What the STE should've been under the hood

[Foebane]

Well, that's simple economics - should've guessed that myself.

[calimero]

Well, that's simple economics - should've guessed that myself.

 

 

maybe

 

obviously IBM did not know this they, like Apple, charge something like 6 times!

[chepe]

CUSTOM CHIPS ALL THE WAY, BABY! The Amiga BURIED the Atari ST for that reason alone!

Custom chips are fine & dandy if you can afford them - but to really get ahead of curve you have to take enormous technical risk, or invest tons of moolah. Commodore itself couldn't afford to develope modern chipset in the '90s, they could only produce more budget-friendly AGA which was obsolescent when it arrived.

Heck, even modern era video game consol giants have trouble keeping up. Playstation 4 is basically just a crappy PC on Sony case.

 

It's funny reading people talking about ST as 'not real Atari'. Here in Finland, Atari = ST, 8-bit Ataris were virtually unknown. Nobody had them. 8-bit scene was 90% Commodore, with MSX taking up most of the rest.

[Foebane]

Custom chips are fine & dandy if you can afford them - but to really get ahead of curve you have to take enormous technical risk, or invest tons of moolah. Commodore itself couldn't afford to develope modern chipset in the '90s, they could only produce more budget-friendly AGA which was obsolescent when it arrived.

Heck, even modern era video game consol giants have trouble keeping up. Playstation 4 is basically just a crappy PC on Sony case.

 

It's funny reading people talking about ST as 'not real Atari'. Here in Finland, Atari = ST, 8-bit Ataris were virtually unknown. Nobody had them. 8-bit scene was 90% Commodore, with MSX taking up most of the rest.

 

AGA was a good step-up in spec for the Amiga, even if it was flawed in places, and it allowed the Amiga to be evenly-specced with the PC, except maybe sound. It's just a shame the AA chipset never got finished.

 

I didn't say ST wasn't "real Atari", but I refuse to believe that Hi-Toro/Amiga developed Lorraine for Atari, they were just one of the potential buyers, the field was wide-open. It was just a horrible mess that all the Atari/Amiga/Commodore shenanigans happened in the first place.

[leech]

 

Atari TT shifter sometimes referred as "double shifter"?!

- TT shifter had 64bit width and 16MHz access to 154KB of ST-RAM (16 256Kbit 100nS) link and have 250nS time slots for shifter/CPU RAM access

- ST shifter had 16bit width and 8MHz access to 32KB ST-RAM? Shifter never interfere with CPU ram access since MC68000 can read from RAM every 4 cycles and shifter read from RAM in oposite cycles since memory is fast enough for this. It has 500ns time slots for shifter/CPU RAM access.

- Falcon Videl had 32bit width and 16MHz but with Burst mode of FAST-PAGE RAM (3, 1, 1... cycles; total 17 longword in sequence) with no limit on memory amount, only limit was bus and memory speed (e.g. if you increase bus speed from 16 to 25MHz you can get greater resolutions!).

 

Does MC68030 in TT have any speed penal if TT run in specific resolution or is MC68030 running always at full speed regardless of resolution? There are infos in link that I left but it is not clear to me they stated that RAM have slices of 250nS (same as speed of RAM in ST??)...

 

That reminds me, I need to look into increasing the bus speed on my Falcon... That's a good question about the TT, would have been nice if you could use the TT RAM for video if you had it for higher resolution/color depth. Would have been an epic feature at the time.

[calimero]

It's funny reading people talking about ST as 'not real Atari'. Here in Finland, Atari = ST, 8-bit Ataris were virtually unknown. Nobody had them. 8-bit scene was 90% Commodore, with MSX taking up most of the rest.

 

 

absolutely same in ex-Yugoslavia! Atari = ST

[kimchipenguin]

But to sum things up, it almost seems to me that the Atari community is a bit more alive than the Amiga one. I think the reasoning behind that is the split in Amiga-land between Aros, MorphOS, AmigaOS and OS4. So software development seems to have just choked, with the exception of getting Linux ports. Atari-land seems to get a lot more new software projects happening. Hardware projects seem to be about equal, though most of the Amiga ones seem to be for accelerators rather than memory upgrades.

I don't know where you got that impression, but the Amiga scene is more active than the Atari ST one, including software and hardware. New software projects for the ST are rare, with the exception of demos. You're also mistaken about the hardware projects I believe, various accelerators, memory upgrades and flash drives exist or are in development for the Amiga, as are projects such as a new Amiga board (Amiga Reloaded) and new A1200 cases. Same with magazines, books, websites etc. - the Amiga scene is just bigger.

 

Anyway, back on topic: I think regardless what Atari did with the ST, they would have eventually been defeated by the PC. Even a STE with a 256 color mode wouldn't have helped in 1990 - developers already switched to the Amiga or video game consoles. I liked the ST and the Falcon, but the STE not so much. Atari did very little to help the STE and those enhanced joystick ports were useless until the arrival of the Jaguar pads.

[leech]

I don't know where you got that impression, but the Amiga scene is more active than the Atari ST one, including software and hardware. New software projects for the ST are rare, with the exception of demos. You're also mistaken about the hardware projects I believe, various accelerators, memory upgrades and flash drives exist or are in development for the Amiga, as are projects such as a new Amiga board (Amiga Reloaded) and new A1200 cases. Same with magazines, books, websites etc. - the Amiga scene is just bigger.

 

Anyway, back on topic: I think regardless what Atari did with the ST, they would have eventually been defeated by the PC. Even a STE with a 256 color mode wouldn't have helped in 1990 - developers already switched to the Amiga or video game consoles. I liked the ST and the Falcon, but the STE not so much. Atari did very little to help the STE and those enhanced joystick ports were useless until the arrival of the Jaguar pads.

 

Well, I guess I should stress the word 'Alive'. People in the Atari community seem generally more hyper and the old models seem to be getting as much love as the new as far as the hardware hacks and such. Which by the way seem like the proper term of hack (Soldering for installs!) than most of the Amiga stuff. Actually maybe it's the impression of how bitter a lot of people are in the Amiga community that seems different. Besides the SDL based ports, the software development seems pretty dead, at least for the classic machines.

 

I loved my Mega STe. but yes, there just wasn't enough push to the developers to really take advantage of the newer machines. The lowest common denominator ended up always being the ST, and so the extended abilities were there for nothing. At least if they had upped the desktop resolutions they would have made even better business level machines, for things like DTP. I would have given my left nut for that many colors back when I was using Calamus or Pagestream. I wasn't even aware until very recently that the non-Mega STEs had the enhanced joystick ports. I noticed them when I got my falcon and found out about them. So Atari didn't really advertise any of that much.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

 

That reminds me, I need to look into increasing the bus speed on my Falcon... That's a good question about the TT, would have been nice if you could use the TT RAM for video if you had it for higher resolution/color depth. Would have been an epic feature at the time.

Well - this is just total wrong idea. Fast RAM is called fast - what is case with TT RAM (just another name) because it has nothing with video. If you use it for video generation it is not fast anymore - will be slow as ST RAM.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Does MC68030 in TT have any speed penal if TT run in specific resolution or is MC68030 running always at full speed regardless of resolution? There are infos in link that I left but it is not clear to me they stated that RAM have slices of 250nS (same as speed of RAM in ST??)...

I really don't know. But that's easy to test. Just run some benchmark in low res (ST) mode and then in highest TT video mode and compare results. Of course not some graphic speed test, but pure CPU speed test or like. And of course make sure that it works not in fast (TT) RAM if there is such.

[calimero]

^

if I had TT...

[chepe]

Anyway, back on topic: I think regardless what Atari did with the ST, they would have eventually been defeated by the PC. Even a STE with a 256 color mode wouldn't have helped in 1990 - developers already switched to the Amiga or video game consoles. I liked the ST and the Falcon, but the STE not so much. Atari did very little to help the STE and those enhanced joystick ports were useless until the arrival of the Jaguar pads.

Yeah, PC would have probably won anyway, regardless of what other platforms did. In fact, in the end it was consumers who won the home computer wars. PC market became so cutthroat and competive that even big PC manufacturers couldn't take it. IBM had to give up its own creation, and Compaq which looked absolutely undefeatable in the '90s folded.

That said, I do believe that with better choices Commodore and Atari could have made it for few more years at least. I maintain that CPU upgrade would have been must for STE to make it more attractive. And yea it's puzzling that analog joystick ports were not employed at all. Not only they'd have made it competive with console controllers, also they would have been great in flight simulators which was very popular genre at the time. Many people bought ST to play Falcon (well at least I did).

 

AGA was a good step-up in spec for the Amiga, even if it was flawed in places, and it allowed the Amiga to be evenly-specced with the PC, except maybe sound. It's just a shame the AA chipset never got finished.

Sure AGA wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't in any way groundbreaking. No PC user was going to look at AGA and think "wow if only I had all that". Especially as it was bolted on otherwise unremarkable machine.

Edited January 29, 2016 by chepe

[ParanoidLittleMan]

PCs main problem at start was it's price and being not multimedia. High price was partially because expansion slots. But 10 years later that, + CPU socket + no need to pay license was what made it winner. Prices dropped, and in couple years it was affordable for 100th of millions. Open architecture and expansion slots made possible third party expansions, and their development and launching on market time was always much faster than of big manufacturers.

I bought ST to play Flight Simulator 2 - well, it was one of titles what attracted me, and it looked and played far better than on any 8-bitter. But must admit that with some 3D card and 1000 MHz CPU it is way better :-)

Falcon is mentioned (SW, not computer) - I never liked it much. Flight of the Intruder was best avio/war simulator for me.

[chepe]

Yea FotI was better (it was after all, made by SH as successor to Falcon). Alas it required 1MB memory for full graphics and sound, and I had only 512kb...

I guess my point is that while backwards compability is nice to have, it's killer applications which sell the machine. Why didn't Atari at least release their own joystick for STE to get things going?

Edited January 29, 2016 by chepe

[+DarkLord]

 

You're joking, right?

 

Given the names "Rock Lobster" and "Rock Bottom Price", I know which one I'd prefer.

 

Jesus, why is Tramiel so OBSESSED with "cheap"?

 

You think these 2 weren't?

 

Irving Gould and Medhi Ali...

[leech]

Well - this is just total wrong idea. Fast RAM is called fast - what is case with TT RAM (just another name) because it has nothing with video. If you use it for video generation it is not fast anymore - will be slow as ST RAM.

 

Well put that way... being able to use TT RAM for all the applications and using ST Ram for purely video display would have worked, right? The problem I had with my TT is that most applications didn't realize the memory was even there. I'll need to find out what happened to the guy I was going to buy TOS 3.06 off of so I could play more with my TT

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Yes, display in ST RAM, and CPU intensive code, data in Fast RAM. There are flags in TOS executable files (PRG, TOS) which say that it should run in fast RAM. Of course that some ST SW will not use TT RAM - maybe little playing with those flags can make it faster.

And I know case, where using TT RAM is actually counterproductive: it happens with ACSI attached hard disks - since DMA of it can access only ST RAM, but TOS sets TT RAM as disk buffer for Desktop, what results in overall slower work - because hard disk driver must move data between ST and TT RAM. Solution would be to set those buffers in ST RAM, but nothing about how to do it - probably only TOS hack can solve it.

[leech]

I always thought it'd be awesome, now that we have EmuTOS, if we could get 100% compatibility (which I realize is really hard) and then started adding a lot of the nicer looking things that TOS 4.x has (like the better looking windows, I know not much of a difference, but definitely looks nicer) so that we could have overall better looking systems on the older ST line.

 

Granted these days, I have to wonder how many people have upgraded the memory and just run MiNT. It was going to be my goal to see if I could land a CT60e and start updating a lot of the FreeMiNT packages myself and put it out there, since a lot of it seems pretty old.

 

But I'd also like to expand out my TT030 and Mega STe and do the same there.

 

Anyhow, that's a bit off topic You know what would be cool for the topic? Let's make a new STee? FPGA that sucker, get some of the chips from the arcade machines (we could probably use mame bits, right?) and put together a MiST style box. New TOS machine would be pretty epic.

[barnieg]

I always thought it'd be awesome, now that we have EmuTOS, if we could get 100% compatibility (which I realize is really hard) and then started adding a lot of the nicer looking things that TOS 4.x has (like the better looking windows, I know not much of a difference, but definitely looks nicer) so that we could have overall better looking systems on the older ST line.

 

Granted these days, I have to wonder how many people have upgraded the memory and just run MiNT. It was going to be my goal to see if I could land a CT60e and start updating a lot of the FreeMiNT packages myself and put it out there, since a lot of it seems pretty old.

 

But I'd also like to expand out my TT030 and Mega STe and do the same there.

 

Anyhow, that's a bit off topic You know what would be cool for the topic? Let's make a new STee? FPGA that sucker, get some of the chips from the arcade machines (we could probably use mame bits, right?) and put together a MiST style box. New TOS machine would be pretty epic.

The MiST is ideal for this. STEroids mode is great and the potential is still there for a few extra graphics modes.

 

 

To add: an XEGS/ mega st style case with separate keyboard?

Edited January 29, 2016 by barnieg

[leech]

The MiST is ideal for this. STEroids mode is great and the potential is still there for a few extra graphics modes.

 

 

To add: an XEGS/ mega st style case with separate keyboard?

 

I'm going to have to look into this STEroids mode! I ordered a MiST, it's sitting on my table at home, but I've had about 10 minutes with it since I got it (installed TOS and got it to a desktop and that's about as far as I got, then realized I really liked my old STs so started getting them up and going again.)

 

Agreed with the XEGS/ Mega ST style case, that'd be awesome. I need to do the 'whitening' on my XEGS. Actually I need to do it on most of my Ataris.

[Foebane]

Yeah, PC would have probably won anyway, regardless of what other platforms did. In fact, in the end it was consumers who won the home computer wars. PC market became so cutthroat and competive that even big PC manufacturers couldn't take it. IBM had to give up its own creation, and Compaq which looked absolutely undefeatable in the '90s folded.

 

Sure AGA wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't in any way groundbreaking. No PC user was going to look at AGA and think "wow if only I had all that". Especially as it was bolted on otherwise unremarkable machine.

 

If only you'd seen me back in the early 1990s in my computing college courses, I was quite the Amiga zealot and was happy to promote the Amiga every chance I could to everyone who was thinking of getting a PC for their college course. If I recall, there was even a moment where me and some PC zealot (who was a complete jerk in any case) had a loud argument in front of the whole group, mainly about the meaning of the term PC (was it a brand or a generic computing term). I would get quietly outraged at lecturers scoffing at the inflated prices of the higher-end Amigas, and I did everything I could to use my Amiga feasibly for the PC stuff (I used CrossDOS for PC compatibility, as I recall). Someone else I knew in the group had bought a cheap PC and brought in a box of his old Amiga games for me to have a look at, although I inadvertently almost got him in trouble by risking the lecturer (a complete asshole, everyone agreed) seeing the box and us engaging in disk swaps right there in a lecture. Really should've apologised to him for that, but didn't realise what I'd done at the time.

 

Of course, I was starting to learn that PCs are not entirely compatible with Amigas, when it came to working on a COBOL text file, and some of the time was spent stripping away ASCII characters that had been added by the PC or Amiga for carriage returns/New Lines.

 

I didn't consider the PC to be any threat to the Amiga in the early 1990s whatsoever, as AGA had come out and at least there was no advantage to either platform, graphics-wise (please explain how VGA could be better than AGA). However, I had an Amiga 1200 and didn't count on the Motorola 68x series' low processing power compared to the Intel x86s of the time, and things finally began to turn me towards the PC once I saw Doom on a friend's PC and was blown away by how good it looked. I knew then, that the Amiga's days were numbered and the next Big Thing was on its way. Commodore going bust was the final nail in the coffin. Yes, despite what happened before, I was a turncoat.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Things are that in all this years there was only evolution and never something revolutionary. Except in advertisements, of course - they are full with word "revolution". Stays for HW and SW too.

It is easy to come out with some great ideas (may see some in this very thread too ) but that's not what determines will it be realized and when. Development times, market, component, manufacturing prices are what will decide at the end (when) will it go in manufacturing. SW is little different, but nobody made something like polygon graphic of Starglider 2 quality in first try to make 3D. There was Starglider 1 first afterall In SW time and experience are factors.

SW is flexible - as name self says. It is good if HW is such too

[ParanoidLittleMan]

....

please explain how VGA could be better than AGA ...

Seriously ? Just one simple thing, understandable for everyone: VGA is for monitors, AGA is for TV. You getting headache from AGA, not from VGA - talking literally, and reason is refresh rate.

[Foebane]

Seriously ? Just one simple thing, understandable for everyone: VGA is for monitors, AGA is for TV. You getting headache from AGA, not from VGA - talking literally, and reason is refresh rate.

 

Um, you DO know the Amiga had monitor as primary output, right? Namely for the 1084S.

 

I never got "headache" from AGA, but I dunno about you.

 

Refresh rate is irrelevant as the Amiga could both 50Hz and 60Hz, unless you're suggesting 60Hz should be the only one?

[ParanoidLittleMan]

 

Um, you DO know the Amiga had monitor as primary output, right? Namely for the 1084S.

 

I never got "headache" from AGA, but I dunno about you.

 

Refresh rate is irrelevant as the Amiga could both 50Hz and 60Hz, unless you're suggesting 60Hz should be the only one?

Huh - I caught you ! Under proper monitor I understand non-interlaced, min 70 Hz refresh rate display. Not because ST mono mode was it, but because it is known ergonomic fact.

I did lot of PC serviceings, which started with setting refresh rate from 60 Hz to 75 or more - because 60 Hz was visible in first sec and irritated me.

All above stays for CRT monitors - just to mention, before someone comes with that his monitor is at 60 Hz - but that's LCD, complete different story.