Lynxpro

Has anyone claimed ownership on this board of any of the STs that supposedly had 286 processor slots directly on the motherboard?

Seriously. I've been following some of the more recent developments via the English Amiga Board. The stuff that they're doing to the Amiga brand is a travesty. Although to be fair this has been going on for awhile now. McEwan [sic] is the anti-Steve Jobs of the Amiga world. That website doesn't even look up to 1994 web standards for graphics.

This is pure speculation, but I just can't see James Morgan settling for just a licensing agreement on the Amiga chipset. Had Warner retained Atari Inc./NATCO, I'd say Atari would've played hardball to land Amiga Inc. outright and prevent them from licensing the chipset to anyone else. I'm sure some Atari Inc. executive would've pointed out "hey, remember when Warner didn't allow Atari to acquire MOS after Al Alcorn recommended they do so?" Granted, as you mentioned about the speculation on the RAM size that would've been included with the Mickey, it is probably reasonable to conclude Atari would've replaced the Paula chip with the AMY chip at least for the audio responsibilities. Wow. That's amazing a single shareholder with only a 17% stake could exert so much control over a company the size of Commodore throughout the majority of its operating history. I was under the impression Gould had at least a 40% stake and Jack had 30% or less. That just goes to show any founder of a company who wishes to control it in perpetuity should always retain at least a 50.6% stake. If that's just a rumor, why did the Tramiels perpetuate it? Jack always emphasized he wanted "Atari Corp" to be a family operation [for his family] and he certainly wasn't shy about making his sons VPs of everything there. [i must concede though that Leonard seemed to be totally qualified to run the OS operations]. As for the direction of the company, there was a lot to be angry about regarding Jack's strategy. Sure, he drove out most of the competition, but he ruined the profit markets of the C64 without having a follow-up product in the pipeline. But is it true that RJ and co. were barred from working on the Amiga for several months during the lawsuit, or is that more of RJ's [and also Jay Miner too] colorful storytelling? How do executives get away with that? Shouldn't Warner/NATCO/Trammel/Atari Corp. have sued David Morse directly? That's basically a corporate crime. Someone's gotta get those settlement papers leaked. Both corporate entities are "dead" so why isn't anyone coming forward with the deets?

Separately, aren't there SCART to HDMI cables? I could swear someone discussed that as a means of hooking up Jaguars to modern LCD televisions...

I doubt that . . . many of Atari Corp's own difficulties came from the sale/lliquidation itself. it caused more problems than it solved by a massive margin, and James Morgan (at least by Curt and Marty's accounts) appeared to be making major headway in cleaning up Atari into an efficient/lean company, though he still had some ways to go to cut through Warner's red tape. Granted, Warner still could have come in and screwed that all up . . . which is exactly what happened with the horribly sloppy sale to TTL. (and by extension, Tramiel lost a ton of potential resources from that mess and wasted more time/resources trying to sort through everything in the wake of that chaos) The best case would have been something like Warner spinning off Atari Inc as an autonomous affiliated company, with benefits of profits (from Atari) and funding (from Warner), but a hands-off approach allowing much more efficiency/freedom of management of Atari while also keeping Atari's debts/problems off of Warner's books. Of course, Morgan's Atari/NATCO wouldn't have been the same as Atari Corp . . . it certainly wouldn't have had the same emphasis on computers, but it may have been a far healthier and more stable company in general. (retaining the arcade division and many other resources lost in the sale -including internal software and hardware R&D talent and marketing/management personnel, and avoiding massive delays in the 7800's release and such) The ST wouldn't have been, and Atari's own 16-bit machines may not have been nearly as low-cost, but that doesn't mean they'd have been insignificant in the computer market either. (the A8 line may have ended up a bit healthier too, though much of that potential had been lost by mistakes made up through 1983) . . . Or maybe they would have caught-on to how important the low-end market was (especially in Europe) and tailored some of their new machines to aggressively target that. (and of the A8 itself, with the right marketing it may have been possible to champion the real advantages over the C64, at least in the US - with the fast floppy drive and general expansion options -both simple RAM expansion and more extensive support through the new 1090XL expansion module pushing it closer to the Apple II's expandability) Heh, that same (albeit vague) description would also describe Atari's 68000 based Unix workstation projects. (using a custom GUI on top of UNIX) Your 2 posts kind of answer each other. The Warner Atari 68000 machines would have cost more than Commodore+MOS facility building Amiga 1000 due to their complex chipsets and the fact production would be farmed out to chip manufacturers. There's no way those machines could have been sold for $549 or $749 with monitor+FD in 85. The Commodore 68000 based workstation was a much simpler design (cheaper) and Shivji would have been involved in that so it kind of fits for. It was like a 68000 based PET with bare minimum custom chips, which is pretty much what the ST is and why it is such a great business machine. I dunno about that. We all seem to be under the impression that vertical integration is a way to go when it comes to custom chip manufacturing but Atari Inc. certainly wasn't so hot on it [and even though Warner itself tried to be rather vertically integrated with their other businesses, such as not only owning record labels, but the record pressing equipment and also being involved with publishing rights, etc.]. Apple has never vertically integrated chip making but with their wads of cash seem to dictate the price they are currently willing to pay for any components now. The modern Apple method seems to be the favored approach since the adoption of just-in-time-accounting although that is advocated by service based economies and not export driven economies that actually manufacture goods. I don't think Atari Inc. ever got skrewed by DRAM prices unlike Atari Corp if you take Jack's side [retroactively] regarding his lawsuit against Micron for an alleged breach of an oral contract for specific DRAM pricing. Hey, remember when Atari Corp. discussed manufacturing the STs here in the US?

Good gawd... For those who think the current Atari [ahem, "Infogrames", so to speak] is continuing to ruin the "Atari" brand, it could be worse. Head over to amiga.com and just look at the travesty that guy is committing against that brand. $98 junk Android tablets with the Amiga name on them but without, like, a classic Amiga emulator all while certain older games for the classic Amiga are being ported to iOS? Why won't that guy just sell the rights to the Amiga name and get out of the way instead of continuing to drive it into the ground? I mean, sheesh...at least the Tramiels unloaded the "Atari" brand and disassociated themselves from the "company's" legacy. If Amiga could only be so lucky.

I wonder if something to be able to access the internet would be possible, then someone could write a multiplayer shooter for the 5200! Halo 5200

Has anyone ever added a heatsink to the Maria chip? Yeah, I know, not exactly a big time mod but I thought I'd ask if that was ever successful at reducing the temperature of the console...

No, that's old information from Curt's site. Those were part of the 68000 research that Atari Inc. had been working on. The Amiga license was for a console (Mickey) that would later be allowed to be expanded in to a computer, and a separate full computer allowed for release in 1986, as well as using the chipsets in coin. The only thing being worked on at the time was Mickey however, the console. Also not right, this has been gone over before. There was never any provision to aquire Amiga, the only provision in the contract was for Atari Inc. to aquire the chipset specs from escrow royalty free should Amiga go under due to it's financial state. From day one Dave Morse made it known he intended to eventually sell Amiga and didn't want anything getting in the way. In fact there were several other groups that invested in Amiga besides Atari. Atari's contract was for licensing and royalties to Amiga only, with the initial check a sign of sincereity between both companies for signing the final licensing contract at the end of June upon the delivery of the first chip samples. In the interim the check gave Atari access to Amiga people for technical assistance during the development of the Mickey PCB and put the chip documents in escrow. Should Amiga go under because of it's shakey financial state, Atari Inc. needed someway to recoup it's investment considering the earlier investors also had stakes and would be first in line during any liquidation. So the clause let Atari gain the documents in escrow royalty free. They would be able to produce the Amiga chips without having to pay anyone. There was never any clause about taking over Amiga, that's missinformation that somehow warped out of this. Likewise, the afraid of Tramiel was just a story spun to lure an advance from Commodore. The talks for the takeover were private and didn't occur until just after Dave tried to give Atari Inc. the check in July. The talks between Dave and Commodore started in early to mid June. As was shown in the testimony, when the Atari Inc. and Amiga people (Dave and his counterpart at Atari) met at the June CES, they were both excited and looking forward to signing the final contracts. Something happened to spook Dave in the interim after, and he BS'd Commodore about Jack - most likely based on his experience when Jack visited Amiga that April while going up and down the valley looking for possible companies to fold in to TTL. But there was no public knowledge of any Jack/Atari purchase yet because it hadn't happened yet. And when it did, it was so secret that even the people at Atari Inc. itself had no idea about it, including Jim Morgan who didn't find out until he was called in to the board room to sign the papers. Warner is the one that called Jack the last minute about wanting to sell, which all occured during the July 4th weekend. Dave tried to give the check in on June 28th. The purchase was never about aquiring talent, Jack already had his team of ex-Commodore people. In fact most of the engineering talent never made it over to Atari Corp. or were put to work in areas other than their talent (the one person left from the Mickey team was actually put to work running the mainframe). Atari Inc.'s Consumer Division was bought purely for it's established manufacturing and distribution network which Jack wanted to leverage for distribution his new computer. It was a bonus that it also included the consumer video game properties and backstock, which Jack would use to keep the new company afloat while development of RBP finished. I certainly agree on NATCO, though the 1850XL and XLD had already been cancelled. As far as the 7800, the big question comes to mind as to what would have been done with Mickey if it came out. Either they'd have to cancel the 7800 or place it as the high end console with the 7800 being mid and 2600jr being low end. Similar to what Jack tried to do with the XEGS/7800/Jr combination. As far as what would have happened with TTL, it's hard to say. But your scenerio is most likely right, as without all those resources he would have had to find someone else to buy in to for manufacturing and distribution and find investors to boot. With the Atari Inc. Consumer Division purchase, Warner was in effect the major investor in his company. Thanks for clearing that up. I was under the impression that Amiga's early investors [the dentists, for example] had already been taken care of [i.e. had their stake re-purchased] but I guess not. I shudder to think how much the Mickey console would've cost back then considering talk of it [or at least when Commodore later toyed with the idea] of having 128k standard for its RAM in 1984/85. Granted, Atari Inc. was rather stingy with console RAM considering the 5200 probably should've had 32k [and not 16k] and, well, the 7800 should've had even more than that [iMHO].

CT63? What's that? I've totally lost track...

I'd love to hear more about your 060 upgrade to your Falcon. I'm assuming you've taken the Falcon mobo out and installed it in a case like the Wizztronics model, right? Or did you take the floppy and HDD out to make room for the upgrade and a possible SD reader? I'm not looking forward to salvaging my Falcon out of storage and doing the surgery to remove the battery and all...

Atari was going to release the 1850XL and 1850XLD which were Amigas had Atari acquired Amiga Inc. due to the failure of Amiga to repay its loan. Had Warner kept NATCO going, Amiga might not have panicked about ending up in the hands of Jack Tramiel and thus wouldn't have prostituted themselves to Tramiel-less Commodore. The ST wouldn't have happened and Tramel Technologies probably would've imploded because not only wouldn't they have acquired any talent from the former Atari Inc. but they wouldn't have acquired Atari's Taiwan assembly plant, distribution network, dealer network, etc. They probably would've bought some other company like Mindset and been erased from history whereas NATCO [Atari] probably would've rebounded first with the 7800 available for Christmas 1984 and all the cash coming in from that and then launching the 1850XL and XLD in 85. Hopefully they would've renamed it something else to avoid confusion with the regular 8-bit XL line.

I wish they'd pack in some paddles. Paddles are hard to find for the 2600 and I'd love to play Warlords again. Love the 2600 version of that game; didn't care for the arcade version and the 2600 version isn't included in the Xbox Live marketplace "pack"...

Rite Aid is selling the Flashback 3 this week for $29.99.

I'm close to 37 so I remember a lot of that era. I remember the PC World also had GEM but Microsoft muscled it out of the way with the inferior Windows. GEM/3 was pretty decent on a 286. Didn't Ventura Publisher on PC use GEM exclusively? As for "layering", I don't have a problem with that. It could be argued that GEM was overlayed atop GEMDOS [or CP/M 68K as the previous plan], I'm sure an Amigan would say WorkBench was layed atop AmigaDOS [although I'm probably wrong there], and of course Mac OS X is sitting atop FreeBSD. That all sounds fascinating. I'm surprised a lot of these old Atari employees didn't publicly mention to the computer press what they had worked on that got canned due to the dismantling of AtariInc. Classnet sounds like it would've been a viable competitor to AppleTalk and perhaps it would've been as capable as Ethernet if it was the same as the other networking system Atari was working on named in honor of Alan Kay you chronicled. But alas, that's one more thing the Tramiels blew it on apparently. Yep, that AppleTalk network port really came in handy on my Falcon... Any pics of Eskimo or Atari Explorer? I have/had no idea of the power of AREXX on the Amiga when compared to AppleScript. That's why I was asking about it. Wouldn't inter-process communication between apps and the OS be a security no-no in the modern computing world which is moving to more sandboxing of apps? Syquest! I don't recall them having any "click of death" issues like the later ZIP drives... Oh, and Gauntlet on the ST was awesome. My friends and I [mistakenly] thought back then that possibly the arcade game had been programmed on the ST originally because it seemed so close to the original. Of course, the Amiga's version of Marble Madness was also a masterpiece. Now according to the Wired interview with the creator of Asteroids and the Atari Games/Tengen version of Tetris, he/Atari Games was definitely aware of the ST because he said he had played the ST version of Tetris before creating the Atari Games version, so it is conceivable that perhaps some of the Atari Games Corp programmers had STs at home despite the new found rivalry between the two corporate Ataris at that point. That was an angle mentioned in "Game Over" that the two Ataris mutually hated each other until Steve Ross apparently found them both common ground on suing Nintendo in court. Curt can correct that it if isn't/wasn't true...

Christos, umm, one problem... I doubt a PC was multi-tasking or animating in 4,096 colors......or had stereo sound... or, much of ANYthing at this point...First off, PC's cost a minimum of $1000. at that time, double that of the A500... Second, even this early , the Amiga had CAD programs, can't tell ya how good they were, tho... And LOL! Tom Hudson's CAD-3D was out on the 520ST in, what, 1986? And he went on to write some rather famous graphics software on the PC. So the ST had CAD programs almost from day 1 as well. Some of the guys who worked at ComputerTime - a computer store in Citrus Heights/Sacramento that sold both STs and Amigas - wrote some big paint program on the ST after having to deal with DeluxePaint on the Amiga for 2 years. I can't remember if that was Spectrum 512 or not. ComputerTime pimped both lines but they went heavily into Amiga after Atari bought Federated, especially since there was a Federated right across the street from them. Now one thing I remember about their Amiga displays - and this ties into the discussions earlier about Amiga video being "fuzzy" - for their primo Amiga system, they had it connected to a Sony RGB monitor and some pretty sweet JBL speakers [the same speakers I believe Apple later bundled with the //GS]. Come to think of it, another big Commodore/Amiga dealer in Sac [Put's] also connected some of their Amigas to Sony monitors. I remember they had an Amiga 2000 hooked to a really nice non-Commodore monitor and they showed off that famous "Walker" demo [of an AT-AT walking downtown firing off its blasters] which was so large at the time it had to be loaded from one of those 44MB cartridges [what was that standard...Bertoli or something, like the MegaFile 44 on the ST side]... 'cept the Amiga 2000 had one of those installed in its 5 1/4" drive bay... I recall them pimping Iomega's first big product...the flopticals... I remember the Amiga 1000 being what lots of people lusted for back in 85-86 but it wasn't cheap and it looked like Atari was taking down Commodore due to sales as well as the court case. Of course Commodore came back with the A500 and flipped the tables for the most part. It also didn't help at first that the Amiga was released by Commodore and most Atari fans hated Commodore with a passion no matter that Jack's crew now owned "Atari". I despised the C64 back in the day even though I didn't have an 8-bit and all but one of my friends had one [the other friend had an Apple //c]. My grandmother got a Commodore Plus 4 for free in 1984 [or 85] for having gone to a real estate seminar and that was a pile; had she gone one month before [as I had pled for her to do] she would've had an 800XL for free [my parents also refused to go]. My aunt went to one at that time and got a full TI-99 4/A with voice modulator for free. It was cool picking up AtariSoft titles for it at Federated in 1987 for 99 cents a piece. I'm still kicking myself for not having purchased the Atari/LucasFilm titles for the 5200 there that cheap since they are now collector's items. I kinda wish I would've had an Amiga back in the day for ARexx considering REXX is still used in mainframe environments used by government institutions. Do Amiga enthusiasts consider Mac OS X's AppleScript language a copy of ARexx functionality? I mean it's obvious that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's "multi desktop" feature is a copy of an Amiga function from circa 1987...

You forgot to mention Crystal which was a GEM add-on that was sold through Antic/STart's infamous catalog of software... The first thing I did with the Falcon desktop was change the background to blue. I always did prefer blue to green but I don't know if that counts as a point in the favor of Amiga...

Oops, I already answered that last year on here... And from another post question, both the stand up and sit down versions of Atari's "Star Wars" arcade game used the yoke and not a joystick. I just know I performed better with the stand up units... If that's the case, then how can iPod Shuffles even play 256Kbps AAC files considering they are only using the Motorola DSP in them without the advantage of a 680x0 processor to boot? I'm very impressed with what I saw on YouTube of a Falcon owner with a CT60 adapter installed playing both Quake 1 and Duke Nukem 3D on it. Both seemed to be twice as fast as my Pentium rig from the era those games debuted. Granted, there's no specs available as to how much fast RAM the owners had in their Falcons nor whether they had modified them with other video cards and such...

Stock ST's and Amiga's can't, afaik - some semi-rapid Amiga user can correct me on this if I'm wrong. An 030 equipped Amiga, or a stock Atari Falcon can play MP3s though. On my Falcon 060, running at 95mhz and with 256 megs of Ram, Aniplayer reports approx. 5-6% CPU usage during MP3 play. Not bragging or anything like that, just posting for comparative/example purposes. I think other accelerated Falcon users have reported even lower. I'm only 10 pages into this thread so someone else probably pointed this out but iPod Shuffles have the same DSP in them as the Atari Falcon. That's why there's only a 5% CPU overhead when playing an MP3 on a Falcon... I'm actually surprised nobody has "sourced" the Motorola 56k DSP from old discarded iPod Shuffles and made an adapter so ST/STe/TT owners could finally have sound parity with the Falcon...

Heh.. There was a sysop of a local ST BBS called Sac Base who had at the bottom of each of his posts 'By the light of the flickering Amiga' Heh. Sac Base? Was that a Sacramento based BBS? I swear I remember that tagline but I never participated on that one. The Gateway BBS was my favorite [bBS, specifically an Atari BBS] until the sysop closed it down when he left for college... I remember one guy really favored Ratsoft BBS. He was the first person I knew who grew weed inside of a PC clone case. I think he said that finally made it [the PC] useful...

Oh You are so NOT dredging this up Matt?!?!? The ST was a beautiful bare bones, get the job done machine, a good workhorse and out of the gate it was a great, nice features, graphics, sound and memory at a dirt cheap price. Problem is that once it was out of the gate, the firm lost focus, in fact I have a memo from one of the ST's original engineers who upon resigning from Atari, pointed out that his resignation was due to the lack of focus and future growth of the ST line and the company as a whole. The Amiga is a darling of a machine, good graphics and sound and while Kickstart needed a kick in the butt early on and went through several iterations to get the system stable, the architecture was elegant and having legacy ties to the Atari 800 line didn't hurt either since its chipset was architected by the head of the Atari 800's chipset team. The ST found its niche, with little thanks to Hybrid Arts who consulted on getting MIDI included into the ST design and that feature was its strength. The Toaster was Amiga's "killer app" giving it unbelievable multimedia capabilities. The Amiga is honestly an Atari machine, with Atari engineers, design aspects carried over from the Atari 800, and $500,000 in financing from Atari in late 1983 to bring the wirewraps to silicon, the machine is really an Atari plain and simple. The ST was an amazing start to finish product, thanks to aggressive and concise management by Tom Brightman at Atari, the ST design stayed on course and only slipped by several months to full production release in Sept 85, only 1 year after the Tramiels came into the firm.... this is a task of monumental proportions given the fact that Atari itself spent over 18 months between its Corporate Research Group and its Atari Products Group just trying to lay out the technical details for: "Eskimo" a portable computer "Atari Explorer" a Notebook computer (Yup, Atari Explorer was its product name way before the Magazine!) and while GAZA and SIERRA were in the works in Corporate Research, Atari products Group was working on a machine with spec's that made the Amiga and ST pale in comparision, Called "OMNI" this system was spec'd out to be a 3D graphics system using the AMY chip for sound and other new chips like Heather, Vivian and Penny for advanced features. The use of CD-ROM technology and many other specs.... Whats far more bizarre is the chip designs were done and in the testing phase, what happened to it and why the machine was never reviewed and completed by the time the Tramiels took over is a mystery I am working on and hopefully will answer.... More details on OMNI to come in some new pages on the Atari Museum site quite soon including memo's, and other details. Your regularly scheduled ST vs Amiga thread now continues..... Curt That was brilliant. So in essence the 16-bit war between the ST and the Amiga was the civil war of mid/late 80s computing. And we all lost because a viable third computing platform [Linux doesn't count] didn't survive and so we're now stuck with Windows vs. Mac, two inferior platforms to this day. All of these secret Atari chipsets you keep uncovering are fascinating. What I'd really like to see is some specs and some examples of the GUI Atari Inc. created [snowCap] for its BSD based OS. If there's proof of this, it means Atari Inc. had the right idea on a next-gen OS that NeXT/Apple ultimately agreed upon years later. I should mention my first computer was a 1040ST. Was a heavily partisan ST user back then [hey, I was a kid!] and the first computer I bought with my own money was the Falcon, only to see Atari completely abandon it the following year. While that broke my heart, I always told myself that had I bought a PC that year, it would've been completely obsolete in 6 months and I would've had to use Windows 3.1 which just totally sucked IMHO. Made the transition to Windows with Windows 95 [on a Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM] which made it finally as usable as my original 1040ST with 1MB in 1986. Now I'm 100% Mac [only considered Macs decent with the advent of OS X]. My Falcon is out in storage and I'm really dreading having to do the battery fix to get it running again. I plan on picking up an A8 or something to let my baby daughter learn basic computer skills on in a couple of years time... I would like to see the Amiga [or a serious Atari project] rise up and challenge the other platforms but as long as the Amiga community is divided with none of the camps going the Apple route [adopting FreeBSD and basing the "new" OS on it such as OS X] - not to mention A Inc. being owned by an apparently selfish incompetent [imho] - there's just no hope. Hyperion is doing great work tinkering around with old code but again, if it ain't *nix based, what's the point? It is sad to see QNX, the folks who were originally going to rewrite AmigaOS back in the 90s, getting dragged down into the abyss that is the RIM Blackberry's death spiral.

Somewhat agree but Marble Madness would kick a** on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. I hope WB Games seriously brings it out... Had Atari Inc. never been split up, Paperboy would've been a 7800 exclusive title back then. We're only "fantasizing" here about bringing the title out on the console it should've been available on in the first place!

Ah, but can't a homebrewer hope that one day *his* game will be included in a retro emulated commercial gaming environment like the handful of homebrews that have been included in Atari's recent iOS/Android release*? I know, the money certainly wouldn't come close to re-imbursing all the development time but still... Can't it also be a resume-builder? Doesn't it say something about your programming skills if you can do something amazing on such a limited environment compared to modern systems? *If Microsoft [and the programmer] was willing - and I have no clue about this - they should've included "Halo 2600" in that release just for the lulz... Groovy, the game looks awesome! I was going to ask you about the single player reasoning but you answered that question later on...

Wasn't the Pokey made circa 1978? As opposed to the SID in 1982? I would certainly hope a chip designed 4+ years later by an actual chip maker [MOS] would be superior to what had come before. Same goes for the VIC graphics chip in the C64. But alas, there are tradeoffs. When I listen to the soundtrack to M.U.L.E., I'd say the A8 version is better than the C64 version. A8 just needs its own Timbaland championing the Pokey - or dual Pokeys - to the rest of the music world...

Well, their control of the App Store prevents apps from being hosted that have trojans built into them. That's the exact opposite of what's happened with the Android App Store, so I'd say that's one way it benefits users/consumers...