down this thread (and I think in-article too?) says it's 1:1 ... the CPU/etc get a turn, then the shifter gets a turn, etc. But the available video modes and some other timing charts (which say, e.g., a PAL ST has 512 cycles but 128 "NOPs" per line, with four pixels per NOP (4 pixels x 4 bits = one 16-bit memory word)) suggest more of a 3:1 CPU:shifter relationship (2Mhz / 4MBs for video, not 4/8), and it presumably isn't a problem of the shifter sending an address to the RAM and then being made to wait for a cycle, as the Amiga uses a similar 1:1 scheme when operating purely from "Chip RAM" (witness the boost in processing speed when non-vidchip-accessible "fast RAM" is added), but can dump approximately twice as much visual data to screen per second (i.e. at 640x200, it can show 16 colours, not 4, and the ECS allows a 1280-wide, 4-colour mode with very little change to the architecture).
What exactly is going on, here? Is it possible, with some twiddling about and replacement of ROM routines (and maybe soldering a wire here and there) that the ST could be granted a 16-colour medium resolution mode? (4-grey hi rez or 256-colour low rez would need rather more work than just doubling the data rate and allowing all 16 registers to be used with a 640-pixel display) ... Or is there something fundamental I'm just not quite getting? 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 13:44, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
In response to points raised on this page (i have done a bit of editing on the main article page but have both got tired, and think the following thoughts are too informal/inappropriate/unfounded to go on there):
Thanks for your patience... I had a lot to say... I really liked that old thing, and I've just realised, as it's been sat in my cupboard gathering dust (needs the joystick socket re-soldering), I missed it's "20th birthday" due to work pressures and other such chaos :( (it would have been 20th November 2005 - going by the license date in it's TOS "About" screen)
--- Tahrey1043 --- (yeah.. i'm also a VW fan, thats a handle from a Polo messageboard ;)
I think there are a couple of mistakes on the page:
I noticed that the image is of unknown status. I'm pretty sure its a copyvio from Atari advertising. In any case, I own an STfm so I'll take a photo of mine and upload it under the GNU FDL.
The Atari ST was used in the ICS computer music course until PC soundcards gained in capability and popularity.
The ICS course included the ST, a MIDI keyboard and music software. The ST was dropped for a PC as ICS expanded their PC courses with 80286 and 80386 based computers.
ICS, or International Correspondence Schools, originated in 1891 as the Colliery Engineer School of Mines expanded its courses beyond the fields of mining, railroads and ironwork/construction.
I haven't been able to find more about ICS other than at some point in its early history it was based in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
If anyone can find a current website for ICS or a decent history of the school, please add the info.
I commented out these sentences from the opening paragraph:
This is a plausible explanation, since the Atari ST also used a bumblebee as the busy mouse pointer image, which might be a reference to Jack's birth name (although the phrase "busy as a bee" was probably the more likely inspiration).
I have a few problems with this block of text:
In other words, it's a huge big mess. If there's a real explanation here, let's write it clearly, and move it to a "naming" subsection rather than leading off the article with it.
Also, the only source I could find for the theory that ST stands for Sam Tramiel is — you guessed it — Wikipedia. Can someone find a real reference that this belief had at least some traction? Otherwise, we should delete it as original research. Nandesuka 21:03, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I can't provide documentation, but personal recollection indicates that we hypothesized ST and TOS expanded to "Sam Tramiel" and "Tramiel Operating System", mostly as a joke, back in the day (the day here probably being 1987 or 1988). -- Metahacker 23:35, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Need more info on the ST overseas, especially Europe, as they did way better than in the U.S. Pelladon 22:11, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
Also needs to discuss the DRAM shortages and tariffs that limited availability of the ST computers in the U.S. (STs were built overseas). The tariffs were to counter the Japanese dumping DRAM chips into the U.S. market. To counter the tariffs, Atari planned to open a US manufacturing plant, but the DRAM shortage delayed this. Atari did file suit against Micron Technology for price gouging. Europe didn't have this problem, so they had no shortage of computers and accessories. This was around 1988. -- Pelladon 18:45, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
The article is currently worded to suggest that Tramiel seriously considered using the Amiga technology, and was upset when they couldn't. I can't say for sure, but I don't believe this is the case.
I believe Tramiel bought Atari largely for its name, distribution and manufacturing. When he took over he fired practially everyone in the engineering and programming teams, ending development of all the Warner-era products. One of these was the advanced 68k-based workstation project.
I also believe that he basically saw Atari as a shell that he could dump his surviving Commodore people and recreate the company as Commodore II. "That'll show Gould!!". I'm not sure he even knew what projects Atari had on the go at the time.
Consider: if he really wanted to use an existing design for his 32-bit entry, he could have used the other workstation being developed. Alternately he could have just not pissed off the Amiga team. Does anyone have any reason to suggest that he could not have used the Amiga for his next machine, if he had wanted to?
No, I think he sued Commodore over the Amiga because he could. If you follow the logic above he was still furious over being ousted from Commodore, and this was simply one more way to piss them off.
Maury 12:39, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
RJ Mical is well known among Atari historians as big a huge source of missinformation, who came on later in the design life and had personal gripes with the Tramiels because of the whole Handy/Lynx issue. There have been plenty of interviews and records on the Atari Inc. side (please don't confuse the contract with Atari Inc. to have been with Atari Corp./Tramiel - another of RJ's missinformation), and the suits and purchases are a matter of public record and were reported in newspapers, business periodicals, etc. of the time. -- Marty Goldberg 19:49, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
The sentence in brackets wondering why the ST didn't recieve many megadrive ports seeing as the systems were so similar, specifically mentioning them having the same Yamaha soundchip is erroneous and misleading.
Whilst The systems share the same 68000 CPU, thats about where the similarities end. The megadrive had relatively advanced 2d sprite, playfield and scrolling hardware, as well as a far higher on screen colour palatte (64 colours, although as this was made up from 4 16 colour palattes, each having to share one transparant colour, the practical total was 61 colours)
Regarding the soundchip, whilst both system have chips of yamaha design, they are totally different models with vastly different specifications. The Megadrive soundchip is a 6 channel FM synth of the sort commonly used in arcade machines and synthesisers in the 80s, where as the ST has a 3 channel PSG, of vastly inferior specifications (infact it's the same soundchip used in the 128k spectrums, and the amstrad CPC series)
The ST would be no more capable of running 'megadrive ports' with little coding effort than it would a port from any late 80's arcade hardware. Everything the megadrive does in hardware, the ST developer would have to kludge in software, and still require cpu time left to run the 68000 code of the megadrive original.
When you go beyond the fact the cpu is the same, and the soundchip was designed by the same company, there is little wonder that the ST was incapable of running megadrive or even amiga games towards the end of it's life, it simply was an inferior design when it came to running games. The amiga ended up being a more robust gaming platform and survived a few years more, although it too struggled to quite match the megadrive perfomance in certain types of 2d game, where the megadrive had the advantage of arcade style sprite/playfield handling.
As such i've removed that comment, as it directly contradicts the previous statement, and incorrectly suggests the megadrive and ST were relatively comparible in 2d game performance, so as to make a megadrive port a trivial thing.
I found a photo of Jack Tramiel signing autographs at an expo in ally pally in prob 1988.
Shouls I scan it and post it here ?
robin48gx.
where? also... NEOchrome RULES!!! I loved that program... its far superior to any (affordable) pc equivalent. Umm, yeah. WookMuff 08:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
I have had a close read of this section and can't see anything that is portraying a particular POV. Tag removed.
Personally, I believe that listing examples of the ST memory as 512 kilobytes but 1 mebibyte (rather than 1 megabyte) to be confusing. Although Italic texttechnicallyItalic text 1024kb is a mebibyte (that's 1024 kibibytes, not 1024 kilobytes), this is a naming convention that's not used as often as megabyte. Certainly in the original days of the ST, it was marketed with memory listed in megabytes, and to me it's rather pedantic to list memory in mebibytes here (especially as the kilobytes here are still kilobytes, and not kibibytes).
Will anyone be offended it the "MiB's" are changed to "MB's"?
I've done some minor cleanup, but I'd like comments on something a little more major.
As the article was before my edits, the "debut" section of the history included not only the debut, but a sort of rambling description of some of the follow-on models. Much worse, the Description section switched back and forth between historical details of the machine's introductions, as well as a description of the systems themselves.
I propose this should all be collected into the history section. That is, following Debut, there would be sections for the STfm's, the Megas, the STE's, and finally the Falcon. The description section would then discuss the "baseline" ST, with much-reduced subsections for the differences in the STE's and Falcon.
What say you all?
Maury 20:18, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Atari had originally intended to include GEM's GDOS (Graphical Device Operating System), which allowed programs to send GEM VDI (Virtual Device Interface) commands to drivers loaded by GDOS. This allowed developers to send VDI instructions to other devices simply by pointing to it.
What are the 'other devices'? What is this the main/preferred device? This section has been modified and now it is unclear. In a previous version the last sentence was actually this:
This allowed developers to export high-resolution graphics to printers, plotters and other peripherals.
This sentence seems very useful, as it captures the idea that the 'graphics display' was somehow retargetable (something of which I was unaware). Shouldn't this idea be incorporated somehow?
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Another removed sentence is this:
This ment (sic) that using GDOS generally required a reboot in order to load it into the operating system.
I thought this was true. Is it? Isn't this seeming inflexibility of TOS mildly interesting?
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
And another removed sentence:
Performance problems in GDOS were supposed to be addressed by the BLiTTER chip, a hardware-based BitBlt implementation. This too was unavailable at launch, and would not appear in any of the ST designs until years later.
Isn't this (somewhat?) true? It at least seems plausible.
--GrimRC 86.4.53.107 21:31, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, kinda difficult to countersue when Commodore didn't own Amiga at the time (Tramiel discovered the contract before the Amiga/Commodore deal). Citation needed. Also, parts of this section reads like original research. — Pelladon 05:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Regarding not owning Amiga, your statement is not exactly true. The purchase was announced in June of '84, money was exchanged, and the sale completed that August after approval by the board. Jack Tramiel discovered the contract after the Amiga/Commodore deal was announced and after his engineers were sued in late July (which included an attempt by Commodore to get an injunction on the production of the ST). He had in fact considered buying Amiga that previous April/May under his TTL company, and had meetings with the executives and engineers (Jay, etc.) but they decided against it after realizing he'd be dismissing most of them. At the time he knew nothing of the Atari/Amiga deal. (This is where a lot of the confusion comes from, most of it trumpeted by RJ Mical). He then moved on to discussions with Atari Inc., which were on and off again through May/June before Warner/Atari finally approaching him again and completing the sale. After moving all Atari Consumer properties (which included the buildings, projects, etc.) under Atari Corp., they immediately froze all projects pending evaluation. As stated (and I personally conducted the interview with his son Leonard), it was not discovered until Leonard and another employee were going through the records all during late July/early August to see what they had "inherited" in buying Atari Consumer. It was then Leonard discovered the cancelled check and terms. The "countersue" was a tactic pursued to do the exact same thing - stop Commodore's purchase of Amiga and in effect freeze its access to the Amiga computer to get Commodore to drop their suit against the Atari Corp. engineers and the feezing of the ST. Much of this material was also published in "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall. -- Marty Goldberg 19:44, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Pelladon a) I'm not a newbie to Wikipedia, and I'm not prone to contributing "speculation". b) I'm a well known researcher and writer in the video game history arena and the video game industry in general. Much of what I shared in the rewrite is from personal interviews with the people involved over the last 6 years for a book that's being written and was also shared in interviews published online as well as the previously mentioned Commodore book. Curt Vendel also has most of the paperwork involved in the original Atari Inc./Amiga contract (as well as a plethora of other important paperwork). The one cited in this entry that appears on his site is simply the one he's put up so far. However, the suits you want citations on are a matter of public record. As far as the Amiga purchase being announced in July, here's an example: http://www.amigau.com/aig/2ndamiga.html. As far as the suits - From the August 21st New York Times at the time: "In July, in a separate court action, Commodore obtained an injunction against four former Commodore employees recruited by Mr. Tramiel. The injunction bars them from disclosing Commodore trade secrets in their new jobs at Atari." From the 06/20/85 San Jose Mercury news : "Both sides are claiming victory after a U.S. District Court judge in Philadelphia ruled that four Atari Corp. engineers wrongfully took confidential information when they left their jobs at Commodore Business Machines Inc. of West Chester, Pa. In an opinion filed Wednesday, Judge John P. Fullam ordered that the material be returned to Commodore. But he also cleared the four of charges of stealing secret computer tapes from Commodore". Likewise according to Leonard when I spoke to him (which was also backed up by other employees and paperwork), the ST was 95% done by the time his father bought Atari Consumer from Atari Inc. (the OS was the main part of the development left), which was bought for manufacturing and shipping rights. (Because of the time frame, this also strongly suggests that Shiraz did take the work he had been doing on a 68000 system with him from Commodore, which is also mentioned in the Commodore book). They had no clue about the deal ahead of time, Leonard still has the stamped (cashed) check he discovered in fact during the search through all of July (the freeze of all projects was done July 3rd). When the deal was discovered in late July his father used it as leverage (citing the chip issues published at the time in the New York Times article I quoted from) to get Commodore to back off in typical Jack style. The idea that they were to rely on Amiga technology for the ST was actually what was speculation (and the New York times correctly puts "and by some accounts" when mentioning it rather than presenting it as fact like other newspapers did), and further propogated by the spin put out by RJ. Everything I've said is substantiated, if you don't believe me then talk to Curt - as the largest Atari collector, archiver, and historian, he's always willing to help people out. -- Marty Goldberg 16:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
No, there you go again. "Strongly suggests" was in reference to a side note I was mentioning about Shiraz during this "debate". Why present it as evidence that everything else I'm saying is "analysis" when they had nothing to do with each other? Unless you're here just to argue. This is not based on "analysis" (as some of the Wall street journal articles you seem to want to quote was). It is not a "proposed theory", these are things stated by the individuals involved in interviews. Likewise, its also been published in the previously mentioned Commodore book already. I've given way to much time to this and gone out of my way to give several references already and leads if you want more, I'd be happy to take this to wiki admins if you want to continue this route. -- Marty Goldberg 17:06, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
It was also the first home computer with integral MIDI support.
What about the Yamaha CX5M - this had a midi port and I am sure was launched in 1984. It was an MSX compatible. CX5M Info
Peter 81.99.41.208 21:50, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The problem is that the CX5M was specifically a Music Computer and targeted as a music device only, and was only promoted as such (in fact it sold only though Yahama music equipment dealers). As you quoted, the ST was a "home computer". It was a general purpose computer designed for home use that also entered the music device market (as well as other markets). -- Marty Goldberg 22:06, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Just being curious, when was the Atari ST released, and how does this compare to the Amiga 1000? The article says September 1985 for "full retail sales", whilst the Amiga 1000 has July 24 1985 for "introduced", with shipping also being in September. Does anyone have more exact dates for either of these machines? Mdwh 01:22, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I will be in the future write about the speed of the ST graphics hopefully soon.
I will be showing some examples and comparisons to the Amiga hopefully soon.
I made a few, mostly minor, technical corrections. I also removed two full sentences:
"It had an innovative single-chip graphics subsystem (designed by Shiraz Shivji) which shared the full amount of system memory, in alternating clock cycles, with the processor, similar to the earlier BBC Micro and the Unified Memory systems that have become common today."
The above is a very nice looking paragraph, but there are more wrong statements in it than right ones. With so many wrongs and inaccuracies, I don't know how to replace the sentence with something correct in a similar "spirit". So I removed it.
"To make matters worse, the built-in floppy disk drives could not read as many tracks on a floppy disk as the built-in floppy disk drives on older models. While this was not a problem for most users, some games used the extra tracks as a crude form of copy protection and as a means of cramming more data onto the disk, and formatting as many as 86 tracks on an "80-track" disk was a common space-expanding option in custom formatting utilities".
The issue of how many tracks some ST drives supported, is not specific to ST vs STe. This topic has no place in that section. Ijor ( talk) 01:37, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I think it's important to talk about the memory in the ST. It gave a clear advantage over other computers including the Amiga. A 1 or 2 megabyte ST for example could use all of it's memory for graphics or sound with no wait states because 8 Mhz Ram went to Video, and 8 Mhz Ram went to the processor. This caused problems for accelators but made the ST a very fast 8 Mhz computer.
Rowbeartoe ( talk) 19:07, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Memory in ST is 4MHz (3.5Mhz in Amiga) not 8MHz. "Even memory accesses are given to CPU/Blitter/DMA while odd cycles are reserved or used by Shifter". ~CK 9:51, 5 Mat 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.41.251.15 ( talk)
Most of these seem to have been deleted with the like subsequently taken out by some autobot. They are mirrored here and the page looks much better with them. Anyway they can be restored? 212.159.69.172 ( talk) 21:31, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
In the 7th paragraph of "Amiga contract".
Could that be right? Surely "Amiga" should be "Atari" DHR ( talk) 17:46, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
In the last paragraph of "Amiga contract".
The supporting reference says "may very [sic] have been systems far superior to the ST's and the Amiga's were already completed". That hardly justifies the definite statement of superiority in the Wikipedia article.
My feeling is that the Atari ST was a very good design ("superior") because it was so minimal and yet powerful. Anecdotal evidence: when I bought one early on (1985 or 1986) it was perhaps half the price of an Amiga and actually superior for my applications (due to the mono monitor).
Changing the claim to "technically more advanced" is more plausible but there is precious little support for even that claim.
Since the team or teams that designed these prototypes were apparently dissolved, the chances of actually producing them quickly would seem low. DHR ( talk) 18:02, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
The Amiga had sample-based synthesis, not wavetable-based. Totally different, only Creative started to mix these up for marketing purposes when they came out with AWE32. 178.48.242.69 ( talk) 19:11, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
This is clearly not true, unless you somehow exclude the Macintosh Plus which was released before the 1040ST (on January 16, 1986).
The cited BYTE article doesn't make this claim, but does support the $1/kB claim
--- Agree, the cited BYTE article is from March, and touts it as "upcoming". Not to mention, hadn't IBM made 1 MB standard in the PC-AT 5170 by then? This has been an unsourced claim for over 2 years, I'm removing it. 2601:1C2:1200:2E16:4862:4154:8A6E:E263 ( talk) 07:57, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
Hello I would like to bring to the attention of the author/s of the Atari ST article that the statement obtained from reference 19 is incorrect. The source referenced (Infoworld) actually states the complete opposite of what is written in the Wikipedia article - the Atari ST is NOT a Tramiel corner cutting product.
Thank you 217.65.57.154 ( talk) 03:23, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
Hi, sorry but the Atari ST sales of 2.1 million units is wrong. There's an article from ST Format magazine issue 20 (March 1991), page 7 where Atari announced it has sold 2.5 million ST-computers worldwide by the end of the year 1990, and 500 000 of them were in the UK at the time.
Also an article from ST Format issue 49 from 1993 writes that there are over 3 million Atari ST -computers in Europe. Also in issue 48 is mentioned that of those over 3 million, there are 950 000 ST machines sold in the UK.
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-020_7.jpg 84.231.221.42 ( talk) 07:43, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-048_104.jpg
https://www.atarimania.com/mags/hi_res/atari-st-format-issue-049_27.jpg