MiSTer FPGA Forum

throAU wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:42 am

I said revolutionary for the CONSUMER MARKET. Which they were, for the price. They were not Sun or Mac price. And the QL was crippled massively with the 8 bit bus on the 68008.

It seems you didn't read the discussion here. My remark was in reference to the Amiga, not the ST, not the Mac (which by the way was in the same price league as the Amiga and not in the league of the Sun: Mac 1984 $2495 with built in monitor, Amiga 1985 $1595 with monitor, Sun-1 1982 $8900 including monitor).
When Commodore released the Amiga they were the last of the big 3 in the US to release a 68000 machine and because of this I said the 68000 was mainstream at this point.
I don't really see your point in lumping Apple, Atari and Commodore together saying they were revolutionary for the consumer market, when my point was that when Commodore launched the Amiga, the competition was already there.

The 68008 ran at about 50-70 percent of the speed of an 68000, this means the CPU still outperformed all other homecomputers in its price range, when it was released in January 1984. For sure the QL flopped horribly, but when it comes to CPU speed it was much better then the other Mirco Computers at the time of release.

throAU wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:42 am

And the QL was crippled massively with the 8 bit bus on the 68008.

I don't think the Microdrive helped it much either....

bbond007 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:47 am

throAU wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:42 am

And the QL was crippled massively with the 8 bit bus on the 68008.

I don't think the Microdrive helped it much either....

Hard to imagine that Sinclair achieved a system with a user experience worse then audio cassettes but they did it.

Counting the Atari as earlier than the Amiga is true in a literal sense, but you have to realize that Tramiel was involved in early Amiga development, lent the team a lot of money, and thought they would fail and he would end up owning the tech. Then Commodore came in, bailed out the debt, and took over the hardware.

At that point, Tramiel put the ST out on an absolute crash development cycle... it was kinda the minimum viable computer that had a 68000 and color graphics. The graphics were crap and it had terrible sound, but they could get it to market before the Amiga, and that's all they cared about.

So pointing at them as the innovator is not correct; the ST shipped with a 68000 because of the Amiga's 68000. They cut every possible corner to jam it out to market, and it was a pale, pale imitation of the actual thing.

Of course, its simplicity had some real value. STs made awesome MIDI controllers, and still work just fine in that capacity. The last real use for the Amiga died when SD video did.

Malor wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:10 am

Counting the Atari as earlier than the Amiga is true in a literal sense, but you have to realize that Tramiel was involved in early Amiga development, lent the team a lot of money, and thought they would fail and he would end up owning the tech. Then Commodore came in, bailed out the debt, and took over the hardware.

At that point, Tramiel put the ST out on an absolute crash development cycle... it was kinda the minimum viable computer that had a 68000 and color graphics. The graphics were crap and it had terrible sound, but they could get it to market before the Amiga, and that's all they cared about.

So pointing at them as the innovator is not correct; the ST shipped with a 68000 because of the Amiga's 68000. They cut every possible corner to jam it out to market, and it was a pale, pale imitation of the actual thing.

Of course, its simplicity had some real value. STs made awesome MIDI controllers, and still work just fine in that capacity. The last real use for the Amiga died when SD video did.

That's not how it was. Tramiel bought Atari in July 1984. The first thing he did when he visited the offices in July was recruiting a team for the development of the new computer. Development of the Atari ST began right away (August 1984). At this point Tramiel didn't even knew about the deal with Hi-Toro.

A very good insight of this phase was written by a former Atari developer who was in the ST team since day one. It can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200924181 ... st-part-1/

It is a quite interesting read. The rapid pace of the ST development was possible because Tramiel brought some engineers from Commodore over when leaving the company in January 1984 and they did some groundwork even before the takeover of Atari. So there is no connection between the ST and the Amiga during its development.

Technically the grapics of the ST weren't "crap" at all. The machine had high resoultion b/w graphics on a flicker free monitor that was bigger then its competitor the Mac and it offered additionally full colour graphics with a higher color palette then any other machine on the market. The Amiga wasn't the competitor for Atari, it was the Mac and here the ST blew Apple out of the water hardware wise. The machine had more RAM, a bigger screen, better sound and costed less then half of what you had to pay for a Mac. The sound chip was chosen because Atari's own development Amy was simply not ready.

The Amiga was orignially intended as a console and offered superb graphic and sound capabilities but this was not was Tramiel was aiming for with the ST. He planned a machine that could be sold as an expensive home computer and a cheap office machine.
The Amiga was at no point of the development of the ST the reference simply because the Hi-Toro deal was one amongst dozens of "small" deals Atari made during this time. The sum we talk about here was $500,000. Tramiel learned much later about the deal and at this point he steered Atari in a direction that wasn't compatible with what the Amiga was any more.
Atari didn't choose the 68000 not because of the Amiga, they even considered the National 32000 but in the end chose the 68000 because of it's price and overall specs. This shows again that using the 68000 was a no-brainer at this point. The chip was cheap, available and already in use.

Chris23235 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 9:18 am

It is a quite interesting read. The rapid pace of the ST development was possible because Tramiel brought some engineers from Commodore over when leaving the company in January 1984 and they did some groundwork even before the takeover of Atari. So there is no connection between the ST and the Amiga during its development.

Technically the grapics of the ST weren't "crap" at all. The machine had high resoultion b/w graphics on a flicker free monitor that was bigger then its competitor the Mac and it offered additionally full colour graphics with a higher color palette then any other machine on the market. The Amiga wasn't the competitor for Atari, it was the Mac and here the ST blew Apple out of the water hardware wise. The machine had more RAM, a bigger screen, better sound and costed less then half of what you had to pay for a Mac. The sound chip was chosen because Atari's own development Amy was simply not ready.

The ST was a great computer, I never had one but enjoy tinkering with the MiSTer core., it was miles better than any other home computer at the time of launch. Tramiel's team defined a realistic, good-enough product and bought it to market where it sold well and turned around a basically dead company. I did have an Amiga and it's interesting to note it didn't get market traction until C= repackaged it to compete with the ST.

The ST was a great computer,

It was. I had the first 1Mb Atari 1040ST to hit the UK sometime in 1986, and I loved it more than any of my later Amiga machines. I still have it here, in it's original box, second disk drive, 4Mb upgrade, AtariI SC1435 RGB Monitor, also have a modern UltraSatan, and a SD4ST.