Purpose of the 520STE?

[leech]

Was just thinking about this; and realized that the 520STE likely should have never existed.  I mean by the time it was coming out, how much of a price difference between 1MB and 512KB of RAM would have been?  This would have just created one more option for developers to target 'lowest common denominator' instead of just assuming everyone with an STe had 1MB or more of RAM.

 

Is there any software that is STE enhanced that will run with less than 1MB of memory?  Seems kind of similar to the A300/A600, where they were trying to sell a cheaper model, but it was basically just a repackaged A500 with PCMCIA and no numeric keypad...

[zzip]

It may have been designed during the time period when RAM prices were really high?   88 or so

But the cost to upgrade it to 4mb would be the same as the 1040.

 

IDK,  I guess Atari marketing had a preference to release machines in pairs, with a low-end and high-end model.       400/800,  600XL/800XL   520ST/1040ST   Mega2/Mega4   but there are a few exceptions to that.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2022 by zzip

[leech]

7 minutes ago, zzip said:

It may have been designed during the time period when RAM prices were really high?   88 or so

But the cost to upgrade it to 4mb would be the same as the 1040.

 

IDK,  I guess Atari marketing had a preference to release machines in pairs, with a low-end and high-end model.       400/800,  600XL/800XL   520ST/1040ST   Mega2/Mega4   but there are a few exceptions to that.

 

 

True, and for the most part the only real difference would be the badge and the label on the bottom.  Not sure if there are any differences in the silkscreen on the PCB.  By the time the STe released, you'd almost think they would have sold a 1040 and a 2060, so you could get 1 or 2mb from factory, with upgrades to 4mb.  But I'd think 512kb by that point would have been kind of pointless.  The 520ST and 1040ST made sense at the time though.  It's the same reason I'd think that the 260ST never really released properly, as memory had become cheaper fast enough to skip it.

[Chri O.]

Interesting the advantages of adding more RAM was one but the DMA 8-bit sound upgrade was freaking awesome for the time ?

No Signal by DHS (Atari ST music demo) 1080p50 -- ST

No Signal by DHS (Atari STe music demo) 1080p50 -- ST/e

No Signal by DHS (Atari Falcon music demo) -- Falcon 030 😁 16 bit 49kHz

 

[oracle_jedi]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

It may have been designed during the time period when RAM prices were really high?   88 or so

But the cost to upgrade it to 4mb would be the same as the 1040.

 

 

Its an interesting question, looking at ST Format magazine from March 1990 - http://www.stformat.com/stf08/stf08.pdf - it shows several vendors offering the basic 520STE pack for under £300.  These same vendors seem to be charging a £200 premium for the 1040STE models.  Of course the old trick of different bundles with supposedly high value software and extras makes exact comparisons hard, but my understanding is that those included software bundles were usually low cost items for the vendors to justify a higher price and collect a larger margin.

 

Also curious, is that at this time - early 1990 - the older STF/STFM is still being sold by other vendors, and I spotted a 520STFM to 1040STFM upgrade for £60.   However that would have been 512K worth of DRAM chips and not the DIMM stick used by the STE.  Does anyone know if DIMMs were more expensive that the older RAM chips around 1990?

 

[leech]

2 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

 

Its an interesting question, looking at ST Format magazine from March 1990 - http://www.stformat.com/stf08/stf08.pdf - it shows several vendors offering the basic 520STE pack for under £300.  These same vendors seem to be charging a £200 premium for the 1040STE models.  Of course the old trick of different bundles with supposedly high value software and extras makes exact comparisons hard, but my understanding is that those included software bundles were usually low cost items for the vendors to justify a higher price and collect a larger margin.

 

Also curious, is that at this time - early 1990 - the older STF/STFM is still being sold by other vendors, and I spotted a 520STFM to 1040STFM upgrade for £60.   However that would have been 512K worth of DRAM chips and not the DIMM stick used by the STE.  Does anyone know if DIMMs were more expensive that the older RAM chips around 1990?

 

It is a bit foggy, but I believe it was about 100 for a 1mb around 91/92?  But that was retail price.  I had upgraded my Mega STe to 4mb.  The foggy bit was that I don't remember if it was 100 for two SIMMs or for each.

[zzip]

10 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

Also curious, is that at this time - early 1990 - the older STF/STFM is still being sold by other vendors, and I spotted a 520STFM to 1040STFM upgrade for £60.   However that would have been 512K worth of DRAM chips and not the DIMM stick used by the STE.  Does anyone know if DIMMs were more expensive that the older RAM chips around 1990?

 

Was that upgrade just a board where you provide your own RAM chips?   I recall such things being sold.

 

You could also upgrade a 520STfm to 1mb using the piggyback method-- no extra board needed.  I had a friend do this for me, but I had to locate the DRAM chips...  this was probably sometime between 1990 and 1992, and I had to buy a full mb, and I don't recall spending a lot on it or I wouldn't have bothered.  

[Megalomaniac]

How much difference would 1Mb have made to the STe's potential compared to 512k? Remember that a 512k STe could sometimes do things an ordinary ST needed 1Mb for - witness The Chaos Engine as an example. It was still 16 colours on screen at a time, so less memory hungry than 32- or 64-colour. 512k was still a lot of memory in 1989, especially from a games perspective.

Edited December 22, 2022 by Megalomaniac

[leech]

17 minutes ago, Megalomaniac said:

How much difference would 1Mb have made to the STe's potential compared to 512k? Remember that a 512k STe could sometimes do things an ordinary ST needed 1Mb for - witness The Chaos Engine as an example. It was still 16 colours on screen at a time, so less memory hungry than 32- or 64-colour. 512k was still a lot of memory in 1989, especially from a games perspective.

Hmm, interesting.   I do kniw that Shadow of the Beast was coded to only utilize 512kb on the ST, where it uses a full 1MB on the Amiga.  The Genesis version goes to show that the ST could have quite easily looked as good.

How did the STE manage to require less ram?  More memory was handed off to the Shifter?  More graphic calls built into the hardware?

Now I want to play The Chaos Engine... 😛

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, leech said:

Hmm, interesting.   I do kniw that Shadow of the Beast was coded to only utilize 512kb on the ST, where it uses a full 1MB on the Amiga.  The Genesis version goes to show that the ST could have quite easily looked as good.

How did the STE manage to require less ram?  More memory was handed off to the Shifter?  More graphic calls built into the hardware?

Now I want to play The Chaos Engine... 😛

The Amiga version of SOTB had more going on.    Remember most ST and Amiga games were 1:1 ports and virtually identical except for sound..  but there were a handful of games Amiga owners would point to to show the superiority of their machine.  Shadow of the Beast was one of that, as well as Defender of the Crown.

 

48 minutes ago, Megalomaniac said:

How much difference would 1Mb have made to the STe's potential compared to 512k? Remember that a 512k STe could sometimes do things an ordinary ST needed 1Mb for - witness The Chaos Engine as an example. It was still 16 colours on screen at a time, so less memory hungry than 32- or 64-colour. 512k was still a lot of memory in 1989, especially from a games perspective.

The biggest thing is developers almost always code for the lowest spec machine to maximize sales.   So 512K is the baseline, but that predates the STe.   If there was only a 1040STe, and you were writing an STe only game then you could safely target 1mb and not worry.     So higher minimum spec means better games in the long run.   All I can say is thank God the 130ST model that was originally announced in 85 never saw the light of day

 

[leech]

42 minutes ago, zzip said:

The Amiga version of SOTB had more going on.    Remember most ST and Amiga games were 1:1 ports and virtually identical except for sound..  but there were a handful of games Amiga owners would point to to show the superiority of their machine.  Shadow of the Beast was one of that, as well as Defender of the Crown.

Defender of the Crown is still better on the ST anyhow, considering it was somewhat broken on the Amiga.

 

The earlier games were for sure written for the ST, then ported to the Amiga.  So many of them ended up being identical anyhow, Shadow of the Beast was purposefully gimped on the ST though.

[MrMaddog]

The extra memory does count...

 

I remeber having a choice of either getting the 520STe Disocvery Pack with games I like (Final FIght & Sim City) or a plain 1040STe with nothing but ST Basic.  Since it was a graduation gift from my mom she's like, "No you're getting the one with the most memory so it won't go obsolete."

 

And I'm glad she did cause I found more use with a RAMdisk than some shoddy arcade ports.

 

Anyway my guess was that in the 90's, Atari (in the US at least) stopped making STfms along with the 8-bit line so the 520 STe is their "basic" machine.

[Zogging Hell]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

All I can say is thank God the 130ST model that was originally announced in 85 never saw the light of day

 

Atari did release a 1mb Falcon though, which is about as much use as a chocolate teapot... You'd literally run out of memory switching resolution.

[leech]

55 minutes ago, Zogging Hell said:

Atari did release a 1mb Falcon though, which is about as much use as a chocolate teapot... You'd literally run out of memory switching resolution.

Ha, I was thinking this very thing earlier today, that the options for the Falcon should have been 4mb or 14mb, but they wasted the boards and connectors for a 1mb version (the originals didn't use SIMM slots, did they?)

[oracle_jedi]

6 hours ago, leech said:

Ha, I was thinking this very thing earlier today, that the options for the Falcon should have been 4mb or 14mb, but they wasted the boards and connectors for a 1mb version (the originals didn't use SIMM slots, did they?)

 

On both of my Falcons the RAM is on a daughter card that plugs into the motherboard.   I thought all Falcons were shipped this way, with the daughtercard being 1MB, 4MB or 14MB (technically I think it was 16MB but 2MB is masked out).

[leech]

9 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

 

On both of my Falcons the RAM is on a daughter card that plugs into the motherboard.   I thought all Falcons were shipped this way, with the daughtercard being 1MB, 4MB or 14MB (technically I think it was 16MB but 2MB is masked out).

I bought mine used, and have seen a lot of variants of how people made them later.

I always thought they maxed out at 14mb because that last 2mb is because of how the cpu does memory mapping of 16bit memory, whereas 32bit memory can go much larger (4gb).  But my memory is fuzzy on that...

[+DarkLord]

For some reason I was thinking it was reserved (hardware?)... Dunno, like you fuzzy memories... 

 

[Megalomaniac]

On 12/22/2022 at 6:23 PM, leech said:

Hmm, interesting.   I do kniw that Shadow of the Beast was coded to only utilize 512kb on the ST, where it uses a full 1MB on the Amiga.  The Genesis version goes to show that the ST could have quite easily looked as good.

How did the STE manage to require less ram?  More memory was handed off to the Shifter?  More graphic calls built into the hardware?

Now I want to play The Chaos Engine... 😛

Amiga Shadow of the Beast ran in 512k, not sure if it used the extra 512 if it was present. ST Wrath of the Demon shows that the ST could do a better imitation of Beast if programmed properly.

 

As for The Chaos Engine, my understanding is that it used the STe's hardware scrolling if it was present, but did the swapping-between-multiple-slightly-different-screens trick on the ST, which is notoriously memory hungry (potentially 256k used up just for the display, and that game has complex AI which must be memory hungry), hence the need for more memory on the standard model.

[leech]

35 minutes ago, Megalomaniac said:

Amiga Shadow of the Beast ran in 512k, not sure if it used the extra 512 if it was present. ST Wrath of the Demon shows that the ST could do a better imitation of Beast if programmed properly.

 

As for The Chaos Engine, my understanding is that it used the STe's hardware scrolling if it was present, but did the swapping-between-multiple-slightly-different-screens trick on the ST, which is notoriously memory hungry (potentially 256k used up just for the display, and that game has complex AI which must be memory hungry), hence the need for more memory on the standard model.

I wonder how many actually had 512kb Amigas.  Seems after the A1000, there would not have been many.  Every A500 I have seen (admittedly not many) have had 1mb or more.

[oky2000]

I would be interested to know the development history of the STE. By the time the STE came out it was pound for pound identical in price to the Amiga, if you are going to do a mid life-cycle upgrade and it can't leapfrog your competition it's a waste of time anyway. Even if you got an extra 512k of RAM for £399.99 it wouldn't have helped sales one bit because by 1989 there were Amiga only or Amiga targeted developments happening but there was hardly any support by publishers for STE specific games. 

 

Memory is meaningless when the chipset upgrade is a half measure to your competition that is matching your price and getting the developer time it was bound to get eventually.

 

 

 

 

[leech]

4 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

I would be interested to know the development history of the STE. By the time the STE came out it was pound for pound identical in price to the Amiga, if you are going to do a mid life-cycle upgrade and it can't leapfrog your competition it's a waste of time anyway. Even if you got an extra 512k of RAM for £399.99 it wouldn't have helped sales one bit because by 1989 there were Amiga only or Amiga targeted developments happening but there was hardly any support by publishers for STE specific games. 

 

Memory is meaningless when the chipset upgrade is a half measure to your competition that is matching your price and getting the developer time it was bound to get eventually.

 

 

 

 

They were spec chasing.  "4096 colors?  We have that now too!'  'Stereo sound?  Us too!'  Unfortunately they didn't give more screen modes, they did add the blitter and the analog joystick ports.  At least if they had standardized on 1mb+ and give it a little bit more video modes / ram... and maybe even if they had bumped the cpu to 16mhz, there could have been more draw for developers.  But as it is we got a small amount of STe enhaced releases.  Not saying the improvements weren't needed.  But it didn't give much reason for current users to upgrade, and only made those that hadn't already bought a 16/32 bit computer a quick 'oh, I like Atari, and this thing looks like it is about the same as the Amiga, spec wise...'

[zzip]

22 hours ago, leech said:

They were spec chasing.  "4096 colors?  We have that now too!'  'Stereo sound?  Us too!'  Unfortunately they didn't give more screen modes, they did add the blitter and the analog joystick ports.  At least if they had standardized on 1mb+ and give it a little bit more video modes / ram... and maybe even if they had bumped the cpu to 16mhz, there could have been more draw for developers.  But as it is we got a small amount of STe enhaced releases.  Not saying the improvements weren't needed.  But it didn't give much reason for current users to upgrade, and only made those that hadn't already bought a 16/32 bit computer a quick 'oh, I like Atari, and this thing looks like it is about the same as the Amiga, spec wise...'

Yeah but it was late to the party

 

Four years after the Amiga 1000 and two years after the popular Amiga 500 they finally produce something to close the spec gap (but not completely).  

 

It was also two years after VGA..   the STe was still stuck with slightly better than EGA graphics.  PC clock speeds were increasing every year,  STe still stuck at 8mhz after four years.  

 

I loved my STe,  but it really needed to be more Falcon-like in 1989-  at least have better graphics and faster CPU.  

[oky2000]

In the UK it was only 3 years after the Amiga 1000 for PAL owners 

 

You can say the same about the non-upgrade that is the 'enhanced' chipset of the A3000, A500plus rubbish of 1990/91.

 

Ultimately it comes down to the games, if nobody was making must have games that would sell the system it wouldn't sell anyway. Not sure about the C64, the 64k base spec of RAM was a massive deal and there was a lot of computers purchased on specs around 1982 but at the same time there were some early games even in 1983 that sold the system so the software was there to push the sales.

 

STE only games are as rare as Commodore 128 only games.

 

(yes I know the 128 sold nearly 5 million units) 

 

 

[leech]

10 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

In the UK it was only 3 years after the Amiga 1000 for PAL owners 

 

You can say the same about the non-upgrade that is the 'enhanced' chipset of the A3000, A500plus rubbish of 1990/91.

 

Ultimately it comes down to the games, if nobody was making must have games that would sell the system it wouldn't sell anyway. Not sure about the C64, the 64k base spec of RAM was a massive deal and there was a lot of computers purchased on specs around 1982 but at the same time there were some early games even in 1983 that sold the system so the software was there to push the sales.

 

STE only games are as rare as Commodore 128 only games.

 

(yes I know the 128 sold nearly 5 million units) 

 

 

Ha, I think there may be about twice as many STe games than C128 games.  Though with Eye of the Beholder being released for the c64, the c128 got an enhancement of supporting two screens, which is pretty sweet.

Seems to me the only thing the A500plus and A3000 gave was 2mb of chip ram?  Which was silly as that's what they (artificially) limited AGA to as well.  That header on the A4000 to allow 8mb of chip RAM... not sure if it could have saved the Amiga, but certainly could have made it more flexible out of the box!  The biggest mystery of the Amiga was the 600... 'Let's make a cost reduced Amiga!  Wait, it ended up being MORE money to make?  Meh, ship it anyhow, we don't care!'  A600 is another 'why did they bother?' like the 520STe.  Amusingly there is an older thread over on eab forums where they are discussing whether or not the A1200 was worth it.  It was another one of those 'why an 020?' as even at the time, I recall the magazines all wondering why they didn't release an 030 system. 

Much like AGA for the Amiga though, the STe came too late.  I also think it would have done better had they at least used the TT graphics, though there is the balance between speed of the CPU vs graphics display.  But at the very least, I think all STe computers should have shipped like the Mega STe with a 16mhz w/cache option.  Could have given a bit more oomph for developers to work with.  (of note, my first ST system was a Mega STe, which I loved, but always thought the resolutions were way too limited).

[TGB1718]

19 minutes ago, leech said:

I think all STe computers should have shipped like the Mega STe with a 16mhz w/cache option

I wondered why they didn't do that too, when I bought my original 520ST, I was working with HP desktop systems

that already were available with 010,020 and 030 processors, so by the time the STE came out, the cost of those 

processors had fallen and could have been incorporated into the STE.