10 Amazing Atari ST Facts

Runner [Music] the notorious T began life in 1984 as a computer codenamed RBP for Rock Bottom price and was the brainchild of newly axed Commodore boss Jack Trammell who sadly passed away in April 2012 at the age of 83. after taking over the Atari consumer division in May 1984 Jack asked chief engineer Shiraz shivji to fast forward development of the new computer and shocked the industry by debuting it less than six months later at the winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Nevada in January 1985. the computer was now called the Atari St the name being a direct reference to its 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU standing for 1632 as this chip was 32-bit internally and 16-bit externally industry onlookers were stunned at the machine's quick development and there were mixed reactions for its Sleek all-in-one design from his release Atari positions the St as a serious computer and squarely at the business market and it often came bundled with applications such as word processors spreadsheets and database programs however it wasn't long before people recognized the machine's potential as a very competent games machine with its large pallet of 512 colors three Channel Yamaha sound chip built-in joystick ports and disk drive it represented a great value all in one setup for gamers who also wanted a system that could be used for more serious tasks as especially when compared to the likes of the Apple Mac and IBM PC compatibles the computer is very successful for Atari particularly in Europe returning the company to profit within just two years of the travel takeover Not only was the St very successful in the home Computing Arena it was also very successful in the YouTube Arena too as it convincingly won the poll to decide what computer I would cover in my next popular 10 amazing facts video series grabbing over 40 of the vote share it represents the biggest winning margin I've ever seen since I started running these europoles so once again people have spoken I have listened and now I can present to you 10 amazing Qatari St facts let Atari tell you how the computer business works Atari buys chips the competition buys chips we buy circuitry they buy circuitry we buy plastic they buy plastic but they have these expensive attachments to that to their price so you can buy an st from Atari with more power than the Apple Macintosh SC and more features than the IBM PS2 Model 50 at about one-third their price for this first segment we need to go back to 1984 to look at the state of play in the home computer Market Atari apple and commodore were all still fighting it out with their respective 8-bit machines but also had new more advanced 16-bit micros on the horizon too Apple developing the Mac Commodore were working on the c900 and Atari were founding a group of their XC employees led by J minor called Amiga but were working on the highly Advanced Lorraine project however trouble was brewing for both Atari and commodore as the latter had just ousted founder and CEO Jack Trammell over disagreements about the direction of the company and atari's parent company Warner Brothers had chosen to put them up for sale due to the losses they had incurred as a result of the great North American video game crash meanwhile an angry Jack promptly formed a new company called Trammell technology along with his sons and several ex-commodore employees their objective was to create Affordable 16-bit Computer to bring the next generation of micros to the largest audience possible Jack was also very aware of the growing computer industry in Japan and was Keen to stop them in their tracks soon after this though Jack heard about Warner Brothers intentions to offload their debt Rhythm Division and saw this as an opportunity to re-enter the market and get back at his former company after much negotiation he struck a very favorable deal to purchase the Atari consumer division from Warner and accelerated development of his new computer under the Fuji brand and this is where it gets really interesting and mid rumors that trammer was negotiating to purchase Atari Amiga Corporation entered discussions with atari's big rivals commodore they didn't want to work with the often divisive Jack Trammell and saw his old company as a way out this led to Commodore wanting to purchase Amiga Corporation outright which Commodore believed would cancel any outstanding contracts including Ataris instead of a mega Corp delivering Lorraine to Atari Commodore delivered a payment of five hundred thousand dollars to Atari on amica's behalf in effect returning the funds Atari invested in Amiga for the Lorraine ship set tremble counted by suing Omega Corp on August 13th 1984 seeking damages and an injunction to Bar Amiga and effectively Commodore from producing anything with this technology this left the Amiga team in limbo whilst the lawsuit was contested and its still development of their own 16-bit machine after Commodore then accused chap tramel of steering technology from them to develop his new computer an agreement was reached out of court between the two companies and commodore completed their acquisition of amiga and although this meant that Commodore could now bring the Amiga to Market Jack managed to get his computer out first finishing the development of it in just six months and beating his old company to the punch in an interesting twist of fate the creators of the Amiga would once again head for pastures new and ended up epics where they developed an advanced fall color portable console called the handy game this of course was then sold to Atari and became the links meaning it ended up in the hands of the very person they'd struggled to avoid bringing things full circle foreign it's almost impossible to talk about the Atari St without mentioning its great rival the Commodore amiga indeed as much as I tried not to imiga is referenced multiple times through this video the St Amiga war is one of the greatest console computer rivalries along with the ZX Spectrum Commodore 64 and Sega bega Drive Super Nintendo so with this in mind it's easy to forget it was never meant to be that way as the St was actually designed primarily to compete with the PC and even more so the Apple Mac in fact it's many similarities to the lateral of those led to the Press of the time nicknaming it the jackintosh both computers have the 16-bit Motorola 68 000 CPU they both featured a Windows style GUI operating system and both offered flicker-free high-resolution Graphics through a monitor in fact many similarities in the hardware LED some interesting opportunities for the St which I'll go into later in this video they were both designed with productivity in mind being ideal for graphic design desktop publishing music composition programming and word processing among many other things but obviously the St had a huge advantage of color graphics and multi-channel sound making it ideal for playing games or two but perhaps this is why the St was never able to knock either the PC or Mac off their perch despite the St being less than a third of the price of both you see the Atari name is so synonymous with games that a lot of business users just dismissed it completely despite its huge range of advantages one of the places where the St was both successful was the UK where it was one of the best-selling computers of the late 80s a lot of that success is credited to one Daryl still who joined Atari in 1988 having previously been at leading software companies like incentive and audiogenic it took up the position of St product manager before going on to become Marketing Manager for Atari UK and Atari Europe who's the main man behind the now famous or should that be Infamous power pack software bundle that encouraged many people to buy an st the power pack contained no less than 20 games from leading Publishers like Houston U.S gold virgin games Elite systems and Activision with titles such as r-type super hang on Double Dragon outrun and Gauntlet 2 making up the star studied lineup sounds great right and it was well for a while at least and perhaps too long and that's the problem I myself had the power pack and so did several of my friends gave a brilliant selection of games that kept me busy for a long time with such a great selection of titles available from the start there was no need to go out and buy any more and that was the problem after the launch of the power pack software Publishers started to notice a rapid decrease in the sales of new St Games showing there really is too much of a good thing and less sales meant less support and this ended up being one of the contributing factors to the rise of the Amiga and the demise of the St foreign with the STS Hardware design nearing completion Atari started looking at the software end and particularly the computer's operating system soon after the Atari buyout Bill Gates Microsoft suggested to travel that they could Port windows to the St but the delivery date was out by two years which was far too long for atari's needs to Microsoft agreement dead in the water Atari instead turned to a company called digital research which was working on a new GUI based system known as Crystal this eventually became gem standing for graphics environment manager and became a key part of the STS design alongside toss which stood for the operating system not Trammel operating system as many reported to form the final product this gave the stf fast and user-friendly operating system that was leagues ahead of MS-DOS and more than comparable to Apple's GUI 2. this new OS initially shipped on disk before be included as part of the st's ROMs which saved all the disk swapping associated with the Rival Amiga and its workbench OS it's pretty amazing to think that the St could have been a Windows machine especially when you consider just how dominant the OS went on to be in the PC World becoming more of a standard than the hardware itself foreign in the UK during the early to mid 80s pop music ruled the charts from the new Romantics to the paint by numbers efforts of stock aching and watermen however the arrival of new affordable keyboards and synth sizes saw electronic flavors start to creep into the UK Top 40. as we moved into the second half of the decade pop began to take a bit of a back seat as the dance music Revolution began and the Atari St played an incredibly influential role in this thanks to its affordable price and built-in midi ports Atari 16-bit computer took composing out of the big budget high-tech recording studios and into the bedrooms of aspiring musicians all over the land they saw a revolution in the music scene as the likes of alternate Utah Saints faithless The Prodigy orbital and Norman cook AKA Fatboy Slim started to dominate the charts Atari St programs like notata quartet and especially Cubase allowed you to write your own tunes on the St and play them back for your keyboard synth or drum machine many people still use the St or a successor the Falcon to make music today thanks to its easy to use software and Reliable Hardware in fact Fatboy Slim Aphex Twin and Depeche Mode amongst others have confessed that they still have an SD in their studio and have used it to help produce recent albums as the only computer of his age with built-in midi ports the St offered unparalleled timing which was hugely important for dance music in particular and it took many years for the PC and Apple Mac to even come close to matching the St when it came to music making the decision to add midi ports to the SD's design was a moment of pure genius and is perhaps the biggest Legacy of the St today Atari initially planned to release three models of their new 16-bit computer for 130 St 260st and 520 St with 128k 256k and 512k of ram respectively but assuming came clear that the 130 and 260 were totally unrealistic as they didn't even have enough memory to run the operating system so the debut machine was the 520 St this external disk drive OS on disk and monitor only display but it wasn't long before Atari started to make various upgrades and improvements to the St in fact PC aside the St probably had more Hardware revisions than any other home computer as previously mentioned the first Improvement Atari made was putting the OS into ROM and then we saw the 520 SD plus which doubled the memory to one megabyte then they fixed another early issue with the launch of the STM which added a TV modulator but undoubtedly the most important change was when they moved the disk drive and power supply into a new deeper case this also saw the midi ports move to the side and the joystick ports relocated underneath not such a good decision known as the stfm this basic design would serve as the basis for all future SD models going forward around this time there was also the 1040 stf which looked the same but emitted TV output from here we saw the launch of the new Mega St range which featured a completely redesigned motherboard and a PC like pizza Fox case it also added a new blitter chip as well as a real-time clock and internal expansion slots these were available in one two or four megabyte configurations the number after the name signifying this but despite all these upgrades one problem still remained the st's technical inferiority when compared to the Amiga which was particularly important for games in the early years this didn't matter so much as most games were developed on the St first and then ported Amiga but with the launch of the new Amiga 500 it also came in an all-in-one case like the St and the fall in price that came with it the Amiga started to catch up to the St in sales this meant the programmers started to look at targeting their games at the Amiga first and the real game changer in this regard was the 1989 release of shadow of the Beast this was the first title to really show the amiga's superiority over the St when it came to playing games and Atari had been far too slow to react watching on as Commodore took control of the 16-bit computer Market there have been rumors of a new more powerful St for several years at the end of 1989 it finally arrived in the form of the Ste with the E standing for enhanced as well as a new revised version of the operating system the Ste added a blister chip for the Mega St as well as a new graphics chip which boasted far more colors Hardware scrolling and a new dma stereo sound chip as well as other more minor improvements such as extra controller ports the same as those later found on the jaguar and much more simple Sim slots for adding more memory whilst these Hardware upgrades are very much welcome the Ste was still criticized for its lack of Hardware Sprites and despite having 4096 colors it was still limited to only 16 on screen they were also compatibility issues with early STS that were very much highlighted by the release of the hugely popular football game kickoff which wouldn't work on Ste machines causing many angry customers to not only return their game but also their computers too switching over to the Amiga Instead This was very unfortunate for Atari and sales of the St range never really recovered then we saw the new Mega Ste models that put this new technology into a pizza box case and added and used 60 megahertz mode and then in 1990 Atari released the Atari tt-030 high-end workstation based around a 32 megahertz Motorola 68030 processor with the TT name standing for 3232 continuing the nomenclature because the 68030 chip as 32-bit bus both internally and externally the TT also had improved graphics and more powerful support chips too it came in a newly designed version of the mega St casing that featured an integrated hard drive enclosure this computer along with the rest of the St range would be replaced by the 32-bit Atari Falcon in 1992 but more on that later perhaps one of the most fascinating features of the Atari St was its ability to emulate two of its biggest Rivals the IBM PC compatible and the Apple Macintosh there are several different ways of doing this including both hardware and software Solutions firstly their respect to GCR which emulated the Apple Mac this was a hardware add-on consisting of a cartridge that plugs into the Atari st's cart port and a cable that connects between the cartridge and one of the floppy Drive ports on the St itself designed by David small the Spectra GCR required the owner to provide official Apple Macintosh one to 8K ROMs and the Apple Macintosh operating system 6.0.8 discs thus avoiding any legal issues with apple the emulator runs best with a high resolution monochrome monitor such as atari's own sm124 but will run on color displays by sacrificing alternate scan lights the reportedly runs 20 faster than an actual Apple Mac plus with a 30 larger screen area and resolution when it comes to PC MS-DOS simulators there are two very notable options called PC ditto a software only version and a hardware version that can either be plugged into the cartridge slot or fitted internally after running the PC ditto software an MS-DOS boot disk is then required to run your PC software in CJ video mode although this software often Rambles slightly than it did on an IBM PC it was still a very useful product of course this was helped by the fact that the St could natively read PC discs which actually allowed me to write all of my college coursework at home using first word on my St and then load it into the PCS at the college and print it off other PC compatibility options for the St included PC speed at speed 286 and at once 386 SX Hardware emulator boards which all required some modification of your Atari Hardware foreign as well as the desktop STS that we all know and love Atari also released two st-based laptops which were both pretty groundbreaking for the time and proved very popular with musicians who wanted to compose new tracks on the go introduced in 1989 the cleverly named Stacy was the first portable St You could argue that it was really a laptop but it featured a full keyboard midi ports high-res backlit LCD screen 2.5 inch disk drive and a mini trackball to replicate the mouse designed to operate at 12 standard C cell batteries for portability when Atari finally realized how quickly the machines range this power source they simply glued the lid of the battery compartment shut and included a power lead instead then two years later they replaced the Stacy with the St book which was far more portable than Stacy the sacrificed several features in order to achieve this most notably the backlight and internal floppy disk drive files were now meant to be stored on a one megabyte internal flash drive whilst on the road and then transferred to your studio St using a Serial cable screen on the St book was highly reflective for the time but still hard to use in doors or in low light the Stacy it was fixed to the monochrome high resolution mode but no external Video Port was provided despite the limitations and compromises it gained quite a bit of popularity amongst musicians of the day yes teams officially discontinued by Atari Corporation in 1993 they could put all their focus into the new 64-bit Jaguar console for the year before it had been replaced by a successor the 32-bit Falcon which is based around a Motorola 68a30 CPU and offered up a high degree of backwards compatibility with his predecessor originally code name Sparrow the Atari Falcon was finally released in late 1992 and was the true 32-bit upgrade to the St that everyone had been waiting for the computer was also released to complete the Commodore Amica 1200 which was released at almost the same time keeping up the long-running St Amiga rivalry unfortunately this wasn't a battle that Atari would win or even put up a fight in for that matter as the Falcon was discontinued just a year after release so what went wrong then well it's impossible to give a straight answer to this as a number of different factors led to the Falcon's demise firstly there was the issue of the St by the time the Falcon arrived the St Mark it was an estate Decline and the computer was no longer being supported by many of the major software houses all Focus now switched over to the Amiga then there was a number of City decisions from Atari themselves that cost a computer and the company dearly the Falcon needed completion it was decided that the computer would be launched in Europe first where the St had been very successful but it hadn't been decided who would take control of this Atari UK or Atari Germany the two leading markets in this region Atari UK put a case across the Falcon should be marketed in the same way as the St as a great all-round computer that was equally Adept at playing games as it wasn't performing more serious applications however in Germany the St had been mainly marketed as a business computer with games very much taking a back seat and their office wanted to market the Falcon in the same way Atari didn't have the budget to support both causes so a decision had to be made Avenge the Atari Germany won out the computer was launched over there first with a far more muted UK launch happening just after and a distinct lack of fanfare to go with it atari's stupid decision pretty much alienated all the UK software Publishers who were interested in making games for the Falcon the only title to arrive on the market were from Atari themselves and even those were in short supply the moment the Jaguar was officially announced Atari fans knew that this was where the company saw its future and that didn't really go as bad either but that's the story for another video the greatest shame is the cancellation of the Falcon meant a number of hugely exciting projects with an Atari were also dropped including the 040 micro box and painter a powerful Falcon Jaguar Hybrid won't go into more detail on these here as I recently did a video looking at both as well as a number of other consult Atari systems which I'll link in the description foreign following atari's departure from the computer Market several companies tried to fill the Gap by creating their own toss compatible machines based on both the St and Falcon but none of them were particularly successful sadly first we have the fire B and Atari stt clone based on the cold fire processor released in May 2012 the Atari cold fire project was started by a team of keen volunteers and hobbyists who wanted to create a modern St computer clone with all the advantages of Windows PC their own website which I've Linked In the description describes it best 5B is a new Atari compatible computer Ataris and Atari clones are special computers with their own hardware and software Beyond PCS Macs nor Amiga compatible a Firebase is similar to Atari Falcon and works very much like that it will run most of the Atari compatible software that would run on a falcon 2. different to older Ataris and their clones the 4B is a model computer that supports almost everything you'd expect from today's machine five USB ports ethernet dvii monitor connection SD card reader and more the firebee neither wishes to nor can bear the Atari name says the former company hasn't existed since 1996 and its name was sold to a computer game company and is a registered trademark already the 90s brought Atari claims like the Hades and the Milan but there was no new hardware since 1997 so there was a demand for new Atari claim with modern features the second part of her statement mentions both the Hades and Milan I suppose I should mention them next created by Medusa computer systems and Milan computers respectively the 68040 base Milan and 68060 based Hades are both considerably more powerful than the 68030 base TT and Falcon these machines support Isa and PCI buses which make use of network and graphics cards designed for the PC possible some thinknote original Atari machine could do and these machines also support Tower cases making it possible to use internal CD drives there's also the GE soft Eagle a 32 megahertz Atari TT clone that offers up a number of improvements on the machine it's based on including the 30 speed boost extra video modes more memory and far more expansion slots these are now very rare and hard to find notes must mention the Sea Lab Falcon 2. it wasn't actually a clone as such being an officially produced version of this 32-bit Atari computer after the Falcon is discontinued in 1993 c-lab license is designed from Atari and released a series of new upgraded machines aimed specifically at the music industry this began with the c-lab Falcon Mark 1 which is identical to Taurus Falcon except for slight modifications to the audio circuitry the Mark II added an internal 500 megabyte SCSI hard disk and further models added a desktop case design foreign hey you know that computer you're thinking of buying the Atari St has more power more features and costs less and for a limited time only when you buy an Atari 520 St you can get The Sensational Atari power pack 24 fantastic programs worth hundreds of dollars including first word which immediately turns your St into a powerful word processor plus stacks of exciting arcade quality games like Double Dragon all for only 14.99 now that's a power packed advantage and now on time I look at 10 amazing Atari St facts for each one of these fabulous facts was your favorite or can you think of any tantalizing tip is the trivia that I didn't include we all love to hear the thoughts and views from my audience so please get typing in that comment section before I go though I must thank all of my little patrons who continue to support my channel and make videos like this possible but if I must give special thanks to the following patrons and YouTube hackers in particular they're much appreciated Pages Grady Haynes Mitchell Valentino Sethi Robinson Carl Olson plus gamer Man Sonic Mania 999 Paul Daniel Andrew McKay retro resolution at Standish James Taylor trogged all the bird atator eight Bitcoin Luke MC and Electro star collapse if you also want to help support all more creative Endeavors including this YouTube channel then please go and check out my patreon right now you can get access to content including downloads exclusive videos creative insights and much more besides I've been the lead and thank you for watching and I'll see you all again for another video very soon

Channel: The Laird's Lair

Views: 45,463

Keywords: Atari ST, Atari Falcon, Mega ST, 16-bit, Jack Tramiel, Atari, STe, C-Lab Falcon, Firebee, Medusa, Motorola, GE-Soft, Milan, Shiraz Shivji, STacy, ST Book, Utah Saints, Fatboy Slim, Home Computer, Aphex Twin, 808 State, GEM, TOS, Sister Bliss, PC Ditto, Disk, Amiga, Commodore, Spectre GCR, Darryl Still, Apple Mac, PC, IBM, Commercial, Advert, Magazine, Scan, Windows, Top of the Pops, Power Pack, First Word, Cubase, MIDI, Notator, Painter, Microbox, Atari TT, 030, AT Speed, Digital Research, 68000

Id: xn24UqSos4A

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023