If you could change one thing about the 520ST/STM/STFM......

[oky2000]

For me it is the YM2149, such a horrible sound chip, it was crap at the start of 1984 in the budget (£80 less than C64) Amstrad CPC + TV modulator bundle. You can get by with just the CPU and Shifter if the coder is talented enough for everything else.

 

You?

[anzac]

For me that the comparison from friends was ZX Spectrum or almost soundless PCs, the Atari sound was great…

 

those mouse/joy ports were a pain though

[MrMaddog]

I'd sell more ST's in America so they can be used as computers instead of 'always compared to Amiga' game machines...

 

 

[oky2000]

3 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

I'd sell more ST's in America so they can be used as computers instead of 'always compared to Amiga' game machines...

 

 

So what would you actually change about the hardware to achieve this?

[oky2000]

4 hours ago, anzac said:

For me that the comparison from friends was ZX Spectrum or almost soundless PCs, the Atari sound was great…

 

those mouse/joy ports were a pain though

I had the 520STM+SF354 so the joystick ports were on the side

 

The sound on VCS Star Raiders is superior. Why are you comparing a £99.99 1983 16kb computer to a £399.99 520STM from 1986 as being OK. The only computers to have that AY/YM2149 sound was the Spectrum +2 for poor people (a pitiful machine with pathetic graphics) and the budget Amstrad CPC464 (which cost about £100 less than a C64 in 1984 when it launched). Not sure why PC is also included as Adlib didn't even exist AFAIK until after the 520STFM went on sale (1987?). Is 160x200 in 16 colours from a selection of 27 palette colours OK for the ST? No. So why is the £199.99 Amstrad CPC type sound?

 

The 520STM was meant to be an upgrade/future generation of 16bit home computers and with the amazing specs of 320x200x16 colours or 70hz 31khz non interlaced better than Macintosh style mono mode, 512 colour palette, 8mhz cutting edge 68000, fantastic doorway into the world of WIMP/GUI based 16bit computing with GEM interface....the YM2149 'poor person's budget computer' noises were not up to the quality of the rest of the design really IMO.

 

 

[+SoulBuster]

Better video resolutions and native VGA port.

[youxia]

2 hours ago, oky2000 said:

the Spectrum +2 for poor people (a pitiful machine with pathetic graphics)

If you want to be a dick, let me point out that this "pitiful" line sold 2.5 much units as the ST and its influence is credited with kicstarting the enire UK programming industry - thus partially enabling the ST to exist at all.

 

Also, the ST was designed in a haste and on the cheap, due to the messy anti-Commodore war Tramiel was in, therefore any 2022-based hand wringing of "what were they thinking" are completely pointless.

Edited October 24, 2022 by youxia

[ojanhk]

A proper way to expand the machine would have been a real plus. The cartridges port was too crippled and limiting expansion, the GLUE and MMU were limiting the memory to 4MB by design and until the STE was released, even adding memory required soldering (not Ok for most people). I had a 520 STF and it never got upgraded, although I purchased a memory expansion, I never installed it as I was scared of soldering on the motherboard (I still have the memory expansion, not the ST).  By 1991 I replaced it with a 386 PC which came with 4MB RAM and a whopping 200MB hard disk. This PC stayed with me for the next five years, slowly adding memory, new video cards, sound blasters, CD ROM and obviously new CPU and motherboard, all this without using a soldering iron. 
 

Would better expansion capabilities have saved the ST line? Not sure, even the Amiga with its Zorro port finally died. But it might have given STs a longer lifespan. 

[+DarkLord]

I know it would have broke the bank as far as the initial release/price point went, but
I think that if the base line standard for the ST's could have been 1 meg of memory

and a DS/DD floppy drive from the start, it would have made a huge difference in

software delivery, especially for games.

 

Also, something that could have been done on the cheap side of things was have the

ST's come with an external audio port (RCA out, mini-jack, whatever). I did that mod

for my Mega ST4 and was amazed at the difference in sound over the SC1224's tinny

little speaker, just by hanging a cheap set of speakers off of it.

 

[Megalomaniac]

The sound hardware was appalling. It was a big step backwards from the C64, and barely better than what the Atari 8-bits had. Would it have really cost that much more to use something good? The other contender is the single-sided disk drive - how much extra, in percentage terms, would it have cost to use double-sided drives to future proof the system much more?

 

You can understand the lack of hardware scrolling and other graphical niceties, because when the ST launched the only thing in its price range with superior specialist hardware was the C64, and the ST had 8 times the memory, 8 times the clock speed and more colours, so in 99% of situations the ST outperformed the C64 on games performance. The Amiga cost nearly twice as much as the ST when they both launched, so maybe we shouldn't be comparing them so closely? Similarly, I'm not sure 1Mb of memory would have been worth it - less sampled sound and less colours mean that 512k allowed developers to push closer to the ST's limits than it did on that other computer.

 

In truth Atari made a lot of mistakes, probably due to completing the ST in a rush. It's glitches like the lousy BASIC (necessitating a later unadvertised upgrade which caused most previous BASIC programs not to run), the badly positioned joystick ports on most models, the many faulty power supplies, and the STe's DMA hard drive fault which are harder to forgive. As is Atari's generally shoddy responses to those issues.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Megalomaniac

[Cyprian]

I would see stereo sound output or the BLiTTER from the beginning

[TGB1718]

For me it would have been custom graphics chips, taking what had been done with the 8 bit line and making

improvements in colours/resolution/hardware control over the screen, loads more hardware multi-coloured sprites etc.

 

[zzip]

Lots of great suggestions in this thread,  but if I had to narrow it down to one thing, it would be the sound chip as well

 

18 hours ago, anzac said:

For me that the comparison from friends was ZX Spectrum or almost soundless PCs, the Atari sound was great…

 

It definitely beats "PC Speaker" sound of that era.   And some games put it to good use- lots of games were able to play sampled sounds on it (albeit with hiss)

But the ST should really have had a more forward-looking soundchip for its time.

[mickster]

I know this would have been impossible at the time, but for me the one thing would be is price.  Even though the ST was cheaper than any alternative, I was used to seeing 8 bit computers for $100-$300 dollars.

 

I loved computers and especially the atari line of computers.  I did not have the money to even consider buying one new.  Even though I was buying the magazines and going to local computer club meetings, I didn't get an ST until another person was selling out of the ST to go to a PC.  While the ST was the first computer to sell with a megabyte of ram for $999.  I could also buy a used sports car for $3000, a normal car for less.   It was still a ridiculous amount of money for something that did so little.  Nothing against atari,  the pc/mac/amiga were even worse price/value ratio.   

 

I bought my first 520STFM with monitor for $350 used and absolutely loved it.  I can't imagine buying it for $1000 though......  At some point, it becomes so expensive that is could just as well be a million dollars.  For me Macs were this way.  At that time of my life I just didn't have that much money.

 

 

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, mickster said:

I know this would have been impossible at the time, but for me the one thing would be is price.  Even though the ST was cheaper than any alternative, I was used to seeing 8 bit computers for $100-$300 dollars.

Main reason was in the 8-bit days, they'd sell you the computer,  floppy drive, and monitor as separate items.   Many people didn't buy them at once so it didn't feel like as big an investment.   If you bought them all together you could easily pay as much or more than an ST system, especially in the days before floppy drive prices came down.

 

The ST was pretty useless without a floppy, so they had to bundle it.  It didn't have an RF Modulator or composite output at first so you needed one of the monitors too.

I did the same thing, got an STfm when they fell to under $400, got a mono monitor and used TV for color.

[+Stephen]

Would have been nice if it was an actual continuation of the 8-bit line, not just a bodged together off the shelf design.  Basically, the ST should have been the Commodore machine, St should have been the Amiga.  That would be my one "small" change.

[Zogging Hell]

I really will have to dig out that magazine interview from c. 1987 where Shiraz Shivji stated that the Yamaha chip was literally just there as a system buzzer, a slightly better alternative to the PC buzzer, and was not envisioned as the final sound output of the ST in the design. It was always meant to get something else to up it's game on that front (as was the graphics, which in the end were upped with the Blitter), but various issues stopped the line evolving. To be fair, given the choice at the time to listening to generally less than stellar 80s computer game music (and I include the Amiga in that) or turning the sound down and putting on my favourite album, I would almost always go with the latter anyway. I can genuinely say I probably like 10% of the tunes on computer games and dislike the remaining 90%, which broadly corresponds with the amount of the wide variety of more traditional music that I would also find pleasant to listen to - tastes may vary So for me I am not that bothered that the Yamaha wasn't that special, more amazed that the ST got away with a system buzzer for so long...

 

Personally I would just add hardware scrolling, as anything else would have upped the price too much and taken away its unique selling point, a whole lot of machine for the money. It was half the price of, and better, than the Mac Plus (faster, colour, and a monochrome with higher resolution), and half the price and better than a 8086 and 286 PC with again better resolutions and graphics, and given the massive price difference at launch it was broadly comparable to the Amiga, custom chips not withstanding.

 

I also would have included the socket - and in the case of the original ST, space on the motherboard, for the blitter from scratch (given that it was always a planned addition), so all ST's could be upgraded easily by popping the hood and pushing the chip in, rather than the soldering iron job it usually is.

 

I agree with Darklord/ Megalomaniac that a double sided floppy should have been standard from the start, the single sided drive was cheaper, keeping the price down, but it was such a albatross around the neck for the ST later on.

 

The STe on the other matter, IMO could have done with some considerable 'alterations' in 1989.. I'm not sure where to start on that. It is the machine the ST should perhaps have been at the start, but couldn't because of the price, but a bit lacklustre for 1989/90 (ditto the Amiga 500+/ 600).

 

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, Zogging Hell said:

The STe on the other matter, IMO could have done with some considerable 'alterations' in 1989.. I'm not sure where to start on that. It is the machine the ST should perhaps have been at the start, but couldn't because of the price, but a bit lacklustre for 1989/90 (ditto the Amiga 500+/ 600).

It would have been nice if STe had new graphics modes at least on par with VGA since that standard had already been around for a could years by then,  not just additional colors to choose from 

[oky2000]

14 hours ago, youxia said:

If you want to be a dick, let me point out that this "pitiful" line sold 2.5 much units as the ST and its influence is credited with kicstarting the enire UK programming industry - thus partially enabling the ST to exist at all.

 

Also, the ST was designed in a haste and on the cheap, due to the messy anti-Commodore war Tramiel was in, therefore any 2022-based hand wringing of "what were they thinking" are completely pointless.

I am not being a dick, if that's all you can afford in 1987 to play games then fine. The point is a 8mhz 68000 based 512k 512 colour 320x200x16 col and a 70hz non interlaced mono mode easier on the eyes than the £2700 Macintosh that cost £399.99 has no business having the WORST sound chip of the era. Please keep your emotional nostalgic noise out of my face in future. Keep it factual, YM2149/AY8192 is a crap sound chip technically.

 

Did the Atari 400/800 have the same sound chip as the VCS? No

Did the C64 have the same sound chip as the C64? No

So why does the 1986 520STM intended for home use have the crap 1984 Amstrad 'cheaper than C64' sound chip.

 

Sales have got nothing to do with quality, the Archimedes sold bugger all and yet by 1987 it was the most advanced computer bar none at any price. Did Acorn stick a crap sound chip in the 1986 Archimedes whilst producing a 20mhz 68020 speed ARM based 256 colour/4096 palette computer? No. They pretty much quadrupled the twin stereo hardwired Portia chip of A1000 by having 8 channel DACs with software controlled left/right stereo placement registers for each channel. 

 

Sound is important, not everybody wanted to spend £2000-3000 on professional musical equipment to use with MIDI, unless Atari could make a cheap MIDI based sound module by 1987 A500 launch it was game over for the ST.

 

 

Next time read my post fully, rumour was the ST was meant to have AMY, that went bad, then the unconfirmed rumour was the YM2151 was meant to go in but that also didn't happen because of the extra spec Yamaha 2149 based MSX1 music package (with MIDI ports and a keyboard similar to the Commodore SFX Sound Expander based Music Expansion system pack) . POKEY could not be squeezed in the timeframe is the rest of the rumour. Delaying the project to not have the utterly crap sounding 2149 in the ST was always and option and probably wouldn't have made much of a difference. Commodore could barely make Agnus/Daphne/Portia custom chips that worked in any meaningful quantity before 1986 anyway!  It was a mistake not to hold back the launch of the ST until they found something better to go with the rest of the cutting edge (for a sub £500 home computer) spec. Square wave only oscillator based chips are pathetic. End of discussion. If you had erotic fantasies about your cheap Sinclairs and Amstrad then great, keep your hackneyed nostalgic emotional reactions it out of this discussion

[oky2000]

9 minutes ago, zzip said:

It would have been nice if STe had new graphics modes at least on par with VGA since that standard had already been around for a could years by then,  not just additional colors to choose from 

I agree the STE simple palette choice increase but sticking with the 16 colours per scanline was a mistake but really I am interested in what was 'wrong' with the ST/STM/STFM base spec. I guess needing to put in a blitter, adding a pair of DACs and increasing the palette was all they could do without breaking compatability too much....or the R&D budget ran out to replace the display chip

 

Looking at Batman the Movie, a game people seem to like back then on the Amiga, the only actual difference playing it on an STFM bought a year or two earlier for £284 from Silica Shop vs £499 A500 is the music. That's why I pick the sound chip, it doesn't match the rest of the spec set in 1986 when the home targeted 520STM was released IMO. I know people coming from Sinclair/MSX/Amstrad are going to get emotional about it but ho hum the fact is the YM2149 is a terrible choice for the rest of the spec and would have been better to delay the project given Commodore couldn't even manufacture the A1000 custom chips without a massive failure rate in 1985 anyway.

 

 

[oky2000]

55 minutes ago, Zogging Hell said:

I really will have to dig out that magazine interview from c. 1987 where Shiraz Shivji stated that the Yamaha chip was literally just there as a system buzzer, a slightly better alternative to the PC buzzer, and was not envisioned as the final sound output of the ST in the design. It was always meant to get something else to up it's game on that front (as was the graphics, which in the end were upped with the Blitter), but various issues stopped the line evolving. To be fair, given the choice at the time to listening to generally less than stellar 80s computer game music (and I include the Amiga in that) or turning the sound down and putting on my favourite album, I would almost always go with the latter anyway. I can genuinely say I probably like 10% of the tunes on computer games and dislike the remaining 90%, which broadly corresponds with the amount of the wide variety of more traditional music that I would also find pleasant to listen to - tastes may vary So for me I am not that bothered that the Yamaha wasn't that special, more amazed that the ST got away with a system buzzer for so long...

 

Personally I would just add hardware scrolling, as anything else would have upped the price too much and taken away its unique selling point, a whole lot of machine for the money. It was half the price of, and better, than the Mac Plus (faster, colour, and a monochrome with higher resolution), and half the price and better than a 8086 and 286 PC with again better resolutions and graphics, and given the massive price difference at launch it was broadly comparable to the Amiga, custom chips not withstanding.

 

I also would have included the socket - and in the case of the original ST, space on the motherboard, for the blitter from scratch (given that it was always a planned addition), so all ST's could be upgraded easily by popping the hood and pushing the chip in, rather than the soldering iron job it usually is.

 

I agree with Darklord/ Megalomaniac that a double sided floppy should have been standard from the start, the single sided drive was cheaper, keeping the price down, but it was such a albatross around the neck for the ST later on.

 

The STe on the other matter, IMO could have done with some considerable 'alterations' in 1989.. I'm not sure where to start on that. It is the machine the ST should perhaps have been at the start, but couldn't because of the price, but a bit lacklustre for 1989/90 (ditto the Amiga 500+/ 600).

 

Interesting about the idea for putting the blitter socket in there, it sounds like the entire project was focussed on the impending A1000 launch but Atari had no idea what a world of pain that was going to be for Commodore to manufacture in 1985. I am not sure any more but I think there was an early (1986?) sampling cartridge that came with a DAC onboard, there was also some French game that came with a cartridge with better sound hardware bundled with the ST release? Just like Commodore purchased the Black Belt technologies HAM+ technology perhaps Atari should have bought the license for that sound cartridge bundled with that game and sold it as a branded Atari product at a loss for the price of an ST full price game (£20-25). Not ideal but a lot easier than selling your 520STFM to fund the purchase of a 520STE in 1989 I would think. Ditto for Blitter socket inside all machines released.

 

The double sided/single sided drive issue really only happened because of the 520STFM right? Didn't the 1040STF launch with a double sided drive and the 520STM also launched at the time could be purchased with either the SF314/SF354 external drives. I seem to remember that 520STFMs just started appearing with 720k drives as standard with no announcement like the silent '1mb capable' Agnus chip in the A500 and Amiga 2000 during later in the Kickstart 1.3  period before A500plus/A3000 officially launched.

 

The Amiga chipset in 1990 was long in the tooth, it was already overtaken by the £700 Acorn Archimedes computers of late 1986 or early 1987 with their 16-20mhz 020 performance CPU, 256 colour hi-res interlace mode, 8 true stereo channel DAC based sound....just not much talent working on the games for it 99% of the time. 32 colours was OK for 1986-88 but once PC Engine and Megadrive were out 32 colours just wasn't enough, 15 colours for hardware 2 layer parallax mode a complete joke by 1989, it was crap in 1986.

 

Commodore never upgraded the hardware, in 1989 if the STE had specs that exceeded the A500 AND the software publishers bothered to write STE games from scratch it could have been a real game changer. In a way the blitter's access to all the memory in the STE is much more useful than the Chip/Fast RAM method of Amiga 500/2000 of 1989 (which was silently upgraded to 1mb from 512k between 1989 and 1990 when I got my A2000 with KS1.3 and 1mb Chip RAM). Commodore and Atari spent too much time looking at each other and not Acorn (A3000/A3010 all in one A500 rivals with ARM2) and PC or even Macintosh LC475 25mhz 040 bargain costing half the price of the Amiga 4000/040. 

 

Of course Atari had to pay for all custom silicon design and manufacture as a customer unlike Commodore so they were always hampered with possible price point/spec. IF the 520ST had launched with a YM2151 or even OPL1 or similar it may have been enough to win, most games look the same and looking at Lotus II on the STFM and Amiga 500 graphically the Amiga is only about 2-2.5 times better, a far cry from the 5-10 times more powerful quotes being bandied about. Writing games as good as Beast 1 on the Amiga was a rare talent, maybe only 4 coders in the world hit that sort of chipset efficiency, most games were like Super Hang-On or OutRun before 1990/1991 when Amiga was the prime development and ST games were back converted from Amiga design most of the time. 

 

As a seventies kid I grew up with the sound of analogue synthesizers, didn't like music with singing but the instruments were awesome for me. That's not to say the ST should have had something similar to the SID or Ensonique sound chip but certainly something a bit more sophisticated than the 'Amstrad sound chip'. The Exceptions (tex) demo group did their best but as a 520STM owner playing some of those demos with SID tunes translated who had a C64 on top of the cupboard I really didn't think it was impressive....except the digi-demos of The Big Demo second page. But as Gauntlet 1 proves you can't get the ST to scroll the screen 15/16 pixels in 8 directions AND play samples without causing severe delays in processing. Still I'd rather play Gauntlet 1 on the ST than any other console/computer before the Megadrive. Not sure the FM sound of YM2151 was my cup of tea artistically but at least it does a mean rendition of Magical Sound Shower from OutRun when played on the Yamaha MSX1 computer + musical keyboard bundle which had the usual crap MSX sound chip and an additional YM2151 + MIDI ports expansion to the spec etc. That's not to say I hate every piece of ST music, some of the demo tunes are pretty good.....they just will never touch my top 5 SIDs or MODs which is a shame because most of the time the games were pretty much the same thing as a 16bit computer gamer in 1986-88 (my ST years)

Edited October 24, 2022 by oky2000

[oky2000]

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Would have been nice if it was an actual continuation of the 8-bit line, not just a bodged together off the shelf design.  Basically, the ST should have been the Commodore machine, St should have been the Amiga.  That would be my one "small" change.

In interviews Amiga team were scared that Atari would just take the technology and do something else with it, perhaps a premium games console like the original design was based on. It would be interesting to know how much such a console would have cost Atari to manufacture, it would only have 128k RAM vs 512k RAM inside the 520ST or even 700kb of the "512kb Amiga 1000" which is quite a significant saving in 1985, not so much an issue by Xmas 1987 due to the number of 512k/640k PCs forcing the number of DRAMs produced to massively increase.

[zzip]

16 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

Looking at Batman the Movie, a game people seem to like back then on the Amiga, the only actual difference playing it on an STFM bought a year or two earlier for £284 from Silica Shop vs £499 A500 is the music. That's why I pick the sound chip, it doesn't match the rest of the spec set in 1986 when the home targeted 520STM was released IMO. I know people coming from Sinclair/MSX/Amstrad are going to get emotional about it but ho hum the fact is the YM2149 is a terrible choice for the rest of the spec and would have been better to delay the project given Commodore couldn't even manufacture the A1000 custom chips without a massive failure rate in 1985 anyway.

 

I agree, looking at what was realistic in 1985,  the ST was already ahead of what most of the competition could do.   Yes the Amiga was more powerful, but had been in development a lot longer and cost at least twice as much.   The sound chip was the only thing that didn't seem "next level"

 

Apart from that. maybe they could have engineered in more "forward compatibility",  so that when things like new graphics modes or HD Floppies or 115200 bps serial ports are available, new models can include the hardware and the OS/software can support these without major rewrites,  more like how it worked on PC.   Instead it seemed that R&D didn't want to change things to radically and potentially break compatibility.

[Goochman]

IMHO there are 3 things that hampered the STs ability to move with the market:

 

1.  Design didnt allow for CPU upgrades.  ST was locked to the 68000 while the Amiga and Mac lines moved forward must faster

2.  Graphics - again design locked ST to 3 resolutions making expanision impossible.  The monochrome on the ST was class leading for about a year or 2 before high rez color screens began surpassing it

3.  Sound - I have this as 3 since honestly with Midi the ST became the muscians choice.  Sure the Yamaha was great but as a games machine was good enough.

 

[Megalomaniac]

I think the performance gap between standard Amiga and standard ST is bigger than suggested by games released for both systems such as Lotus 2, much as its my favourite Outrun-style racer. If you look at Amiga-exclusive games like Brian the Lion, Elfmania, Apidya, ATR, the Digital Illusions pinball games, I'd say those are artistically well clear of what the ordinary ST could do.

 

Slightly off topic, but - question for particularly oky2000 - why do you think the Archimedes made such a minimal impact on the market despite its power advantage over the ST and Amiga?

Edited October 24, 2022 by Megalomaniac