Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre

I chose an ST because the Amiga was too expensive, the Mac didn't have colour and was very very expensive, and the PC was a wretched business-use-only text-only waste of desk space.

I had a 1040 STe. I rigged up a hard drive (the Atari ST had what was effectively a SCSI bus built in, it just needed a small adaptor board to adjust some signals). Installed MiNT (a multitasking operating system extension) and the GNU tools and was in developer heaven.

The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). It was also a leading light in the music industry: I had a copy of Cubase v1.0 (a DAW), which was available only on the ST with its built-in MIDI out and MIDI through ports.

Unfortunately the company was run by the Tramiel family so it didn't really stand a chance. Then a couple of hears ago a derecho destroyed the drive shed where I kept all my old computers and I lost my ST. No more Time Bandits.

The Commodore Amiga was better at everything but the Atari ST had a MIDI port. I saw Atari ST used in music studio well into the 2000s and not for nostalgic purposes: they were silent. Back then ultra loud PCs (PCs were ultra loud back then) were an issue in music studios, so some kept using Atari ST way past they're prime.

I remember in the late 80s a neighbor's friend would bring his Korg synth and hook it up to my neighbor's Atari ST. That was quite something.

Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. One of the very best video games of that era. FWIW that little FTL studio then went on to make another incredible hit: Dungeon Master (best selling Atari ST game ever and an incredibly prescient video game).

For whatever reason Dungeon Master got ported to the Amiga but Sundog: Frozen Legacy never did.

John Anderson wrote several articles a month for Creative Computing, particularly covering the Atari beat. He was a definite hero of mine as a kid. Sadly he was killed in this earthquake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake

at the age of 33.

The Atari ST (for me, a 520 ST+) filled the gap between entertainment-centric home computers (Commodore C64) and PCs that could run Linux (some no-name with Intel i486DX-33), you could program it in so many languages (ST Basic, GFA Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, Forth etc.).

With a dream black/white monitor, this was a wonderful machine to improve one's programming skills on with structured programming and to do systems programming (TOS/GEM) on - it was the monitor and the available range of compilers that made me want an ST ASAP.

(At the same time, the Amiga had more powerful graphics hardware, but was very slow if you did not have a harddrive and "Kickstart ROMs", as it originally required two floppy disks to start up, not just one. The Amiga had a sophisticated OS but I always felt it was too demanding for the hardware it was running on.)

The ST for it's time was a good computer. It didn't gain the popularity that the Amiga and Mac did but it was a decent machine. Also the history of GEM could have its own article.

Funny, I plugged my ST back in today and then there's an ST article linked here.

I never had one back in the day (in fact I wasn't even alive yet), but became aware of it when my interest in the demo scene and chip music started in my teens. The ST's sound chip, the YM2149 - an antiquated PSG based design, was of course made fun of back in the day by Amiga and even C64 owners. But ironically something about the sound it makes spoke to me and I had to get one. The history of the ST demoscene is quite interesting to explore chronologically, seeing the hardware get pushed past it's boundaries time and time again as the years went on, and the rivalry with the Amiga scene is fun.

Recently I've been doing some retro coding on it for fun, setting up okami shell, MicroEMACS, and a sort of make wrapper [1] for the Pure C compiler, using some available C libraries to make a little curses-like SNDH player for myself. Of course using a cross-compiler on a PC would be simpler but where's the fun in that?

[1] https://github.com/th-otto/pcmake

I remember wanting Atari 520ST for a moment. So shiny in the store.

Then I heard about Amiga 1000, but it was too expensive. But those colors and sound!

Eventually I had an Amiga 500. But it could have gone differently.

My first encounter with an Atari ST was when I visited a recording studio as a kid. They were in the middle of a recording session, and I asked if I can play with the Atari while they were doing that. "No, you see, we are running the whole recording session with this Atari..."

I used a 520 and a 1040 for a short while. Running the Mac emulator on it was amazing at the time.

I bought a 1040ST not long after they came out in 1986. I got the system unit, the color monitor, a mouse, GEM/TOS disks, and that was it for about $1500. Software titles were scarce but I was eventually able to pick up the Megamax C compiler. To be effective with it you needed to have a second floppy drive or the pricey SH204 20 Megabyte (yes, megs!) external hard drive.

Megamax C was a K&R style single-pass compiler that had libraries to access the special features of the Atari like the MIDI port.

I think I missed some of this in my youth, going from the Commodore 64 straight to a PC XT clone. Monochrome Hercules graphics, but I still coded my first games in it (using GW Basic).

I still wonder about this early era of computers that came after the C64.

What's the word for nostalgia about something you didn't actually get to experience back then?

I got a 1040STFM and SH204 through their developer offer, had been writing GEM applications on a PC so it was an obvious choice over an Amiga.

Got a Mega 4 soon after they were launched, followed by a 1040STe at home that I upgraded to 4MB RAM.

Still have the SH204 but with a 40MB drive in it.

also. one cannot have a thread about the atari st without mentioning midimaze!

the original multiplayer first person shooter that would run over an ad-hoc midi ring network.

my first ever network program was a multiplayer math problem race game, written in gfa basic in the '80s. :)

many 520STs had TV out built in so you could get started by hooking it up to a TV if you had to.

very cool machine, with affordability that made it available for many. so much cool european software.