Lynxpro

Wouldn't that be slower than an UltraSatan - and similar devices - since the floppy emulator hardware is connected via the floppy port instead of ACSI/SCSI?

If I recall, the Mac Plus had a HD option and that was at the same time the 1040ST was released in 1986. Not sure what you mean, the 800 *was* the high end model. That was the specific plan behind moving the 400 from a game console to a low end "intro computer" for gaming, positioning the 800 as the high end serious offering. I was alluding to the 1200 that never was released.

What about ST-SCART cable to a SCART-to-HDMI cable adapter? A lot of HDTVs supposedly have built-in upscaling so has anyone tried that? So Atari Age is allowing members to promote warez sites now? All of the games that I recognize from that klapauzius site were commercial releases and still under copyright protection. You're breaking the law if you download from them. It doesn't matter if they are modified from their original form or not. Let's all not get into a shouting match over this. Save that bile for those cursed Commodore fans. [just kidding] If I do recall correctly, there were some laws recently passed concerning copyright and abandonware and I'm sure most of us can agree that the vast majority of commercial software for the ST/STe/TT/Falcon out [probably 99.5% at this point] qualifies as abandonware status. The only people buying old software these days are the completist box collectors. It's not like the fight against piracy that was so important back when the Atari platform was still alive and we were all being scapegoated by the software publishing industry [both the 8bits and 16bit Atari lines] all the while the other platforms had far more rampant piracy going on... But I digress, can the daggers be put away now? Thanks... I'm personally interested in any info on any games that were later patched to work on the STe/TT/Falcon and/or with 68881/2 co-processor upgrades, video card upgrades, RAM upgrades, or CPU upgrades... I'm also curious - if the source code is available - if Amiga graphics/sound coding could be swapped into some of those games to run better on the Falcons out there...

They could've started out with 5MB or 10MB... ANY hard drive cost about that much, back then. That's why so many computers did not have one, and anybody who is old enough to have paid for their own computer in 1985 knows this well. The 20MB for $700 simply replaced the 10MB for $700-ish. If the ST had launched with a hard drive, it would have failed because nobody could afford it - which was its greatest strength. Did the Mac 128K/512K come with a hard drive? Did the Amiga? No, and No. They could've offered a "high end" ST [like the Mega ST later on] at launch time or at least when the 1040ST debuted the following year. Heck, they could've just made it $700 more and pocketed the added profit considering an internal drive wouldn't need a separate case, power supply, and other items that the external options would. Of course, not offering a "higher end" model at launch was also a mistake going back to the original release of the 400/800 series as well...

They could've started out with 5MB or 10MB...

Great points... I don't know if I agree with that. Had Atari Corp purchased a semiconductor company instead of say the Federated Group, Atari Corp could've had a secure base for custom silicon like the Mega ST's Blitter chip which suffered manufacturing issues when GE failed to produce them on time and in sufficient quantities. Right after the 1040ST came out, Atari Corp was basically promising that the initial ST owners would get a chance to buy a Blitter upgrade once the chip was available but that kept getting pushed back which each delay and thus it only ended up in the Mega line due to the shortage [and later the STes...] WDC was a fabless design company back then if I recall. The manufacturing fundamentals for outsourcing everything only came into effect when the whole computer business shifted to a commodity market for the components and that was in the mid 90s. PC cloners like Compaq progressively became less "proprietary" with their internal components because of that by the time of the late 90s. NATCO could've been Microsoft and Nintendo rolled up into one... The other thing that doomed the ST was real expansion capabilities. Even when the MegaST came out, I cannot recall the stackable external expansion bus ever making it to market. It would've stacked under the MegaST along with the MegaFile so we would've witnessed the proto-Mac Mini concept back then in 1987. And then they repeated the same mess with VME expansion on the MegaSTe and the TT. Why they picked Motorola's favored VME "standard" when Apple and Commodore didn't will always be a mystery. Oh, and the cartridge port was very business-perception unfriendly... I thought Borland did release software for the ST... Ah, the CDAR. Yet another point to gripe at from an old ST owner. That thing again was promised to us back in 1985 but apparently was only made available to OEMs back then that included auto mechanic shops that had catalogs of parts on CDs back then.

Apple removed it because the author failed to inform them that Commodore BASIC was enabled which violated the App Store rules... I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't have an issue with it either since Commodore BASIC is actually Microsoft BASIC...

I bought one. Old Navy claims it is exclusive but a t-shirt vendor at WonderCon earlier in the year had similar offerings... Probably used internally at the company. I saw another variation on an arcade machine that had "Los Gatos" written under the iconic Atari logo. I wish the current Atari Inc. would buy out the rights to the various "Atari Games" logos from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment so they could go on merchandise.

No, I'd say that's a fair statement. Other than being an Atari fan, I don't have a horse in the race because I never had an A8 growing up in the 80s. I had my 2600, 7800, and my 1040ST. But I knew people with A8s and I used Apple //es at school. I said the Apple // line had superior expansion capabilities. As such, it was easier to upgrade the RAM and the display to 80 columns, and the later edition of the //e had a numeric pad, but in every other regard I can't see it being superior to A8 at all. The Apple // 6502 was slower, the graphics and sound capabilities weaker [not counting the //gs], etc. So if I'm missing anything, let me know... Oh, and Applesoft Basic was Microsoft BASIC, but some might consider that actually a handicap....

That's pretty impressive, DarkLord. Does anyone have an UltraSatan mounted in a modded SF354 or 314 case?

Mr. Dyer, if I/we haven't thanked you for participating here already, thanks! I've enjoyed reading your postings on here as well as on your own website. And definitely thanks for your work on the ST...that was the computer I grew up with! [1040STf] You know, I was just [re] thinking about this topic this morning. Since both companies no longer exist, I can't really see how Jack Tramiel could sue for breach of a confidentiality agreement on a settled lawsuit from 1984-87. The "assets" of Atari Corp. belong to "Atari Inc." today so I'd think they'd be the only group that could actually file. And on the Commodore/Amiga side of the settlement, they too have exchanged probably far too many hands to have grounds to file either. That's like a million times less standing in court than what fake-SCO had going into their Linux lawsuit case against IBM a decade ago. But even with the threat of a frivilous (sic) lawsuit one has to pay - in either time, money, or both - in order to defend themselves so I guess that's motivation enough to stay silent about this old lawsuit, not to mention the other ex-Atari Inc. employees who took their work home with them following the TTL "takeover". What a shame. I really hate when technology and knowledge is suppressed either in cases like this or as the result of more sinister endeavors. And what I still cannot fathom going back to the Atari Corp/Digital Research Project Monterrey Days was the apparent fact that ex-Atari employees then working for DRI never mentioned casually that they had developed far more powerful systems back at Atari Inc. than what the ST was meant to end up at. Maybe they stayed quiet laughing to themselves about how the Tramiels were paying them for their development work while unbeknownst to them they could've used previously created designs [assuming they'd be cost effective going into 1985]. Or maybe some of the elements of the Atari SnowCap GUI ended up in DRI's Crystal/GEM and we just don't know it to this day... Just speculation on my part there... This is something else I don't get about his psychology and motivations. He wasn't born in the US so I don't understand why he felt he personified the entire American computer industry. I understand he did feel a great debt to the US for defeating the Nazis in WW2 and liberating the concentration camps - and he eventually joined the US military partly because of that - but to take offense to a perceived Japanese invasion of the domestic computer market just seems a bit odd. Commodore was no longer his concern [and Commodore was originally founded in Canada if I recall, later becoming a company with a world corporation HQ in the Bahamas]. Even going back to the calculator wars, he seemed to have more personal hatred held for Texas Instruments than for any Japanese competitor. And it couldn't have been racism either [or personal anger for Japan having been part of the Axis in WW2] since he greatly admired [autocratic] Japanese business practices [and vertical integration too]. Maybe he saw himself as a shogun or something. I guess that really wouldn't be all that weird for a technology CEO since Larry Ellison [reportedly] likes to think of himself as a samurai...

True in almost all regards but the Mac platform is still deficient compared to Windows for gaming but that's mainly because Apple stubbornly refuses to offer reasonably priced mini-tower Mac that would allow for easy video card expansion. Instead, Apple sells the Mac Mini that doesn't appeal to PC "gamers" for that very reason. If Apple were to do this, they'd gain more gamers to the platform but Apple would never do this because they believe it would cannibalize the sales of both the Mac Mini and the iMac despite the fact that neither of those lines appeal to PC gamers. If Jobs were still alive, he'd dismiss the whole point since he'd say PC gaming is in decline anyway... Personally, I'd much rather have a modern version of the end-of-life PowerMac G4 series than a modern iMac. It would certainly compel Nvidia and AMD to write better OS X video card drivers. Perhaps this will be revisited now that Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs looking over his shoulder before making business decisions...

Ain't that the truth. You can run Microsoft Office 2008 on a MacBook Core2Duo with 1GB of RAM and OS X 10.6 decently but you'd be a fool to try to run Office 2007 on a similarly equipped PC with Windows XP SP3 on anything less than 2GB of RAM, if not more. Isn't that an unfair fight since the Apple II line is inferior to the A8 line in every way except for standard expansion options?

Therealbountybob, Is that a Breakout wallet? I got an Atari Fuji leather wallet at WonderCon earlier this year...

And in my opinion, this is what the Amiga [or ST] OS platform needs to do today [err, a decade ago]. Bring out their own FreeBSD-based OS [or their own port of Darwin] which rings true to the originals but is actually "modern", not to mention easy to port software from iOS/Mac OS X to it...as well as software ported from Linux and the other BSDs to it too. And ARM-based. I actually switched to PCs [first] because circa 96, it looked like Apple was going to take a dirt nap [not to mention I felt MacOS was inferior until OS X] and I didn't want to "jump from a burning platform" to another "burning platform" in the words of Nokia CEO - and proxy Microsoft executive - Stephen Flop. I switched after my first WinXP desktop died with SP2... Had HP been smart, they would've switched to EFI on their PCs with webOS built in. But alas, Mark Hurd was fired. I'm sure Apple will be the first to jump to ARM for desktops/laptops after the 64-bit versions debut. But I digress...back to the regularly scheduled broadcast...

Don't give them too much credit. Had Warner not been able to sell off Atari Inc. remnants to the Tramiels, Steve Ross probably would've re-entered negotiations with Philips. Those talks had broken down previously because Philips wanted 100% of Atari and Steve Ross didn't want to part with the whole shebang...more like he wanted someone else to revive the company and then buy it back cheaply thereafter.

And it's money McEwan isn't getting his hands on either.

Probably. I thought they had worked on a simple ST [non e version] with it though. I'm probably wrong though...

Right, but if Atari Inc. only owned the license [royalty free] for Mickey as a console based system [but with the ability to negotiate to use it the following year in a computer] then again they could've faced Commodore [or other competitors] bringing out systems based upon the Amiga chipset. It would basically be a repeat of the 8-bit wars that Atari Inc. could've avoided had they simply listened to Al Alcorn about the need to acquire MOS before anyone else did [sure, that wouldn't have stopped so-called "second source" deals although at the time, Synertec was probably the only second source deal for the 6502, but I digress]. Or a better analogy would be the whole fiasco with "Donkey Kong" where Atari Inc. had the exclusive home computer rights to the game but Coleco had the console rights in comparison to most of the other home rights to other arcade games Atari Inc. tried [and mainly succeeded at] gaining full exclusive rights [console and computer]. Obviously landing an exclusive to the Amiga chipset would've been preferable to only owning certain rights and then having to compete with Commodore, Apple [yes, Jobs didn't like Amiga but Jobs was gone shortly thereafter], Tandy, or others marketing computer wares with the same chipset. Getting Amiga Inc. in full dirt cheap and then having the option to fire everyone [except Miner, RJ, and Needle(s)] would've been primo. Or, after gobbling the company up, Atari Inc. could've just sat on the tech just as they apparently planned to do with acquiring the non-Japan world exclusive to the Nintendo Famicom... True, but apparently Gould controlled the board so that's kinda a minor technicality. A legal one though... I don't know about you, but I think surrounding myself with my own family would be at the last of my choices. My own personal opinion but he made the wrong decision with canning the MindLink system. It still smarts reading his opinion of the 7800 being a souped up 2600 although not as grating as personally listening to Sam Tramiel telling us shareholders that the JagCD would be just as successful as the Commodore 1541 disk drive [i took that he was referring to the sales figures and not the actual quality of the unit(s)] or his unabashed love for the Highlander cartoon... One is reminded of the two somewhat recent lawsuits against ex [iBM?] employees joining Apple. Ah, the joys of corporate personhood. Then again, Amiga was an incorporated entity at that time...less legal shielding than a true corporation... Either way, his actions were quasi-criminal. Definitely negligent in terms of shareholder "wealth". One wonders if any of all of that ever ended up at other companies or if those former employees are still storing all of that stuff in their garages for ***ts and giggles. Well, when Jack is gone, maybe more will come out as long as the ex-Atarians that were involved outlive him.

Irving the Ghoul Gould has been dead for several years. Jack Tramiel remains alive so long as he physically possesses the Swordquest sword of power. So who exactly would be hurt if the settlement finally became public?

Starball was frikkin' awesome! I loved that game. I could swear it played on my Falcon...it certainly played well on the 1040ST. That game needs to be converted to the iPad and/or PSN and Xbox Live Marketplace...

Anything you'd like to share! What was it like as an office tasked with having to program/convert/create games for the 2600/7800/XE/Lynx and ST? That must've been maddening. And who made the mind-numbing decision to close the office prior to the release of the Jaguar?