What to do with an Atari STe ?

[countzero]

well, I had the atari bug some while ago too, used 1040ste and TT briefly. Sadly, whatever the ST does, Amiga does better so there's little there that can entertain you. If you're into demoscene some ST demos are really cool (check dead hackers society). The software support is horrible for the ST, they don't have something like Aminet, you have to hunt the softyou're looking for among dozens of outdated ftp sties sprayed across the net, praying the version you're downloading is cracked/serialed properly and actuallyy works, before taking all the hassle to transfer it to the ST. which is another nightmare in itself ...

[Everblue]

Thor is coming to rescue this thread!

[_ThEcRoW]

You can use ghostlink, and take availability of the pc drives in your ste. I have a old pc as slave to the Atari, and having it as hd server. That and 4mb of ram would be sufficient to run floppy images directly from the hd to ram without the need to write back floppies. It works like a charm.
My 520stE run flawlessly in this setup.

[slaapliedje]

I still have in my closet an Atari 1040ST, Mega STe and TT030.

The thing is that the STe line was too little too late.  Basically it came out at the time the Amiga community were drooling over the soon to be released AGA chipset, and the STe just finally added enough to the ST line to compete with the OCS/ECS.  Blitter, larger palette (512 on the ST, 4096 on the STe) and Stereo sound.

The issue I have with that, is they didn't add any new video modes.  Spectrum 512, which allowed all 512 colors on the screen (kind of like HAM on the Amiga) didn't work all that well on the STe, and at that when I'd clock my Mega STe up to 16Mhz, it wouldn't work at all.  It was very much tied to the timing of the processor.

The ugliness is GEM by the way, TOS is the text based underside.  It's actually almost Unix like, but not quite.  Not much besides a few command line programs used it.  Like LHA, zip, etc.  GEM was the graphical interface that most everyone used.

I was always jealous back in the day, of my friend with an Amiga, and it's color icons.  But then I finally bought me an A4000 (have a second on the way), and I love it!  

I have considered pulling out my Ataris and doing some MIDI on them, from what I've seen / read, the software for doing it on the Atari is still a bit above what the Amiga had.  But I could be wrong on that.  I tend to think that's because the Atari ST has always had MIDI ports.  Which is why MIDI maze was so epic!  

It would be fun to have a huge group of atari freaks to play MIDI maze with... but then I think it'd be hard to find 16 players to max it out....

Wonder if they ever made a port of something similar for the Amiga?

slaapliedje

[Amiga_Nut]

The STE chipset was even less exploited than the Amiga chipset so not much.

Get a hi-res monitor and use it as a 16bit PET replacement for serious apps, that is after all what the original design was that Shiraz Shijvi used

[dougal]

I have just played a game which is actually better (!!!??) on the ST than it is on the Amiga.

Addams Family looks so much nicer on the ST. It has proper detailed backgrounds. The Amiga does not. Ok the sound fx and music is not as nice on the ST though.

[Amiga_Nut]

Strange that the Amiga version has pure black backgrounds. Ocean software = scumbags

[dougal]

Don't get me wrong, the Amiga version is brilliant and has much better audio (obviously!) but yeah the backgrounds missing suck.

Strange that the Amiga version has pure black backgrounds. Ocean software = scumbags

[Gazbonk]

Hi, I have a  Atari STE with 4 meg in it they take the old 1 meg 32 pin simms & I have a Atari Mega, but sadley they are both sat in the garage, because I  have no room in the house.

Take a look at these links you may find them useful

01 http://www.atari.org/links/ST/Demos/

02 http://equinox.planet-d.net/atari.html

03 http://www.keychange.co.uk/

04 http://www.atarimuseum.com/

05 http://virtual-markets.net/vme/yac/yac_deal.html

Did have a lot more sites but the links are broken or discontinued, anyway have fun and enjoy.

PS Kim Wilde made Kids in America EP with an Atari.

[fishy_fiz]

Amiga version of Addams Family is much better besides the lack of backgrounds. I'll take some blank, barren gfx vs. flick screen scrolling any day, not to mention the fluidity and responsiveness is also superior on Amiga.

[james666]

Strange that the Amiga version has pure black backgrounds. Ocean software = scumbags

If memory serves Adams Family was ported from the SNES version, which had some nice parallax backgrounds visible where the black holes are in the Amiga incarnation.  I suspect Ocean originally planned to port the parallax scrolling to the Amiga too but decided late in the day it wasn't fast enough and then didn't have time to do anything else instead.  The ST never had a chance of pulling it off (cf its dismal Shadow Of The Beast port) so detailed non-parallax backgrounds were included in the design from the start.

[motrucker]

These computers are great for target practice! :destroy:

[Ami_GFX]

Apart from Notator, Cubase and other Midi software, there isn't much to do with an ST(e) other than play games. MIDI is the one area where they shined and were better in than an Amiga. Back in the day, they also had some good--for the time--mono DTP programs. They have a totally different personality with a 640x400 mono monitor. Once I got an Amiga, I never used a color monitor with an ST again. Even a stock A500 beats anything but a Falcon in color graphics. On the other hand, I'd never use an Amiga for MIDI either. There's never been any other sequencer with timing like Notator.

I currently have a a Mega 4 ST and a Mega 4 STE both running Notator and a few midi utilities and nothing else. Both have internal hard drives--hard drives are to the Atari St what expanded memory and flicker fixers are to an Amiga: hard to find and expensive. They used a limited version of scsi called asci and asci to scsi boards are not easy to find, especially the good ones that can use modern scsi drives. Most don't support parity.

On the bright side, it is easy to make a cable that will connect an ST in mono to a vga monitor. Just the connectors and 3 resistors.

[RobertB]

A few months ago, I received an Atari 520ST system, seen at

http://retro-link.com/smf/index.php?topic=1001.msg2975#new

I still don't know what to do with it.

Happy New Year!
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[psxphill]

Commodore should have taken note and added Simm slots to the A600 and A1200.

Maybe on the a600 for adding the extra 1mb of chip ram.
Adding a fast ram memory controller would have pushed the price up and it was already expensive to produce.
 
But for the a1200 it would have been too limiting. Add more than 4mb and pcmcia would stop working and you'd disable it when you added an accelerator (that is if they could have fit both the accelerator and the simm slots).

[Digiman]

If memory serves Adams Family was ported from the SNES version, which had some nice parallax backgrounds visible where the black holes are in the Amiga incarnation.  I suspect Ocean originally planned to port the parallax scrolling to the Amiga too but decided late in the day it wasn't fast enough and then didn't have time to do anything else instead.  The ST never had a chance of pulling it off (cf its dismal Shadow Of The Beast port) so detailed non-parallax backgrounds were included in the design from the start.

All I see on youtube is

Amiga = black empty space for background.
ST = has actual graphics

What a joke, and no excuse covers it. Pirating of this on Amiga at the time 100% justified.