oky2000
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Posts posted by oky2000
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Does anybody know what was the last generation of colour inkjet/laser printers that could be used with an Atari ST?
I remember when I borrowed a printer from school in the summer I used the screen dump facility and it just worked, probably after setting some dip switches too, but that was a 9 pin dot matrix and monochrome (Epson FX-80 I think).
Inkjet printers came more in the era of the Falcon I think from memory.
(of course I could transfer them from disk onto a PC, convert them to BMP etc and then print them no problem but that means I have to use a PC.....so less of an authentic experience for fun).
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Bionic Commando video - They look like ST graphics and STFM push scrolling to me. Looks nothing like the arcade so next time don't bother.
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Michael Current has been researching the history of Atari, in particular using old industry periodicals and newspapers. It's not complete, but he has numbers for several years. http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/wci_games.html
In 1977, Atari sold around 340,000 VCS units (and had total console sales of around 850,000, if you include their dedicated consoles with the VCS numbers).
In 1978, Atari sold 800,000 VCS units (but still had 200,000 unsold).
In 1982, Atari sold approximately 12 million VCS units.
It's not on his timeline but I've read elsewhere that Atari Corp sold over 1 million VCS units in 1985.
By 1988, Atari Corp. announced over 25 million VCS units had been sold.
As far as specifically overseas numbers: In 1981 Atari announced that it had sold around 800,000 VCS units overseas, which would include Europe.
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Figures for 78 mean they shipped 800,000 to stores and distributors and 200,000 in stores were still unsold? That's how all console sales are handled by Sony and MS these days, units shipped is what people on the payroll always quote to the press.
I seem to have jumped on the VIC-20 and C64 home computer bandwagon in 1982 just when the Atari VCS was going crazy, mostly because I wanted to code my own games. No doubt due to Atari's excellent eye for arcade titles to licence. Even to this day I prefer VCS invaders to playing it on MAME....except with a Zipstik or Competition Pro 5000
If the magazines are archived it's incredible what you can find looking through things. I remember reading Commodore UK telling a magazine that in the USA in 1983 or 1984 it had something like 45% of the sub $1000 computer market and by 1983 the VIC-20 and C64 had exceeded total sales of the prolific Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum computers (Timex in the USA) despite people in the UK remembering 'facts' that the C64 didn't overtake the Spectrum in sales or market share until the late eighties had arrived.
edit: Wikipedia 2600 page has some comments about 2600 console sales for 1979(1 million), 1980(2 million), 1981(4 billion). They do not cite sources for these figures however. Still an interesting read and it would appear within a couple of years of Space Invaders 2600 we went from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions at the peak before the video game crash in NA.
Wikipedia Space Invaders page also mentions that VCS Space Invaders sold approx 2 million units in its first year on sale. "It sold over two million units in its first year on sale as a home console game,[43] making it the first title to sell a million cartridges."
(I know from memory VCS Pac-man sold approx 7 million in total but not how many in the year of release).
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Given the multiple changes in corporate ownership and structure, I would be surprised if any corporate records still exist from the 1970s -- barring something donated to a public repository a few random bits held by private collectors. You might try reviewing old published annual reports; those would be more accessible than original sales records.
That said, I highly doubt that you will be able to find solid numbers (rather than best-guess estimates). Some years ago, I reviewed the business press in the mid-1980s for a series of articles on the video game industry, and the best data that I found were gross annual sales figures, and some comments about the relative market share of the major players. Given the competitive nature of the market, companies were unwilling to publicly release much information.
I was really just looking for a trend, approximate figures would be fine even for just the few years before VCS Space Invaders came out and a few years after (for PAL regions that was fall of 1980 right?).
I got my VCS a month before Space Invaders came out and it was the first game I saved up for after saving my pocket money for 6 months to get a VCS (much to the annoyance of my Mum when she heard the games were 30 quid lol).
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Great to see this is still alive after all these years. I found this again after checking out an awesome tech demo of Wolfenstein for 7mhz Amigas at a similar sort of stage.
Wolfenstein is quite an underwhelming game on the Jaguar, there are more impressive Wolf style games that run in HAM mode on a £300 Amiga 1200 already so clearly that is not exactly pushing the Jag. Also, said HAM based FPS is more impressive than Wolf on a £1000 386DX VGA high street DOS PC families were buying in the mid 90s.
In fact Doom and Wolf are only average games anyway and championed by losers, probably the fathers of the losers who constantly champion Super Mario Bros NES as best game in history (another average game with crap music). "DOSwankers" go on and on about them but I never played it yearly for decades and yet I could name 100+ 8bit and 16bit computer games, let alone console games, I wouldn't mind playing right now. I play Lotus II challenge on ST/Amiga all the time and Lotus III on Amiga 1200. The music on Doom and Wolf is also rubbish (because every bit of music on PC is crap and inferior to even the 1985 Amiga 1000 before Windows could handle unlimited DAC based streamed sound from an API)
That was exactly my point, I mean if it'd come out around the same time as the Jag port, there would have been a lot of "wait... if the 8bit can do this... why is the Jag not so much more awesome? Actually the most amazing thing beside Project-M I've seen is the 60fps video playback. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/211689-60-fps-video-using-side-2/?hl=video player
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A different style of wood grain for the stickyback plastic add-on styling kit than the original VCS perhaps?
is it a fifth light?
no, that'd be too technical.
must be a different colored shell. Taco skin?
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That's why I mentioned magazines in the UK. Surely a huge company like Atari had their own sales records for annual units shipped and these are not lost. I tried a couple of links given in the past here but none worked so I don't know if people had yearly sales figures in graphs comparing various consoles/micros of the period.
I could ring up Nolan Bushnell, he's still around and that's all that matters when it comes to all things Atari
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Can't say I have any interest in it. Atari was Nolan Bushnell, and Atari exclusive innovative and technically stunning games were the reason to get one. Neither of these things are present.
I would rather spend my money on a laser projector and play Vector Based arcade games on a huge projected image than have some case design I don't like housing some weak PC based hardware to play inferior games of this century thanks
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I was wondering if anyone had a source of data for the worldwide or US yearly sales figures of the VCS before Space Invaders was released on the system (but still had Combat pack in game with the console).
I can find total sales but I am interested in yearly sales, which seem to be available in various magazines of the time for my homeland of the UK for popular home computers at the time, some even had monthly sales of the 4 most popular micros for a while.
VCS magazines only went as far as charts and some news snippets for new consoles/accessories/expansions as far as hardware goes.
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They are not MISSING then.
Shame Atarilegend got buggered into the useless site it is now without downloads then isn't it.
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Somewhat dull, but interesting. Jack seems very matter-of-fact. Wish he would've emphasized the ST's advantages a bit more.
The host emphasised it enough at the opening credits where he tells us the Mac should prepare to do battle AKA get ass-raped by the $800 ST with colour AKA the Macbasher/Jackintosh lol.
Also it is important to remember JT jetted into London the same day and was off to the airport or another press related duty in the UK. Did Commodore top brass or that little Golem Irving Gould ever come on any UK show at all to explain their piss poor 11 month delay for a PAL Amiga 1000 release? nope. In 1986 Micro Live were STILL using an NTSC Amiga 1000 in 1986 to demonstrate Marble Madness lol.
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Of all the things that REALLY held back purchasers of the ST in the mid 80s it was the sound chip. Yes you can all hate me for it but the simple fact is even Amstrad/Sinclair owners didn't like their sound chips. Had the C64 not been such a great seller by the time of the 520stm+sf354 pack in spring 1986 release it would have sold much better. Actually the two things that REALLY aged the ST artificially was hideous borders around the screen and that horrible sound chip. Yes genius coders did produce the Beat Dis demo for the ST and it sounds fantastic but genius coders were a rare species.
However Atari could have fixed this problem overnight, they could have used the cartridge port for something and put a decent soundchip on a cart (samplers on cartridge had built in DACs so clearly possible) or made a VERY cheap midi sound module (although this means like PC Dos gamers with Roland MT-32 means no sfx worth a crap for gaming).
They chose to do neither, Commodore eventually bumbled into the idea of a cheaper Amiga (the hideous A500) and that was the end of the future of the ST really, especially once teenagers had seen some HAM porn images on disk lol. Shame because the ST is a really nice home computer but having a C64 style border around the image and a Sinclair/Timex sound chip instantly dated a very powerful home computer. They should have left out the side borders at least and done something useful with the midi ports/cartridge ports to help the creative/gaming purchaser.
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We all know what digital screen captures from emulator output looks like vs real hardware and yet when you see games where the output is clearly taken from an emulator like Animal Kingdom and Rogue II why are the download files labelled as missing. Missing from what? Their own personal USB thumb drives?
The screen shots are both taken from emulators so that is utter bullshit. Where are your files mate?
If you had to remove them because some lawyer with a small cock and terrible smell affliction asked you to then say so. Don't tell me games YOU ran on an emulator to make the screenshots has magically vanished. If it was brown trousers time when lawyers got in touch then bloody say so.
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Wrong again. The American public and their tiny unimaginative minds abandoned Atari and Commodore in favour of INFERIOR PC/Mac/NES rubbish long before Commodore and Atari gave up on them. In fact for the people at Atari and Commodore USA territory it must have been a serious case In the Mouth of Madness LOL
They concentrated on EU and AU because those were the only countries where the population wasn't interested in backwards overpriced crap like Mac/PC/NES for their homes....then again if you look at the kind of cars and music yanks were making the ST and Amiga 1000 were too good for them obviously
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Despite this ad being the other way round, generally Sega were too aggressive in their Saturn advertising vs the genuinely quite well made Sony adverts like the iconic Formula 1 game advert, which ultimately hampered their market penetration. Not having the 3D Sonic and Ecco games finished didn't help either. Either aggressive or leave you with a sense of puzzlement 'and your point is?' kind of situation. I owned both at the time well before PS2/Dreamcast wars came along so I noticed it without bias as I liked both consoles I had bought equally and purchased games for both at the same time.
This aggression was fine against the SNES vs Megadrive but Sony was already a cool brand (as an older teen you would know this from electronic goods purchased/experienced from this high quality brand) and the Playstation had no technical hurdles compared to Saturn in the 3D department.
Dreamcast was fine if a little early to the internet gaming world due to most of it using 56k modems at best for internet access, but crucially did not have DVD playback built in. SEGA could never have known that the world was desperate to buy into DVD movie playback devices due to how horrible commercially sold VHS copies of movies were on even £1000+ VCRs. Sony got REALLY lucky with the PS2 as many just ended up being the only commercially viable choice in the early years as consumers who wanted second generation 3D consoles ALSO wanted a new DVD player as well to watch movies on.
However before you scream that's unfair, and it is, it is no different in life for animals all over the world. Your health declines and then bad luck finishes you off (leg injury that summer, tiger by the water hole is closest to you).
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Possibly the last ever copy of that game around, possibly now lost forever after the death of some old man who bought it passed away.
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Sadly a case of you need a perfectly working original and an engineers workshop and all the schematic specs (like Ben Heck had when he fixed one on his YT channel) to produce a replica of the custom IC. The rest of it is perfectly possible to recreate and repair but just like with a Commodore PET with a dead CRTC IC you are screwed if that one component doesn't work.
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The timing is so specific on Amiga that PAL games seem to have more problems running at 60hz (which is a pseudo kludge thanks to the fatter Agnus of 1mb chip ram Amigas and not quite as reliable as the 50/60hz program the ST used in my experience) however if you had got an Amiga 600 or 1200 there is an easier way to put the machine into 50 or 60hz mode (still NTSC video output in either case). Oh and of course in PAL mode the Amiga does 320x256 (basically removing bottom border you would see) but the NTSC machines can not open this screen mode and so would crash the machine if it need to open a 320x256 rez screen I guess as 320x200 is max for NTSC lo-res. The ST is always 320x200 whatever the TV system.
Of course OP has made a choice already and if you have an NTSC Amiga 500 the first thing you should do is load up Lotus Turbo Challenge II and revel in amazement at how this 1985 chipset is just drilling the SNES a new poop shoot and double the speed and smoothness of Outrun on the Megadrive
There is also a specific version of Shadow of the Beast that still works at 60hz, the others don't work properly....however if you don't like 2.5D games like Outrun or Rastan Saga arcade games and prefer solid 3D filled polygon games all but one (Elite) will be slower on the Amiga.Also, if you can, grab a Gotek USB drive or similar which is the best way to run thousands of single loading games from the TOSEC on real hardware, just the other day I was playing a fixed version of Lotus III for A1200 which is as fast and smooth as the CD32 or PC version.
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Maybe the story of cost reduced motherboard was to cover their asses like you say if they found a cache of old STFMs which are very difficult to get to 1mb? I dunno but today I am picking up a huge stash of New Computer Express weekly magazines from that era so will see if anything around that time is in the lot and if they have anything about.
Atari made many claims to mags, like the Atari all in one Amstrad PCW8256 competitor that apparently existed but nobody ever saw either.
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The motherboard they mention may not have been manufactured but the £159 price was in all the adverts even half a year later so they must have been sold (bugger all free software though unlike the STE bundles).
At this time the STE was £250 but STE was not selling as very few games made effective use of STE enhancements unlike Amiga 600, which let's face it is essentially a culmination of the cost reducing of Amiga 1000 to 500 and features of 500Plus incorporated so this STFM I guess is Atari's version of that (A500plus chipset is a useless pile of rubbish unless you need 4 fixed colours at 1280x256 resolution doh!).
Interestingly the A300, project which became the A600, was meant to end up at £199 by 1992/93 to directly compete with SNES/Megadrive sales by tugging on the concerns of EU parents but still having some awesome games graphically and sonically to shut the brats up. At just £10 more than a SNES/MD for some parents it was worth considering in the EU, school Computer Science classes did not turn into MS Windows/Office training camps until this century. Also, copied games on disk are easy to get in playgrounds all over the land so I guess once your mate gets an ST and some awesome cracked games for the price of a chocolate bar you wouldn't feel too bad....you can save the money you would have spent on 5 full price ST games and buy a SNES/MD later anyway. Oh and Atari probably thought screw the software houses that never bothered to support the STE/Falcon if THEY don't make any money out of cost reduced 520STFM sales to new owners
I think the XEGS analogy is right in the sense you have the tech but need to get it out to a new market but at half the price of the competition this ST is probably really trying to do more like the Megadrive/SMS licensed consoles of Tectoy produced in Brazil STILL in production today ie open up the market to a new market segment untapped who can't afford the prices of latest tech (Xbox One currently the thing there so they do get current gen tech). Also the XEGS was financially viable only as Atari inherited massive stocks of A8 cartridge software (and they were cheaper to make than larger capacity NES carts I guess too) but there is no extra profit for Atari from additional software sales to back it up in this case.
(Basically what happened in Brazil would be like going into a shop today and being able to buy an Amiga or STE for £99 or less ie a third of the price of a Wii U/Xbox/PS4 slim etc TODAY and production of said machines had never stopped from 1985 until today).
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I have no factual idea why it was not so prominent on the XL series but not having a fuji logo to a computer clearly aimed at competing with home gaming computer (you don't need most powerful sprites or expensive analog phase accumulating synth chips inside a business or even hobbyist home computer) like the C64 would only make sense from an industry that had abandoned arcade and home video game console markets all together by the start of the mid 80s. The truth is after the crash the PC was pushed as being the only respectable choice to invest in, something that could do more than games. Anything with the Atari logo would naturally be seen as a toy from the VCS ERA (which caused said crash in the eyes of many a fool btw)
Putting it back on the ST was probably a mistake too as despite the fact you would have to be an absolute fucking clueless twat to get anything other than an Amiga 1000 instead of a 520ST when choosing a new 16bit home computer (ie the dumb asses paying $5000 for PC XT or 128k Mac mono rubbish) hurt the machine a lot because very early on there was KUMA/GST software far more usable compared to anything on even Windows let alone DOS as far as small business/home office use and the Mac only had the Lotus/M$ office software initially too.The ST business software was 1000% cheaper doh! We all know it wasn't sales of A1000s to artistic businesses that stole sales of the ST in the USA.....and yet the ST made minimal impact at $799??!? Has to be down to the name Atari and the logo....bad memories of an era dominated by gaming crash. IMO
Nobody in the US computer industry wanted to be part of the Atari VCS invented video games market crash, well that's how investors in suits and fathers purchasing for the family perceived the problem of Atari I guess after the crash.
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As it says on the title, surely this C64 port is nearly finished for 800XLs now?
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SotB ran on a PAL 512k Amiga 1000 or 500 low end spec so it makes sense it was 512k for ST. Sure the FM could do with more RAM for more pre-calc'd stuff for a better engine but few people had bought a 520 and upgraded it before the SIMM socket equipped STEs. SotB Amiga is the same as Rescue on Fractalus on Atari 800, there is no way it will be better on any other system but even so the ST version was not coded by a genius for sure and falls way short of the coding skill employed by Martin Edmondson's Amiga dev team but even so it is a game engine designed around the advantages and disadvantages of the PAL Amiga 500/1000 chipset.
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I have a Romantic Robot cartridge and FAST ST BASIC and at the time even my first sampler for an original 520ST was for the cartridge port too (although Clarity 16 appears to have a serial port connector from what little Google images showed me but maybe that is the Amiga version I am seeing in the results as I was sure it was a cartridge device for the ST).
But yeah it was not meant as a games machine and so the cartridge port is more akin to the thinking behind the Commodore 264/VIC-20 range where there were all sorts of project type cartridges to control things not like the NES or 2600 which is ALL cartridge and all of them are games software (2600 ROMSCANNER, Keyboad BASIC cart combo and Starpath etc excluded).
Games on cartridge was such a dumb idea (which yanks didn't agree with of course going potty over the NES in the mid 80s to early 90s) because realistically due to cost they would all be less in size than the total free ram of a single loading 520ST game anyway and the ST disk drive is not that slow as to go out and buy $60 games on cartridge like the people who bought an NES and ended up paying more than a brand new Amiga 1000 + 30 new games over the ownership of a machine (!!) And, of course, the NES is not even the best 8 bit system ever made...that would be SMS, Gamegear, CPC+/GX4000 or PC-Engine or even the 256 colour SAM Coupe Spectrum compatible machine. The NES looks and sounds like a doorbell
The Amiga doesn't have a cartridge port really but the side expansion Zorro slot of the A1000/500 I guess is the same sort of thing more or less in terms of getting data into the machine but sod all except memory or hard drive interfaces were ever made for the Zorro 1 side expansion slot. Memory was too expensive to make even 256kb carts let alone games the size of Dungeon Master for the 512k BUT not having a cartridge port really knackered low end stuff like digitizers and samplers using the serial port or even parallel port on the Amiga.
The Atari ST really was suited to the BBC Micro upgraders (as opposed to people who ONLY played games on their C64 or ZX Rectum, really nice all round home computer that's a lot less annoying to use than windows 10 today even if you had to the the 4 inch drop trick to reseat the GEM ROMs lol (45 minutes from first power on to being able to use my brand new expensive Wintel box, ST seconds...Amiga 2000 with booting Hard disk card 20 seconds).
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Printing 16 colour Neochrome pictures from a real Atari ST today?
in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers
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...or Windows as I said. I found a website about a software company that wrote their own drivers after pestering Atari for ages for printer driver developer files to make them. It would be easier to write a AAA game for the ST from what I gather