Single sided vs double sided commercial software over the ST life

[Xebec]

When the ST launched they sold both single sided and double sided (360KB/720KB) floppy options.

 

“Back in the day” when did the pivot happen that you had to have a double sided / 720KB floppy to even run software?  Was the 360KB very short lived?   Maybe when Amiga/ST ports became common as the Amiga always had a double sided drive?  (Though the Mac had single sided also initially).  

 

..

 

Growing up our first ST was a 520STm with an external single sided floppy, and then later a 1040STf with the built in double sided floppy.  I remember demos like the Union Demo would work single sided or double sided, but then a lot of later software definitely required 720K+ formatting.  

[zzip]

I thought 360K disks lasted way too long personally.   I can't remember that many things that absolutely required 720K.     

 

It's kind of a curse of Atari computer hardware that developers always support the lowest-common-denominator,  whether that be the 810 disk drive and 48K RAM on the 8-bit line,  or SS/DD disks and 520K RAM on the ST.    And that kind of held things back.  I think some games had content cut so it could fit on smaller disks and have a smaller memory footprint.

 

Thankfully the 130ST never saw the light of day! 

 

[Goochman]

360k disks were the norm for the commercial life of the ST unfort.  512k also was pretty common for games through out of its lifespan.  Only Apps and such came out with 1MB or more.

 

Really wish Atari would've defaulted to the 720k drives at the start.

[+DarkLord]

Gotta echo everyone here - so wish they'd never supported the singe sided floppies

and went all in for 720k from the start... 

 

[atarian1]

Realistically, I think single sided drives were the better choice when Atari really needed to keep the original 520ST under $1000. It's a magical marketing number that turns heads. The good thing is that one can upgrade to a double sided drive later since the drives were external.

 

The point where they should have went all double sided was when the 520STFM came out. It came with the built-in single sided disk drive. Ugh! Now upgrading was much harder for the general user because you had to open up the computer to upgrade to a double sided drive. Most people were not comfortable with that. Since most games had to be booted from drive A, it forced software publishers to continue using single sided disks which added more cost to each game. To me, this was the worst computer design decision ever made by the Tramiels in the ST line.

[Zogging Hell]

Quest for the Time Bird was the first double sided only game iirc, and that came out late '88/ early '89. I guess at that point double sided had become prevalent enough that the publishers thought they could get away with it being like that. This came as the market for the ST had reached its peak, before the long decline set in. So basically the ST was dominant when it was mainly small single sided games, and it then became a handicap when games needed more space. 4 years with single sided disks is a bit of a long time though and it is noticable that the graphics radically improve after this point, but may be that is just experience with the format coming through.

I suppose with the original format of the ST, with an external disk drive, the swap would be fairly easy for a end user - so I can perhaps see the logic, particularly with the price factor. I'd agree though the STFM all in one box should have always been double sided.