1986 Atari 520ST+ "The Jackintosh"

[f0ofyBunny]

OK... I've been comparing apples to oranges. The point I wanted to make, poorly, was that the Falcon was Atari's answer to what the Amiga 500 already was. They added custom chips, 32 bit capability, etc... but by that time the Amiga 1200 was out and better. Am I wrong?

[vwestlife]

@f0ofyBunny Actually, it was the opposite: the Amiga 500 was Commodore's answer to the Atari 520ST, a cheaper, more compact machine for the home market.

[f0ofyBunny]

But... dontcha still wish you had an Amiga? C'mon... you know you do. The Falcon was equal to the Amiga 500. The ST was just... never... good.

[vwestlife]

@f0ofyBunny I do have an Amiga 500, but I prefer the ST series because it can directly read and write PC formatted disks. The Atari Falcon030 was superior to any Amiga in the compact all-in-keyboard layout; it had a 68030 processor, while the Amiga 1200 was only a 68020.

[AmstradExin]

@f0ofyBunny Can your STOCK Amiga 500 play MP3's? Display 65536 colors at once? 256 colors in real 640x480 VGA? Does it have a built-in IDE Harddrive? Does it have SCSI ON BOARD? Even use a 1.44MB Floppy disk? I don't think so.

[f0ofyBunny]

@AmstradExin A stock Amiga 1200 beats the Falcon hands down. Or, have you found an 060 accelerator for the falcon that you do not own?

[AmstradExin]

@f0ofyBunny Actually yes. The CT63 is a much faster 060 accellerator than any 060 for the amiga due the SDRAM. You can overclock a 060 to 100Mhz and more if you are lucky. With no waitstates. The A1200 is nowhere near the Falcon. The DSP is clocked at 32Mhz in a stock falcon. That DSP has the power of a fast '040 CPU despite its 16 Mips. While the A1200 cannot even accept a normal 1.44 floppy drive. The A1200 Fas a big failure for commodore while the Falcon was produced after Atari went down.

[f0ofyBunny]

@AmstradExin Sure... the A1200 was a failure. Unless you are counting sales figures. How many Falcons were sold? Or made?

[AmstradExin]

@f0ofyBunny That is not quite sure. Since it's a specialized computer for the semi-proffessional market, it was quite expensive. (More than twice the price)

I've heard, the falcon was difficult to be made and only around 14.000-25.000 units have been made in it's 1.5 year lifespan under atari. About half of them have been sold in Germany where some advertising was being made. Unless you're from either there or the UK, there is only little chance you see one.

[AmstradExin]

@f0ofyBunny C-Lab (Audio-Software and Hardware maker) bought the rights and plans to continue making the falcon in 1995. I even saw one of those. But neither Atari nor C-Lab ever released any sales figures, so it's alot of speculation. Also, i'm from germany, where Atari seemed to have made a better advertising (Instead of just let it compete against a Mac.). So i may have a biased opinion since appearantly most Atari ST machines and onwards have been sold in Germany, UK and France.

[f0ofyBunny]

@AmstradExin and.. wait for it... the stock ST couldn't do any of those things, save for read and write PC disks.

[AmstradExin]

@f0ofyBunny Yeah, but you were not comparing the ST with a A500.

[KartSeven1]

@vwestlife If you want to refresh the floppy disk window, you do not need to reboot; just close and reopen the window.

[vwestlife]

@KartSeven1 I know.

[KartSeven1]

@vwestlife How do I turn off the key click sound?

[vwestlife]

@KartSeven1 I believe that's in the control panel desk accessory (CONTROL.ACC). If you don't have that file, or want something better, you can download an improved one called XCONTROL. Google "Atari ST essential software".

[KartSeven1]

@vwestlife I download software for my Atari ST from “Atari ST essential software”.

[KartSeven1]

@vwestlife I restarted my Atari ST, and it shows!

[Lachlant1984]

You may have noticed that when the video was glitching like it did, the operation of the stepper motor in the disk drive was causing the video on the screen to do some strange things, also what was that sonar 'ping ping' type sound in the background that I heard when you reset the Atari?

[vwestlife]

@Lachlant1984 Probably there is some shielding in the Atari's case that needs to be resoldered, because the operation of the CPU and disk does tend to cause noise on the video. The "ping... ping" noise was my PC's instant messenger telling me one of my friends had logged on, so that was totally unrelated to the Atari.

[JonesTarpley]

It's weird how all this computer technology one day becomes junk.

I don't know of anyone personally who owned one of these in Australia, I used to see them in department stores but the Amiga seemed to have much more widespread adoption. Maybe the popularity of the Commodore 64 paved the way?

[techguruuk]

Cool vid, it runs a motorola 68000 not 6800 though

[EPICLULZ123]

I won't lie, as soon as it said "I AM AN ATARI..." I got goosebumps...

[bobbystar101]

Yeaboy!!

Speaktex was shit hot I remember typing in "Dad is an idiot" and turning the tv up to full once...

Ahh such fun!

That video interruption looks like when my atari's 4mb ram screwed up.

[RetroNetVideos]

Very cool. I love the voice, I wish modern speech synth sounded that cool :)

[Lachlant1984]

Given that the machine can read MS-DOS formatted disks, can you for example write an ASCII Text file in Notepad for instance and read it back on the Atari? Were there any ways to Emulate MS-DOS on these Atari ST's? Can you turn off that annying key beep? Is the OS in ROM?

"From England will you welcome please, Big Audio Dynamite". "It's Out Of Sight". Download Misfits and Miscle Men from iTunes and you'll see what I'm talking about, it's a song from 1991.

[vwestlife]

@Lachlant1984 The ST can read ASCII text files, and you can turn off the key click sound. The OS is in ROM, as I mention in the video. MS-DOS emulation is not possible due to the Motorola 68000 processor, but the ST can emulate a Macintosh if you plug in a card with Macintosh ROMs on it. There is also a software program which emulates Atari's 8-bit (400/800/XL/XE) series of computers on the ST.

[MagikGimp]

@vwestlife Actually a Intel 80386 emulator (plug-on board) was made but yeah, not a lot you can do on a 386.

[karadok666]

@vwestlife sorry but there is an MSDOS emulator for the ST. I dont know if i can find it again but there is really one out there.

[karadok666]

@vwestlife ...and the 520 was not the first ST

[vwestlife]

@karadok666 It was the first production model. Atari displayed a prototype 130ST at shows, but 128K RAM was too small to do anything useful with it, so the production model became the 520ST, with 512K RAM. There was also a lower cost 260ST model in Europe.

[karadok666]

@vwestlife yes the 260 was verry rare in europe. I am searching for it but i cant find it. Eaven here in europe! Its easy to find a Falcon, a 520+ or a TT but i never saw a 260 to buy :(((((((((((((

[allardstindie]

@karadok666

I got a 260 ST , mainly difference is it uploaded TOS from disk,after that i always had too short memory for programs,so its upgraded with rainbow TOS

[Lachlant1984]

@vwestlife OK, that makes sense, I didn't even think about the 68K and running MS-DOS, of course that makes sense. BTW, I got the name of the Big Audio Dynamite song wrong, it's actually called Kool Aid.

[allardstindie]

@Lachlant1984

Yes,the Atari ST can emulate MS-Dos machines with a program called PC-Ditto

[npalivos]

B17 BOMBER!!!!

[estevens1234567]

My family got one of these when I was a kid, I used it for ten years while growing up. It was amazing how much software could be stored on one diskette.

[walter0bz]

"sued by apple for making it look too much like a macintosh"

i.e. putting the Menu Bar in the RIGHT place

[MacintoshPlus1MB]

love it. thumbs up. favorited

[TussinProductions]

Man it sounds evil...

[TNG128MB]

Scares the shit out of me lol

[horde5150]

Didn't the Atari ST series have a 68000 just like Amiga?

[vwestlife]

Yes. I mention it in the video.

[MrXnews]

Nice! Can you play other MIDI file types on the Atari?

[vwestlife]

@MrXnews I don't have any MIDI playback software for the Atari, but I'm sure I could find some. However, it would need an external device for MIDI playback; it does not have a built-in MIDI synthesizer.

[MrXnews]

Interesting...

[windoes98se]

lol, my ti84+ has a 15mhz processer but it is more useless than you  atari

[1thetweekmaster]

that voice is weird...

[Xend54]

i love your videos, can you make more about audio tho, i love audio especially sansui

[CoolDudeClem]

sounds very much like S.A.M. on the C64 (I don't mean microsoft sam). I wonder if it used the same speech engine?

[vwestlife]

Probably. It also sounds identical to the Amiga's speech synthesizer. (I have an Amiga 500. I should make a video about it sometime!)

[Lachlant1984]

@vwestlife Please do, I'd like to see some more videos on the Amiga series.

[jamesbooty]

@vwestlife While it is similar, I don't think the Atari ST's speech synthesis is identical to the Amiga's. In my opinion the Amiga sounds more smooth. I made a demo video of my Amiga 500 with a brief voice demo at about 7:05 - /watch?v=H86miOXXS48

[EvilPinkBunnyRabbits]

This is way better than any Windows OS :) Not better than Mac though :P

[THEDEFOCATOR]

Did this speech synth come stock with the ST?

[vwestlife]

I don't think it came with the operating system, but it was distributed as a freeware program.

[weallfollowmanutd]

LOOOL - That was cool! Awesome in fact! - Sounded better than Windows text to speech !

[themaritimeman]

That's really cool! GEM was certainly interesting. Today there is OpenGEM, a free varient of the original GEM for MS-DOS.

Sounds like a radar at 5:45! lol!

[TheBloodyKnife1]

cool sythesyser

[THEDEFOCATOR]

floppy disks always ruined the computer experience for me, cartridge's always worked!

[vwestlife]

Yes, that's what I love about the 8-bit Atari computer series: an immense library of games and software was released for it in cartridge form. As long as you keep the contacts clean they last forever, and the loading time is nearly instant!

[m2esectr]

The 3 1/2 inch floppy was introduced by Sony in 1981, and its first licensee was HP, whose PC's were equipped with 3 1/2 drives right from the start. Then Apple came to use it for the first Mac in 1984, and IBM started using it in 1987.

[vwestlife]

Actually the first IBM to use 3½" floppies was the PC Convertible, in 1986 -- a full year before the PS/2 series made it standard across the board. And a curious side note is that Steve Jobs initially insisted that Apple design their own 3½" floppy, but Apple engineers knew it wouldn't be ready in time for the Mac so they conducted secret negotiations to use Sony's design, only revealing it to Jobs when he realized the in-house design wouldn't fly.

[Lumotaku]

hmm the macnintosh had them in 84?

[me748]

i'm familliar with it. when i was little, my uncle had the atari 1040 st. it had the same green desktop. we had a game called north and south that i always played on it. it looked like that with a floppy drive in the side of the main unit.

[maskedmillionaire]

3 1/2" floppy? And it reads 720k PC formatting? Wow.That must have been one of the first to offer that--my Commodore 64 was 5 1/4" all the way.

[vwestlife]

I believe a few PC laptops may have used 3½" floppies in 1984, but otherwise, aside from the Macintosh, the Atari ST was one of the earliest adopters of the 3½" size. The Amiga arrived a few months after the ST was introduced, but its 3½" floppies use a special format which is not compatible with PCs (or Macs).

Near the very end of its life, Commodore did introduce a 3½" floppy drive for the C64/128 series, but not many were sold. Likewise, Apple had a 3½" drive for its Apple II series.

[ThisIs2009]

cool!

[007ghg7]

wow it sounds better than MS sam

[user12119]

We have one of these in our school computer suite.

[Noyjeetut]

Nice find.

[ess1898]

Nice. I used to know a guy that ran a BBS off of a Mega ST.

A lot of the non IBM PC machines in the mid to late 80s were way ahead of their time. It's too bad the PC kept progress back and innovative systems like this and the amiga ended up going bust.

[vwestlife]

The Amiga was even more advanced, but both it and the Atari ST never recovered from their reputation as being "just for video games", because back then people didn't understand the concept of multimedia computers that were equally suited to business and fun. Each found their niche popularity, however, with the Amiga being popular in video production and the Atari popular in music production.

[maynardcat]

Interesting video. I always used computers at work tied to to the main frame, but had not interest in them until the mid 90's for personal use. I had no knowledge of the operation of computers. I bought old computer parts at the recylcling center to put together. I got a better understanding of them and then moved on to assembling new hardware Now I don't have to rely on expensive computer svc as much. I am hanging on to my IBM office keyboard forever.

[Trance88]

Wow! Nice computer. Kinda wild seeing file dates from the mid to late 80's.

[BadEditPro]

Great Video... AT that time, my brother and I had a Tandy 1000 and it had a similar speech program on it. :) JC

[DrCassette]

That's a really interesting looking computer!