Any chance of an Amiga subforum?

[Ganky Ghost]

So could the ST using any Multisync monitor of the day. 15Khz.

 

But you were limited to the ST's crappy LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH graphics modes. Which gave you what?

 

320x200 16 colors in LOW

640x200 4 colors in MEDIUM

640x400 2 colors (black and white) in HIGH

 

A multi-sync monitor would get you the same number of colors at the same resolutions on a bigger what? A 15" monitor? A 17" monitor? A full-page display?

 

No, thanks. My Mac gave me higher resolutions and more colors on bigger monitors. A much nicer user experience than the 4 color Atari MEDIUM resolution or the Atari's monochrome high resolution. Plus the Mac didn't have an ugly desktop and filenames weren't limited to FILENAME.EXT (8.3).

 

I stand by what I said though you try to mitigate it..You ignored the Magic Sac comment which came out in 87.

 

That's because the Mac II came out in 1987. It did 8-bit color (256 colors) at 640x480. It used a much faster 68020 processor. Had a full thirty-two bit data bus. RAM was expandable to 68 megabytes. It had 6 NuBus expansion slots. Shipped with System 4.1.

 

Yeah, I know you're going to bitch about the price of the Mac II, but you add everything to your ST that the Mac II offered and then tell me how much more expensive your ST would have been. You can start by adding a case to your ST that isn't made of painted Saran Wrap.

 

Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh.

 

The press were making fun of it. Remember, that back then the press were heavy Macintosh users. The desktop publishing genre of software was pretty much invented on the Mac. Did you see the press abandoning the Mac for the cheaper ST? I didn't. Not even the much touted (in the Atari community) release of Calamus caused much of a stir in the desktop publishing world -- outside of, perhaps, Germany, that is.

 

Apple paid attention at the time as well and tried to limit rom availability so they were taking notice.

 

LMFAO! You're talking about the company that invented the "look and feel" cause of action. Apple had never made Macintosh ROMs available to the general public. Apple had never made anything openly available. Apple was a company that protected its assets with tooth, nail, and claw. You make me laugh if you think the lowly ST and a product introduced by a man working from his house caused Apple to lose any sleep. Apple was in it's heyday. It was pulling in money hand over fist. It had the education market locked up. Most musicians and virtually everyone in the publishing industry would use nothing but a Mac. lol.

 

 

Color is quite relevant as it is needed for the main reason people owned a system at the time. GAMES. We carried over 5000 sku's of software at that time. 95% appx was games!

 

Color wasn't relevant to Mac emulation on the ST. Color Quickdraw didn't arrive until the introduction of the Mac II.

 

And the Mac II was a cool machine, in my opinion. Take a look: http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/photos/apple_mac2.jpg

 

And here's something you'd NEVER be able to do with a bunch of Atari ST computers: http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-ga...re-mac-ii-couch

 

I'm bored of this discussion... Moving on...

Edited December 15, 2008 by Ganky Ghost

[atarian63]

So could the ST using any Multisync monitor of the day. 15Khz.

 

But you were limited to the ST's crappy LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH graphics modes. Which gave you what?

 

320x200 16 colors in LOW

640x200 4 colors in MEDIUM

640x400 2 colors (black and white) in HIGH

 

A multi-sync monitor would get you the same number of colors at the same resolutions on a bigger what? A 15" monitor? A 17" monitor? A full-page display?

 

No, thanks. My Mac gave me higher resolutions and more colors on bigger monitors. A much nicer user experience than the 4 color Atari MEDIUM resolution or the Atari's monochrome high resolution. Plus the Mac didn't have an ugly desktop and filenames weren't limited to FILENAME.EXT (8.3).

 

I stand by what I said though you try to mitigate it..You ignored the Magic Sac comment which came out in 87.

 

That's because the Mac II came out in 1987. It did 8-bit color (256 colors) at 640x480. It used a much faster 68020 processor. Had a full thirty-two bit data bus. RAM was expandable to 68 megabytes. It had 6 NuBus expansion slots. Shipped with System 4.1.

 

Yeah, I know you're going to bitch about the price of the Mac II, but you add everything to your ST that the Mac II offered and then tell me how much more expensive your ST would have been. You can start by adding a case to your ST that isn't made of painted Saran Wrap.

 

Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh.

 

The press were making fun of it. Remember, that back then the press were heavy Macintosh users. The desktop publishing genre of software was pretty much invented on the Mac. Did you see the press abandoning the Mac for the cheaper ST? I didn't. Not even the much touted (in the Atari community) release of Calamus caused much of a stir in the desktop publishing world -- outside of, perhaps, Germany, that is.

 

Apple paid attention at the time as well and tried to limit rom availability so they were taking notice.

 

LMFAO! You're talking about the company that invented the "look and feel" cause of action. Apple had never made Macintosh ROMs available to the general public. Apple had never made anything openly available. Apple was a company that protected its assets with tooth, nail, and claw. You make me laugh if you think the lowly ST and a product introduced by a man working from his house caused Apple to lose any sleep. Apple was in it's heyday. It was pulling in money hand over fist. It had the education market locked up. Most musicians and virtually everyone in the publishing industry would use nothing but a Mac. lol.

 

 

Color is quite relevant as it is needed for the main reason people owned a system at the time. GAMES. We carried over 5000 sku's of software at that time. 95% appx was games!

 

Color wasn't relevant to Mac emulation on the ST. Color Quickdraw didn't arrive until the introduction of the Mac II.

 

And the Mac II was a cool machine, in my opinion. Take a look: http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/photos/apple_mac2.jpg

 

And here's something you'd NEVER be able to do with a bunch of Atari ST computers: http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-ga...re-mac-ii-couch

 

I'm bored of this discussion... Moving on...

one by one..

*Display, and excellent display, the mac did mono only, smaller screen, slower machine.The desktop looked great, and you could do St AND Mac..

*Again you miss it was to compete with MAC plus, quit distorting. And yes the price was better than mac plus and you got 2 machine for that lower price. 3 if you count the pc card. Lower price better deal. No thanks on MAC of the day, I skipped it. Overpriced.

* no the press was loving it, compute etc had glowing reviews of it. Not sure what you were reading

*Wasnt apple produced by a guru loving idiot in a garage? oh, that was woz, jobs never made anything. LMAO We had loads of fun stealing MAC sales not to mention when Apple made the roms hard to get, we had people burning them. Those who has ST's and Amigas thought MAc was a joke. And TI invented GUI no Apple. As I have mentioned in other threads.. the general public is not too bright so the majority or most arguement doesnt do anything for me.

* The color issue is for ST games, which at the time, we are talking about Mac plus (you keep forgetting but I'll get ya back to it) played games in black and white, kind of an etch a sketch for games HA Ha!

*Mac Plus not Mac II or other.. Can't change the subject or comparison.. Apple = overpriced, just like today, schools are dumping them in droves. Finally

 

Here you go to make my point.

 

Here is an Atariage thread

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9183

Edited December 15, 2008 by atarian63

[frogstar_robot]

And here's something you'd NEVER be able to do with a bunch of Atari ST computers: http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-ga...re-mac-ii-couch

 

I'm bored of this discussion... Moving on...

 

The Mac II retailed at damn near $4K in it's base configuration and could be as much as $10K with maximum storage and memory. A cursory read of my other posts will tell you that I'm not a big fan of the ST. I am even less of a fan of ANY Mac that DOESN'T run OS X. I am an Apple Certified Technician and have been since OS 8.6 was a current OS so I'm quite entitled to negative opinions of what could be quite large PITAs. Oh the hardware wasn't bad, it was quite good considering. But however much the OS may have been "friendly" it was a technical disaster. Macs of that era were overpriced and employed a non-memory protected form of co-operative multitasking. An application didn't have to do what we now call a segfault to crash. All it had to do was get stuck in a state that it couldn't pass the timeslice token to the next app in the chain but if it did segfault then unrelated apps could die for no apparant reason or the machine would just lock. And that happened....a lot. I did extension removal bisections to isolate crashes more than I want to think about as well as "trashing preferences". Suck suck suckity suck sucked (and yes Windows had it's own list of suck. I hated it ALMOST as much.)

 

The bulk of Mac software in that time frame targeted the lower spec 68000 machines like the Plus which still retailed for twice as much as any ST or Amiga. Those low spec machines were targeted due to people being able to somewhat afford them and therefore having them. In terms of computing power per dollar spent an ST BADLY outclassed the lower priced models in the Apple's product range. So what you had were crashy overpriced machines with occasionally nifty software. Why pay that kind of money when an Amiga or ST would run the stuff as well (or not) as the real thing?

 

There's things I don't like about Apple, OS X, and odd holes in Apple's product line-up. But obscenely priced hardware that runs a flakey crashy OS is no longer one of them.

[_The Doctor__]

frogstar_robot hit the nail so firmly on the head that it drove it right thru the wood!

I could not say it any better!

Edited December 15, 2008 by _The Doctor__

[atarian1]

Atarian63 got most of it, but I'd like to point out a few things.

 

The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran.

 

According to whom? lowendmac.com says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. Wikipedia says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. I realize that you don't trust Wikipedia or Lowendmac so I went straight to the horse's mouth for its word. Apple's technical specifications for the Macintosh Plus says 8MHz. http://support.apple.com/kb/SP190

 

Just look up ads and articles at the time. If they were not true, they would have been pulled. I think the sources you mentioned were lazy and just rounded up.

 

The Mac was a fierce competitor in the MIDI world, even though it didn't ship with standard MIDI ports. Where the Mac was really shining in the late eighties and early nineties was in the area of direct to disk recording. Something I don't recall the ST ever being suitably capable of.

 

Yes, there were direct-to-disk recording systems for the ST. Hybrid Arts ADAP, Digidesign's Sound Tools (sound familiar?), plus one or two more from Europe. The Mac and ST were neck-to-neck in the US music market with a slight edge to the Mac. However, the ST totally dominated Europe (90%+ market share).

 

The separate keyboards of the Macs or the Mega/TT machines? The extended keyboards of the Macs of that era were orgasmic to use. They were well laid out, good tactile feel, solid construction, and virtually non-destructible. So durable and well made were they, that you could use them as lethal weapons one minute and type up your confession to murder on them the next.

 

Purely subjective, but that grey colored brick that Atari called a mouse was terrible. Almost everyone I knew who owned an ST soon bought a replacement mouse for those bricks.

 

Mice and keyboards are subjective, but you make it sound like no one liked the Atari keyboards. Not true. The MegaST keyboard is still the best keyboard I've used - much better than the Apple Mac keyboards (even today). I like the feel of hitting bottom as do many other people. BTW, I like Atari mice - just need to load a mouse accelerator to make it faster.

 

You gotta be kidding. The ST case was as cheap and brittle as it looked, and it looked really, really cheap. I could bend my 520ST in my hands with little effort. I seem to recall reading in an Atari magazine of the time that twisting the bloody case with your hands could actually remedy some malfunctions. It was insanely crap.

 

The Mac has always had character and class. Almost everyone agrees on that. Apple has probably won more industrial design awards than any other computer manufacturer that has ever existed. If Atari were to win an award for case design, it would be an award for having built the cheapest case ever without having to resort to cardboard and tinfoil.

 

No, YOU have got to be kidding me. I simply CANNOT see how anyone can say the Mac Plus/IIs were a strikingly attractive design. The ST case was strikingly different from any computer out there at the time. As I said, the Mac case is the same old boring beige case like all the rest of the computers during the era. Character and Class? HA! More like BORING!

 

People walk right by it and not notice it because it looks like the computer next to it whether it's a PET, Tandy, Amiga, etc. I remember waiting for a computer store in a mall to open up which had set up the Mac, Amiga and ST in front of the store. None of them were turned on yet as the store was just opening. I noticed more people stopped to look at the ST than the other machines, probably because of its unique design. People were copying the ST design in their own products such as nametags and even cakes.

 

Oh, industrial design awards? Only after the iMac came out. Why do you think Apple was dying in the 1990s? Because Macs were the same old boring beige case like PCs. Apple needed to do something different to distinguish itself from the boring beige case PCs. The result was the colorful iMacs which I hate, but people thought they were cool and different - just like the ST case.

[atarian1]

The main midi machine of the day was Mac then ST and hardly any Amiga.

Hmm. I knew quite a few more musicians using AMIGAs than STs. The school I attended used Macs for the electronic music class, but the Teacher owned an ST. He alwayse said he wiished he could afford one of the macs the school used for MIDI.. But then again, he couldnt afford the keyboards they used either.

 

All of the MIDI musicians I knew personally preferred the AMIGA because not only could they compose music that sounded awesome on their keyboard, but they could then sample the relevant instruments into the amiga and use a tracker to make a 4 or 8 voice digital version to distribute via floppy or over BBSes. And it would work on peoples machines who werent musicians and therefor did not own any musical instruments/equipment.

 

electronic music is not my area so I cant comment on who had better software.. ive heard some pretty amazing midi sequences that were done on the AMIGA though. Like I said, from the hardware standpoint, MIDI takes next to nothing to do...

 

Just like I know quite a few people using STs for Desktop Video. I'm sure there were a few Amiga MIDI musicians too, but they were far and few in between.

 

That must have been painstaking to convert a MIDI file to a tracker. They must have had tons of samples to sample each chord. They must have been very simple songs in order to make it worthwhile.

 

The ST always had the rock solid timing that the Amiga, Mac, PCs never had at the time. That and the built-in MIDI ports is what made it THE music machine at the time.

[atarian1]

Ok. noone is arguing that the ST wasnt cheap..

 

MIDI made up for inferior sound? I guess an atari 8-bit with a MIDI-MATE is equivelant to an ST sound-wise then. A MIDI interface (even in the 80s) took about $1.50 worth of parts to implement (minus connectors, cables, and software of course).. the ST had some fine MIDI software on it. Noone can deny that. But so did the MAC.. And the AMIGA.. Both of which had native sound chips that crapped all over the ST..

 

What I was saying was that while the ST sound chip was not as good as the Amiga's, Atari allowed an easy way to get around it by including a built-in MIDI interface to hook up professional gear to it. Get it? Having the MIDI port built-in WAS a big deal. You didn't have to go through the hassle of building/buying an interface, or having it share the same port as your modem or whatever serial device. Not to mention the fact that some software required a certain MIDI interface.

 

As far as the falcon being cheap, I dont care how cheap it was. It was a weak piece of crap for its time.

 

Lies.

 

I knew people using full 32-bit A3000s, A500/A2000s with 32bit accelerator cards, 32-bit Macs, etc. YEARS before the falcon was released. The DSP driven sound is nice.. But my point is that no matter how good of a value it was at $2,000.00, it would have still been a good value, and ALSO been a decent competitor performance-wise at $2500.00 with some extra bus lines (and additional custom logic to maintain/allow 16bit ST compatability if desired.) In fact, if you read the atari history websites, thats exactly what engineers had originally planned for the machine before ATARI "cheaped out" on the production model.

 

Full 32-bit Atari? It's called the TT030. Yes, there was a 50MHz accelerators, graphics cards, ethernet, etc, etc, just like the Amigas and Macs. As Atarian63 said, the Falcon030 was intended to be the "low-end" machine. The engineers had to weight price/performance/price in the design. At $2500, it's not so "low-end" anymore. It's too bad Atari never got around to a Falcon040 which would have really kick ass...

[MEtalGuy66]

Just like I know quite a few people using STs for Desktop Video. I'm sure there were a few Amiga MIDI musicians too, but they were far and few in between.

there was quite a huge market/user base for it.. Check out the MIDI section on Aminet.

 

That must have been painstaking to convert a MIDI file to a tracker. They must have had tons of samples to sample each chord. They must have been very simple songs in order to make it worthwhile.

Can't comment.. I didnt do it.. I do know it was quite popular to have a variety of major/minor chord samples of various instruments in songs that employed those type of arrangements.

The ST always had the rock solid timing that the Amiga, Mac, PCs never had at the time. That and the built-in MIDI ports is what made it THE music machine at the time.

 

Thats a total farce... And having never heard that claim before, I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS.. Midi iis a 31.25Kbps ring-topography SERIAL transmission standard. Timing for things like disk interfaces, arbitration of various high speed data buses, DRAM control circuits, etc. are literally THOUSANDS of times more timing-critical than MIDI and all of these machines employ these features quite well. The "MIDI timing" would be 100% software dependant on any personal computer. You sir have allowed ATARI ST worshipers to absolutely "blow smoke up your ass" if you actually believe that the ATARI hardware was more precisely "timed" than any other computer platform. I can in fact SHOW you on a logic analyzer that this is not the case, but even if it was, it wouldnt matter. Digital circuits in microcomputers are timed in terms of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and the smallest relevant timing interval in MIDI is in terms of miliseconds (thousandths of seconds) and amounts to an eternity in terms of machine cycles for even the slowest processors.

 

Like I said.. I didnt use the software.. So its quite possible that CUBASE(or whatever you used) shits all over BARS&PIPES on the Amiga.. I dont know.. But I do know there was a TON of people using AMIGAs and MACS for MIDI, and alot of the ones I knew had tried STs, or even OWNED STs and preferred the other platform. And some of these people make their living in the music industry to this day..

[HiroProX]

Lies.

Fact. At the time the Falcon came out, it was up against 486DX PC's, 68040 Macs, and the Amiga 3000 and 4000. In addition, just about every serious Amiga 2000 and 500 user had at least a 33MHz 030 accelerator in their machine. In fact, having a 40MHz 030 accelerator in my A500 is why I got a 50MHz 030 with FPU accelerator with my first A1200, and in total it cost less than a Falcon, and flat outperformed it.

Full 32-bit Atari? It's called the TT030. Yes, there was a 50MHz accelerators, graphics cards, ethernet, etc, etc, just like the Amigas and Macs. As Atarian63 said, the Falcon030 was intended to be the "low-end" machine. The engineers had to weight price/performance/price in the design. At $2500, it's not so "low-end" anymore. It's too bad Atari never got around to a Falcon040 which would have really kick ass...

If you could find expansion hardware for the TT. TT's have always been a bit rare, and add-on hardware for them being moreso. In fact, ST accelerators period were quite rare items outside of the ICD AdSpeed, which was just a 16MHz 68000 with 32K of SRAM cache.

 

I like my STs, but frankly, compared to my Amigas, they just weren't quite as good. Nothing made an ST look worse than one with a color monitor next to an A500 with a color monitor. And that's exactly why I bought an A500, because I had gone with my dad to Dallas back in 1989 to buy a 1040ST, and came home with an A500 with the A501 RAM upgrade for 1Mb.

Edited December 15, 2008 by HiroProX

[TwiliteZoner]

Here is a link to the Google video of the Computer Chronicles ST episode from 89. At the 12:08 mark they discuss the speed of the emulation compared to a Mac Plus of the time.

 

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=comp...;aq=f&aq=f#

[TwiliteZoner]

Just like I know quite a few people using STs for Desktop Video. I'm sure there were a few Amiga MIDI musicians too, but they were far and few in between.

there was quite a huge market/user base for it.. Check out the MIDI section on Aminet.

 

That must have been painstaking to convert a MIDI file to a tracker. They must have had tons of samples to sample each chord. They must have been very simple songs in order to make it worthwhile.

Can't comment.. I didnt do it.. I do know it was quite popular to have a variety of major/minor chord samples of various instruments in songs that employed those type of arrangements.

The ST always had the rock solid timing that the Amiga, Mac, PCs never had at the time. That and the built-in MIDI ports is what made it THE music machine at the time.

 

Thats a total farce... And having never heard that claim before, I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS.. Midi iis a 31.25Kbps ring-topography SERIAL transmission standard. Timing for things like disk interfaces, arbitration of various high speed data buses, DRAM control circuits, etc. are literally THOUSANDS of times more timing-critical than MIDI and all of these machines employ these features quite well. The "MIDI timing" would be 100% software dependant on any personal computer. You sir have allowed ATARI ST worshipers to absolutely "blow smoke up your ass" if you actually believe that the ATARI hardware was more precisely "timed" than any other computer platform. I can in fact SHOW you on a logic analyzer that this is not the case, but even if it was, it wouldnt matter. Digital circuits in microcomputers are timed in terms of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and the smallest relevant timing interval in MIDI is in terms of miliseconds (thousandths of seconds) and amounts to an eternity in terms of machine cycles for even the slowest processors.

 

Like I said.. I didnt use the software.. So its quite possible that CUBASE(or whatever you used) shits all over BARS&PIPES on the Amiga.. I dont know.. But I do know there was a TON of people using AMIGAs and MACS for MIDI, and alot of the ones I knew had tried STs, or even OWNED STs and preferred the other platform. And some of these people make their living in the music industry to this day..

 

Whether it is actually a "farce" or not I cannot say, but I do remember reading in various Atari and MIDI specific magazines the timing issues and the Atari being the better MIDI platform. I know that the local music shops only carried STs and didn't even have Macs, let alone Amigas.

 

I will see if I can find those articles and scan them and post them in here.

 

 

Edit: Found one online.

 

 

Here is a link to atarimagazines.com where Jimmy Hotz mentions the timing of the MIDI.

 

http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n4/rockandroll.html

 

But, of the Atari ST. Hotz is unequivocal in his praise. He's used the Macintosh. He's used the IBM. In fact, he's tried every computer available. Compared to these other machines, Hotz says "the Atari is cheaper and works faster. Of all the computers I've used, Atari seems to react the fastest and have the best MIDI timing to make it sound the most natural with what you put in there."

Edited December 15, 2008 by TwiliteZoner

[MEtalGuy66]

Imagine that.. A guy in an atari magazine pumping people up on ATARI capabilities.. You think that review may be a little preferential? Theres also many professional musicians who, due to personal preference, wouldnt touch an ATARI...

 

Im not debating that the MIDI worked well on the ST... What Im saying is that if it does excel above other platforms in the respect of timing, its due to the software being used, not the machine. Again, I can't comment on this area, because I couldnt "find my ass with both hands" in a MIDI sequencer appication... I can however comment on the hardware end of it because as a communications standard, Im well aware of the hardware/resource requirements involved. And to say that one 16bit machine has "better midi timing" than another is like saying that one brand of chainsaw can cut a toothpick better than another.

[TwiliteZoner]

Imagine that.. A guy in an atari magazine pumping people up on ATARI capabilities.. You think that review may be a little preferential? Theres also many professional musicians who, due to personal preference, wouldnt touch an ATARI...

 

Im not debating that the MIDI worked well on the ST... What Im saying is that if it does excel above other platforms in the respect of timing, its due to the software being used, not the machine. Again, I can't comment on this area, because I couldnt "find my ass with both hands" in a MIDI sequencer appication... I can however comment on the hardware end of it because as a communications standard, Im well aware of the hardware/resource requirements involved. And to say that one 16bit machine has "better midi timing" than another is like saying that one brand of chainsaw can cut a toothpick better than another.

 

I understand what you are saying. I just wanted to point out that there were several articles related to the ST and timing compared to other platforms regarding MIDI that's all. The one I happened to find was from an Atari magazine. There were others like Electronic Musician that did not have an Atari bias.

[ijor]

The ST always had the rock solid timing that the Amiga, Mac, PCs never had at the time. That and the built-in MIDI ports is what made it THE music machine at the time.

 

Thats a total farce... And having never heard that claim before, I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS.. Midi iis a 31.25Kbps ring-topography SERIAL transmission standard. Timing for things like disk interfaces, arbitration of various high speed data buses, DRAM control circuits, etc. are literally THOUSANDS of times more timing-critical than MIDI and all of these machines employ these features quite well. The "MIDI timing" would be 100% software dependant on any personal computer. You sir have allowed ATARI ST worshipers to absolutely "blow smoke up your ass" if you actually believe that the ATARI hardware was more precisely "timed" than any other computer platform. I can in fact SHOW you on a logic analyzer that this is not the case, but even if it was, it wouldnt matter. Digital circuits in microcomputers are timed in terms of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and the smallest relevant timing interval in MIDI is in terms of miliseconds (thousandths of seconds) and amounts to an eternity in terms of machine cycles for even the slowest processors.

 

I'm not a musician, and I can't say how important really it was. But the references at the time about the very accurate MIDI timing on the ST, were more at the software level, than at the hardware level.

 

The ST can easily perform cycle accurate code (that's why you can do "software" overscan, and "spectrum" effects). That was common in 8-bit machines (as using WSYNC in the A8), but not common at all on 16-bit (or 32-bit) ones. e.g.: it is almost unfeasible to perform cycle accurate coding on a PC, and I'm not talking about a modern OS not being real-time, but about the bare-metal PC hardware.

 

Additionally, the clock of the MIDI interface is derived from the same oscilator that drives the CPU and the system. So the issue is not about how many nanoseconds, but about how many cycles.

 

I have no idea how the Mac can do cycle accurate coding or not. And again, I don't know how really the whole thing was important. I am just pointing what were all these remarks about, at the time.

 

OTOH, one major drawback of the MIDI on the ST (at least this was the main complain from musicians), was lack of MIDI pass-trough.

[FastRobPlus]

This would be a great discussion to have in a 16-bit classic systems forum.

[MEtalGuy66]

The ST always had the rock solid timing that the Amiga, Mac, PCs never had at the time. That and the built-in MIDI ports is what made it THE music machine at the time.

 

Thats a total farce... And having never heard that claim before, I find it UTTERLY HILARIOUS.. Midi iis a 31.25Kbps ring-topography SERIAL transmission standard. Timing for things like disk interfaces, arbitration of various high speed data buses, DRAM control circuits, etc. are literally THOUSANDS of times more timing-critical than MIDI and all of these machines employ these features quite well. The "MIDI timing" would be 100% software dependant on any personal computer. You sir have allowed ATARI ST worshipers to absolutely "blow smoke up your ass" if you actually believe that the ATARI hardware was more precisely "timed" than any other computer platform. I can in fact SHOW you on a logic analyzer that this is not the case, but even if it was, it wouldnt matter. Digital circuits in microcomputers are timed in terms of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and the smallest relevant timing interval in MIDI is in terms of miliseconds (thousandths of seconds) and amounts to an eternity in terms of machine cycles for even the slowest processors.

 

I'm not a musician, and I can't say how important really it was. But the references at the time about the very accurate MIDI timing on the ST, were more at the software level, than at the hardware level.

 

The ST can easily perform cycle accurate code (that's why you can do "software" overscan, and "spectrum" effects). That was common in 8-bit machines (as using WSYNC in the A8), but not common at all on 16-bit (or 32-bit) ones. e.g.: it is almost unfeasible to perform cycle accurate coding on a PC, and I'm not talking about a modern OS not being real-time, but about the bare-metal PC hardware.

 

Additionally, the clock of the MIDI interface is derived from the same oscilator that drives the CPU and the system. So the issue is not about how many nanoseconds, but about how many cycles.

 

I have no idea how the Mac can do cycle accurate coding or not. And again, I don't know how really the whole thing was important. I am just pointing what were all these remarks about, at the time.

 

OTOH, one major drawback of the MIDI on the ST (at least this was the main complain from musicians), was lack of MIDI pass-trough.

 

Yep. Theres only one Oscillator on 16bit macs and AMIGAs as well.. Every chip on all of these systems in question operates at a divisor frequency of the same oscillator. And if you want to break it down further into "how accurate is one cycle" you realize that if any chip on the bus's "cycles" were out of sync (due to design characteristics of the system) with any other chip's by more than say 50ns, youd end up with all kinds of errors.. And 50 ns is .000005 miliseconds, so the largest concievable timing variation due to design would still land any "cycle calculated event" on the exact same "midi cycle" regardless...

 

The whole premise that ANY computer's hardware (even 8-bit) could be inaccurate timing-wise enough to effect the timescale of a midi sequence is uttery rediculous. Now if youve got piss-poor software design, extreme device driver overhead/inefficiency, or extremely slow/latent interfacing (which isnt the case in any of these circumstances either) its easily concievable..

Edited December 15, 2008 by MEtalGuy66

[atarian63]

Atarian63 got most of it, but I'd like to point out a few things.

 

The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran.

 

According to whom? lowendmac.com says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. Wikipedia says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. I realize that you don't trust Wikipedia or Lowendmac so I went straight to the horse's mouth for its word. Apple's technical specifications for the Macintosh Plus says 8MHz. http://support.apple.com/kb/SP190

 

Just look up ads and articles at the time. If they were not true, they would have been pulled. I think the sources you mentioned were lazy and just rounded up.

 

The Mac was a fierce competitor in the MIDI world, even though it didn't ship with standard MIDI ports. Where the Mac was really shining in the late eighties and early nineties was in the area of direct to disk recording. Something I don't recall the ST ever being suitably capable of.

 

Yes, there were direct-to-disk recording systems for the ST. Hybrid Arts ADAP, Digidesign's Sound Tools (sound familiar?), plus one or two more from Europe. The Mac and ST were neck-to-neck in the US music market with a slight edge to the Mac. However, the ST totally dominated Europe (90%+ market share).

 

The separate keyboards of the Macs or the Mega/TT machines? The extended keyboards of the Macs of that era were orgasmic to use. They were well laid out, good tactile feel, solid construction, and virtually non-destructible. So durable and well made were they, that you could use them as lethal weapons one minute and type up your confession to murder on them the next.

 

Purely subjective, but that grey colored brick that Atari called a mouse was terrible. Almost everyone I knew who owned an ST soon bought a replacement mouse for those bricks.

 

Mice and keyboards are subjective, but you make it sound like no one liked the Atari keyboards. Not true. The MegaST keyboard is still the best keyboard I've used - much better than the Apple Mac keyboards (even today). I like the feel of hitting bottom as do many other people. BTW, I like Atari mice - just need to load a mouse accelerator to make it faster.

 

You gotta be kidding. The ST case was as cheap and brittle as it looked, and it looked really, really cheap. I could bend my 520ST in my hands with little effort. I seem to recall reading in an Atari magazine of the time that twisting the bloody case with your hands could actually remedy some malfunctions. It was insanely crap.

 

The Mac has always had character and class. Almost everyone agrees on that. Apple has probably won more industrial design awards than any other computer manufacturer that has ever existed. If Atari were to win an award for case design, it would be an award for having built the cheapest case ever without having to resort to cardboard and tinfoil.

 

No, YOU have got to be kidding me. I simply CANNOT see how anyone can say the Mac Plus/IIs were a strikingly attractive design. The ST case was strikingly different from any computer out there at the time. As I said, the Mac case is the same old boring beige case like all the rest of the computers during the era. Character and Class? HA! More like BORING!

 

People walk right by it and not notice it because it looks like the computer next to it whether it's a PET, Tandy, Amiga, etc. I remember waiting for a computer store in a mall to open up which had set up the Mac, Amiga and ST in front of the store. None of them were turned on yet as the store was just opening. I noticed more people stopped to look at the ST than the other machines, probably because of its unique design. People were copying the ST design in their own products such as nametags and even cakes.

 

Oh, industrial design awards? Only after the iMac came out. Why do you think Apple was dying in the 1990s? Because Macs were the same old boring beige case like PCs. Apple needed to do something different to distinguish itself from the boring beige case PCs. The result was the colorful iMacs which I hate, but people thought they were cool and different - just like the ST case.

Thanks for the assist! very good points!

[atarian63]

Lies.

Fact. At the time the Falcon came out, it was up against 486DX PC's, 68040 Macs, and the Amiga 3000 and 4000. In addition, just about every serious Amiga 2000 and 500 user had at least a 33MHz 030 accelerator in their machine. In fact, having a 40MHz 030 accelerator in my A500 is why I got a 50MHz 030 with FPU accelerator with my first A1200, and in total it cost less than a Falcon, and flat outperformed it.

Full 32-bit Atari? It's called the TT030. Yes, there was a 50MHz accelerators, graphics cards, ethernet, etc, etc, just like the Amigas and Macs. As Atarian63 said, the Falcon030 was intended to be the "low-end" machine. The engineers had to weight price/performance/price in the design. At $2500, it's not so "low-end" anymore. It's too bad Atari never got around to a Falcon040 which would have really kick ass...

If you could find expansion hardware for the TT. TT's have always been a bit rare, and add-on hardware for them being moreso. In fact, ST accelerators period were quite rare items outside of the ICD AdSpeed, which was just a 16MHz 68000 with 32K of SRAM cache.

 

I like my STs, but frankly, compared to my Amigas, they just weren't quite as good. Nothing made an ST look worse than one with a color monitor next to an A500 with a color monitor. And that's exactly why I bought an A500, because I had gone with my dad to Dallas back in 1989 to buy a 1040ST, and came home with an A500 with the A501 RAM upgrade for 1Mb.

I dunno, we had quite a few hobbists but sold very accelerators for either machine, on ST it was mostly for the original 520 and 1040 model, we sold very very few for Amiga, ended up sending most of what we had back.

 

On the monitor, I guess if you are doing games the amiga one might look better but for work and crisp clear display.. The customers always picked the ST.

I would say both were excellent monitors The Amiga one being great for Atari,nintendo etc, hard to beat.I have one here at the office hooked up to a Nintendo 64, one of the nicest displays I have ever seen. The color ST monitor was very sharp though, I do think that most of what I am saying had to do with the computers output. The interlace amiga display drove me batty and it looked very cartoon like. Soft and fuzzy.

[doctorclu]

I have to agree with Metalguy on page one. Atariage is for Atari.

 

But for good Amiga coverage, check out http://www.Amiga.org

 

I am thinking of getting on that and some Commodore forums. Anyone know a good Commodore forum?

[atarian63]

Imagine that.. A guy in an atari magazine pumping people up on ATARI capabilities.. You think that review may be a little preferential? Theres also many professional musicians who, due to personal preference, wouldnt touch an ATARI...

 

Im not debating that the MIDI worked well on the ST... What Im saying is that if it does excel above other platforms in the respect of timing, its due to the software being used, not the machine. Again, I can't comment on this area, because I couldnt "find my ass with both hands" in a MIDI sequencer appication... I can however comment on the hardware end of it because as a communications standard, Im well aware of the hardware/resource requirements involved. And to say that one 16bit machine has "better midi timing" than another is like saying that one brand of chainsaw can cut a toothpick better than another.

At the time it seemed like most musicians buying for midi, bought for 3 reasons.. obviously the built in midi,the software and they knew someone else who had one. They weren't buying it for technical specs. More like a tool to get a job done. If you notice on ebay, those selling ST's used for primarily midi, the software they have is all midi, no games or productivity. Same applies to Amiga for video production. many 2000's and 2500's we sold were for toaster systems. The buyer much like the ST buyer needed it for a purpose and again didn't care about tech specs, other than HD and ram, needed the device and software and knew someone who had one.

Just my 2 cents..

[atarian63]

I have to agree with Metalguy on page one. Atariage is for Atari.

 

But for good Amiga coverage, check out http://www.Amiga.org

 

I am thinking of getting on that and some Commodore forums. Anyone know a good Commodore forum?

Since we are talking Amiga, I could use some help from anyone here on my CD32. Hard to get much working from floppy. Maybe it's AGA or the floppy drive is flaky though it loads WB fine.

Also trying to makes bootable CD's with loads of games with a menu.

Looks like I need a KB adaper as well, hopefully one that I can use a tiny PC kb on.

[ijor]

Yep. Theres only one Oscillator on 16bit macs and AMIGAs as well.. Every chip on all of these systems in question operates at a divisor frequency of the same oscillator.

 

It doesn't matter how many oscillators the computer has (as a matter of fact, the ST has multiple oscillators, not all the chips are driven by the same one). It matters, for this purpose, if the oscillator that drives the MIDI interface is the same or not. Again, I can't tell about the Mac or Amiga, but the typical MIDI interface on the PC uses a separate crystal.

 

And if you want to break it down further into "how accurate is one cycle" you realize that if any chip on the bus's "cycles" were out of sync (due to design characteristics of the system) with any other chip's by more than say 50ns, youd end up with all kinds of errors..

 

This is probably completely off-topic, but no, you are wrong. Many of the chips used at the time had an asynchrous bus interface. Their clock could be completely off (or it might have no clock at all) without creating any kind of error.

 

And 50 ns is .000005 miliseconds, so the largest concievable timing variation due to design would still land any "cycle calculated event" on the exact same "midi cycle" regardless...

 

I don't think you are understanding my point (probably my fault). Again, we are not talking about nanoseconds, but about cycles. In other words, it is not about how accurate a cycle is in nanoseconds, but how accurate a given code is in cycles. On a PC at the time, you could be off by easily 10-100 cycles. Then you are talking about at a magnitude not that far from the MIDI frequency.

 

Still, even then, it doesn't matter too much for a single MIDI access. It matters for a sequence where you have not just one MIDI accesses, but plenty. Then the cumulative rounding error is becoming bigger and bigger. Of course that a good software can compensate for this, but it is not nearly as easy or accurate as when the system is already in sync with the MIDI interface.

 

To understand what I'm trying to say, consider the following. On the ST, if 10,000 vertical blanks passed since a given instance, you know exactly how many MIDI cycles you are talking about. On a PC is much more difficult, if possible at all. Of course that a modern high quality MIDI interface has its own hardware, including clocks, DMA, timers, etc. But that wasn't present in the typical PC MIDI card at the time.

 

Finally, I'm not even suggesting this was what made the ST a better MIDI machine (or even if it was indeed a better MIDI machine or not). Personally, I don't give a f* about this. Didn't we have enough with that silly A8 vs. C64 thread?

Edited December 15, 2008 by ijor

[+remowilliams]

Since we are talking Amiga, I could use some help from anyone here on my CD32. Hard to get much working from floppy. Maybe it's AGA or the floppy drive is flaky though it loads WB fine.

Also trying to makes bootable CD's with loads of games with a menu.

Looks like I need a KB adaper as well, hopefully one that I can use a tiny PC kb on.

Your best bet would be to get a hold of the 222/444/888 compilation CDs and forget about floppies. Also, while a PC mini/DIN connector is needed, you need an Amiga keyboard not a PC one. The CD32 makes a kickass little Amiga with an SX2 interface+mem+HD, but they are a bit scarce/pricey.

[MEtalGuy66]

I do understand exactly what you are saying... I would contend that you are the one who is not "getting the big picture" here.

 

Regardless of the operational frequency of anything in the machine, On any bus, the two devices on both ends do have to be in SOME FORM of synchronization. Otherwise, theres no way to know when states are active for the transfer of data.. Now whether youve got devices in between that act as buffers, dedicated bus signals that indicate state, or a number of other variables in design, the bottom lne is that the timing does have to "line up" with a margin of +/- 50ns (and thats an very LOOSE figure for the purposes of illustration only) on any given transfer, regardless of the different clock rates. Any code youd write (knowing the documented characteristics of the machine) would be based on KNOWN relationships with this very negligable margin of timing difference. And wheter we consider how many "average cycles" of the device generating the data = how may "average midi cycles" or the approximate values of these in fractions of a second, the point is still the same. On devices in microcomputers, the margin of timing variation under which they could still concievably operate is so much smaller than the smallest time interval in which a STATE can exist on the MIDI end, that any variations due to hardware design (other than pure lack of throughput capability which is in no way the case on ANY of these platforms) that YES, the software considerations you mentioned would be very REAL factors, the "timing" variations due to hardware design quality are so negligable, that they would not have the slightest effect on the "MIDI end"...

Edited December 15, 2008 by MEtalGuy66

[atarian63]

Since we are talking Amiga, I could use some help from anyone here on my CD32. Hard to get much working from floppy. Maybe it's AGA or the floppy drive is flaky though it loads WB fine.

Also trying to makes bootable CD's with loads of games with a menu.

Looks like I need a KB adaper as well, hopefully one that I can use a tiny PC kb on.

Your best bet would be to get a hold of the 222/444/888 compilation CDs and forget about floppies. Also, while a PC mini/DIN connector is needed, you need an Amiga keyboard not a PC one. The CD32 makes a kickass little Amiga with an SX2 interface+mem+HD, but they are a bit scarce/pricey.

Thanks!

I'll dig around for those. The floppy device have is from a Uk company called analog computers, it's an SX2 sort of look alike