(wank) Atari ST.. getting there :)


skeezix

Internal Development
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Mar 11, 2003
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OKay, so I can't show anythign yet, but I'm rpetty excited!

Couple of days of hard hacking here; loooong days. Must run to work though, damnit ;)

I've got ST emu running in GeePee32 (the GP emulator), with no display; it looks like shes running.. the blitting routines are being invoked, RAM is being accessed, disks are being checked, etc. I just need to add some rendering and decoding code to see whats going on in the ST screen :)

I hope its running.. this has been a bitch, and no idea if I'll be able to get it working.. if the screen is actually updating, very good odds. If the screen is still a nogo, I'll be at a loss.. almost gave up 5h ago, but kept bangign away. This close to knowing.. but alreayd an hour late for work :)

More details in a day .. damn easter ;)

Lets hope. Man. ST, STE, 2MB machine, TOS 1.02... I just wanna see Dungeon Master :)

jeff
 
This is very good news!! :) :) :)
I can't wait to play Llamatron and Chaos Strikes Back on GP32.

Fingers crossed...
 
I think the ST Dragon's Lair was nasty.. 4 floppies or so, and just not great :)

My favourites.. Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back, Time Bandits, Carrier Command, Oids, Super Sprint, PowerMonger.. you know, you can go on for hours. So many classics.

Not to mention all the goofy GFA Basic, Cad 3d, etc, stuff :)

Wouldnt' that pop someone sbrain.. showing them CAD3d rendering on a GP32 :)

How fast? IT shoudlnt' be too fast.. the processor (68000) is pretty beefy, and theres also the IKBD, Blitter, and lots of other things going on.. so I donb't imagine it'll be fast. But hey, beggers can't be chosers :)

jeff
 
I don't need to bother with medium res or high res support, right? We're mostly concerned with games here, right?

(ie: I know it would be mindbogglignly weird to see Calamus ST running under Mint with Neo Desktop multitasking.. but we really dont' need to go there do we? :) (Besides, you'd have to scroll the screne around to see it, since they wouldnt' fit onto the GP32 screen)

As an aside, I was able to run my BBS on the GP; I have my own little mini-ST emulator that is very limited.. really just a TOS emulator. I was able to run my BBS, and do serial across USB with some ugly hacks. (Not well mind you, but just a prtoof of concept).

I'll never let that out.. its entirely useless and needs some hardware hacks to see it. But if there was ever a reaosn for a portable BBS, it can be done :p

jeff
 
I am completely unfamiliar with the Atari ST. I don't even know anyone who had an Atari computer. I went the TRS-80 > Apple II > Commodore 64 > PCjr > Amiga > PC route. What other computers would you say the Atari ST is comparable to?

Flack
 
Flack posted on Apr 17 2003 said:
I am completely unfamiliar with the Atari ST. I don't even know anyone who had an Atari computer. I went the TRS-80 > Apple II > Commodore 64 > PCjr > Amiga > PC route. What other computers would you say the Atari ST is comparable to?

Flack
The ST and the Amiga were rivals; at the time, the PC had the main business market, but wasn't much of a machine; both the ST and Amiga smoked the PC until a few years went by. The Amiga had superior graphics and a fancier OS (those funky HAM modes were awesome, nice built in multitasking), but the ST had built in Midi so had the musician market, and being Atari had a lot of great games. So the PC was for business, the ST was huge for games, music, and desktop publishing/graphics stuff, while the Amiga was pretty good for games, and sweet for 3d and 2d effects graphics, killer machine based music, etc. Essentially the ST andf Amiga did all the same things, but the ST guys were always grumpy since the Amiga had better graphcis, and the Amiga guys were always annoyed the ST had so many games :p I can't rate the Mac.. the Macs at the time had the same sort of GUI as the ST, but were 10 time smore expensive, so had their usual 5% market share. The ST and PC were all the bbses (aside from Atari 8bit and Commodore 64 bbses anyway :).

It was a funny time.. the ST crowd hated the Amiga crowd, and very much vice versa; one of the biggest rivalries of all time I'd say.

jeff
 
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An ST Emu playing Dungeon Master would be the dogs danglies!

Keep up the good work mate!


:D
 
Well I can relate there, I remember how much the C64 users hated Apple and PC owners, and vice-versa. I hope the emulator you are working on works out, it will be fun to go back and do some "exploring."

Flack
 
skeezix posted on Apr 17 2003 said:
Lets hope. Man. ST, STE, 2MB machine, TOS 1.02... I just wanna see Dungeon Master :)

jeff
na.... just Oids :)...........
 
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As an Amiga owner at the time I was never annoyed that the ST had so many games, the Amiga had plenty of games that never featured on the ST. Especially once the ST had died.

You'd think I could have gotten over this rivalry by now... :)

ST emulator will rock though, I'll have one SMC just for it!
 
You certainly are the main man at the moment Jeff

I really appreciate your Very hard work for the scene

Thankkkkkkkkkkkkks

MrT
 
I'd love to see an Atari ST boot-up on a GP32, it would be just another killer reason to buy one ^_^

Hardware, for those not aware:

Processing power:

the ST and Amiga both ran on the Motorola 68000 chip, the ST at 8MHz, and the Amiga at the slightly slower 7.142MHz, so the ST was slightly smoother when rendering polygon games.

Graphics:

ST had a palette of 512 colours and could display 16 at once, the Amiga had 4096 and could render 32 at once, or 64 with a bit of careful tweaking (the extra 32 displayed colours were half-bright copies of the first 32 on the display), as well as the famous HAM (4096 on-screen at once, but slow and some colours could bleed). So, generally, ST games had less subtle-looking games. It also lacked the Amiga's hardware sprites and scrolling, but programmers mostly wrote their own routines, anyway, so that hardly matters, even though scrolling was easier to do with the Amiga's display. Oh, and the ST graphics modes above 320x200 were very limited, with 640x400 being purely in black and white, whereas the Amiga could display that res with 16 colours, as an example.

Sound:

ST was quite underpowered. I remember the ST press getting quite excited about games which had digitised samples in soundtracks or as effects, while they were pretty standard with Amiga games. It may have had a MIDI interface as standard, but it's own aural abilities were quite limited.

Games:

To start with, both machines were fairly evenly supported, with some games coming out on one and not nexessarily the other, especially as the ST out-sold the Amiga at the very start. Within 2 or 3 years of release, though, they were neck-and-neck, and then pretty soon the Amiga was consistently outselling it's rival. As someone who would've ended up as an ST owner had the company he'd ordered one from not gone bust, and found another company selling Amiga 500s at a similar price just in time for Xmas that year, I was never aware of any game-envy ^_~ I can only think of a handfull of games that weren't released onthe Amiga but were for the ST, Oids being one of them, but seeing as it was a Thrust-type game, which I'd played to death on on C64, it wasn't in too much of a hurry (although I did want to see it ported across).

I shan't bother to pass comment on the ST's TOS (is this where the 'wank' in the subject comes from...?) in comparison to the Amiga's Workbench, as I just think a comparison would be too cruel ^_~

Oh, a thought about displays at a higher res than 320x240; what about some sort of interlace mode? Unless I'm remembering this wrong, didn't a few games (mostly adventures, I think) used the ST's MedRes mode? Would be nice to have...

As it's BLOODY unlikely we'll ever see an Amiga emulator for the GP32, I'm awaiting the arrival of an ST emulator (STE would be even better, any notable games use the extra colours etc.?) with baited breath, I really am. The Amiga may have had cosmetic improvements on the games, but it's the gameplay which has us all here today talking fondly of it and wanting to play the games again on modern hardware capable of much more, right? ^_^
 
If the ST can be emulated, maybe the Amiga can be. I think the Amiga has more custom chips, though.
 
The Amiga had a huuuuge ammount of custom hardware, leastways according to the discussion on emulating it on the GP32dev Yahoo group a while back. Which kinda makes it hard to do - I'm told its only been fully emulated on normal PCs very recently. So its less likely, I think, that it'll be done for GP32. Hence the ST being used :)
 
Ahhhhh the old ST / Amiga rivalry :) Second only to the Spectrum C64 rivalry!

I started with an ST back in the early 90's and Amiga was the "enemy". Oh the joys of playing leagues of Kick Off 2 till 3 in the morning!!!!

The ST might have been underpowered compared to the Amiga but it only needed 1/2meg to run Microprose GP and Secret Of Monkey Island when the Amiga needed 1meg!!

When it game to the 32bit age I went too the other side and changed to the Amiga 1200 which was a pretty magnicent machine....

Adios,
Matt
 
The A1200 was 16bit, not 32bit. It just had a better graphics chip than the other amigas.

edit: actually thats not right, all amigas had a 32bit cpu, other parts of it were 16bit. Its all rather complicated really. The A1200 still wasn't any more 32bit than the others though.
 
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