What to do with an Atari STe ?

[dougal]

I have this Atari 1040STe which I had bought from a carboot sale about 5 years ago. I never really bothered with it except for switching it on to try it when i bought it.

Anyway, recently I decided to mess around with it but I know absolutely nothing about these machines. The OS (TOS i believe) looks green and awful compared to Amiga Workbench.

I did manage to download this program on the PC which writes ST floppy images back to floppy disk and have tried it out and it works. Played Lotus Turbo & James Pond. Graphics similarish to the Amiga but the sound was terrible.

Is there anything fun I can do with this other then play games which look worse than they do on the Amiga ? Maybe something with the OS etc.. ?

[dougal]

It's a humble 8MHz STE sans harddrive, which is by definition kind of limiting There are some nice demos for this machine, however.

Check out: http://dhs.nu/dhs-demos.php?sd=1988-01-01&ed=2011-12-31

Given the technical limitations some of that stuff is pretty amazing, notably the beam-synchronized coding required to do overscan, and overcoming the limitations of the sound system.

There's also a Wolfenstein 3D port, which actually runs pretty well.

Nice.. Will check that out. Looks like i will have to open it up and hope that i have 4 1MB ram simms in my little box of old ram sticks.

[dougal]

Send it to meeeeeeeeee.

LOL!! Think I will keep it for now. Just been reading about it and apparently the STe has much more stuff than a standard ST like the Blitter, ability to take Ram simms and better audio.

[dougal]

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

Atari STe's are good machines.. they have a lot of stuff the ST should have had originally (especially the audio!).

Of course the amount of software using it is practically nil. Bit of a shame really, the STe would have been nice with a bit more oomph (and a bit less TOS

[dougal]

All you need is a kettle plug/cable for power and an RF lead to the TV and it will work.

For software i downloaded a windows program (forgot the name, will check when i get home if you like) which writes ST disk images downloaded from the web to floppy disk using the PC's floppy drive.

I found one in a bin last year... Not managed to find the right cables to make it work... I guess the ultimate goal is to get some variant of AROS booting on it.... :-/

[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.

[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