[HN Gopher] Really Atari ST?
___________________________________________________________________
Really Atari ST?
Author : diffuse_l
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-09-22 08:29 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| Zenst wrote:
| I vaguely recall that people used to get their atari floppies and
| format in a MSDOS machine as it would yield a slightly bigger
| capacity - something to do with default format on DOS using more
| tracks. That was until alternative floppy formatting tools came
| about on the Atari scene and there was one that was also great
| for copying discs - going to bug me to recall it's name, but was
| one of those utils that had a cult rep in its day in atari land.
|
| [EDIT ADD] Ok had a dig around and the tool most used was
| Fastcopypro - https://sites.google.com/site/stessential/disks-
| tools, was useful to do fancy formats for extra capacity if you
| had good quality discs as well as copying/backing up discs
| rzzzt wrote:
| I remember a tool called 2M on DOS, which allowed formatting
| 1.44M disks to non-standard capacities, up to ~1800k or so...?
|
| Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)
| bregma wrote:
| Both DOS and Atari used FAT format. The capacity was identical,
| but MS-DOS would have trouble reading Atari ST floppies because
| Atari had followed the published standard and wrote two copies
| of the allocation table to the disk, and MS-DOS would only
| write one and overwrite the second one with data and corrupt
| the disk. The 'extra space' was the space that was supposed to
| be taken by the redundant file allocation table.
|
| The rule was if you wanted to move files between systems, you
| had to format the floppy on MS-DOS, then you can use it
| everywhere. If you formatted on the Atari and used it on MS-
| DOS, you would end up using it nowhere.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I didn't grow up with floppies, so pardon my ignorance, but
| two questions: (1) _which_ FAT? I figure it can't be FAT32,
| but that still leaves FAT12 and FAT16, both of which
| Microsoft helped develop. And (2) since Microsoft helped
| develop it, were they just not following their own spec?
| Because that doesn't make sense (not that you're wrong).
| Zenst wrote:
| FAT afaik is also known as FAT12 - nice explanation in the
| wiki over the differences and some history aspects:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system
| code_duck wrote:
| Of course MS didn't care about their 'standard'. They
| assumed they're the only ones using it and/or don't really
| care about breaking other systems.
| Miraste wrote:
| Sometimes they broke other systems on purpose, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code.
| tomxor wrote:
| That screenshot of fastcopy just brought memories flooding
| back! I was one of the strange kids in the 90's who had an
| Atari while everything else in the world was windows, the FAT
| format was invaluable for me as I could easily transfer files
| between home, school and other kids computers... I didn't
| appreciate at the time that this kind of compatibility wasn't a
| given.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| As someone who didn't grow up with many floppy disks, how was
| one able to format a floppy to have a different capacity? I
| know there's different "formats" such as DOS, C64, etc, but I
| don't understand _why_?
|
| I have heard about how formatting a floppy involved placing the
| tracks and how modern hard drives have "hard sectors", but for
| some reason, it's not "computing."
| Zenst wrote:
| Most discs were rated to format to 80 tracks but some you
| could format with 81 or 82 and IIRC even 84 on some.
|
| Then there was sectors, which was common to have 8, though
| again you could with better quality discs (quality did get
| better ahead of the standards) you could go with 9 sectors
| and higher - https://www-user.tu-
| chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/usbfloppy/f....
|
| Of course, you could think of it as over-clocking - was no
| guarantee you get that extra capacity, and the early days -
| it was really luck, but like most things, quality improves
| and such avenues of formatting became more accessible.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Basically your floppy disk is formatted on each side with a
| number of tracks, each containing a number of sectors of a
| given size. [1]
|
| The standard 720KB 3.5' floppy disk as used by the Atari ST
| used 80 tracks of 9 sectors.
|
| With these tools you could format with, say 11 sectors
| instead of 9 and boost capacity to 880KB (I think the Amiga
| was doing that as standard).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I seem to recall having a program called "Twister" that
| could format disks like this.
| foobarian wrote:
| On top of that some tools (I used fdformat) shifted the
| sectors to speed up sequential reads, i.e. have the first
| sector of the next track rotate in under the r/w head right
| as the head arrives.
|
| Edit: another unrelated practice was buying up cheap(er)
| single-density disks, which were distinguished by the lack
| of a marker hole opposite the r/o protection slider, and
| used only one side of the medium for data. By drilling it
| out, one could trick the drives into using both sides,
| which usually worked out just fine. Mentioned here [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk
| 6581 wrote:
| Single-density is not the same as single-sided. There are
| single-sided double-density disks.
| Zenst wrote:
| Ah yes, interleaving of the sectors. More prominant with
| early HD's and using tools like spinwrite to optimise the
| interleaving. Today it's all 1:1 as processing from the
| heads just been fast enough for decades to handle the
| speeds.
|
| Spinwrite still exists, though in the early days/versions
| it was the golden tool for tuning up a system and could
| make huge differences. Like double your drive speed and
| more in some instances, but talking late 80's early 90's
| here when interleaving was thing and mid 90's 1:1 became
| the norm and made it moot.
| https://www.grc.com/Spinrite.htm
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The floppy drive has a stepper motor that controls the
| placement of the read/write head above the disk.
|
| In the ST era, the control of that motor was directly under
| the control of the operating system. For an 80 track disk,
| the movement required to step between tracks was a certain
| known amount.
|
| If you formatted the disk with the tracks spaced closer
| together, by altering the stepper movement during that
| process, you would 'magically' get more space.
| prox wrote:
| Weren't there special compression softwares that added even
| more capacity?
| Zenst wrote:
| There was, can't recall the one that was popular prior to
| Microsoft adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
| MSDOS 6.0
| simcop2387 wrote:
| That'd probably be DoubleDisk or Stacker.
| https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/10401/software-
| spotl...
| FilthyAnalyst wrote:
| Stacker was pretty common in the early 90s.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I don't really remember any: my main recollection as an
| ST user was the format programs that let you increase the
| track count and the sector density.
|
| I recall the default format was 9 sectors, 80 tracks, 2
| sides with 512 bytes per sector = 720KB, and you could
| push up to sometimes 82/83 tracks and maybe 10 or 11
| sectors to get more out of a diskette.
|
| Actually, I think my ST originally came with a single-
| sided floppy drive and had to be upgraded.
| Zenst wrote:
| The initial release of Atari's has single sided drives, I
| think the 1040ST had Double sided though, they did
| upgrade that shortly afterwards I believe to enable the
| marketing bods to show a larger number they could compare
| to the Amiga. So was only early 512STFM systems and those
| had a red drive light and the double sided had a green
| one if my memory holds.
|
| Sad thing was, due to the early single sided models, many
| games would limit to 720k so as to not limit there
| market. That saw games that would happily fit upon a
| single double sided disc, cast upon two floppies forcing
| switching. So that small batch of single sided initial
| release systems, really did have a legacy impact that
| lasted for years and did it no favours.
| fullstop wrote:
| I remember seeing a tool that could be used to punch a hole in
| floppy disks in order to double the capacity. I didn't have
| such a tool, but I did have a cheap soldering iron. I ended up
| with a bunch of 3.5" floppy disks with holes melted through
| them.
|
| Thinking back on it now, I'm surprised that I didn't damage the
| disk with the heat of the iron. Then again, maybe I did and
| didn't notice because I was 12.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Flip-it?
| [deleted]
| fullstop wrote:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/1027113
| 0...
|
| Might have been that brand. I remember seeing what it did
| and then figuring out how to get a hole in the 3.5" disk
| without cracking the plastic.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I've seen it used - IIRC the problem is that the media isn't
| rated for the storage that you're now asking of it, so while
| it may survive being written/read a few times, it'd fail
| sooner.
| andrewf wrote:
| You're basically overclocking your storage medium.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Can confirm. I used to drill holes with a... well, a drill.
|
| Totally worked. Capacity increased. Until one day your
| files were corrupted. And that day often came soon!
| monocasa wrote:
| It might fail sooner, but you were banking on it
| essentially just being a binning distinction, that they
| didn't really do any testing either way and just stuck them
| in cases with or without the hole depending on what they
| thought they could sell at the time.
|
| Did I lose files on fake doublesided disks? Yes. Did I lose
| files on real doublesided disks? Also yes.
| Sodaware wrote:
| There are so many things the ST does badly - weak sound chip,
| screen memory laid out like a Venetian blind (to quote Jeff
| Minter I think), and a mouse that was designed in a universe
| where ergonomics did not exist.
|
| But I still love it. Without the ST I wouldn't have discovered
| programming and all the highs (and lows) that it brings. Looking
| back now, I'm surprised people were able to get as much out of it
| as they did.
| thorianus wrote:
| Well, I'd argue about the music. The chiptune music from SID
| and YM has aged very well, while Amiga sounds horrbile without
| FM synth and 8-bit 11kHz samples.
|
| Also memory was much better organized than Amiga - without the
| speed penalty.
|
| And the simplicity of Shifter (the "GPU") allowed for really
| awsome 'beyond the dream' hacks, which were unavaliable on
| Amiga due to much more capable - but limited in 'hacking' video
| chip.
|
| And then the first upgrade - Atari STE - amazes today with full
| control 8-channel 50kHz MODs... While mc68k CPU stayed at 8MHz!
| bbarnett wrote:
| At it again, thorianus! Spreading anti-amiga propaganda,
| lies, all pure, devilish, unvarnished lies!
|
| I will follow you down the ages, through age extension tech,
| uploading of consciousness, to the eventual universe spanning
| one mind!
|
| Always I will appear, always I will prevent your foolish,
| unjust and untrue claims from spreading unchecked.
|
| Amiga is better ; she is the best. Your Atari smells of
| milk!! Amigas rule!
|
| (what part of early computing culture did not have inane fan
| wars?)
| gallier2 wrote:
| Atari STE had 2 channels 8 bit DAC a 25kHz on DMA.
|
| It was the Falcon who had incredible sound capacity with its
| matrix channel mixer and DSP.
| Sodaware wrote:
| I'd love to own a Falcon, but the prices on eBay make my
| eyes water.
| thorianus wrote:
| Well, that's the HW. As with video, the 16-bits went on
| further than just mere hardware limits.
|
| When we talk software mixing, STE maxed out CPU at 8
| channels 50kHz, here's an example:
| http://yerzmyey.i-demo.pl/YERZMYEY-Octopush_ATARI_STe.mp3
|
| Even plain 520 ST can do a lot on this YM chip.
|
| Amiga 500 on the other had could a bit of this but only
| with 12kHz samples, and no volume control per channel, also
| those pesky filters.
|
| Amiga 1200/4000 could do same - as per much faster CPU,
| but... they still left the old audio 8-bit chip in it :/
| egypturnash wrote:
| All Amigas had a 6-bit volume control for each individual
| sound channel.
|
| All Amigas except the A1000 could turn the high-pass
| filter off, and pretty much everything tended to do this.
| alexisread wrote:
| There's a package EPSS for the STE which allows using its
| 8 channel DMA as a software synth, at the same time as
| running other midi channels in Cubase. Makes for a very
| tidy DAW:
|
| https://youtu.be/OlspnqVcJho
|
| Other packages (DBE tracker?) allow the STE to play
| 32channel mods albeit not at 50Khz
| aidenn0 wrote:
| _Star Trek: The Rebel Universe_ looked far better on an ST than
| on a PC.
|
| [edit]
|
| Compare:
|
| http://www.atarimania.com/st/screens/star_trek_the_rebel_uni...
|
| https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/s/star-trek-...
| cptnapalm wrote:
| I've never heard of this game before. Looking it up, its
| impressive considering the capabilities of then current
| hardware.
| thorianus wrote:
| Well, plain ol' Prince of Persia looked much better on ST -
| if you compare PC/Amiga ports. Look at the torch animation.
| jandrese wrote:
| Everything that supported graphics looked better than CGA.
| Even monochrome Hercules graphics.
|
| Although to be fair CGA wasn't intended to be used on
| monitors. It was intended to be used on smeary composite
| video sources where you could expand the palette using
| artifact colors. Even then the graphics were terrible, but
| you could at least get a green.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > (ST refers to Sixteen/Thirty-two, referring to the 68k CPU's
| external and internal data width)
|
| I thought ST referred to Sam Tramiel - Jack Tramiel's son.
| icedchai wrote:
| Sixteen/Thirty-two seems to make more sense, especially if you
| look at the TT, which is Thirty-two/Thirty-two.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The one thing I like the most about the ST (when compared to,
| say, the Amiga) is its simplicity. It's vastly less capable, of
| course, but, in the end, the simplicity pays back by allowing
| easier expansion. The Amiga was a hard machine to evolve,
| something that cost Commodore a lot.
| icedchai wrote:
| I think the Amiga was _much_ more expandable than Atari. Just
| check out the variety of accelerator boards, RTG graphics
| cards, serial boards, HD controllers, etc. available. The Atari
| OS (TOS) was also very simple compared to Amiga OS.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think that's oversimplified. TOS was single tasking but two
| things a) unlike the Amiga a proper 68000 syscall TRAP
| mechanism was used meaning the OS etc ran using proper
| supervisor / user separation and b) the application toolkit
| (AES) built overtop supported message passing and multiple
| application semantics and c) the graphics subsystem (VDI) was
| also in theory abstracted away from the physical. In fact the
| OS components themselves had originally been developed (by
| Digital Research) for both x86 and 68000 and the original
| work was done on the Lisa before it ever got put on a Atari
| hardware. And DR's GEM had a life of its own on PC hardware
| (see Ventura Publisher, etc.), though handicapped by the
| Apple lawsuit and competition from Microsoft.
|
| These things meant that later the Atari community and Atari
| themselves were able to extend the OS in a proper
| multitasking almost Unix-like direction (MiNT and MultiGEM)
| and bring it to new hardware, and new display formats and
| architectures, etc. Provided the applications being run were
| cleanly written (well, that's a big caveat...). For example
| -- we can now run TOS/GEM on an Amiga, that's pretty neat
| (though totally pointless).
|
| In true Tramiel fashion they shipped the cheapest simplest
| thing they could. But it was something they were able to
| iterate on -- unfortunately they just did this too slowly. As
| others have pointed out, the Amiga had amazing hardware from
| the go, but its architecture became somewhat tied to that
| original hardware. It was more like a video games console
| than a workstation. They had a few years headstart on
| everyone else and then having (then dated) specialized
| hardware became a liability, not an advantage.
| rjsw wrote:
| The Atari ST could do the same kind of cooperative
| multitasking as GEM on a PC.
|
| I built MicroGNUEmacs as a desk accessory so that I could
| run it at the same time as other programs.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this because I'm
| not sure if I understand what you mean.
|
| My take is that both the Amiga and the Atari had a plethora of
| expansions and, without having any numbers to show, I think the
| Amiga won out in the expansion race, from 040 cards for the
| A500 (AFAIK no 040 was available for any Atari until much
| later) to the Video Toaster.
|
| Both machines were hard to evolve because both their designs
| encouraged software that was tightly tied to the hardware.
| VIDEL and AGA were both desperate and, ultimately, fruitless
| attempts at having the cake and eating it: sticking to custom
| chips was needed to keep backwards compatibility, but they made
| the machines both too expensive and too underpowered to be
| competitive.
| alexisread wrote:
| The Amiga was much more closely tied to the hardware than the
| ST, by dint of it's bus system sharing between the blitter
| and CPU for chip RAM.
|
| Additionally, having the copper, sprites, scrolling, HAM and
| planar graphics modes meant that backwards compatibility is
| harder - just look at the difficulty of emulation for both of
| them.
|
| The Amiga graphics layout is also (slightly) more difficult
| to work with, there's a trick for the ST to do quick chunky-
| to-planar (C2P) conversion, check out the texture mapping in
| Thunderdome demo (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503)
|
| All said, yes the Amiga had more expansion cards for it, but
| the central bus system was a bottleneck as for the majority
| of Amigas, you had to use the built-in graphics, if you look
| at the a1200, the AGA chipset was a poor upgrade over the
| original chipset, hampered by backwards compatibility and the
| expense to needing to add a separate (fastram) bank to bypass
| the system bus for speed.
|
| As far as retargetable graphics goes (ie. VGA-style cards),
| the ST was ahead as GEM allowed this from the start. That
| combined with the much simpler design allows a newer machine
| to be much more powerful as it has to worry about backwards
| compatibility less.
|
| The Atari Falcon bears this out, a stock Falcon can manage to
| run Quake2 at 10FPS odd, a stock a1200 even with fastram
| can't get close. The Falcon was actually developed using an
| ST with a processor socket, bearing out the simpler
| architecture could be abused more :)
|
| TBH the Falcon could have been much more, but Atari were
| broke and cheaped out on the 16bit bus, could've had 24bit
| VIDEL at 800x600 and run Quake2 at 15-20FPS for PS500 in
| 1992. Add a cdrom with multiTos (effectively unix with a GEM
| frontend) and you'd have a competitive machine even against
| the PC of the time.
| [deleted]
| thorianus wrote:
| Well, that was the problem. Atari had the MIDI (pro music)
| and DTP from the start. The mono 640x400 monitor - ultra
| sharp was a great gig.
|
| Amiga went the road of being console turned computer, and the
| expansions only created havok with support. Even A500 Plus
| had issues.
|
| Sadly - it also affects community - the IP rights for Amiga
| are mess, the recent issue with Terrible Fire extensions -
| for some reason a lot of bad blood in a very bold and
| interesting system made by Atari engineers.
| gallier2 wrote:
| The question is also to consider when and at what price. A
| Amiga 2000 had indeed quite the extension possibilities, but
| they were expensive. An Amiga 500 was a whole other story.
| The expandibility was limited and only in later times was it
| possible to add a lot of RAM and disks, etc. and RAM it
| needed a lot, much more than than Atari, but the Ataris
| didn't need as much memory, but they were also less greedy
| with it.
| simonh wrote:
| I got an Amiga and honestly while it was a great machine, a lot
| of games were written to support the ST as well so didn't use
| the Amiga's more advanced capabilities. If you were doing video
| production and graphics work it paid off but frankly I probably
| would have been just as happy with an ST.
|
| Also the ST gets dinged for being less powerful, but it was
| actually significantly faster than the Mac at the time and with
| an add-on could even run Mac applications.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| ST and Amiga looked like competition to each other because of
| the wider market they were situated in but they really had
| different focus and points of success. The ST was a better
| DTP and general productivity machine and really was a "rock
| bottom price" competitor to the Macintosh; its gaming
| capabilities were nothing compared to the Amiga, but I am not
| sure that's where the Tramiels really wanted to focus
| anyways.
|
| I never even had a colour monitor for my ST. The paperwhite
| monochrome screen was to die for back then, and sure beat the
| interlace hi-rez experience on the Amiga.
|
| And the ST was a few hundred bucks cheaper. Price per mhz, it
| was a great machine.
| gallier2 wrote:
| Indeed. As a student (1987) I had an Amiga 500 and after a few
| months I sold it and bought an Atari Mega ST2 in its place. The
| Amiga was so unpleasant to use for programming. To be
| confortably usable it required at least 2 floppy drives (a 3rd
| one would even been useful) or a hard drive, expanding beyond 1
| MB was also not cheap and the display was horrible. TV
| resolution 576i (PAL) is inadequate for editing text. On the
| Atari we had the cheap SM-124 fantastic monochrome 71Hz refresh
| rate screen which allowed to stay for hours programming. All
| compilers and editor I needed would fit in one 800K floppy and
| the 2 mb of RAM would even allow to work from RAM disk. A
| breeze. Gaming was still possible with the second cable
| connected to the TV set (later I installed the PC-Speed
| emulator in my Mega ST which transformed it in a very capable
| XT PC (8Mhz V30, 704 kB DOS memory, with 640x400 Olivetti
| graphics). The Amiga was better for gaming, no contest, for
| serious stuff like porgramming, word processing (pixel perfect
| Signum!) and stuff, it was so much better in lower budget.
| thorianus wrote:
| The Amiga's problem was expensive monitor, flickering screen
| and... with such great video chip - the default color palette
| was just abnomination. I know it was made for TV, but that
| was the problem!
| hinkley wrote:
| Every time we talk of hardware from this era I'm reminded that I
| was absolutely set on getting a Commodore 64 or even better, a
| ColecoVision Adam computer, and my dad 'made me' get a Tandy
| instead. Ugly tan box. Yuck.
|
| My dad and I don't have what you might call compatible decision
| making processes, so there were many times I was disappointed by
| his decisions growing up. But that machine taught me DOS, the
| next one got me onto Windows (answering the question, "How could
| I possible fill up a 43 Megabyte hard drive?") and those got me
| my foot in the door at one of the best jobs I ever had.
|
| I'm still a little jealous of all of the Atari and Commodore fans
| out there, that I didn't get to participate. But if I'd had my
| way I would probably be worse off _and_ still not be able to
| participate because I don 't think anyone but me has ever
| mentioned the Adam unless I fished for it. Kids are dumb.
| the_af wrote:
| According to the 8 Bit Guy, the Tandy was actually a superb DOS
| computer, maybe the best :)
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The Tandy 1000 line was a great DOS machine of its moment for
| _games,_ because the 1000 wasn 't just a PC clone, it was a
| better version of the PCjr -- it had better sound and
| graphics out of the box compared to PCs, with better actual
| PC software compatibility and without the horrible chiclet
| keyboard. The 1000 was so successful for a while that games
| that supported the PCjr's enhancements were marketed as
| "Tandy-compatible".
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish4 wrote:
| I love how every comment here is about the Atari ST instead of
| what the post is about, which is where the 069H byte check
| actually came from.
| tus88 wrote:
| Blame the title.
| petercooper wrote:
| I had a similar experience when going through the (MRI) Ruby
| source code which contained conditional directives for Atari ST
| compilation. Support was dropped only as recently as Ruby 2.4!
| https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/c5eb24349a4535948514fe765c...
| 08-15 wrote:
| So the theory is that MSDOS tried to detect if a bootsector
| contained executable 68k code, because if it did, the BPB was
| valid and could be used to locate the FAT(s) and the master
| directory?
|
| That's triply dumb, because of the typo noted in the article, and
| also because executable Atari ST bootsectors had a checksum that
| should be computed instead of silly heuristics, but most
| importantly because most Atari ST disks had no executable
| bootsector, but the entries concerning disk layout were still
| valid.
|
| It sounds exactly like the fractal of incompetence Microsoft
| would implement, and it would explain why we Atarians had to use
| disks formatted on a PC for data transfer, even though the
| formats were nominally the same. Funny to read about that,
| because back in the day, I thought the ST somehow formatted disks
| "wrong".
| kebman wrote:
| Is this a good time to post this video of the Union Demo Copy
| Program tool[1] for the Atari ST? When it came to serious copy
| jobs I used Fast Copy[2], though. But I'd heard rumours about
| formatting disks on DOS.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf19uSe2UIA
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Libl3S9AaT8
| tomxor wrote:
| Gotta capture the floppy drive sound too!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7aogLweOac
| TLightful wrote:
| Oh. My. God ... just travelled in time back to my 14 year olds.
| Thanks.
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(page generated 2020-09-22 23:00 UTC)