Machine of the month
Atari ST
Regarded by many as the first proper 16-bit computer, the Atari ST was a powerhouse for its era and price. If you don’t associate this kind of serious product with Atari, fair enough. This is not the same company that put Pacman into American living rooms – this was a new era led by the most bullish man in the business: Commodore founder Jack Tramiel.
Tramiel spent the early 80s aggressively expanding Commodore’s market share, undercutting the competition. The results led to the Commodore 64 becoming the best selling computer of all time, but Tramiel’s brutal methods were unsustainable and burned too many bridges. Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was sick of Commodore. Tramiel left in a huff in January of 1984.
Meanwhile, Atari was reeling from America’s video game crash of 1983, bleeding a million dollars a day by 1984. Parent company Warner wanted to cut its losses, and Tramiel saw an opportunity, buying Atari’s consumer division in July 1984. He kicked the company into shape in his usual aggressive style, firing almost everyone, and bringing a team of engineers snatched from Commodore to create a new machine. With Atari,
Tramiel had an established name through which he could sell products and focus on developing a new computer.
Development
Tramiel had specific goals for his new machine: It would be 16-bit, powerful, cheap, and dramatically undercut Apple and IBM on price, while sticking it to Commodore.
Commodore 64 developer Shiraz Shivji was put in charge of the machine’s design. For a CPU, National Semiconductor’s NS32000 chipset was initially considered, but after witnessing disappointing performance, the team went with the Motorola 68000 instead.
Weirdly, pre-Tramiel Atari had already flirted with Motorola’s 68000, with some key engineers wanting to make a 68000-based machine, but management wasn’t interested. These engineers left Atari to start their own company, Amiga, and the computer Commodore would later buy and sell as its flagship model. In a strange twist of fate, Atari’s engineers ended up working for Commodore, and Commodore’s engineers moved to Atari.
For an OS, Atari rejected Microsoft’s unfinished Windows 1.0 in favor of Digital Research’s
GEM (Graphical Environment Manager). After combining it with its underlying DOS, the environment was dubbed TOS (The Operating System). This simple and highly usable environment was similar to the Macintosh and often dubbed the “Jackintosh” after Tramiel.
While the team had originally planned to use a custom sound chip, time ran out, and Atari had to settle on a bargain-bucket Yamaha YM2149 chipset. To make up for it, Atari installed factory-standard MIDI ports, something that would turn out to be a 75-cent stroke of genius.
Launch
Released in June 1985, the Atari ST packed a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 8MHz, laid claim to 512K of RAM, and had a proper mouse-driven GUI. Arriving a month sooner than the Amiga, prices were $800 for a monochrome version or $1,000 for colour, around $500 cheaper than an equivalent Amiga.
TOS was a hit with consumers. Atari’s high-res monochrome mode was popular with business users, and being able to buy an Atari ST with a printer and hard drive for less money than a single IBM printer made it popular with artists and publishers, too. Furthermore, it could use MS-DOS formatted floppies, and even emulate Mac software – faster than a real Mac.
The ST became an instant hit with musicians as well. Despite the cheap sound chip, when plugged into external MIDI, the Atari ST truly shines, with better latency than a lot of professional equipment. Programs such as Cubase started life on the ST, and its MIDI functionality is still used today by a number of high-profile musicians.
The ST had rapidly turned Atari’s fortunes around, although it was only a niche player in the US, where IBM compatibles were dominant. The ST was far more popular in Europe (especially France), where it accounted for 75 percent of total sales – IBM machines were seen as too expensive, and TV-based micros were still popular. If you want a real
Atari ST, buy an Australian or European model, because the PAL library utterly dwarfs the number of NTSC titles.
The gaming market was strong during its first years. Classics include 1987’s first-person RPG
Dungeon Master; Peter Molyneux’s pioneering god game, Populous (1990); and 1993’s tactical shooter, Cannon Fodder. However, support began to wane when Commodore introduced the cost-reduced Amiga 500, which had better graphics and sound than the ST, ultimately swallowing its gaming market.
Over the years, it released better machines to rival the Amiga, but neither company could compete with the PC market, which was growing cheaper by the day. Atari produced some 32-bit machines in the early ’90s, but stopped making computers in 1993 in favor of a shift to consoles, and the ill-fated Atari Jaguar.
How do I emulate it?
The first thing you should know about is EmuTOS (https:// emutos.sourceforge.io/en). Most ST emulators require a system ROM (TOS) to function. EmuTOS is a free, open-source reimplementation of TOS that can run on original hardware (even some Amigas), or be used by emulators as a replacement system. It will suffice for most uses, but programs requiring obscure functionality may need an original system ROM.
The two most popular emulators are Hatari and Steem SSE. Hatari is probably the best choice, and it offers versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux (note that on the PC you may need to run it as administrator). Once loaded, you should hit F12 to configure a few settings, including where the two floppy drives point to, which will be any disk images you download.
The Linux version in system repositories will probably start with an error about the TOS file – licensing restrictions mean that a system ROM is unlikely to be included. You therefore need to specify a TOS file in the application’s ROM menu, whether it be EmuTOS or a proprietary ROM image. Windows builds from the website come pre-loaded with EmuTOS, although you can use a proprietary ROM if you prefer (https://hatari.tuxfamily.org).
Steem (now Steem SSE) used to support Windows and Linux (https://sourceforge.net/ projects/steemsse); newer versions only support Windows, but it runs well under Wine. Steem SSE requires a ROM image. We prefer Hatari to Steem, but if something doesn’t work under one emulator, it’s worth trying the other.
For lazy gamers RetroArch has a core based on Hatari, under “Load Core > Download a Core.”