HiroProX
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Posts posted by HiroProX
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Personally, the main interest I have in the ST line is they offer a glimpse at a "route not taken". When the IBM PC was on the drawing board, the MC68000 was considered as a choice for CPU, though the (in my opinion cripple-beyond-all-hope) i8088
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I was merely attempting to rebut the notion that an buying an Amiga was "loyal to something"
Designer loyalty. I never cared at all about Atari or COmmodore. To me, Jay Miner was The Man.
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Back in the day I went from the Atari 8-bit computers to the Amiga, more out of designer loyalty. I still pick up Amiga 1200s today. Mainly because nowdays, the A1200 is a much more accessable machine than the Falcon. Contrary to price claims, the Falcon was always more expensive than a higher speced A1200 system. And that difference has only grown. The last A1200 I picked up was for $300 with a 50MHz RC030/882 accelerator, 64mb ram, and a 4gb CF for a HDD. In comparison, finding a Falcon for less than $600 has proven fruitless. The Falcon's problem has always been its status as an inaccessible machine. Originally, it was inaccessible due to Atari's pathetic excuse for distributing, and now it's that way because $600 is a bit much for what it is. I can get a Turbo Color NeXTStation for less, and it has the DSP and a stronger OS, as well as a 33mhz RC040.
At the time I bought my first CBM A1200, due to Atari's lousy distribution especially in the U.S., the Falcon was a mythological creature, while the A1200 was a reality I could touch and walk home with one new in a box for $500 with a 40mb HDD in 1993. Same thing happened earlier in 1989, the ST and such were mythological creatures only seen in magazines, while the A500 was a reality down at Montgomery Wards for $400 with the A501 ram expansion and a 1200bps modem.
It was kind of neat to capture one of those Atari "unicorns", a STacy 4mb with HDD, but for $300 it was okay. But $600 can get a fully loaded A1200 or a midlevel A3000. So no Falcon for me until the price drops, if it ever does.
STacy is a really fun system. Beware because nowdays the screens have often become quite dim
How did you know of the lineage between Atari -> Amiga back in the day? I know in the user groups many satyed loyal to Atari by buying the ST, which turned out to be an error. I myself didn't understand that the Amiga had Atari DNA for the first year or two. After using an ST and and Amiga, the Amiga just felt much better and I guessed I just wasn't a very loyal Atari fanboy... It was only later I discovered that I was more loyal than I could have ever guessed.
I followed news about Jay Miner and Amiga, Inc. before the ST or A1000 showed up.
Yeah, those LCDs were a custom job by Epson used in the STacy and the Apple Mac Portable. I'm looking into a new EL panel that is the same resolution and dimensions as the Epson panel.
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I guess my resolution might be to get off my butt and build a piece of hardware this year, either for A8 or ST.
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Back in the day I went from the Atari 8-bit computers to the Amiga, more out of designer loyalty. I still pick up Amiga 1200s today. Mainly because nowdays, the A1200 is a much more accessable machine than the Falcon. Contrary to price claims, the Falcon was always more expensive than a higher speced A1200 system. And that difference has only grown. The last A1200 I picked up was for $300 with a 50MHz RC030/882 accelerator, 64mb ram, and a 4gb CF for a HDD. In comparison, finding a Falcon for less than $600 has proven fruitless. The Falcon's problem has always been its status as an inaccessible machine. Originally, it was inaccessible due to Atari's pathetic excuse for distributing, and now it's that way because $600 is a bit much for what it is. I can get a Turbo Color NeXTStation for less, and it has the DSP and a stronger OS, as well as a 33mhz RC040.
At the time I bought my first CBM A1200, due to Atari's lousy distribution especially in the U.S., the Falcon was a mythological creature, while the A1200 was a reality I could touch and walk home with one new in a box for $500 with a 40mb HDD in 1993. Same thing happened earlier in 1989, the ST and such were mythological creatures only seen in magazines, while the A500 was a reality down at Montgomery Wards for $400 with the A501 ram expansion and a 1200bps modem.
It was kind of neat to capture one of those Atari "unicorns", a STacy 4mb with HDD, but for $300 it was okay. But $600 can get a fully loaded A1200 or a midlevel A3000. So no Falcon for me until the price drops, if it ever does.
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Looks like LCD issues to me.
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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.Lies.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.
Funny, because everyone I knew, myself included, who owned an Amiga had an accelerator. I remember the CSA Derringers being quite popular as they were the most common A500 accelerator that didn't have to reside in a "sidecar" off the side of the A500. And accelerators for ST's are exceedingly rare. Probably because the ST had a bigger problem with programmers using tricks that were 68000 specific. Thus an 030 accelerator would break nearly half the software library.
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Houston, TX
STacy4/20 and a MegaSTE here.
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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.Lies.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.
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Now I find ST vs. Amiga comparisons amusing, because at that point Atari and Commodore had effectively traded design teams. The ST is more closely related to the C64, and the Amiga is the direct descendant of the A8.
what I find amusing is how a8 fans are constantly trying to claim a piece of amiga's fame. but the amiga was C='s. without C= there would have been no amiga, just ripped off chips in an atari pc. so stop stealing, and stick to c64 vs a8.
The Amiga OCS was Jay Miner & Co.'s baby, and is a follow up of their previous work on the chipset for the A8. Agnus was a further enhancement to ANTIC, Denise was an improved version of GTIA with outputs for RGB video as well as composite, and Paula was an improved POKEY.
The ST, was designed by the same team that designed the C64, and in the end is a classic example of the universal truth that Jack Tramiel was an idiot. Atari had their own 68000 based machine in the works codenamed "Silver and Gold" when he bought them out. The video and audio chipset for this did eventually surface later, as the video system was kludged onto the Atari Transputer as a video subsystem, and the sound chip was AMY.
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Partially, it was Jay Miner's fault to leave Atari. Actually, Atari wanted to make a "Amiga" with downward compatibility. Doing so, the line could have stand until today.
But Miner wanted to create the machine with the 68000 instead, they couldn't come to a conclusion and Miner left Atari.
The Amiga died by a similar fact. Owning an Amiga 2000 with Harddisk etc. 2 years later, Commodore kicked the old users right in the ass, by having no compatibility either downward and upward. Just some workarounds were done. You needed Hardware workarounds with Kick-switches or else. No software update or else was given.
So I decided to change to a PC after 1994 where you always had a cross compatibility for over 6 years...
Downward compatibility was unrealistic at the time. Since the WDC 65816 was still several years away, the only way to implement it would have been a 6502C as well as a 68000. The end result would have been far closer to the C128. And the biggest problem the C128 had, was being compatible with the C64. As a result, every company coded software for the C64 and the C128's abilities were rarely used. If Miner had yielded to the pressure to make the Amiga backwards compatible with the A8, software companies would have just coded for A8's in order to maximize potential market size.
And actually, 99% of Amiga software incompatibilites were due to programmers using 68000 specific hacks that Motorola themselves advised against using because they could guarantee those tricks would not work with later 680x0 series CPUs (and those tricks were broken by the 68012 and up).
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Why no STacy? because it's a 16 bit machine and he asked for a list of you favorite 8bit stuff.
As has been mentioned, because I'm inquiring about 8-bit hardware.
But since you mention it, I do have a STacy4, 4Mb RAM, 20Mb HDD, and working screen. My other "big Atari" is a Mega STE. The third 16-bitter is an Amiga A600. In 32-bits, I have the 32-bit descendant of the A8, an Amiga A1200.
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Many of us like our 8-bit machines, so list your favorites of your collection.
And I'll even start...
1. Atari 1200XL with clearpic2.
Happy 1050
Atari 1020 printer/plotter
2. Atari 130XE
XEP80
SX212
XF551
MyIDE
Okimate 10
3. Commodore 128
Two 1571 floppy drives
512K REU
HP LJ1
4. Northstar Horizon S-100
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Smaller and lighter equals less materials used in construction and less channel operation cost. It's cost reduction 101 and the reason that cheap, thin plastic and barely-meets-the-FCC regulation RF shielding is the norm. It's not what customers want beyond the fact that it makes the unit cheaper and more affordable.
So Atari did the same thing for the 800XL then, and I'm to assume that customers didn't want that either?
No, because in the case of the C64, it was a breadbox. The XL line was just dead sexy.
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One cannot deny it. Seeing the powerful Amiga (ECS) not able to outperform the ST with simple 3D operations, because the ST's CPU is clocked only 11% higher than the Amiga's CPU.
On the ATARI8 you have gains from C64 to the A8 between 30% to 200%, depending on the different modes of both machines.
Actually, on both of those machines, 3-D could only be accomplished via CPU power due to neither machine having any custom hardware for 3-D operations at all. So for 3-D, the difference 11% higher clock speed made mattered. This is why 3-D didn't really take off on the Amiga until the proliferation of 030 and 040 accelerators. And Atari lost their early lead mainly because 020+ accelerators on ST's broke too much software, though that was the fault of developers insisting on using 68000 specific dirty tricks that Motorola had been warning for years would fail on later processors.
Now I find ST vs. Amiga comparisons amusing, because at that point Atari and Commodore had effectively traded design teams. The ST is more closely related to the C64, and the Amiga is the direct descendant of the A8.
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Having programmed both the C64 and the 800XL, I think it's telling that my 8-bits of preference are the 130XE and C128.
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Disk:
Temple of Apshai Trilogy
Silent Service
The Halley Project
Cart:
Star Raiders
Caverns of Mars
Joust
Space Shuttle
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the 6502 was designed to be cheap, and was never meant to be put into homecomputers, and it shows. compare it with a z80.
Actually the 6502 out performed the Z-80 primarly due to its instructions requiring fewer clock cycles to execute. Hence a 2MHz 6502 would blow a 2MHz Z-80 out of the water.
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East Texas. Nearest city worthy of the title... Beaumont.
Love your avatar!
I picked it because it shows what I consider the current prize of my Atari collection.
An Atari laptop with a color screen?
Actually a mono screen. The Stacy has a blue tint to its screen, which wasn't unusual on "supertwist" STN screens made by Epson at the time.
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A "Super-ANTIC & Super-GTIA" in an FPGA probably wouldn't be unrealistic. (I'm thinking of the Amiga evolutions here, super & fat angus and paula chips).
To my way of thinking, the "Super A8" has already been done and that is the original OCS chipset in the Amiga. I'm not sure if the later AGA chipsets were very Miner-style or not. Any significant enhancement to stock A8 capabilities be they 16 bit processors or expanded ANTIC/GTIA capabilities are just going to make it resemble an Amiga 500. And even an Amiga 500 doesn't function well as a "modern PC" so I'm having a hard time seeing the point in doing any such thing.
If were talking about a new A8 that could still be fairly called an A8 then I see several possibilities that vary in realism and appeal.
1. A new motherboard that takes an existing A8 chipset and will go into a modern form factor such as ATX or mini-ITX. This can include out-of-box various enhancements that we've already been doing to A8s like 576K memory, Clearpic, SIO2IDE, 32-in-os, and so-forth.
2. The best possible software emulation on a device dedicated to emulation. The purists won't like it but on the other hand the people who want to make A8s DVD capable and surf the net can go wild. You can already do this with with GPXes, EEE pcs, Mac Mini's, and other such small platforms. I gently suggest that improving emulation quality may be a better than complaining "but it isn't a REAL A8." "Real A8s" are an increasingly threatened species. I also note that very little emulation work is done on the behaivor of old NTSC screens. OGL and hardware scalers still don't truly approximate the TVs and monitors we used and to my mind video behaivor is biggest thing that affects my suspension of disbelief in emulators. This is ESPECIALLY true of vector monitors (off-topic I'll grant.).
3. A modern re-implementation of the A8 chipset in FPGA with currently practiced enhancements like flash roms and the other things mentioned in #1.
I don't see Frankensteins with 16-bit CPUs and wildly enhanced video/audio as either realistic or something you could call an A8 when finished. Such things would be geek fantasties that almost no one will develop software for even if someone just quit talking and actually built one of the things.
Minter was already working on AGA as early as 1987-89. But the AGA Amigas are effectively the 32-bit successors.
A8 ---> OCS/ECS Amiga ---> AGA Amiga
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Another possibility:
Instead of the pain of trying to do Antic/GTIA in FPGA, do it via emulation by a second RISC CPU.
The primary CPU could indeed by a lowly 6502 or clone running at 1.79 MHz. The second CPU could do all manner of processing tasks in the time outside of normal display.
Retain POKEY as there would probably be little or no benefit in trying to emulate it's functionality.
Actually what you suggest is as or more complex than a FPGA. You're effectively building two computers on one board at that point, and that can be a major pain. Not only whould the two computers have to talk, they'd have to operate in a synchronized manner. Never mind that the emulation would have to be re-coded to deal with the intricacies of accessing real RAM chips.
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Yes, and yes.
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The problem with the "Let's build a new A8" approach is that doing so would represent a major investment of time and money. Even then, the resulting product would cost several hundred dollars and have a maximum potential user base of maybe 300-400 people, worldwide.
I contemplated such an idea at one time, and reached the conclusion that buying a 130XE off of ebay, buying a Blackbox with a floppy board, doing the dual POKEY mod, upping the ram to 320k, doing a video mod for good and clear s-video, and building a MyIDE would cost about half as much as doing what would amount to nothing more than fusing all of that onto an AT form factor mobo.
That doesn't even touch on trying to build a "modern" A8. Frankly, I don't think I'd even like a "modern" A8. To me one of the appeals of the A8 is that it's such a small system, one person can write an entire program for it, without that program becoming a life-consuming nightmare. The last thing I want to do is program an A8 with 16-bit ML and a 16Mb address space. If I want to code for that, I'll dig up an Amiga 500.
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Warerat's Atari 800
Seconded.
Ok, you got me if we can go with one-offs...definitely Beetle's XL laptop.
That goes without saying.
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Atari ST vs. Amiga
in Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers
Posted
Pretty much covers what I was going to say about 68000 vs. 680x0 compatibility.
As for the i80286, the closest Moto equivalent is actually the MC68012, as it had the protection ability present in the MC68010 and added VM support. The 68020 was comparable to the i80386DX. The MC68RC030 at 40 and 50MHz respectively encroached on i80486SX performance levels at the lower end, and the MC60LC040 matched the 486SX and SX2 CPUs. And the 68RC040 was the equal of the 486DX. Now the MC68EC020 is an interesting animal, as it has the full 32-bit data bus, but a 24-bit address bus, it's usually considered comparable to the i80386SX, even though unlike the 386SX is has a full 32-bit data bus.