Returning to the dark side

[coze]

I think the most impressive demo for the ST line is More or Less Zero. 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).

[Harrison]

I think the most impressive demo for the ST line is More or Less Zero. 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.