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thrax

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Everything posted by thrax

  1. Post it in the local craigslist. If someone takes it than at least it will still be alive within the atari community instead of permanetely gone!
  2. I definately kept it in mind. (See below also.) We were an Amiga and ST dealer back in the day. The Amiga multitask was a joke especially on the release machine, customers used to crash it all the time. Maybe if the Amigahad been an Atari as it was intended to be and not cludged up by Commodore.. We sold both Systems and the St was the big seller hands down. Atari ST easy, plus is could later on do mac and PC, best of all worlds. it really was power without the price! Atarian63 Another thing about multitasking that made it a 'joke' in those days was the fact that most people wouldn't of had enough memory to run more than one program. The original amiga 1000 came with 256K!
  3. Yeah the mac iifx was really high end at the time. Apple also came out with a high end 24 bit graphics card and apple unix version 2 around the same time. I remember using it and comparing its then mind blowing fast speeds compared to more common IIs or SEs of the time. It was also featured on the cover of Byte Magazines April 1990 issue which is a mag that catered to high end systems. The cover caption was "Apple redefines top of the line with the 40MHz IIfx" Many of the games of that era (1990) were still focusing on the black and white 9' screens. So many popular games of the time like Dark Castle i don't recall working on colour systems. But since the fx was so faster you could get games made later (like say 1992ish) that would probably work since low end "II" systems were available for home use where gaming was more popular.
  4. A potential problem you should consider if you do this is the availability of parts in case something happens. Keep backup of some hardware parts although a falcon itself will get more expensive and harder to find as time goes on! You may also want to have an emulator that runs all the atari software you plan to run on a PC so that if you do have a breakdown (after all you are using old equipment) you can still run or transfer stuff.
  5. The only problem is that the TI was so crippled that comparisons with 16 bit computers is unfair. In fact it used a graphics chip similar (or possibly the same?) as the MSX series. Yep...the only thing 16-bit about the TI was the processor. Great machine though, but poor marketing and support. My personal fav is the Apple II. I didn't have any other 8-bit until they were well past their prime. I know now that the C64 and Atari were far better for graphics and sound. The Apple II is really a computer of the '70s but with add-on cards and more memory it was able to keep up pretty well. Last line. I was one of them
  6. I'd say the apple II just on their expandibility alone. Eight expansion slots with plenty of options from early on in its life. I got my II in the late 70s and was easily able to upgrade it to keep it on par with newer apple iis. This included memory upgrades, video card upgrade, even a keyboard upgrade to use those new fangled "lower case" keys :-) Also price wasn't as much of a factor as one would think due to the large amount of clones available as well. I've known plenty of people who've used their IIs so long they were able to skip the 16 bit generation of computers and either go into a 32 bit Mac or PC in the mid 90s. Part of the reason they were able to do this was the Appleworks productivity software was very powerful for 8bit computing, supported many hardware upgrades and was well supported by tons of software vendors.
  7. At the time (80s) i only knew of a couple of owners of either ST or Amiga computers. Of the STs, one used the st as a cheap mac clone with the spectrum emulator and the other used it as a word processor. The majority of my circle of friends had either apples (both IIs and macs) as well as PCs in those days. The st i use today is for vintage collecting purposes. I was really fascinated by all the different 16 bit computers of the day parcticularly the 68K series of computers.
  8. All the 16-bit computers had their strength and weaknesses. You also need to compare the computers available at the time it appeared. One can't compare a falcon to an amiga 1000 or compare an amiga 3000 to a 520st. The macs of the day were pretty state of the art but VERY expense. The macs available during the 16 bit days had the best OS but you had that tiny (albiet high resolution) 9" monitor. The color mac II was just not in the same price league. The last most 16 bit apple II, the IIGS, had and excellent graphics, a whopping 15 sound channels. It also had great expandibility options (8 slots) plus backward compatibility with the 8bit a2. But it was way overpriced and was clear it was going to be discontinued. Apple could of easily put in a motorola chip to make it faster but they wanted people to switch to macs. Apple had only made it to compete with the first ST an Amigas and didn't make any further models. The atari st just gave the best bang for the buck period. Both the atari and amiga had little software when they came out. I remember some people buying an atari with the spectrum adaptor to be able to run mac softare at a way lower price (without sound). This was a good for them since it took a little time for both atari and amiga to develop software packages. And as many have mentioned it had MIDI built in. I always thought the computer media/magazines always emphazed the higher colour counts on the amigas too much. Not all 16 bit computer users cared exclusively about gaming.
  9. I remember macs having it before atari as well. Also there were 8-bit computers with 5 1/4" drives before as well.
  10. I've subscribed to compute! through most of its life and obtained the disks as well (for my apple ii at the time). I quickly checked planetemu for the st disks and they didn't have them. I guess if worse comes to worse you could always retype the program from the listing in the mag
  11. Sweet, especially the fact that it had imagic carts! highly coveated by intellivision gamers.
  12. 20 bucks got me my first atari computer a couple weeks ago (hence joining here). A 1040 ste with original manuals in near mint condition plus a new mouse and monitor master. I like all the 68K motorola computer brands so it really made my day since I rarely find anything good.
  13. I had an intellivision and it was awesome. In those days i think the idea of rivalry between the systems is a little interesting to debate because chances are the people in those days liked ALL VIDEO GAMES. This was all new ground. At school it didn't matter who had an atari, intellivision or colecovision because who ever was lucky enough to get a new game became everybody's best friend One thing that was neat was all those numeric buttons which allowed for interesting game functions. My favorite game was sword and serpents. The one player was a knight and the other was the wizard. Each button on wizards controller was a spell you could fire. I also liked the D&D treasure of tarmin game. A 3D first person view with all sorts of cool goodies your character could pick up.
  14. One of their delays was due to the fact they used what was then state of the art memory chips (less chips for equivalent memory) and they had to wait to get a secure amount for production at the prices they were hoping for.
  15. The first most model and hte last most model of a computer series tend to be more in demand. The first most for museum reasons and the last most because it tends to be faster and sometimes rarer. I also have a NeXT and the first most 030 cube and the final Turbo 040 models are the most desired.
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