What caused you to change (Atari/non-Atari) platforms?

[Keatah]

Hey folks, I'm a US resident who "went" from Atari 800 platform (several variations) --> Atari ST (520ST, 1040ST) --> PC (an XT and then a very expensive 486, both in 1990).

 

Although I used each platform for a variety of things it was games that had me more or less mentally migrate away from each platform. Those games were:

 

2600 --> "Dad, I want an Atari 800" = Miner 2049er ~ 1983

800 --> ST = SunDog then Dungeon Master (then the 800 saw little use) ~ 1986-1987

ST --> PC = MechWarrior (playable on XT), Gunship 2000 (80486) (+ ST HDD died) ~ Late 1990

PC --> "Strictly PC" - original Unreal (caused me to sell or box up any consoles I owned). ~ 1998

 

I was always an Apple II and Atari VCS user (and TRS-80 admirer) back in the day. Probably simply because that's what I was first exposed to. Though I remember strolling through Olson Electronics prior to all that and looking at a PET 2001, the one with the funky keyboard-like "button pads"..

 

Anyways. I eventually got an Atari 400 somewhere around 1979/1980 pretty much for the improved games, Star Raiders and arcade conversions. I quickly moved to the 800 because I thought it would be much like the Apple II (which I was seriously into) and would support an 810 disk. Oh I got the drive alright, but I never jibed too much with the style of DOS 2.5. Just simply never hit it off like I did with the Apple II. Perhaps for me knowing one version of DOS (in any form) is enough!

 

But for a real long time the Atari 800 coexisted right atop my Apple II. One was a serious machine, one was a game machine. And I happily switched back and forth between them. The Amiga eventually replaced the Atari 800 in attempt to get a serious professional graphics computer going. Didn't work out, the OS was too toy-like.

 

Anyways, the PC lifted me out of the quagmire and roiling sea of changing standard that were par for the course in the 8/16 bit world. It bought the necessary stability. It allowed me to work with school activities and colleagues in the lab. And of course Doom and Raptor came out. Imagine that! A generic computer, without bullshit custom blitter chips, having games that blew away everything before it.

 

So in the early 1990's I continued using my Apple //e AND a 486. And life was good. Soon I'd relegate the Apple //e to "collector" status and box it away for safekeeping.

 

Now fully absorbed into a real computer, a professional computer, I was free to explore fractal mathematics, do word processing like never before, and even play games previous platforms would never achieve - because they stopped evolving and dried up.

 

The PC (was) and is now more important than ever because it fulfills a real childhood dream of having all classic systems in one box via emulation.

[zzip]

 

Weren't there plug-in cards (for the PC or amiga) that allowed you to use real GEM roms?

 

Correct. The Gemulator emulator required such a card, and it's only purpose was to house a set of TOS roms. It didn't hardware-assist the emulator in any other way. The reason for it was that its creator, Derek Mihocka (sp?), believed that dumping roms to a file and using the rom file with the emulator, as most emulators do, was not legal. But unlike most emulators, his was a commercial product. He may have had a real concern about getting sued.

[juansolo]

 

Must have been a 386 because I don't think the 286 was capable of running Doom.

 

 

I know the PC I got to run it was an AMD 386DX 40 with a Tseng ET4000 in it. Which at the time was pretty high end. Those were the days

 

Later I got the first Power VR card also, which came with the most excellent Ultimate Race Pro. I'd love to play that game again. /tangent

Edited January 25, 2017 by juansolo

[Keatah]

I understand (never had a 386DX 40 of my own) that it was THE sweet spot for price/performance.

 

---

 

@zzip

http://emulators.com/gemul8r.htm

[+DarkLord]

Way back in about 1999, when I finally started using something else than my

Atari's for everything, I looked at emulation. I just couldn't get into it. Don't get

me wrong, it's brilliant stuff, people have put a lot of hard work into them and

it shows. It just doesn't *feel* right to me, and I do realize that is very subjective.

 

Today, nothing has changed for me. I can sit down and fire up my highly

modified STacy, putting my hands on a real keyboard, real hardware and

the experience can't be matched by any of today's emulators, IMHO.

 

So I'm glad we do have emulators out there, whether it's software, or even

hardware like the MiST, but until the last of my Atari's dies, and I just can not

find a replacement, I'll stay where I'm at, 'cause there ain't nothin' like the

real thing, baby.

[Goochman]

I was an 800 owner and then a 1040ST->Mega 2ST owner. I held out for a long time until I needed a real good VT100 emulator for connecting to work remotely. The ST didnt have any good programs in the early 90's so I got my first 386SX PC and ProComm Plus.

 

Of course when Wolfenstein and then Doom hit the streets going back was out of the question

[Keatah]

I think that most people in most situations and times would have migrated away from anything 8/16 bit when presented with X86 machines.

 

If you thought that a PC side-by-side a popular 16-bit machine of the day was pale in comparison. You'd likely have been right. But you'd also have noticed the PC platform evolving at a faster and faster pace while the 16-bit whatever was not.

 

So yeh, the PC would likely be behind, but also gaining at breakneck pace.

[vattari]

University and a glossy magazine ad for a Tseng Labs ET4000 displaying an image of Einstein made me sell my Atari STFM in 1992 and move to IBM compatibles. I had an Atari 800XL and 1010 tape drive prior to the ST. Each had to be sold to fund the next.

 

In the mid 90s I picked up an XEGS and 800XL/XF551 for next to nothing at a garage sale.

 

In 2015, I decided to reminisce and by an ST again. This time, I wanted the "dream setup" I couldn't afford as a teenager. I now have 2 x TT, a Falcon, a Mega STE, 5 Mega STs, 3 STEs. Each with mass storage, displays, RAM and mice with a modern spin. I have STFMs and STFs, but they're no longer good enough for me

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Keatah]

I had a similar experience, I needed a PC to do college work (and play games). I came across some astronomy program brochures Dance of The Planets, SkyGlobe, Redshift. Things like that. Also pamphlet for some advanced flight simulators. In both cases the emphasis was on making montages and concept art of the graphics. It totally blew me away. I would read these every night before bed, imagination wandering to distant destinations and voyages in between.

 

I came across another nicely prepared glossy brochure from Cirrus Logic. It talked about advanced tech things like RAMDACS, Frequency Synthesizers, Windows GUI Libraries. It talked about things like 16.8 Million Colors and High Resolutions. Finally at a low cost. This magical chip even had custom Windows blitting capability for hi-speed drawing of the dialog boxes.

 

Inside the brochure they had a stylized representations of hi-res graphics superimposed over the chip, one was a cute exotic girl, another one an artist's conception of what looked like the Pontiac Trans-Am or Banshee. I was a sucker for these sorts of things and I was creaming my jeans just reading through the booklet.

 

Yet another one was the Practical Peripherals Guide to Modems, this around the 14,400 baud era. And of course the SoundBlaster series. Western Digital too.

 

Companies seemed to produce a lot of nice literature back then. From a time when the companies themselves were proud of what they made. And it was cool that you could get these sent to you either via Reader Service cards or right from the computer store displays for the products themselves. These things introduced complex and new technologies in really basic layman's terms. Something my pea-brain could absorb and understand. And I'm not sure if they were more valuable back then, or today for historical and sentimental value!

 

But anyhow even back then I always hoped that Atari or Commodore would get on the bandwagon. I was slapping myself in the head like a crazed dummkopf. Why couldn't those companies see what was going on and join in?

 

For a long while I was a fan of custom chips, like GTIA, ANTIC, VIC-II, SID, POKEY, IWM, and many others including separate DSP and FPU. This from like 1980 through the late 1990's. Then nothing I didn't give a shit about them. Then sometime 10 or 15 years after the turn of the century I began to dislike rigs full of custom chips. They were a huge major contributing factor to clamping down an architecture. The PC proved it. With its slower main bus, and faster CPU and ClockDoubled DX2 chips, the PC could evolve different parts of the system at different rates. Different rates to match advancement in either communications, storage, graphics, processing, memory, or whatever. Different rates to match performance price points for cost conscious consumers. Different rates to match different applications. You may need a server with basic graphics but bad-ass SCSI drives. Or you may need those advanced graphics but little or no sound.

 

The architecture was flexible and could meet many needs with many price points with a variety of hardware. Nothing a closed system like an 8 or 16 bit machine could offer.

 

Another little noted thing of the PC was how it was slowly absorbing functionality of add-on cards into the motherboard chipset and then into the processor itself.

 

Consider SoundBlaster Audio. The cards were expanding in size and functionality and standards they supported. More codecs, midi, samples.. Then eventually PC sound was put back on the motherboard in a small custom chip, then in a generic form in the motherboard southbridge and a disk full of drivers and emulation. This matured and is very stable versatile with lots of possible configurations. Graphics experienced similar migrations. From an outboard card, to a soldered motherboard chip, then into the northbridge, then CPU package, and finally CPU die. With PC you can still pick from both ends of the spectrum; in the choice of integrated or discrete graphics. Or both.

 

Similar expansions could be done on the Apple II, but just hardware cards and only certain applications/games would recognize the new hardware - think MockingBoard or the Arcade Board. 8 bits and 1MHz CPU was too limiting to go beyond that.

 

Finally soft soundcards, soft modems, soft LAN, while sucky in the beginning matured nicely and helped free the hardware to advance to new speeds. Something custom chips could never allow.

 

[zzip]

I think that most people in most situations and times would have migrated away from anything 8/16 bit when presented with X86 machines.

 

If you thought that a PC side-by-side a popular 16-bit machine of the day was pale in comparison. You'd likely have been right. But you'd also have noticed the PC platform evolving at a faster and faster pace while the 16-bit whatever was not.

 

So yeh, the PC would likely be behind, but also gaining at breakneck pace.

 

Yeah, PCs were definitely weak back in the 80s. I mean they did usually have good keyboards and were built like tanks to justify their outrageous prices, so they were good for business apps. They were inferior for multimedia apps, and games. Plus you had DOS and its weird 640K + EMS , XMS issues to deal with. Even when they got VGA, they were still running on the ISA bus and that meant slow refreshes.

 

It wasn't until PCs got local-bus graphics (VESA.PCI), 32-bit apps/OSes (got rid of the 640K problem) and soundblaster-level sound in the early 90s that they got compelling enough for me to move from ST

Edited January 26, 2017 by zzip

[Keatah]

From a professional point of view, the PC produced attractive text and ANSI displays, and could do so throughout a wide range of configurations. 16-bit machines of the same era were focusing on graphics - perhaps too much before their time too. This reason, the prowess at handling text, was cited to me many many times as the reason to move away from Atari/Commodore. An offshoot of that was that people could take their work home with them for either more productivity or telecommuting.

 

It is my belief, but I don't know with 100% certainty, it cost the PC less cycles to put a character of text on the screen than any of the graphically oriented 16-bit machines.

 

---

 

I tried to own many of the 8/16 bit rigs back in the day, from KIM-1 and RCA COSMAC VIP through the 486 timeframe. I succeeded rather well with the 8-bit stuff. And got an Amiga too. But I never could afford a MAC. And by the time the ST came on my radar I was pretty much done and done with going through computers. I needed to standardize big time.

 

Most of the times I switched systems because of improved graphics and games But as I got older, architecture, storage, raw speed, and software pervasiveness became more important. And all my recollections told me going with Atari/Commodore wouldn't benefit me. Every time a new level of performance was "invented" by the industry I'd have to swap machines. With the PC, and Apple II and MAC to lesser extents, I could upgrade piecemeal.

 

When I got my 486 it was a stripper machine, multi i/o board and video board, 1 hdd, 1 floppy. That was it. When I retired it I had added 2 more hdd, another floppy, cd-rom, soundcard with fm/pcm/wave/samples, 2nd parallel port, memory expansion board, modem, game card, digitizer, extra cache memory, and some other things. All of which had been acquired over the years when the price looked right.

 

While the 16-bit A/C machines may have outperformed the PC in select areas, their infrastructure and support was not stable or even available. But with the PC I could walk to 3 different computer stores (wow what times!) and get help on almost any issue.

Edited January 27, 2017 by Keatah

[Christos]

I will have to disagree a bit. The way the ST handles text is actually excellent and quite modern in some respects. First of all, the ST high resolution is quite high for the time it was released all the way up to early 90's. Also unlike the text mode graphics you had on PC high resolutions, you could mix a lot of fonts and encodings in the same text which was quite difficult at the time. Also having used equivalent speced pc's, I would say that business applications were quite fast compared to their counterparts. The only thing the ST really missed was a version of COBOL

[D.Daniels]

I will have to disagree a bit. The way the ST handles text is actually excellent and quite modern in some respects. First of all, the ST high resolution is quite high for the time it was released all the way up to early 90's. Also unlike the text mode graphics you had on PC high resolutions, you could mix a lot of fonts and encodings in the same text which was quite difficult at the time. Also having used equivalent speced pc's, I would say that business applications were quite fast compared to their counterparts. The only thing the ST really missed was a version of COBOL

 

I had an ST as kid for games, as kids do, but I'm quite sure back then I remember hearing or knowing that desktop publishing software was supposed to be really good on an ST, so it must have been capable for handling text at a low cost for the time

Edited January 27, 2017 by D.Daniels

[zzip]

From a professional point of view, the PC produced attractive text and ANSI displays, and could do so throughout a wide range of configurations. 16-bit machines of the same era were focusing on graphics - perhaps too much before their time too. This reason, the prowess at handling text, was cited to me many many times as the reason to move away from Atari/Commodore. An offshoot of that was that people could take their work home with them for either more productivity or telecommuting.

 

It is my belief, but I don't know with 100% certainty, it cost the PC less cycles to put a character of text on the screen than any of the graphically oriented 16-bit machines.

 

That is true. The PC still had (and still has) text modes at a time when ST/Amiga/Macintosh got rid of text modes in favor of all bitmap graphics. They did this because they believed "all GUI" was the future. But this meant that to draw each character, the 16-bit machines had to push 16-bytes in monochrome (8x16 text), or maybe 40-bytes in color (Amiga, 5-bit planes 8x8 text). Although blitter chips could help here.

 

To do the same work, the PC only had to push 1 byte to the screen. That's why text is so fast on PC in comparison.

[zzip]

I will have to disagree a bit. The way the ST handles text is actually excellent and quite modern in some respects. First of all, the ST high resolution is quite high for the time it was released all the way up to early 90's. Also unlike the text mode graphics you had on PC high resolutions, you could mix a lot of fonts and encodings in the same text which was quite difficult at the time. Also having used equivalent speced pc's, I would say that business applications were quite fast compared to their counterparts. The only thing the ST really missed was a version of COBOL

 

The stock text handling on ST was pretty poor. There were programs like "QuickST" that would replace text handling with faster procedures. The difference was night and day after installing them.

 

Even as far as mixing font types and sizes on screen, GDOS was the part of GEM responsible for this. But it wasn't ready when TOS shipped, so the built-in font support looked awful. Many desktop publishing programs needed to supply GDOS as an add on to get decent font support

Edited January 27, 2017 by zzip

[D.Daniels]

 

The stock text handling on ST was pretty poor. There were programs like "QuickST" that would replace text handling with faster procedures. The difference was night and day after installing them.

 

Even as far as mixing font types and sizes on screen, GDOS was the part of GEM responsible for this. But it wasn't ready when TOS shipped, so the built-in font support looked awful. Many desktop publishing programs needed to supply GDOS as an add on to get decent font support

 

How much was the price difference if you can remember then between a PC and ST? I assume maybe then the power without the price slogan should have been the powerless with this price. As we didn't have PC' as common in the UK, I always thought the ST was ok, as people were still using Spectrums and C64's.

[zzip]

 

How much was the price difference if you can remember then between a PC and ST? I assume maybe then the power without the price slogan should have been the powerless with this price. As we didn't have PC' as common in the UK, I always thought the ST was ok, as people were still using Spectrums and C64's.

 

It depended on the year in question. In the mid-80s, when Atari coined the slogan, it was true. The ST was $799, while the Amiga was $1299 while for PC and Mac you were easily looking at more than $2000. The IBM PC AT was $6000!

 

Clones and economies of scale pushed down PC hardware prices way down over time, but in the mid-80s, PCs were very expensive

[D.Daniels]

 

It depended on the year in question. In the mid-80s, when Atari coined the slogan, it was true. The ST was $799, while the Amiga was $1299 while for PC and Mac you were easily looking at more than $2000. The IBM PC AT was $6000!

 

Clones and economies of scale pushed down PC hardware prices way down over time, but in the mid-80s, PCs were very expensive

 

thanks for reply, I was too young at the time and in the UK to understand that difference, in a sense Jack's vision kind of seems quite wise, but sadly flawed

[Keatah]

Yes all that! I want to add in that another part of the PC's success was because of quality of materials in construction. And enough of them!

 

With the PC you got some sort of fiberboard slip-on cover for the manuals - which themselves were 3-ring binders. The heavy keyboard - which is still highly desired today. The metal case of system itself.. MY 486 box has gotta weigh at least 40lbs or more. This was beefy industrial stuff. And this construction allowed the PC to live and work in areas that'd make lesser machines fail.

[zzip]

 

thanks for reply, I was too young at the time and in the UK to understand that difference, in a sense Jack's vision kind of seems quite wise, but sadly flawed

 

Jack had made the C64 a major success, and he was determined to do the same for Atari. The ST was the right computer for the time in 1985, and at the right price. It sold fairly well at first. The PC was aimed at a different market as the price shows.

 

But I don't think anyone in 85 foresaw that innovation in the PC space would far outstrip everything non-PC. The STe and Falcon felt like they should have been released sooner than they were. The ST in 85 was a great value, but the Falcon in 92 was hard to justify compared to the kind of PC you could get for similar money.

[zzip]

Yes all that! I want to add in that another part of the PC's success was because of quality of materials in construction. And enough of them!

 

With the PC you got some sort of fiberboard slip-on cover for the manuals - which themselves were 3-ring binders. The heavy keyboard - which is still highly desired today. The metal case of system itself.. MY 486 box has gotta weigh at least 40lbs or more. This was beefy industrial stuff. And this construction allowed the PC to live and work in areas that'd make lesser machines fail.

 

I ended up with with an original IBM PC for free many years later. That thing was built like a tank! Nice keyboard too, but it ran like crap!

 

But that pushed up the price too. Lots of people were buying cheap clones that were nowhere near as well made.

[D.Daniels]

 

Jack had made the C64 a major success, and he was determined to do the same for Atari. The ST was the right computer for the time in 1985, and at the right price. It sold fairly well at first. The PC was aimed at a different market as the price shows.

 

But I don't think anyone in 85 foresaw that innovation in the PC space would far outstrip everything non-PC. The STe and Falcon felt like they should have been released sooner than they were. The ST in 85 was a great value, but the Falcon in 92 was hard to justify compared to the kind of PC you could get for similar money.

 

Over here, I think the problem for the Falcon and STE was as you say, too late, people had also moved on to cheaper consoles or were happy with their Amiga. Plus Atari didn't offer anything exciting, they needed something like AVP to be on the Falcon rather than Jag, or an amazing piece of software application. Its a shame they couldn't have made the Falcon a Microsoft office/windows compatible business machine, power for the price.

Edited January 27, 2017 by D.Daniels

[Keatah]

In a sense I never really abandoned Atari platforms. While I may not have real Atari hardware anymore I thoroughly enjoy the 400/800/130xe systems through emulation. Not forgetting the VCS either.

 

Eventually soon I'll get into the finer points of ST/STE/megaSTE/Falcon emulation. I'm all setup I just haven't gotten into details.

[atarian1]

 

The STe and Falcon felt like they should have been released sooner than they were. The ST in 85 was a great value, but the Falcon in 92 was hard to justify compared to the kind of PC you could get for similar money.

 

For the Falcon, it depended on what you were using the computer for. For general purpose word processing, telecoms, games, etc, yes, the Falcon looked overpriced. I am sure even Atari saw this as noted in interviews that they couldn't compete with PCs, so they concentrated the Falcon features on their niche market - music. You could not beat the price/performance of a Falcon as a digital music recording studio.

 

It urked me back in the day that people would compare a Mac LC II and a Falcon - both with 68030 16 MHz CPUs - that the Falcon was a rip off based on the CPU and speed. No mention that for the same price as the Mac LC II, you get a DSP, 16-bit stereo sound, slightly higher res graphics with TV output modes, etc. None of which were available on the Mac without expensive add-on cards. An Mac AV computer with a DSP cost 2-3x (IIRC about $2799) that of a Falcon though it did have a 68040 and faster DSP chip. In this case, you get what you pay for. Same with the PC. I still remember the cheapest Turtle Beach DSP card for the PC cost $1000! Almost the cost of a base Falcon.

 

Unfortunately in the end, Atari couldn't keep up with the faster computers and falling prices of Apple and Intel/Windows machines.

[pixelmischief]

Atari 2600: Video Pinball, Pitfall II, Demon Attack, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Atlantis, Kaboom, Warlords, etc.

 

Atari 800XL with (2) 1050 disk drives and 1027 printer: DOS 2.0S, Disk Wizard II, AtariWriter, Donkey Kong, Summer Games, GhostBusters, Ultima IV, etc.

 

Atari 130XE with (2) XF551 disk drives, ICD MIO, and Star NX 1000 printer: SpartaDOS, AtariWriter Plus, SynCalc, GT Data Manager, Envision, Arkanoid, etc.

 

Atari 1040 STe with ICD Link II, Syquest 120, Epson BJ-100 printer, and NEC Multi-Sync 3D monitor: TOS 2.06, Speedo GDOS, Atari Works, Kandinsky Art, Addison's Monopoly, Xenon 2, etc.

 

Atari Falcon with Sun 240MB external SCSI hard drive, NEC Multi-Spin top-loading CD-ROM drive, HP Laserjet III printer, and NEC MultiSync 4FG monitor: MultiTOS, NVDI, AtariWorks 2.0, Obsession Pinball, Ishar 2, Bound Demo, etc.

 

Intel/Windows with 486DX4-120, 240MB internal IDE hard drive, 4x CDROM, SoundBlaster AWE-32, Cirrus Logic Video Card: DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Space Quest III, Eye of the Beholder, King's Quest VI, 7th Guest, etc.