Any chance of an Amiga subforum?

[atarian63]

In what way did Atari do that?

 

There was a period in the mid eighties where you could use a product called Magic Sac that took a couple of Mac OS roms. Once started from that cartridge you had an ST that was cheaper and faster than contempory Macs. Later, the Spectre GCR which replaced the Magic Sac took the 128K roms and could run the MultiFinder and drive laser printers.

We sold these, and believe me it sold lots of ST's. We used to sell it with the pc card installed and a Spectre GCR so you had all 3 systems in one package. The mono mode made it. Suposedly Amiga had something much later but without the mono display.. no takers.

[Albert]

GEM was really basic at first but it got the job done. Strange but true: I know potential buyers were turned off by the busy bee wait cursor of the ST and the Zzz wait cursor of the Amiga.

I remember eagerly waiting TOS updates from Atari. I wasn't around long enough to ever experience MultiTOS.

 

..Al

[atarian63]

GEM is aboit the only thing I ever liked about the ST... (Well, that and the case styling)..

 

I hated both. GEM is/was terrible in my opinion. Of course, I'm comparing GEM to my many years of using Systems 7.0.1, 7.1, 7.5. 7.5.3, 7.5.5, and Mac OS 7.6, and 7.6.1. I never ever spent much time with System 6 on a Macintosh, but with MultiFinder it was like Heaven compared to anything that Atari ever offered in any of their 16 and 32 bit machines. The only GEM based machine that Atari ever released that was somewhat usable, in my opinion, was the Falcon. Alas, the Falcon used the same horrible industrial design as the ST/e machines. It was precisely that style that always turned me off the 65 and 130XE machines.

 

I liked the design of the TT machines, minus the terrible keyboard, but you were still stuck with that awful GEM desktop and the lacklustre TOS.

 

Who was it that wrote that the ST out-MACed the Mac? In what way did Atari do that? Aside from cost? I believe the Macs outdid the Atari offerings in every conceivable way. They had a better operating system. They had better graphics capability. Better builtin sound capability. They were more expandable. Had a better industrial design. Had builtin networking as standard equipment. Had better keyboards. Had mice that didn't feel like bricks. For word processing or desktop publishing, the Mac Plus blew the ST/e/Mega with monochrome monitor out of the water. Just about every 68020 and 68030 based Macintosh kicked the ass of the Mega STe/TT/Falcon machines. The top of the line 68030 Macintosh, the IIfx, left everything Atari ever offered in the dust. The Stacy was a nautical disaster, rivalling absolutely nothing in Apple's Powerbook camp.

The current model mac at the time was the mac plus. SO the ST was faster, had a larger screen, could run mac software Via Spectre GCR, was cheaper, looked nicer. Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh. It was so great. The mac people hated it. We loved it!

[atarian63]

You could easily end up with forums for:

 

- Commodore 64/128

...

- NES

 

I'd love to see those, as well as a Miggy forum

whats a miggy?

[atarian63]

Also, while the AMIGA hardware was originally an ATARI funded project,

 

no it wasnt.

Yes it was

[FastRobPlus]

You could easily end up with forums for:

 

- Commodore 64/128

...

- NES

 

I'd love to see those, as well as a Miggy forum

whats a miggy?

 

Ooh! Ooh! I just learned this one. Apparently it's what our overseas cousins nicknamed the Amiga. As to why they would nickname our beloved Ami something so stupid sounding... No clue.

[atarian63]

Bottom line is that AMIGA is based on a custom chipset that was developed over many years by the same guys that did the original ATARI..

The ST was slammed together in a few months by Jack's people in an attempt to have something to compete with Commodore (The AMIGA)..

I totally agree,

However the ST was released first and it worked, the early A1000's which we sold went back in large numbers, it just wasnt ready from a hardware standpoint and the O/S was not nearly ready. We used to demo workbench crashing, just run a few demos from WB and bing.. guru meditation error, for us ST outsold AMiga until about 1-2 years after the A500 came out. that is probably what the Amiga should have been, it was just not ready when released.

The ST's early problem was TOS on disk, Very very short period of time for ROMs and the loose chip thing also short lived. After the initial problems maybe the 1st month or so, it was rare for an ST to Fail. We did tons of solder in ram upgrades. Even had a customer bring in an ST monitor that had been in a flood.ot was covered in mud internally, we figured we had nothing to lose so.. I took it apart and took it all to the car wash! Then brought it all back and hung up the parts for a week and then reassembled. I was very suprised, it worked. The customer picked it up and used it for years.

[atarian63]

You could easily end up with forums for:

 

- Commodore 64/128

...

- NES

 

I'd love to see those, as well as a Miggy forum

whats a miggy?

 

Ooh! Ooh! I just learned this one. Apparently it's what our overseas cousins nicknamed the Amiga. As to why they would nickname our beloved Ami something so stupid sounding... No clue.

Well now I know something new.

At the retail store we called them Ameoba's. Slow and not too smart. This was in the A1000 days.

[Ganky Ghost]

The current model mac at the time was the mac plus. SO the ST was faster, had a larger screen, could run mac software Via Spectre GCR, was cheaper, looked nicer. Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh. It was so great. The mac people hated it. We loved it!

 

The Mac Plus ran at 8MHz, the same as the 520 and 1040ST. The Mac Plus also had 800K floppy disks compared to the ST's 720K floppies. The Macintosh II was released almost a year later and featured a 16MHz 68020 with a 68882 FPU chip. The Mac II was more expandable than anything that Atari ever released. So the Mac was either comparable in speed or faster, depending on whether you're comparing 1986 machines from both companies, 1987 machines from both companies, and beyond. Yeah, I know the ST was released in 1985.

[atarian63]

The current model mac at the time was the mac plus. SO the ST was faster, had a larger screen, could run mac software Via Spectre GCR, was cheaper, looked nicer. Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh. It was so great. The mac people hated it. We loved it!

 

The Mac Plus ran at 8MHz, the same as the 520 and 1040ST. The Mac Plus also had 800K floppy disks compared to the ST's 720K floppies. The Macintosh II was released almost a year later and featured a 16MHz 68020 with a 68882 FPU chip. The Mac II was more expandable than anything that Atari ever released. So the Mac was either comparable in speed or faster, depending on whether you're comparing 1986 machines from both companies, 1987 machines from both companies, and beyond. Yeah, I know the ST was released in 1985.

Yes well at the time when were were running speed tests using Spectre, it came up about 10% faster. For the same reasons I disliked the original apple,I disliked the Mac, very,very overpriced also in the macs case, no color kind of an etch a schetch

To each his own.

Edited December 13, 2008 by atarian63

[+remowilliams]

Yes well at the time when were were running speed tests using Spectre, it came up about 10% faster.

Yeah, Spectre/GCR was amazing. A faster and much cheaper Mac on your ST. Hell Spectre with the Stacy made a hugely cheaper portable Mac.

Edited December 13, 2008 by remowilliams

[MEtalGuy66]

Yep.. I had emulators for the ST, MAC, and PC... and each would fit on a single amiga floppy, including the rom images.. In fact, the machine could run all 3 at the same time, if you wanted..

 

What was hilarious is that the ST emulator was a 16k program, plus the TOS images..

 

What kind of AMIGA emulator did they have for the ST? Oh.. THATS RIGHT... It can't do it...

 

I dont remember any version of workbench ever being "crash prone". There was a good share of poorly written apps on the amiga that didnt "play well" with certain other things.. But Thats really the case on any system..

 

And as far as the A1000 being unreliable/poor build quality, I think you must be smoking crack.. Especially by comparisson to early STs...

 

Ive owned six A1000s and all of them were rock solid, and inside, some of the most beautiful work Ive seen. And I've done a little bit of soldering in my day..

 

And to this day, Ive never seen ANYTHING that had the shittiness of build quality of the PCB assemblies atari was putting out in the early "Trameil years". And there are PLENTY of people who will back me up on this 100% because they paid me to completely strip & rebuild their boards after pulling their hair out from constant flakiness and sporadic problems from the machine. I was the "hardware guy" for an ATARI user group for about 4 years in the late 80s/Early 90s. I didn't own an ST at the time, but worked on PLENTY of them. When 75% of the solder joints on the PCB did not get enough solder to even wick through the holes to the component side, and the machines passed QC and were sold to end users, thats absolutely unacceptable in my oppinion. To be fair, I guess I should say that 99% of the bad stuff was on 520s and early 1040s.. Early XEs and XF551s exhibit similar "quality" of workmanship..

 

The one guy I knew who worked for an Atari retailer (and authorized repair center) had an A500.. I used to call his BBS, and later met him at some "parties" (piracy-fests.) He was so fed up with fixing early STs that he wouldnt buy anything atari made, and quit fixing stuff for ANYONE except paying customers... I remember being horrified when he told me about the famous "drop test" that some people used to identify flaky machines..

 

From the GUI standpoint, I would argue that GEM desktop was cosmetically AWESOME compared to amiga workbench 1.1,1.2,or 1.3... GEM had a much more polished appearance,and was well organized and implemented. Until third parties came out with nicer workbench-based utilities & plug-ins, there was a whole lot of things you had to do from the command line in the early days on the AMIGA..

[Shannon]

All this talk of Amigas makes me want to dig one out and start playing with it.

 

..Al

I recently bought a CD32 and imported a floppy drive. The thing is hard to use and lots of stuff that does not run. You have to try turning off cache and if that doesnt work then try original mode, then try AGA mode, then try enhanced mode. At least for floppy games. CD ones are expensive these days though there are ways to creat a bootable cd32 cd with games installed.

I have tried this Amiga thing several times and each time I end up selling it. Had a 1200 1 year ago, same thing picky, I only want it for games nothing else but it would seem AGA is a problem.

 

If your interested in gaming for the Amiga there are two ways to go.

 

An Amiga 500 with kickstart 1.3. 512k chip ram (standard) and an extension of 512k fast ram.

Optionals - a GVP hard drive with extra RAM.

 

An Amiga 1200 running whdload. Alot of the whdload configs fix the little "issues" of running certain software. Might need a little extra RAM as well (4 megs?) for some whdload games.

 

Or just get an Xbox and run all the emu's!!

[atarian1]

The current model mac at the time was the mac plus. SO the ST was faster, had a larger screen, could run mac software Via Spectre GCR, was cheaper, looked nicer. Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh. It was so great. The mac people hated it. We loved it!

 

The Mac Plus ran at 8MHz, the same as the 520 and 1040ST. The Mac Plus also had 800K floppy disks compared to the ST's 720K floppies. The Macintosh II was released almost a year later and featured a 16MHz 68020 with a 68882 FPU chip. The Mac II was more expandable than anything that Atari ever released. So the Mac was either comparable in speed or faster, depending on whether you're comparing 1986 machines from both companies, 1987 machines from both companies, and beyond. Yeah, I know the ST was released in 1985.

 

Uh, let's get some facts straight. The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran. (Yes, you CAN tell. Spectre GCR was 20% faster than a real Mac!) True, Mac floppies can store 800K, but "Twisted" floppies can store 807K on the ST. The ST had a 640x400 vs 512x342 display in mono, and the ST could do color, unlike the Mac. Macs were not expandable just like the ST. Yes, Macs had better sound, but the MIDI ports made up for it. Networking can be done via MIDI, but it was slow.

 

The separate keyboards were the BEST I ever felt. The mice were about the same, but two buttons really made things easier.

 

I disagree about industrial design. The dove gray ST case was beautiful , especially the original 520ST and Mega/TT cases. The Mac looked like a plain old boring beige box. The all-in-one monitor and CPU design with a separate keyboard is the WORST industrial design ever. (Yes, I still think the iMac is the WORST industrial design ever) Combining the CPU and keyboard with a separate monitor is much more flexible and easier to upgrade.

 

Comparing the Mac II with the ST is very unfair! At $10,000, it better have more features than the ST and Amiga!

 

The low end 68030 Macs were NOT better than the Falcon. For the same price, you got a lot more features like a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, etc. Sure, you can get those features in an AV Mac, but they cost $5,000! Again, at that price, it better be faster!

 

I disagree about the STacy. It was a portable ST just like the original Macintosh Portable was a portable Mac. No real tech innovations in each. However, the STacy was lighter than the Mac Portable, can run Mac software, and cost much less.

 

As for GEM, I would say the Mac OS was a bit more mature by the time the ST came out. GEM did its job, but I always wished GEM became something like NeoDesk. That would have been awesome.

[MEtalGuy66]

The low end 68030 Macs were NOT better than the Falcon. For the same price, you got a lot more features like a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, etc. Sure, you can get those features in an AV Mac, but they cost $5,000! Again, at that price, it better be faster!

 

Did mac ever castrate an 030 by putting it in a machine with a 16-bit bus architecture?

 

If the 030 based macs had 32bit architecture then its not even fair to compare them to the falcon because they would have the potential to adress GIGs of ram, and actually utilize the full throughput of the 68030 processor, which the falcon cannot...

 

heh. talk about "cost cutting"....

Edited December 13, 2008 by MEtalGuy66

[atariksi]

The current model mac at the time was the mac plus. SO the ST was faster, had a larger screen, could run mac software Via Spectre GCR, was cheaper, looked nicer. Why else did the press back then call it the Jackintosh. It was so great. The mac people hated it. We loved it!

 

The Mac Plus ran at 8MHz, the same as the 520 and 1040ST. The Mac Plus also had 800K floppy disks compared to the ST's 720K floppies. The Macintosh II was released almost a year later and featured a 16MHz 68020 with a 68882 FPU chip. The Mac II was more expandable than anything that Atari ever released. So the Mac was either comparable in speed or faster, depending on whether you're comparing 1986 machines from both companies, 1987 machines from both companies, and beyond. Yeah, I know the ST was released in 1985.

 

Uh, let's get some facts straight. The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran. (Yes, you CAN tell. Spectre GCR was 20% faster than a real Mac!) True, Mac floppies can store 800K, but "Twisted" floppies can store 807K on the ST. The ST had a 640x400 vs 512x342 display in mono, and the ST could do color, unlike the Mac. Macs were not expandable just like the ST. Yes, Macs had better sound, but the MIDI ports made up for it. Networking can be done via MIDI, but it was slow.

...

In what respect was the Mac sound superior?

 

I think for word processing, the Atari ST 640*400 was superior to the interlaced 640*400 @30Hz the Amiga had. What refresh rate was the Mac?

 

>I disagree about industrial design. The dove gray ST case was beautiful , especially the original 520ST and Mega/TT cases. The Mac looked like a plain old boring beige box. The all-in-one monitor and CPU design with a separate keyboard is the WORST industrial design ever. (Yes, I still think the iMac is the WORST industrial design ever) Combining the CPU and keyboard with a separate monitor is much more flexible and easier to upgrade.

 

PET and SuperPET had monitor, CPU, and keyboard combined.

 

>As for GEM, I would say the Mac OS was a bit more mature by the time the ST came out. GEM did its job, but I always wished GEM became something like NeoDesk. That would have been awesome.

 

When I was in college, I knew some people using GEM on PC platform. I think it ran on top of DOS like Windows 3.1.

[Rybags]

I used GEM on the PC a few times - it never really caught on, which was strange since it was only up against Win 2.0 which was an utter piece of crap compared to practically any competing GUI OS.

 

Sure, the ST has the looks, but has a real "throwaway" feel. Almost as if they cast the things on the same line they use to do margarine tubs.

[Ganky Ghost]

Uh, let's get some facts straight.

 

Okay.

 

The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran.

 

According to whom? lowendmac.com says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. Wikipedia says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. I realize that you don't trust Wikipedia or Lowendmac so I went straight to the horse's mouth for its word. Apple's technical specifications for the Macintosh Plus says 8MHz. http://support.apple.com/kb/SP190

 

(Yes, you CAN tell. Spectre GCR was 20% faster than a real Mac!)

 

You can't make a blanket statement like that. Let's do a little digging and see what we can come up with. Let's start by looking at when the Spectre GCR was released. Hmmm, let's see here.

 

The Spectre GCR made it's first public debut at the World of Atari show held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim on April 22, 1989. The Macintosh Plus was released on January 16, 1986. That's more than three years from the time the Macintosh Plus was released until the time the Spectre GCR made it's first public debut at World of Atari. Surely Apple must have released some other Macintosh computers in that time. Let's check, shall we? Yes, we shall.

 

Between January 16, 1986, and April 22, 1989, Apple released the following Macintosh computers:

 

Macintosh 512Ke

Macintosh SE

Macintosh II

Macintosh IIx

Macintosh SE/30

Macintosh IIcx

 

Which of the above Macintosh models was the Spectre GCR 20% faster than?

 

 

True, Mac floppies can store 800K, but "Twisted" floppies can store 807K on the ST.

 

The Macintosh IIx (1988) was shipping with 1.4MB floppy drives. The Macintosh SE/30 (1989) was shipping with 1.4MB floppy drives. These were the first modular and all-in-one Macintosh computers to ship with high density disk drives. The SE/30 was a speed demon compared to everything from Atari, even the TT and Falcon. The SE/30 featured a 16MHz 68030 and 68882, RAM could be expanded to a whopping 128MB by simply adding the requisite SIMMS, and could run applications in 24 bit or full 32 bit with a software patch or new ROMS.

 

The ST had a 640x400 vs 512x342 display in mono, and the ST could do color, unlike the Mac.

 

By the time the Spectre GCR was released, Apple had released several Macintosh models that could do color. Even the SE/30 had an 030/PDS slot that allowed you to plug in a video card and run a second external color monitor. The Macintosh II, Macintosh IIx, and the Macintosh IIcx had 6, 6, and three NuBus slots respectively. Each of those slots could sport a video card, meaning that each of those Macintosh models could run six or three monitors simultaneoulsy each. The video card that shipped with the Macintosh II, the first Macintosh with a color monitor, which was released on March 2, 1987, two whole years before the Spectre GCR was debuted, could display 256 colors at a resolution of 640 X 480. There were certainly better video cards available for these machines at the time that could do even better. What were the Atari machines doing in 1987? Oh, right. Something like monochrome at 600 x 400.

 

 

Macs were not expandable just like the ST.

 

You got that right. The Macintosh II, IIx, and IIcx were much more expandable than the ST. The Macintosh II, for example, featured 6 NuBus expansion slots. Memory was upgradeable by adding 30-pin SIMMs. The Macintosh II had 8 SIMM slots that could use 16MB SIMMs for a total of 256MB of RAM. (Memory upgrades were limited to 20MB without the Macintosh II Superdrive upgrade) You could also have two internal floppy drives in this machine as well as internal hardrives. The Macintosh IIx and IIcx were also much more upgradeable than anything from Atari. The SE/30 was more upgradeable than anything from Atari. These were Atari's contemporaries at the time the GCR was released, so there's no way in Hell that your blanket statement about GCR equipped STs being faster than real Macs is anywhere close to being accurate. The Macs of the day would have run circles around anything released by Atari.

 

Yes, Macs had better sound, but the MIDI ports made up for it.

 

Not really. The Mac was a fierce competitor in the MIDI world, even though it didn't ship with standard MIDI ports. Where the Mac was really shining in the late eighties and early nineties was in the area of direct to disk recording. Something I don't recall the ST ever being suitably capable of.

 

Networking can be done via MIDI, but it was slow.

 

Macs had builtin Localtalk networking through the printer port. Macs with expansion ports, like the Mac II or the SE/30, could also run ethernet through the addition of an ethernet card. October 1991 saw the release of the Quadra 700 and the Quadra 900, both of these machines shipped with builtin ethernet on the motherboard and featured Motorola's 68040 processor, two things that Atari computers never ever shipped with.

 

The separate keyboards were the BEST I ever felt.

 

The separate keyboards of the Macs or the Mega/TT machines? The extended keyboards of the Macs of that era were orgasmic to use. They were well laid out, good tactile feel, solid construction, and virtually non-destructible. So durable and well made were they, that you could use them as lethal weapons one minute and type up your confession to murder on them the next.

 

The mice were about the same, but two buttons really made things easier.

 

Purely subjective, but that grey colored brick that Atari called a mouse was terrible. Almost everyone I knew who owned an ST soon bought a replacement mouse for those bricks.

 

I disagree about industrial design. The dove gray ST case was beautiful , especially the original 520ST and Mega/TT cases.

 

You gotta be kidding. The ST case was as cheap and brittle as it looked, and it looked really, really cheap. I could bend my 520ST in my hands with little effort. I seem to recall reading in an Atari magazine of the time that twisting the bloody case with your hands could actually remedy some malfunctions. It was insanely crap.

 

 

The Mac looked like a plain old boring beige box.

 

The Mac has always had character and class. Almost everyone agrees on that. Apple has probably won more industrial design awards than any other computer manufacturer that has ever existed. If Atari were to win an award for case design, it would be an award for having built the cheapest case ever without having to resort to cardboard and tinfoil.

 

The all-in-one monitor and CPU design with a separate keyboard is the WORST industrial design ever. (Yes, I still think the iMac is the WORST industrial design ever)

 

I didn't like the original iMacs either. I started developing a fondness for them when the white half-globe/table-lamp model was released. Everything after that has been very nice indeed, cosmetically speaking.

 

 

Comparing the Mac II with the ST is very unfair! At $10,000, it better have more features than the ST and Amiga!

 

The Mac II has never sold for that much. It was introduced with a starting price of $3898 for a Mac II without a hard drive, and $5498 for a Mac II with a hard drive. Hard drives for the ST weren't exactly cheap either. Oh, and the ST didn't offer near the features and expandability that the Mac II did.

 

The low end 68030 Macs were NOT better than the Falcon. For the same price, you got a lot more features like a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, etc. Sure, you can get those features in an AV Mac, but they cost $5,000! Again, at that price, it better be faster!

 

The Atari Falcon was released in late 1992. By that time, Apple was shipping Macs with 68040 processors. The first Quadras, the 700 and the 900, were released more than a year before Atari introduced the Falcon. The Macintosh IIfx was released on March 19, 1990, more than 2.5 years before Atari released the Falcon. With a 40MHz 68030 processor and a 68882 FPU on a 32-bit bus, the IIfx was a speed demon. It featured two 10MHz 6502 processors to handle the floppy disk, serial ports, and the Apple Desktop Bus. It featured a new fast type of memory SIMMs and SCSI DMA. This was the $10,000 machine -- and worth every last penny. It had six NuBus expansion slots. RAM was expandable to 128MB. It featured an accelerated video card. It was built for speed and power. It was even faster than the first Macintosh 68040 based computers. As a matter of fact, IT WAS the fastest Macintosh until the Quadra 840AV was released with its 40MHz 68040 processor and a DSP chip running at 67MHz.

[Ganky Ghost]

Did mac ever castrate an 030 by putting it in a machine with a 16-bit bus architecture?

 

If the 030 based macs had 32bit architecture then its not even fair to compare them to the falcon because they would have the potential to adress GIGs of ram, and actually utilize the full throughput of the 68030 processor, which the falcon cannot...

 

heh. talk about "cost cutting"....

 

I believe the TT was the only Atari machine with a 32-bit bus, was it not? All 68030 based Macs were either 24-bit or 32-bit. They ran anywhere from 16MHz to 40MHz. The IIfx was the speed champ of the 68030 based Macs. It ran the 68030 processor at 40MHz on a 32-bit bus. Basic input/output tasks were offloaded to a pair of 6502 processors running at 10MHz so that the 68030 didn't have to bother with things like floppy disks, keyboards and mice, printers and modems, etcetera. The SCSI bus used direct memory addressing (DMA) and you could plunk a whopping 128MB of RAM in the sucker using 64pin SIMMs. There were 6 NuBus expansion slots and one 030 processor direct slot (PDS). Oh, and it had a 68882 floating point unit (FPU) for that silly math that you'll likely need if you wanna do some serious computing.

[atarian63]

Yep.. I had emulators for the ST, MAC, and PC... and each would fit on a single amiga floppy, including the rom images.. In fact, the machine could run all 3 at the same time, if you wanted..

 

What was hilarious is that the ST emulator was a 16k program, plus the TOS images..

 

What kind of AMIGA emulator did they have for the ST? Oh.. THATS RIGHT... It can't do it...

 

I dont remember any version of workbench ever being "crash prone". There was a good share of poorly written apps on the amiga that didnt "play well" with certain other things.. But Thats really the case on any system..

 

And as far as the A1000 being unreliable/poor build quality, I think you must be smoking crack.. Especially by comparisson to early STs...

 

Ive owned six A1000s and all of them were rock solid, and inside, some of the most beautiful work Ive seen. And I've done a little bit of soldering in my day..

 

And to this day, Ive never seen ANYTHING that had the shittiness of build quality of the PCB assemblies atari was putting out in the early "Trameil years". And there are PLENTY of people who will back me up on this 100% because they paid me to completely strip & rebuild their boards after pulling their hair out from constant flakiness and sporadic problems from the machine. I was the "hardware guy" for an ATARI user group for about 4 years in the late 80s/Early 90s. I didn't own an ST at the time, but worked on PLENTY of them. When 75% of the solder joints on the PCB did not get enough solder to even wick through the holes to the component side, and the machines passed QC and were sold to end users, thats absolutely unacceptable in my oppinion. To be fair, I guess I should say that 99% of the bad stuff was on 520s and early 1040s.. Early XEs and XF551s exhibit similar "quality" of workmanship..

 

The one guy I knew who worked for an Atari retailer (and authorized repair center) had an A500.. I used to call his BBS, and later met him at some "parties" (piracy-fests.) He was so fed up with fixing early STs that he wouldnt buy anything atari made, and quit fixing stuff for ANYONE except paying customers... I remember being horrified when he told me about the famous "drop test" that some people used to identify flaky machines..

 

From the GUI standpoint, I would argue that GEM desktop was cosmetically AWESOME compared to amiga workbench 1.1,1.2,or 1.3... GEM had a much more polished appearance,and was well organized and implemented. Until third parties came out with nicer workbench-based utilities & plug-ins, there was a whole lot of things you had to do from the command line in the early days on the AMIGA..

THats nice however I WAS an Atari retailer and the largest in Columbus Ohio as well as AMiga. Those A1000 models looked nicely made compare to the ST.However they had many failure and we sent lots of them back. The A1000 was Super crash prone especially at release. So I dont know what crack you are smoking but I sold bot the the Amiga was just not done. I do realize that there were many upgrades like the added ram in the front. kickstart upgrades etc. it was pretty hard to sell when you had to boot one disk, kickstart, then another disk workbench just to get the thing running.

Oh we did have an AMiga emulator. It booted up on the ST with the Amiga screen and if you tied to do anything it gave you a "guru meditation error" just like the real thing.

[atarian63]

Yep.. I had emulators for the ST, MAC, and PC... and each would fit on a single amiga floppy, including the rom images.. In fact, the machine could run all 3 at the same time, if you wanted..

 

What was hilarious is that the ST emulator was a 16k program, plus the TOS images..

 

What kind of AMIGA emulator did they have for the ST? Oh.. THATS RIGHT... It can't do it...

 

I dont remember any version of workbench ever being "crash prone". There was a good share of poorly written apps on the amiga that didnt "play well" with certain other things.. But Thats really the case on any system..

 

And as far as the A1000 being unreliable/poor build quality, I think you must be smoking crack.. Especially by comparisson to early STs...

 

Ive owned six A1000s and all of them were rock solid, and inside, some of the most beautiful work Ive seen. And I've done a little bit of soldering in my day..

 

And to this day, Ive never seen ANYTHING that had the shittiness of build quality of the PCB assemblies atari was putting out in the early "Trameil years". And there are PLENTY of people who will back me up on this 100% because they paid me to completely strip & rebuild their boards after pulling their hair out from constant flakiness and sporadic problems from the machine. I was the "hardware guy" for an ATARI user group for about 4 years in the late 80s/Early 90s. I didn't own an ST at the time, but worked on PLENTY of them. When 75% of the solder joints on the PCB did not get enough solder to even wick through the holes to the component side, and the machines passed QC and were sold to end users, thats absolutely unacceptable in my oppinion. To be fair, I guess I should say that 99% of the bad stuff was on 520s and early 1040s.. Early XEs and XF551s exhibit similar "quality" of workmanship..

 

The one guy I knew who worked for an Atari retailer (and authorized repair center) had an A500.. I used to call his BBS, and later met him at some "parties" (piracy-fests.) He was so fed up with fixing early STs that he wouldnt buy anything atari made, and quit fixing stuff for ANYONE except paying customers... I remember being horrified when he told me about the famous "drop test" that some people used to identify flaky machines..

 

From the GUI standpoint, I would argue that GEM desktop was cosmetically AWESOME compared to amiga workbench 1.1,1.2,or 1.3... GEM had a much more polished appearance,and was well organized and implemented. Until third parties came out with nicer workbench-based utilities & plug-ins, there was a whole lot of things you had to do from the command line in the early days on the AMIGA..

If that guy was doing the drop test then he was an idiot. I did the repair work on ST's for many years in my shop and yes they were simply made but seldom failed. The drop test error as you say was socket looseness in the mmu and glue sockets caused by the chip pins getting pressed in too far. All you had to do was pull the 2 chips, stretch out the pins and reinsert, the problem never returned and it was only in the very early ST's. Both Amiga and ST rushed their product to market before it was fully ready, though the ST was much more ready than the Amiga.

I really have no problem with the Amiga chipset since it is Jay Miner and Atari but the o/s was god awful! (thanks commodore).

Edited December 13, 2008 by atarian63

[atarian63]

The low end 68030 Macs were NOT better than the Falcon. For the same price, you got a lot more features like a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, etc. Sure, you can get those features in an AV Mac, but they cost $5,000! Again, at that price, it better be faster!

 

Did mac ever castrate an 030 by putting it in a machine with a 16-bit bus architecture?

 

If the 030 based macs had 32bit architecture then its not even fair to compare them to the falcon because they would have the potential to adress GIGs of ram, and actually utilize the full throughput of the 68030 processor, which the falcon cannot...

 

heh. talk about "cost cutting"....

$2000 vs $10000... sounds like good cost cutting, for a consumer based company. remember the motto was Power without the price.For the time it was still powerful for the money.

Edited December 13, 2008 by atarian63

[atarian63]

Uh, let's get some facts straight.

 

Okay.

 

The Mac Plus ran at 7.83 MHz, not the full 8 MHz that the ST ran.

 

According to whom? lowendmac.com says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. Wikipedia says the Mac Plus ran at 8MHz. I realize that you don't trust Wikipedia or Lowendmac so I went straight to the horse's mouth for its word. Apple's technical specifications for the Macintosh Plus says 8MHz. http://support.apple.com/kb/SP190

 

(Yes, you CAN tell. Spectre GCR was 20% faster than a real Mac!)

 

You can't make a blanket statement like that. Let's do a little digging and see what we can come up with. Let's start by looking at when the Spectre GCR was released. Hmmm, let's see here.

 

The Spectre GCR made it's first public debut at the World of Atari show held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim on April 22, 1989. The Macintosh Plus was released on January 16, 1986. That's more than three years from the time the Macintosh Plus was released until the time the Spectre GCR made it's first public debut at World of Atari. Surely Apple must have released some other Macintosh computers in that time. Let's check, shall we? Yes, we shall.

 

Between January 16, 1986, and April 22, 1989, Apple released the following Macintosh computers:

 

Macintosh 512Ke

Macintosh SE

Macintosh II

Macintosh IIx

Macintosh SE/30

Macintosh IIcx

 

Which of the above Macintosh models was the Spectre GCR 20% faster than?

 

 

True, Mac floppies can store 800K, but "Twisted" floppies can store 807K on the ST.

 

The Macintosh IIx (1988) was shipping with 1.4MB floppy drives. The Macintosh SE/30 (1989) was shipping with 1.4MB floppy drives. These were the first modular and all-in-one Macintosh computers to ship with high density disk drives. The SE/30 was a speed demon compared to everything from Atari, even the TT and Falcon. The SE/30 featured a 16MHz 68030 and 68882, RAM could be expanded to a whopping 128MB by simply adding the requisite SIMMS, and could run applications in 24 bit or full 32 bit with a software patch or new ROMS.

 

The ST had a 640x400 vs 512x342 display in mono, and the ST could do color, unlike the Mac.

 

By the time the Spectre GCR was released, Apple had released several Macintosh models that could do color. Even the SE/30 had an 030/PDS slot that allowed you to plug in a video card and run a second external color monitor. The Macintosh II, Macintosh IIx, and the Macintosh IIcx had 6, 6, and three NuBus slots respectively. Each of those slots could sport a video card, meaning that each of those Macintosh models could run six or three monitors simultaneoulsy each. The video card that shipped with the Macintosh II, the first Macintosh with a color monitor, which was released on March 2, 1987, two whole years before the Spectre GCR was debuted, could display 256 colors at a resolution of 640 X 480. There were certainly better video cards available for these machines at the time that could do even better. What were the Atari machines doing in 1987? Oh, right. Something like monochrome at 600 x 400.

 

 

Macs were not expandable just like the ST.

 

You got that right. The Macintosh II, IIx, and IIcx were much more expandable than the ST. The Macintosh II, for example, featured 6 NuBus expansion slots. Memory was upgradeable by adding 30-pin SIMMs. The Macintosh II had 8 SIMM slots that could use 16MB SIMMs for a total of 256MB of RAM. (Memory upgrades were limited to 20MB without the Macintosh II Superdrive upgrade) You could also have two internal floppy drives in this machine as well as internal hardrives. The Macintosh IIx and IIcx were also much more upgradeable than anything from Atari. The SE/30 was more upgradeable than anything from Atari. These were Atari's contemporaries at the time the GCR was released, so there's no way in Hell that your blanket statement about GCR equipped STs being faster than real Macs is anywhere close to being accurate. The Macs of the day would have run circles around anything released by Atari.

 

Yes, Macs had better sound, but the MIDI ports made up for it.

 

Not really. The Mac was a fierce competitor in the MIDI world, even though it didn't ship with standard MIDI ports. Where the Mac was really shining in the late eighties and early nineties was in the area of direct to disk recording. Something I don't recall the ST ever being suitably capable of.

 

Networking can be done via MIDI, but it was slow.

 

Macs had builtin Localtalk networking through the printer port. Macs with expansion ports, like the Mac II or the SE/30, could also run ethernet through the addition of an ethernet card. October 1991 saw the release of the Quadra 700 and the Quadra 900, both of these machines shipped with builtin ethernet on the motherboard and featured Motorola's 68040 processor, two things that Atari computers never ever shipped with.

 

The separate keyboards were the BEST I ever felt.

 

The separate keyboards of the Macs or the Mega/TT machines? The extended keyboards of the Macs of that era were orgasmic to use. They were well laid out, good tactile feel, solid construction, and virtually non-destructible. So durable and well made were they, that you could use them as lethal weapons one minute and type up your confession to murder on them the next.

 

The mice were about the same, but two buttons really made things easier.

 

Purely subjective, but that grey colored brick that Atari called a mouse was terrible. Almost everyone I knew who owned an ST soon bought a replacement mouse for those bricks.

 

I disagree about industrial design. The dove gray ST case was beautiful , especially the original 520ST and Mega/TT cases.

 

You gotta be kidding. The ST case was as cheap and brittle as it looked, and it looked really, really cheap. I could bend my 520ST in my hands with little effort. I seem to recall reading in an Atari magazine of the time that twisting the bloody case with your hands could actually remedy some malfunctions. It was insanely crap.

 

 

The Mac looked like a plain old boring beige box.

 

The Mac has always had character and class. Almost everyone agrees on that. Apple has probably won more industrial design awards than any other computer manufacturer that has ever existed. If Atari were to win an award for case design, it would be an award for having built the cheapest case ever without having to resort to cardboard and tinfoil.

 

The all-in-one monitor and CPU design with a separate keyboard is the WORST industrial design ever. (Yes, I still think the iMac is the WORST industrial design ever)

 

I didn't like the original iMacs either. I started developing a fondness for them when the white half-globe/table-lamp model was released. Everything after that has been very nice indeed, cosmetically speaking.

 

 

Comparing the Mac II with the ST is very unfair! At $10,000, it better have more features than the ST and Amiga!

 

The Mac II has never sold for that much. It was introduced with a starting price of $3898 for a Mac II without a hard drive, and $5498 for a Mac II with a hard drive. Hard drives for the ST weren't exactly cheap either. Oh, and the ST didn't offer near the features and expandability that the Mac II did.

 

The low end 68030 Macs were NOT better than the Falcon. For the same price, you got a lot more features like a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, etc. Sure, you can get those features in an AV Mac, but they cost $5,000! Again, at that price, it better be faster!

 

The Atari Falcon was released in late 1992. By that time, Apple was shipping Macs with 68040 processors. The first Quadras, the 700 and the 900, were released more than a year before Atari introduced the Falcon. The Macintosh IIfx was released on March 19, 1990, more than 2.5 years before Atari released the Falcon. With a 40MHz 68030 processor and a 68882 FPU on a 32-bit bus, the IIfx was a speed demon. It featured two 10MHz 6502 processors to handle the floppy disk, serial ports, and the Apple Desktop Bus. It featured a new fast type of memory SIMMs and SCSI DMA. This was the $10,000 machine -- and worth every last penny. It had six NuBus expansion slots. RAM was expandable to 128MB. It featured an accelerated video card. It was built for speed and power. It was even faster than the first Macintosh 68040 based computers. As a matter of fact, IT WAS the fastest Macintosh until the Quadra 840AV was released with its 40MHz 68040 processor and a DSP chip running at 67MHz.

Your whole mac premise is wrong again. You could not have a Spectre GCR made without mac roms available, since you would not be able to GET the current 1989 mac roms then it makes no sense to compare 89 specs. Also most mac software in 89 was available to use in a mac plus, the newer models had the old mac modes but not much for color support software or faster cpu's.so, your specs etc are no relevant to the arguement that the St was faster. It was faster than the mac is was design to emulate. It still amazes me that people paid the amount of money they did for those things, they were incredibly overpriced.

[atarian63]

We sold these for years and I would have to say the opposite. GEM was easy and super stable, the Amiga Workbench on the other hand was always crash happy, though less so as the years went on. It was more flexable but a very cartoon like desktop. It was a hard sale for someone who wanted anything but games. ST GEM on the other hand looked professional and the mono mode was awesome in it's day.

I did see the Workbench crash plenty of times when watching friends use their Amigas (this was in the early days), and I remember it being very slow as well. But the Workbench seemed to be a more capable and complex OS overall. And, yes, the ST monochrome monitor was excellent--very sharp and stable. Just seemed to me that the ST deserved a better OS than TOS/GEM.

 

..Al

I would agree, it had lots of things I wish the ST would have had, just took a year or 2 to get it all working without crashing. The cli was nice. Took atari too long to get to the os the falcon had. it did create quite a market for alt desktops, we sold tons. Dont get me wong I liked the graphics and sound on Amiga, since it's kind of an Atari anyway, but that Amiga cartoony o/s was a real turnoff at least for me and most customers. Most customers bought it as a game system and nothing else. Thats not a slam as it was very good for games. The PC customers back in the day were amazed.

Edited December 13, 2008 by atarian63

[atarian63]

GEM was really basic at first but it got the job done. Strange but true: I know potential buyers were turned off by the busy bee wait cursor of the ST and the Zzz wait cursor of the Amiga.

Me as well, they didn't get it. Those customers were more of a PC type buyer. We were selling Franklin Apple clones at the time and Amstrad PC's as well as Amiga and ST. It was great with all the competeing formats and no real standard. this is early 1986

Edited December 13, 2008 by atarian63