ilaskey

Well done tracking that down. Pity it never came out. I did wonder as I didn't recognize it from back in the day.

Not seen this before, a Swedish computer program from the mid-late eighties call Bit for Bit. Some is on Swedish but most episodes have an English report. This one features an ST game being developed and footage from Jeff Minter's Merak project. https://archive.org/details/bit-for-bit-episode-06

Err, yes. We know.

I had a 286 emulator in my 2.5mb STM. I don't remember cutting any shielding. Used it to run dBASE III mostly. Previously I used PC ditto which used to claim to run at a third the speed of an XT.

Do you mean audio in on a PC? Yes, that would be stereo.

I think the plane one is conversational French.

The Compute graphics books had lots of stuff on mixing basic and assembler. I used a routine of theirs that wrote custom font based graphics directly to a gr.7 screen to do a few games back in the day.

In Europe where the ST had a much higher profile, you'd be hard pushed to find an album or musician NOT recorded using an ST and one of the many sequencers available at the time. There were also all the hardware add ons for SMPTE, extra MIDI ports, rack mount cases etc. Every studio had one or more STs. While some did use them live such as Jarre, Sparks etc, a lot just wrote backing tracks to DAT but the source was still an ST.

Wtf? The asks a perfectly reasonable question and you get all snarky on him?

OK thanks.

Nah, not Chris Payne, it was Darryl Still. He was good, I had a lot of dealing with him and Alistair Bodin when I worked for the Atari mags.

I guess you don't want these now?

Me too. Spent a long weekend at one of the London shows demoing Attack of the Mutant Penguins on the Jaguar. Even had to buy new clothes to match their corporate reqs. The guy that signed me up left soon after and Gleadow wouldn't respond to any calls or emails. By the time I started a formal claim they folded.

Is this the same lot that were threatening to dig it up or a new bunch? http://news.xbox.com/2013/12/ent-xes-lightbox

The extended interview was better and it was good to have that separately available. I still think there's more mileage in more time spent with him though such as internal use of Pascal given the recent discussion here if anyone actually used it.

I can't help but think the interview in the latest podcast was a wasted opportunity. The guy had a lot to say on technical/programming issues but the interviewer didn't seem to understand a lot of what he was saying and just offered the odd 'uh huh'. The stuff about his use of Forth, the discussion on hardware changes he suggested and the SIO issues were fascinating and a few good additional questions may well have teased out some more nuggets. I'll grab the extended version though and see if that's better.

Much underrated game, Cytron Masters.

Sorry, just realised you have this one, I thought you meant you had first episode of "Making the Most of the Micro"

During the Speccy period there were also a lot of C64's and Amstrads and from 1987ish to 1990 The Atari ST was very much in ascendency. It was only when cut price Amigas like the 500 came out that the ST started to lose ground to the Amiga. During that period, I knew 1 person with an Amiga and 6 or 7 with STs although people who knew each other tended to buy the same machine IME.

There's also a 1982 BBC series "The Computer Programme". Episodes : 1. It's Happening Now (introduction to computing - TX 11.1.82) 2. Just One Thing After Another (basic processing concepts - TX 18.1.82) 3. Talking To A Machine (programming languages - TX 25.1.82) 4. It's On The Computer (data storage & retrieval - TX 1.2.82) 5. The New Media (communications and media - TX 8.2.82) 6. Moving Pictures (graphics and animation - TX 15.2.82) 7. Let's Pretend (computer modelling and simulations - TX 22.2.82) 8. The Thinking Machine (artificial intelligence - TX 1.3.82) 9. In Control (computers controlling other equipment - TX 8.3.82) 10. Things To Come (the future of computing - TX 15.3.82)

I can get All of Making the Most and series 1 of Micro Live but it will take me a few weeks to get them. Any good?

Wow, just wow. You are sooooo lucky. We never get anything like that in the UK.

You have to remember that back then, a 410 cost half a month's wages and an 810 3 and a half month's wages for me. Iworked in a bank in the UK and my takeohome was just over £100 a month. A 410 was £50 and the 800 £350. That;'s why most people used tape. Even when you ended up spending an hour trying to load a tape that was baling out right at the end of it's 15min load with 'BOOT ERROR'. Once you had that game loaded, you sure made sure you got your time/money's worth playing it!

I find this thread a bit odd - back in the day I knew many people that used their Atari's for non game/business stuff. I had a friend that ran his double glazing business on an Atari 800 - database, spreadsheets, accounts etc. He printed his stationary/letterheads using Printshop and a 24pin printer of some sort. Word processing was on AtariWriter too. I probably used mine for games only 50% of the time I used it as a database, name/address book. Printed all my Xmas card labels on it. I labelled video cassettes, audio cassettes and did the inlays etc although mine was only an Atari 1029 initially (with extra ROM) then a Star NLQ dot matrix of some sort that was built like a tank. I also used to write lots of Basic and sometimes assembler progs for particular tasks/needs. Plus I used the Conversational German and French cassette systems. I had another friend that used a beta of an online banking system in 1985 in the UK that used Prestel graphics type interface via one of those split baud rate modems that some systems used.

Did the 800xl have that poke to enable fine text scrolling or was that XE only?