Atari ST+. What am I missing?

[Bryce]

Hi all,
     A while back I got myself an Atari 520ST+ (Factory fitted with 1MB). My reasoning was:

1) It's retro.
2) I was always a big XL/XE fan, so another Atari can only be good.
3) It supposedly has great sound.
4) I didn't know much about the hardware and was eager to find out more.
5) It supposedly has a few things in common with the CPC.

I even got myself an external drive, converted the ST to S-Video with one of my S-Video PCBs and added a 3.5mm stereo audio output. Unfortunately I'm rather under-whelmed by the whole thing. The GUI is crap with hideous eye-cancer-inducing colours, any games I've tried out were mediocre to bad (definitely nowhere near the Amiga) and the sound didn't exactly blow my socks off.

Am I missing something? Is there some killer-app that will completely change my mind? Or should I ask Gryzor to move this thread to the Classified section so that I can pass it on to someone with a better opinion of this machine? At this stage it has already broke the record for the fastest computer to make it onto my "Just taking up space" list.

Bryce.

[fatbob]

I have been having exactly the same feelings towards my STe.

I added 4meg of memory and a Satandisk to it and just cant seem get any pleasure out of toying with it.

I struggle to understand how back in the day anyone could have considered buying one of these things when they could have had an Amiga - or even a hoop & stick.

[redbox]

Am I missing something?

The ST is the closest 16-bit cousin to the CPC.  I wouldn't say it has amazing graphics or sound and the Amiga is generally a much more capable machine, but this is mainly due to custom chips.

Try this demo: Atari ST Froggies over the Fence : scans, dump, download, screenshots, ads,

[Bryce]

If a single Demo is all the ST has to offer, then consider my ST+ to be up for sale. Anyone interested in it should  send me a PM. I can post pictures too if required.

Bryce.

[arnoldemu]

What about the load beep the keyboard makes under Gem or GFA Basic???

There are some nice ST games (no second prize, vroom! and a few others).
There are quite a few nice demos.

The overscan demos are a coding accomplishment because to do this on the st, especially the side borders, you have to open every line (same as c64 I suppose).

It's one of those things, some people love em, some people don't.

[The Last Bandit]

Have one, rarely used either. Supposed to have been excellent "back in the day" if you were into MIDI stuff. 


Too many projects/machines/cars and not enough time.....

[MaV]

The Atari ST has a few good games, that is if you are into adventures, rpgs and vector graphics. Granted, most (or all) of them were released for the Amiga and the PC as well, but the Atari ST did not have a problem with flickering (Amiga) and was better graphics- and speedwise than the PCs of that time (if you did not have the money for an EGA card). With the monochrome monitor it was better suited for "serious" applications, and especially because of the MIDI port, many musicians bought an ST.

Games:
Dungeon Master (and later version)
Space Quest I-III
King's Quest I-IV
Ultima II-VI
Purple Saturn Day
Starglider I / II
the Magnetic Scrolls adventures

I wouldn't want one now, but as a 16-bitter in the 80s it was a good choice for a couple of years after it was released.

[MaV]

And the only real problems of the ST according to complaints of magazines of that time were the keyboard and the buggy GFA Basic.

[Bryce]

Well my main reason for getting it was to understand the hardware... Done.

I added the S-Video out, so it is in full colour, ready for games. I was going to make an adapter to connect my HxC to it, but after trying some games from real disks I kind of got dis-interested.

I'll try some more games, but I think I'll sell it anyway. Adventures and rpgs aren't my thing, and it definitely doesn't have any "wow features" that would make me want to keep it aswell as my Amigas.

Bryce.

[The Last Bandit]

ST has RGB out, why bother with the S-Video ?

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

A lot of people used custom GEM bootdiscs that changed the green to a much nicer colour.


The ST was very CPC like in that it put a lot of work onto the CPU rather than having custom chips. Later STs did include a blitter however.


The audio was only "amazing" if you used MIDI. This feature was way overblown everywhere of course, but because it was built in...


It's okay for 3D games versus the Amiga - it has a slightly faster CPU and a lot of 3D games were purely CPU rendered.

[beaker]

Sorry to hear you're not enjoying your ST+. I have to admit the Amiga is probably the better of the 2 machines and most games that appeared on both machines were better on the Amiga, and GEM is pretty nasty to look at 

What games have you tried?

As mentioned the flight sims were better on the ST in general compared to a bog standard Amiga.
Oids is a very good thrust clone and I think an Atari exclusive.
I love Supersprint, Rick Dangerous 1 and 2 on it.
Xenon 1 was possibly better on the ST than the Amiga but Xenon 2 is also very good.
Then there's
Midwinter
Time Bandit
No Second Prize
Lethal Excess..

It's also nice playing games like Supercars at a decent speed compared to the CPC 

[ralferoo]

the Atari ST did not have a problem with flickering (Amiga)

What? The Amiga only flickered if you used an interlaced mode. Almost nobody did because it flickered.

[MaV]

What? The Amiga only flickered if you used an interlaced mode. Almost nobody did because it flickered.

Yes, we know that.
But in the 80s it was this message that the magazines hammered into people's heads. Plus the superiority of the ST's monitors for "professional" use.

Having read through my previous post, I realised that I should have mentioned the fact that I was thinking about how we perceived the ST back then.

[Axelay]

But in the 80s it was this message that the magazines hammered into people's heads. Plus the superiority of the ST's monitors for "professional" use.

I dont remember reading anything like that in mags about flickering.  Would they have been ST magazines you were reading then? 

[Bryce]

ST has RGB out, why bother with the S-Video ?

I have my Retro computers connected to PC LCD screens via an S-Video to VGA converter, so S-Video is more useful for me and more or less the same quality as RGB.

Bryce.

[The Last Bandit]

Ah right, easy of use setup. 


I've got the it other way, everything is RGB'd if possible. My old Grundig doesn't like NTSC and a lot of my consoles US/JPN - refusing to make the jump to LCD for as long as possible 

[Gryzor]

I was an ST user and fan back in the day, but I have to admit that the Amiga was the better computer of the two.


HOWEVER:


-as to the question of "why buy an Atari when there was the Amiga around", price is a prime factor of course (until the Amiga price went down. And even then a 1040 was, IIRC, considerably cheaper than an expander A500). Heck, my neighbor, a couple of years older than me, actually had a laser printer (laser!? WTF?) on which I used to print my assignments. As an all-purpose machine it was unbeatable for the price.


-the Amiga was held back because of ST ports, like the CPC with the ZX (only less so). This means that in many, many, many cases the games on the ST are just as good as the Amiga equivalents.


-early ST games are nothing to write home about nowadays but there are numerous titles that are very worthwhile and fun. I should know - I recently went through 85% of them testing my MiST FPGA. So I'd say you probably didn't find the right titles.


-The early TOS is slow as hell and a pain to watch. Upgrade it and things will become much better (though I don't think anyone had complained about the colour choice back then - maybe your saturation is way high?) Since you have an HxC you can connect to it you could also install something like Terradesk, NVDI and the likes, and it'll be a charm to work with. I can send you some HDD images if you'd like.


The ST was never something really unique or fantastic by itself - but then again noone ever said it was. It was just a fantastically affordable step into the 16-bit era (and without it the Amiga would probably have stayed much more expensive). But it's not to be discounted so easily...

[TFM]

IIRC the Atari ST has a disc format, which can actually conserve data - in contrast to the Amiga. 

[Gryzor]

Really? Was data loss an issue for Amiga?

[TFM]

It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.

[joska]

The GUI is crap with hideous eye-cancer-inducing colours,

Are you sure it's not an Amiga?

Seriously, the GUI is pretty good for 1985. The colour palette is user configurable, I guess you didn't get the language disk with you ST so you don't have the control panel. I had an Amiga 500 for a brief period but switched back to an ST as the Amiga was unusable for "serious" (I could only afford one computer at that time, and I used it a lot for schoolwork) use unless you could afford a couple of external floppydrives or a harddrive. Multitasking on the Amiga was IMO just a gimmick when all you could afford was a 512Kb single-floppy A500.

The sound is not remarkable. After all, it's just an YM. The STE is more capable with it's stereo DMA PCM-sound. But the YM can produce some pretty cool sounds, just listen to some of ultrasyd's productions (like ).

Games are usually not as good as on the Amiga, although the difference is often small. But if you play games that really exploits the Amiga's hardware you'll notice the difference, the Amiga has way more powerful video hardware.

Doing "serious" stuff was much more comfortable on the ST than on the Amiga. As others has mentioned, you could be pretty sure that when you saved something it would load again the next day. It used FAT12 on the floppies, so exchanging data with the PC's at school was easy. Display quality was superior with the monochrome monitor. The ST also booted a lot faster, and a 1040STFM was - atleast here in Norway - considerably cheaper than a 512Kb A500.

The Amiga's hardware was better (well, most of it) but you got a cheaper and more usable computer if you bought an ST. And like today, the owners were a lot more friendly

[ralferoo]

It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.

This is utter nonsense. The data density on an Amiga formatted disc is exactly the same as an IBM or ST or any other 3.5" SD floppy.

The only reason the Amiga format was able to hold 11 sectors per track over the 9 sectors per track of the IBM / ST is because it wrote track-at-once instead of having wasteful gaps between sectors to allow sector-at-once writing.

Lots of people experienced errors using HD discs in SD drives, this was true whatever system you used.

[MaV]

I dont remember reading anything like that in mags about flickering.  Would they have been ST magazines you were reading then? 

Those were german magazines, english ones were much too expensive if you could grab hold of them at all.

We were often reminded of the flickering modes that you had to "endure" when working with the Amiga. So consequently serious work was out of the question, buy a PC or ST for that.

[MaV]

I'm pretty sure that in the end the problem with the Amiga format boils down to cheap noname DD 3.5" disks which would have had the same errors on other computers as well.
Of course, as ralferoo mentions, quite a few also tried to use cheap noname HD disks on the Amiga.