Returning to the dark side

[Harrison]

Yes, it is true. I'm getting another Atari ST! :o

Someone was offering a free Atari STFM, which is the same as the one I originally bought in 1987, and which later expired when it couldn't cope with the presence of so many Amigas surrounding it (in the early 90's) and so did the gracious and honourable thing and set fire to itself and died. :lol:

I'm looking forward to getting hold of one again. Even though the Amiga is far superior in hardware terms, the ST does still have it's unique charms, design and features. And there is still a lot of unique software only ever released for it to be explored. Games, productivity software and demos. Plus having owned and used one for a couple of years as my main home computer it does still hold some good memories.

One thing I never explored on the ST was the demo scene. It appeared later than the Amiga's and really only to try and prove the ST was as good, even trying to copy some of the famous Amiga productions. But there are some unique productions worth watching and it will be a good opportunity to explore and see what they actually managed to squeeze from the ST's minimal hardware guts, running them on the real hardware (which is always nicer than emulation).

Time to dig out my ST rom collections and see how I can convert the images back to disk. ;)

[woody.cool]

Time to dig out my ST rom collections and see how I can convert the images back to disk. ;)

There's loads of programs on the net that can do this.
The Atari ST disk format isn't too different from the PC's

[Harrison]

I knew ST floppy drives and the format isn't that different to the PCs, but do you know of a good Windows program that does this easily? Especially for demo and game disks?

I've been having a look around, and only found an old DOS one and one Windows one that looks quite old.

[woody.cool]

I use FloImg .... you'll also need the FdInstall driver as well.
(can't remember where I got these from now)

The above program works fine on all versions of Windows I've tried it on (I use in XP)
Not tried it on Vista though (as my Vista PC doesn't have a floppy drive)

Obviously this'll only work on a normal internal floppy drive, not a USB one.

[Harrison]

Thanks. I will take a look at that one.

[Puni/Void]

One thing I never explored on the ST was the demo scene. It appeared later than the Amiga's and really only to try and prove the ST was as good, even trying to copy some of the famous Amiga productions. But there are some unique productions worth watching and it will be a good opportunity to explore and see what they actually managed to squeeze from the ST's minimal hardware guts, running them on the real hardware (which is always nicer than emulation).


It's nice to see that you are going to explore the world of demos on the Atari ST. Must admit I haven't watched many ST demos myself, but I believe there are some good ones. I've seen a couple I liked on YouTube.

If you get to watch some demos, it would be interesting to hear how they compared to ones on the Amiga.

[Harrison]

I will do a write up of some when I get chance to watch some. I will have to do some looking around the demo sites and see what the most recommended ST demos are.

[Harrison]

I've now got hold of a program called Floppy Image ST, which also seems to be able to read and write some other formats to 3.5" floppy disk too, such as ZX Spectrum and Sam Coupe.

It was quite hard to track down and find the download for this program, so I have attached a copy in case anyone else needs it, or would like to take a look.

This package includes FloIMG and FdInstall (which Woody mentioned above) and also includes an HTML help file with lots of useful screenshots.

[Harrison]

I had completely forgotten about how the ST crashes.

I'd just written a demo disk image to floppy and was booting it and was greeting with a black screen and a series of little bomb sprites. The memories came flooding back. So primitive compared to the Amiga Guru screens. ;)

[woody.cool]

If I remember correctly, the number of bombs is significant, and means something!

[Harrison]

Yep. A full list of what they mean is found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_of_bombs).

I always used to find it was due to disk read errors most of the time. But sometimes you would get a great crash with loads of rows of bombs. :lol:

I think today the ones I got were due to either disks that were not written back to disk properly on the PC, or I was using .st images in the TOSEC set that are not perfect. Writing alternative .st versions of the same games or demos allowed them to work.

[coze]

I think the most impressive demo for the ST line is More or Less Zero (http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51962). Unfortunately it's STe only, so won't run on your machine. I have recently got myself a 1040 STe with ICD's the link SCSI cable and a 40 mb external SCSI HDD. I've never used an Atari in the back, I found the OS very primitive. No command line, no multitasking, very little you can do with how the OS looks (that green is just plain ugly). Primitive but it has a charm to it :) I'm tracking with musicmon atm, and playing Curse of the Azure Bonds :) The STe is nice cause you can use three channels for chip tunes and two for digi samples, you can make SID like tracks with better drums (digi).

[Puni/Void]

I will do a write up of some when I get chance to watch some. I will have to do some looking around the demo sites and see what the most recommended ST demos are.

That sounds good. Looking forward to hear from you regarding the Atari ST demos.

[Harrison]

I think the most impressive demo for the ST line is More or Less Zero (http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51962). Unfortunately it's STe only, so won't run on your machine.

That is annoying. I did want an STE at the time and think now I've starting playing around with a real ST again that I might start to look for a 1040 STE, although if I remember rightly the 520 and 1040 STE's are identical as the ram is on 4 simm sockets in the STE, so it won't matter which model I find.


I found the OS very primitive. No command line, no multitasking, very little you can do with how the OS looks (that green is just plain ugly). Primitive but it has a charm to it :)
It does? I never really found GEM and TOS to have much charm. You can change the horrible green background for something else, and I'm sure on the STE you can get utilities to replace the background with an image, as well as doing the same for folders.

Later versions of GEM also allowed different icons for folders and HDDs. But compared to Workbench it in my view wasn't really a full desktop OS. More a file manager similar to the one found in Windows 3.1.


The STe is nice cause you can use three channels for chip tunes and two for digi samples, you can make SID like tracks with better drums (digi).

Yes, the STE's upgraded hardware was a big improvement over the STFM. But in reality Atari only developed the STE to try and catch up with the Amiga. Especially the addition of a blitter custom chip, an increase in the colour palette from 512 to 4096 colours, and the addition of stereo audio.

But some other improvements were also not just to catch up with the Amiga. Finally the ability to upgrade ram up to a max of 4MB with simms, instead of having to do some third party hacking to upgrade was a great change.

Although with the popularity and number of STFMs around not many games or applications took advantage of these improvements.