Me and a friend actually programmed the demo you showed. I also did a 7 session workshop on demo programming. Message me for the link. Greetings from Luxembourg.
+Gunstick The Dark side of the Spoon is one of the greatest megademo to ever hit the Atari ST, the fullscreen distorter is the best screen of the demo, thanks for creating it !
About time the demoscene got some recognition. Kudos to the prof (and indeed his parents' purchasing choice back then) for showing what the lovely ST was all about.
Brings all the memories back, the ST shows in london, The Cracking crews like Automation and Pompey Pirates... the wars betrween them (Birdy anyone?) playing 16 player games via the midi port (MidiMaze) Playing the Demo disks... good times
I remember soldering a blitter chip to my STFM (there was a place for it on the mainboard, and the TOS had a support for it), adding HW overscan mod (made from couple of TTL chips), and making memory expansion logic that allowed some odd memory configuration (like 2,75 MB total) before I had enough cash to solder together a clean 4 MB expansion from PC SIM modules. I even made an address decoder for IDE interface, but never had a chance to test it. Golden years...
The effect was called "Hard scrolling". Man... I still have the floppies with these demos on it... We were all competing on effects... Shade bobs, pixel scroll-text, mega scroll-text, waving logos, parallax scrolling, 3D cubes, space field, plasmas, +2k sprites (with auto generated/modified code), DMA routines ("i got the fatest!!!" was heard every month).... good times.
Peter Sunde (co-creator of The Pirate Bay) talked about this exact thing a few weeks ago in a Swedish interview, actually. How he was involved in the demo-scene on bulletin boards and locally in Sweden, pushing these Ataris to display the entire screen and so on.
+Falcrist I mean, technically it could be two different types of display. Display as in show off, and display as in computer monitor. So, we could rephrase as "liquid crystal showing off computer monitor", but that's hardly easy or quick to say.
"so basically they hacked it?" "well no they didn't hack it they just pushed it to do something other than it was designed to do." isn't that pretty much the definition of hacking? lol
Speaking of great monitors, even though I won't dispute that the SM-125 monitor had crisp image quality. The Commodore 1702 (Monitor that came with my C64) was probably the crispest color TV that I ever used. When I was a kid I would plug various consoles from a NES all the way up to a PS1 into it and the image quality was unmatched. You could even retrofit an S-Video jack onto it by wiring up the Chroma and Luma video inputs to an S-Video jack, or splicing the wires from an S-Video cable into seperate Chroma and Luma cables.
Finally got me an STE a couple of months ago and I'm loving every second I spend with it. Believe or not, this video helped spark the interest 8 good years ago. : )
The Atari 800 was my first computer. It had an onboard user programmable video coprocessor long before other computers had any kind of modern day video subsytems. I also remember the old BBS systems. It has changed so much since them!
On the VIC 20 we would put the machine into the hires mode with limited colors, set a timer to wake us up just before we'd get to the end of a particular scan line, watch the beam x counter until we hit the end of the line and then switch the color palette. That let us have more colors than we were supposed to have. Had to do it in assembler, and that's exactly why I learned my first assembler.
What a great video. I used to be such a fan of the Atari range and owned several from the ST to Falcon. I still have one of the Atari clones, the Hades up in my loft. Hmmm, I really should dust it off and fire it up. Some more of these nostalgic videos please. Spectrum? Amiga? :)
Commodore 64 was and still is the ultimate demo scene machine. Of course it should evolve around it, sprinkle with Amiga, Atari, Spectrum. All hail the King C64!
I remember the days of these machines ,and I wanted to get into programming at the time ,but it was a suckfull of a time to be a young beginner ,because All the editors and compilers where worth big money. Which put programming out of my affordability .Something nobody seems to acknowledge or know about these days. Fortunately now days many compilers and editors are free off the net.To late for me but I have been programming for a while since they became available .
You can zoom out all the border on the Atari color and mono monitors with the dials at the back. The borders are there to keep the speed up, it's all to do with pixel clock and 16khz line refresh. It's the same reason why most home computers had a border, the Amiga and Atari 8 bit computers and also the Atari games consoles had no borders and people had no problem using them on very old TVs.
Dunno, I think the the STPad had been released it'd of been similar to the tablets that were around at the same point in history, mainly used in certain neich industrial, engineering and medical situations. I don't think the revolution would of happened until the iPad appeared (or someone else made a consumer version of a tablet) as the things were generally even more expensive than a laptop and often had the specs of the much cheaper base model unit to boot.
Hope we'll get to see more of the demoscene on Computerphile! It's such an important culture that has come out of modern technology and it needs its time in the light!
A lot of people thought that full-screen 3D graphics weren't possible on the Atari 2600. Doug Neubauer proved them wrong, writing "Solaris" not long before leaving Atari.
The main things that limited the Atari with regards to 3D graphics were its pitiful amount of addressable memory and lack of a horizontal interrupt/DMA. Other than that the processor was plenty fast to do the job and the video chip would enthusiastically render wireframe 3D graphics all day!
Well, it's not, that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's only 640x400. The thing is, as it's monochrome it has a flat, uniform phosphor coating rather than being broken up into pixels, and the high scan rate combined with medium persistence phosphor means it essentially looks like an e-ink display. Merely one with 640 pixels along each of 400 lines.
I was in the Amiga camp but regardless of which machine you bought, it's mutually understood that the demoscene was pretty damn cool. That it's still going with people writing new code and making these machines even pull off new tricks they haven't before is amazing to see in action.
In Atari 8-bit it was actually very easy to draw on the screen borders. The playfield (part of the screen with data) could be set to either narrow, normal or wide and in the wide mode it extended beyond the visible screen. You could also shrink top and bottom margins to almost none with properly designed Display List. You could make clone of this demo in Atari BASIC. Not sure if any other computer from the '80s could do it so easily. Atari 8-bit video chips (ANTIC and GTIA) were quite unique in their way of generating video output.
for anyone interested in reading more on the techniques to 'extend' the graphics of the Atari ST, C64 and Amiga, it was commonly called 'Raster Interrupt' and there's a wikipedia page on it under that name that serves as a good starting point.
Jack Tramiel, destroyer of important computer companies MOS, Commodore, Amiga (an independent company before Commodore purchased it) and Atari. I can forgive him for destroying Commodore, since it was his to destroy, I suppose. I really wish Amiga and Atari had landed in the hands of an organization more capable of developing a sustaining business rather than someone who ran his companies as personal fiefs and who consistently burned his bridges with his distributors.
Jack tramiel at some point ruled over the whole computer market. But, he screwed it big time and left IBM PC (aka slow and expensive Lotus 123 machine) to dominate the market.
eng3d There were lots of important players in that era. The mistake of many histories on the subject of computers is to pretend the only story that matters starts and ends with IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and Intel. It would equally be a mistake to pretend that Jack Tramiel is the only part missing from that story. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were a dozen other possible candidates for major players, including some we've barely heard of in the US who were crucial in the UK, Japanese, or various European markets.
Tramiel wanted a cheap 68K machine that could be used to submarine the Amiga and ruin its chances in the market. There's nothing special about the Atari ST. It's basically a dumb frame buffer hooked up to a processor -- the minimum necessary to run.
@dothemathright 1111 No offense intended, but that's a revisionist take, I think. After all, it wasn't even IBM that was most responsible for winning the war for IBM compatible machines in the home, but rather companies like Compaq and Tandy. Even Apple hung in long enough to become a design-centric company very nearly despite itself rather than because of its 8-bit successes, which were marred by design issues and marketing mishaps. I could easily envision a world where Compaq decided to make, say, a Mac-compatible in 1984 rather than an IBM compatible in 1982. It would of course require a different legal decision to go their way, but these things happen. Or, just as likely, a competent machine standard by a third party or consortium. After all, it wasn't IBM's sales staff that got PCs into homes, and the previous winner of the home computer war, the C64, proved that your sales staff could pretty much be incompetent as long as your machine had the right software.
Interesting to note that the Mega ST had a blitter as standard, allowing faster rendering of the OS graphical bitmap operations. It's also interesting to note a company also sold a "software blitter" which when using OS legal design software gave pretty much the same effect for original 1985 520ST owners using GEM applications. Atari could have improved this aspect of the OS design when transitioning from loading OS from disk to placing it on ROM
At Gunnersbury School in the late 80s, the CDT department had one of these in one of their office. One of the teachers would let 3 or 4 of us in at lunch while he was out, to play the golf game on it :)
We used similar principles to step the timing in the ZX-Spectrum to switch the colour attributes between ULA refreshes to get pixel-level colours. It dragged the CPU's available time way down, but got some interesting pictures for the time . . .
The ST Blitter was in development before the ST was released, and it is said the enhanced Shifter from the STE was too. One can imaging then if the STE spec had been released from day one with the ST. It would have been goodbye Amiga.
My most enduring memory of the Atari 520ST is soldering piggy-backed DRAMs onto the existing 512K to upgrade it to a full megabyte. There was also a .BIN image that you could use with an EPROM burner to make the machine believe it was a 1040ST. Without the extra RAM I found the 512K version a little claustrophobic.
I have recently started coding for the Atari 2600. It is very similar to this in all the cycle-counting and timing perfection. It is quite a rewarding beast once you master it.
I'm an Atari guy, had Atari 800XL, best computer I had ever programmed. But soon had to move to 8086/88 because there wasn't any software available, I think Atari should have switched to PC base and kept it's high-end support for Graphics which was better than PC and sound, which was way better till Sound Blaster came along. I really wish Atari had made these changes.
Lesson we learn from it is simple, give what your customer want, don't try to feed them your ideas. Everyone want few things: 1. Faster 2. Simpler 3. Cheaper Don't try to make things slower, harder to use or more expensive.
Dark Side of the Spoon demo - I launched it on this past Christmas Eve to show my niece the power of Atari ST, unfortunately the LCD TV had a major lag with the RF input and some deinterlacing artifacts were visible at point blank range
A dedicated video? Heck, the Demoscene has come up with so much clever stuff that it deserves a whole series. Parallax, fills, zooms, ripples and fades on hardware never designed for the tasks, novel ways of storing images allowing million-fold zooms of fractals without having to do the calculations in real-time, flat-shaded 3D polygons with real-time lighting on 1993-era hardware, real-time raytracing on the CPU as far back as 1995, the list goes on and on and on...
You guys need to hop over to pouet.net and have an explore ... a lot of the catalogued demos have youtube or other video hosting links, as well as downloads for the actual code to run in an emulator or on an original machine ;)
There's a Demoscene production called "Copper" by Surprise! Productions dating from 1992 which does this sort of stuff with VGA hardware on MS-DOS machines. Even DOSBox's best VGA emulation system (which handles a lot of Demoscene effects quite accurately) still doesn't quite manage to correctly reproduce all its effects.
Wow, a coveted Falcon! I actually was gifted a "heavily modified" Falcon myself. It has upgraded memory, an accellerator, etc. Unfortunately, this mod wouldn't fit inside of that beautiful case, so the previous owner tossed it into an ugly pc tower, with no back on it (the Falcon's PCB sticks out of the back of the case). I'm sure it's "faster", etc. but I would trade this frankenstiened computer for a stock 030 Falcon in a heartbeat, if I could! Congrats on your awesome collection.
Waiting for Amiga episodes, i was in that "camp" allthou i used Atari 1040ST(E) for Notator before i got a nice hardware package for Amiga (midi, digitizer, action replay IV and some other knick knacks i can't remember now..). I used the Action Replay to rip algorithm produced waveforms as it was just easier to produce lots of data and browse thru RAM for the samples than to render to file, made very cool industrial metal background noises.. Atari was "just" the brains for midi, never used it for anything else but i did switch to Alesis MMT-8 as that machine just kicked ass with Amiga as a sampler and sysex dump.
Excellent Video, I wonder if the Atari Falcon 060 is the most powerful Atari Computer ever made. I am very curious, because I changed to IBM and my last ATARI was the 130 XE. Now I regret for abandon ATARI, I should keep both lines.
Those slanted F Keys look very familiar. I remember those well, although i can't remember where I have played with those before...when i was probably 7 yrs old.
I don't know what you mean, but I'm gonna stick with my RPG grenades in my RPG games and FPS shooters. Also, i'll read my DC comics in PDF format on my tablet with LCD display while using an ATM machine.
ST Pad? Well before that in the Atari 8-bit days, Atari did make a tablet device and a drawing software for it. Also a lot of 3rd parties made similar products like the Koala pad.
I had an Atari ST at home. A black, white, gray only one though.Played lots of Oxyd, Pong and Flight Simulator on it... threw it away. It still worked perfectly fine.:(
Falcon's are so rare and expensive to obtain, and sadly, there's very little software available that can actually take advantage of it. I would like to own one, but the $3,000 US Plus price tag is getting too expensive for my budget. Nevertheless, I own several models of ST and simply adore their existence. I still remember first booting up Dungeon Master and literally dropping my jaw in complete awe. At this time, being the late 80s, there was simply nothing in the market comparable to this. So many games followed that were simply improved copies of this FPS - like dungeon adventure. Anyway, a fantastic video thank you.
Could the tablet revolution have happened decades earlier? No, the technology just wasn't there. Everybody attempted it back then, even Apple, but nobody could make it work very well.
Arguably, the hardware technology was there, but the comprehension of exactly how to make it work was not. Being able to sense where a big fat finger has made contact with a display has been possible for an awful long time. And that's all that was really needed to get the very basics going (multi-touch, without doubt, vastly expands the possibilities - pinches, zooms, etc. - but it's not necessary for the most primitive of operations, like selecting options from a menu or swiping and the like). But user interface design, software, display technology and the like needed to reach enough of a maturity for comprehending how to do the touch properly, intuitively and well. But the touch itself, in hardware terms, has been technologically possible for decades beforehand.
KlaxonCow I beg to differ. Go check out a laptop fom the end of 90', for reference. The hdd is not shock proof, and there was no sd/ssd. The memory chips was bigger and lot less efficient, same with cpu, what mean more power, and heath. The lcd panels was horribly expensive, and awfull quality with todays eye, no contrast, no proper light level, so you can barely see it. There was no mobile networks, to prowide that mutch needed data connection. And the biggest reason imho, our accu tech was well below todays, li-ion was inwented in 91, so it was horribly expensive. So i guess one could build a fortune costing unresponsive abomination with led batteryes, but who would pay for a mobile tombstone?
***** i did not sad it was not possible, i sad it would be a horrible user experience, for tonns of money. Have you ever spent 4 days setting up a mouse on Debian back in the 90's? :D
KlaxonCow The problem was the hardware, but not the hardware that probably comes to your mind. The practical tablet was made possible by the dense capacitive touch display. Before that, the resolution and accuracy of touch just wasn't good enough to be usable. Once they learned how to make a dense transparent matrix of capacitors, touch become much more usable.
Seems like half the time a hardware manufacturer snuck a DSP into a 90s computer or console it ended up being used to crank out 3D vertex calculations just as often as it was used to decompress audio codecs.
8:35 OPINION: No, it wouldnt have, because the tablet revolution is pretty much the revolution of internet. connectivity makes them popular mostly. Since they wouldnt have been as functional then, as they are now, it wouldve never really been the big thing it is in the modern day
I picked up the 512 ST before the ROM was available. I had to boot the OS from disk and after loading basic as well, I had less than 20k left to write code in. Less than my old Atari 800. If lack of memory serves me :)
As fun as these old computers are, I'm really glad the idea of all-in-one PCs fell out of favour in the desktop world. Not being able to custom build would make desktop PCs no better than consoles... maybe worse. The horror! D:
The "tablet revolution" didn't happen because of the tablets. It happened because of what you can do with them. What good would a tablet be without wi-fi? Tablets in the 90s could've been just for word processors, drawing stuff and organizing.
The ST was designed to use Atari's dedicated monitors just like the one in the video. The gigantic borders on its default display have more to do with lame design decisions than television behavior. Other computers/monitors of this era worked without massive borders.
One of the first hardware hacks of many ST owners I know (including myself) was to open the monitors and carefully adjusting potentiometers to enlage the image while minimizing those borders. Then came graphics cards and multisync monitors. :-)
HMmmmm was the Falcon actually part of the ST family? I always thought it was a completely new computer that was placed into an ST style case in order save costs.
It started life as a processor replacement for the STe (combing a 68030 and DSP in place of the 68000), if you google for 'Atari Sparrow' (the codename it was built in) you could find some photos of the machine during development where it is very similar looking to the STe. Either way, both it and the TT attempt to be ST compatible and run the same OS (albeit modified for the extra hardware capabilities).
The borders around the screen were actually a consequence of the ST's somewhat cheap design. The vertical borders are because there's slightly less vertical resolution being filled by the ST than there could be - only 200 pixels height in colour and 400 in monochrome. Compare this to say, the Amiga, which depending on the mode would do 256 pixels height or 512. I assume this was because Atari designed the machine to work on the lower resolution American TVs, and unlike Commodore, didn't want to spend the money developing a real PAL version. Honestly a better decision as the difference on amigas broke software compatibility quite badly for the unfortunate Americans. Horizontally, it's because the ST's video hardware is straight up just actually wrong. TVs work by drawing the picture left to right, one line at a time. The TV does this at a constant speed, and it's up to whatever is producing the signal to keep up with it. Unfortunately, the ST sends each line too quickly, meaning that the TV ends up finishing drawing that line of the picture waaaaaay before it reaches the side of the screen. To make up for it, they did at least add a long delay before each line so that the picture would be centered. You can compare this with say an Amiga. Like the Atari it also does 320 or 640 pixels wide screen. But using the Same TV or monitor, the Amiga's picture will totally fill the screen, while the Atari's has the horizontal border. It's the same number of pixels, just shrunk. So if you have a crappy TV it can't display this higher DPI picture properly, and is hard to read filenames. This was done because there's timing signals in the computer which control stuff like this. And Atari went with the cheapest way to make it work, even if it's wrong. Its a fun quirk, and means of course that you have these border areas you're guaranteed everyone can see. So if you know how to use them, you get a higher resolution screen for free. It was much harder than he makes it out to be though. People thought drawing stuff in the left border was impossible for years
The 72 Hz "Hi-Res" monitor was monochrome, which is why it appears so crisp. (It didn't have a shadow mask.) When an Atari ST was connected to it, the computer would switch to 1 bit-per-pixel mode, much like the early Macs. Each pixel would either be black or white, as the ST didn't have enough VRAM to display grayscale at the higher resolution the Hi-Res monitor utilized. There probably are some ST games that are compatible with the monochrome monitor, but I can't think of any offhand; my ST had the color monitor.
Shmeh Fleh Well I was talking about framerates, not graphics quality/"crispness" IE, is it possible to write a game that actually updates at 72Hz, or are you stuck to normal refresh rates?
I would imagine you'd be stuck at the normal refresh rates, if you could even use the games on the monitor. Speeding things up like that would probably affect the very particular timing these sorts of games depended on.
cool video but I'm surprised you went into all that detail on the demo mode and totally left out the fact that programmers figured out how to display full color GIFs by flickering the display rapidly.
My brain is an ST, just like a flueter, fluting, mellows, how it goes, and the wind blows, and the ozone hole grows... Rhyme and Reason remix of Satan.. someone please upload
I had the exact same idea when I was watching this episode. The demoscene is still very much active. Maybe computerphile could spend some episodes about the demoscene, by talking to active sceners.
4 роки тому
When I saw "pushing the limits" I didn't think it would be about the borders on the screen XD
It's great to see people still talking about how great the Atari ST was.
Me and a friend actually programmed the demo you showed. I also did a 7 session workshop on demo programming. Message me for the link. Greetings from Luxembourg.
+Gunstick Will you guys be at STNICCC?
+samuraika yes, except only one of the 2 coders.
+Gunstick The Dark side of the Spoon is one of the greatest megademo to ever hit the Atari ST, the fullscreen distorter is the best screen of the demo, thanks for creating it !
About time the demoscene got some recognition. Kudos to the prof (and indeed his parents' purchasing choice back then) for showing what the lovely ST was all about.
Brings all the memories back, the ST shows in london, The Cracking crews like Automation and Pompey Pirates... the wars betrween them (Birdy anyone?) playing 16 player games via the midi port (MidiMaze) Playing the Demo disks... good times
I remember soldering a blitter chip to my STFM (there was a place for it on the mainboard, and the TOS had a support for it), adding HW overscan mod (made from couple of TTL chips), and making memory expansion logic that allowed some odd memory configuration (like 2,75 MB total) before I had enough cash to solder together a clean 4 MB expansion from PC SIM modules. I even made an address decoder for IDE interface, but never had a chance to test it. Golden years...
The effect was called "Hard scrolling". Man... I still have the floppies with these demos on it...
We were all competing on effects... Shade bobs, pixel scroll-text, mega scroll-text, waving logos, parallax scrolling, 3D cubes, space field, plasmas, +2k sprites (with auto generated/modified code), DMA routines ("i got the fatest!!!" was heard every month).... good times.
Peter Sunde (co-creator of The Pirate Bay) talked about this exact thing a few weeks ago in a Swedish interview, actually. How he was involved in the demo-scene on bulletin boards and locally in Sweden, pushing these Ataris to display the entire screen and so on.
"LCD display"
* twitch *
"LCD display"
wat r u doin?
"LCD display"
SHTAAAAP
Falcrist RIP in peace.
+Falcrist I mean, technically it could be two different types of display. Display as in show off, and display as in computer monitor. So, we could rephrase as "liquid crystal showing off computer monitor", but that's hardly easy or quick to say.
+Falcrist LED diode. :D
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
ATM machine. VIN number. That’s just how people talk.
"so basically they hacked it?"
"well no they didn't hack it they just pushed it to do something other than it was designed to do."
isn't that pretty much the definition of hacking? lol
most people looks to hack works in negative way and think it's illegal that's he tried to avoid it .
A hack generally involves a fundamental change to something. They didn't change anything.
@@bkucenski except they did
SM124 was a beast. It was capable of 1100 lines! Running DTP software like Calamus on it was an unforgettable experience
I totally agree about the crispness of the display. I've always said my SM 125 monochrome monitor was the sharpest I own
Speaking of great monitors, even though I won't dispute that the SM-125 monitor had crisp image quality. The Commodore 1702 (Monitor that came with my C64) was probably the crispest color TV that I ever used. When I was a kid I would plug various consoles from a NES all the way up to a PS1 into it and the image quality was unmatched. You could even retrofit an S-Video jack onto it by wiring up the Chroma and Luma video inputs to an S-Video jack, or splicing the wires from an S-Video cable into seperate Chroma and Luma cables.
Finally got me an STE a couple of months ago and I'm loving every second I spend with it. Believe or not, this video helped spark the interest 8 good years ago. : )
The Atari 800 was my first computer. It had an onboard user programmable video coprocessor long before other computers had any kind of modern day video subsytems.
I also remember the old BBS systems. It has changed so much since them!
+Karmic Beats Yes! Someone besides me who knows what a BBS is!!! Or was... :(
Private Pecker
I wonder if any are still around? It would be fun to go to there 😁
Private Pecker
That is interesting. I guess there is no point to a telnet BBS as webpages do it all these days.
Karmic Beats Make an account go on relay figure it out it actually is really fun. I'm pretty sure someone replicated Google on a BBS too.
Private Pecker
Cool I am checking it out Thanks 😁
On the VIC 20 we would put the machine into the hires mode with limited colors, set a timer to wake us up just before we'd get to the end of a particular scan line, watch the beam x counter until we hit the end of the line and then switch the color palette. That let us have more colors than we were supposed to have. Had to do it in assembler, and that's exactly why I learned my first assembler.
Always fun to see the demoscene still getting mentions here and there :)
What a great video. I used to be such a fan of the Atari range and owned several from the ST to Falcon. I still have one of the Atari clones, the Hades up in my loft. Hmmm, I really should dust it off and fire it up. Some more of these nostalgic videos please. Spectrum? Amiga? :)
+Ben Hills ua-cam.com/video/SFAWHB2BKOg/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/C9DB3w-Syfs/v-deo.html ;)
+Computerphile I want my amiga nostalgic video! :'(
Commodore 64 was and still is the ultimate demo scene machine. Of course it should evolve around it, sprinkle with Amiga, Atari, Spectrum. All hail the King C64!
I would love a Hades for my collection..... and a TT! Thinking of the newer FPGA computer as well.....
i love your Atari collection! The Atari ST line was beautiful.
Beatiful machines. Not only the computer capability, but also the design. I like very much the industrial design on this thing.
I remember the days of these machines ,and I wanted to get into programming at the time ,but it was a suckfull of a time to be a young beginner ,because
All the editors and compilers where worth big money. Which put programming out of my affordability .Something nobody seems to acknowledge or know about these days.
Fortunately now days many compilers and editors are free off the net.To late for me but I have been programming for a while since they became available .
You can zoom out all the border on the Atari color and mono monitors with the dials at the back. The borders are there to keep the speed up, it's all to do with pixel clock and 16khz line refresh. It's the same reason why most home computers had a border, the Amiga and Atari 8 bit computers and also the Atari games consoles had no borders and people had no problem using them on very old TVs.
Thank you very much!
Will you do an episode about the *Atari Coldfire Project* ?!!! :D
Dunno, I think the the STPad had been released it'd of been similar to the tablets that were around at the same point in history, mainly used in certain neich industrial, engineering and medical situations. I don't think the revolution would of happened until the iPad appeared (or someone else made a consumer version of a tablet) as the things were generally even more expensive than a laptop and often had the specs of the much cheaper base model unit to boot.
Hope we'll get to see more of the demoscene on Computerphile! It's such an important culture that has come out of modern technology and it needs its time in the light!
This was my first computer, monochromatic BW screen.
Great great memories.
Good episode. Also looking forward to that Steve Furber interview.
A lot of people thought that full-screen 3D graphics weren't possible on the Atari 2600. Doug Neubauer proved them wrong, writing "Solaris" not long before leaving Atari.
The main things that limited the Atari with regards to 3D graphics were its pitiful amount of addressable memory and lack of a horizontal interrupt/DMA. Other than that the processor was plenty fast to do the job and the video chip would enthusiastically render wireframe 3D graphics all day!
Ah the Atari always gets my nostalgia glands running, I grew up with a ST4 with a whooping 60mb harddrive, unfortunately my mother got rid of it :(
Interesting that the screen on the Atari Mega is nearly as crisp as a retina display. that's cool :)
Well, it's not, that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's only 640x400. The thing is, as it's monochrome it has a flat, uniform phosphor coating rather than being broken up into pixels, and the high scan rate combined with medium persistence phosphor means it essentially looks like an e-ink display. Merely one with 640 pixels along each of 400 lines.
I was in the Amiga camp but regardless of which machine you bought, it's mutually understood that the demoscene was pretty damn cool. That it's still going with people writing new code and making these machines even pull off new tricks they haven't before is amazing to see in action.
OMG....I'm so glad I found your channel. Consider me a new fan! Cheers Mate!
Half the price of a Macintosh, but with sound and color. If it wasn't for that "1984" commercial, Atari might be where Apple is now.
A separate video on the demoscene, please? Oohh, and one on the Amiga. :-)
In Atari 8-bit it was actually very easy to draw on the screen borders. The playfield (part of the screen with data) could be set to either narrow, normal or wide and in the wide mode it extended beyond the visible screen. You could also shrink top and bottom margins to almost none with properly designed Display List. You could make clone of this demo in Atari BASIC.
Not sure if any other computer from the '80s could do it so easily. Atari 8-bit video chips (ANTIC and GTIA) were quite unique in their way of generating video output.
for anyone interested in reading more on the techniques to 'extend' the graphics of the Atari ST, C64 and Amiga, it was commonly called 'Raster Interrupt' and there's a wikipedia page on it under that name that serves as a good starting point.
Jack Tramiel, destroyer of important computer companies MOS, Commodore, Amiga (an independent company before Commodore purchased it) and Atari. I can forgive him for destroying Commodore, since it was his to destroy, I suppose. I really wish Amiga and Atari had landed in the hands of an organization more capable of developing a sustaining business rather than someone who ran his companies as personal fiefs and who consistently burned his bridges with his distributors.
Jack tramiel at some point ruled over the whole computer market. But, he screwed it big time and left IBM PC (aka slow and expensive Lotus 123 machine) to dominate the market.
eng3d There were lots of important players in that era. The mistake of many histories on the subject of computers is to pretend the only story that matters starts and ends with IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and Intel. It would equally be a mistake to pretend that Jack Tramiel is the only part missing from that story.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there were a dozen other possible candidates for major players, including some we've barely heard of in the US who were crucial in the UK, Japanese, or various European markets.
Tramiel wanted a cheap 68K machine that could be used to submarine the Amiga and ruin its chances in the market. There's nothing special about the Atari ST. It's basically a dumb frame buffer hooked up to a processor -- the minimum necessary to run.
@dothemathright 1111 No offense intended, but that's a revisionist take, I think. After all, it wasn't even IBM that was most responsible for winning the war for IBM compatible machines in the home, but rather companies like Compaq and Tandy. Even Apple hung in long enough to become a design-centric company very nearly despite itself rather than because of its 8-bit successes, which were marred by design issues and marketing mishaps. I could easily envision a world where Compaq decided to make, say, a Mac-compatible in 1984 rather than an IBM compatible in 1982. It would of course require a different legal decision to go their way, but these things happen. Or, just as likely, a competent machine standard by a third party or consortium. After all, it wasn't IBM's sales staff that got PCs into homes, and the previous winner of the home computer war, the C64, proved that your sales staff could pretty much be incompetent as long as your machine had the right software.
@@combcomclrlsr really? Right out of the box it was more powerful than the IBM or Macintosh.
Interesting to note that the Mega ST had a blitter as standard, allowing faster rendering of the OS graphical bitmap operations. It's also interesting to note a company also sold a "software blitter" which when using OS legal design software gave pretty much the same effect for original 1985 520ST owners using GEM applications. Atari could have improved this aspect of the OS design when transitioning from loading OS from disk to placing it on ROM
At Gunnersbury School in the late 80s, the CDT department had one of these in one of their office. One of the teachers would let 3 or 4 of us in at lunch while he was out, to play the golf game on it :)
It's crazy how much this guy knows.
the some really awesome atraist demoscenes out there , a must to see the limits
We used similar principles to step the timing in the ZX-Spectrum to switch the colour attributes between ULA refreshes to get pixel-level colours. It dragged the CPU's available time way down, but got some interesting pictures for the time . . .
The ST Blitter was in development before the ST was released, and it is said the enhanced Shifter from the STE was too. One can imaging then if the STE spec had been released from day one with the ST. It would have been goodbye Amiga.
My most enduring memory of the Atari 520ST is soldering piggy-backed DRAMs onto the existing 512K to upgrade it to a full megabyte. There was also a .BIN image that you could use with an EPROM burner to make the machine believe it was a 1040ST. Without the extra RAM I found the 512K version a little claustrophobic.
I have recently started coding for the Atari 2600. It is very similar to this in all the cycle-counting and timing perfection. It is quite a rewarding beast once you master it.
I'm an Atari guy, had Atari 800XL, best computer I had ever programmed.
But soon had to move to 8086/88 because there wasn't any software available, I think Atari should have switched to PC base and kept it's high-end support for Graphics which was better than PC and sound, which was way better till Sound Blaster came along.
I really wish Atari had made these changes.
Lesson we learn from it is simple, give what your customer want, don't try to feed them your ideas.
Everyone want few things:
1. Faster
2. Simpler
3. Cheaper
Don't try to make things slower, harder to use or more expensive.
Dark Side of the Spoon demo - I launched it on this past Christmas Eve to show my niece the power of Atari ST, unfortunately the LCD TV had a major lag with the RF input and some deinterlacing artifacts were visible at point blank range
Love to see a video, on TT use, MagiC use and more Falcon stuff Softsynth ACE. Big up DML for the BadMooD Doom clone / nativ
The history of computer development in different species is always amusing to observe.
Can you talk a bit about Acorn Archimedes???
Nice Collection, Cool ...
Dark side of the spoon!!! My fave demo on ST :) You didn't speak of the reset screen! :)
1040STFM was the workhorse of my studio, running Cubase 2.0
The video was great until after the border busting effect, then it turns into a history lesson :/
Demoscene are definitely worth a dedicated video!
A dedicated video? Heck, the Demoscene has come up with so much clever stuff that it deserves a whole series.
Parallax, fills, zooms, ripples and fades on hardware never designed for the tasks, novel ways of storing images allowing million-fold zooms of fractals without having to do the calculations in real-time, flat-shaded 3D polygons with real-time lighting on 1993-era hardware, real-time raytracing on the CPU as far back as 1995, the list goes on and on and on...
I know! I made a playlist because I watch so many demos. There really needs to be more documentary/educational videos on the demoscene.
You guys need to hop over to pouet.net and have an explore ... a lot of the catalogued demos have youtube or other video hosting links, as well as downloads for the actual code to run in an emulator or on an original machine ;)
There's a Demoscene production called "Copper" by Surprise! Productions dating from 1992 which does this sort of stuff with VGA hardware on MS-DOS machines. Even DOSBox's best VGA emulation system (which handles a lot of Demoscene effects quite accurately) still doesn't quite manage to correctly reproduce all its effects.
Nice episode, would be cool if there was one more dedicated to demoscene.
Gonna fire up my Atari STE now.
Wow, a coveted Falcon! I actually was gifted a "heavily modified" Falcon myself. It has upgraded memory, an accellerator, etc. Unfortunately, this mod wouldn't fit inside of that beautiful case, so the previous owner tossed it into an ugly pc tower, with no back on it (the Falcon's PCB sticks out of the back of the case). I'm sure it's "faster", etc. but I would trade this frankenstiened computer for a stock 030 Falcon in a heartbeat, if I could! Congrats on your awesome collection.
Atari was the first computer I wrote a game on. Such a nice machine!
I don't know anybody who had an ST but loads of people who had an Amiga
LONG LIVE THE DEMOSCENE !! :)))
Waiting for Amiga episodes, i was in that "camp" allthou i used Atari 1040ST(E) for Notator before i got a nice hardware package for Amiga (midi, digitizer, action replay IV and some other knick knacks i can't remember now..). I used the Action Replay to rip algorithm produced waveforms as it was just easier to produce lots of data and browse thru RAM for the samples than to render to file, made very cool industrial metal background noises.. Atari was "just" the brains for midi, never used it for anything else but i did switch to Alesis MMT-8 as that machine just kicked ass with Amiga as a sampler and sysex dump.
Man those are some clean looking computers.
The PAL/NTSC hack is presented as a way to extend the monitor beam scanning downward. but what about the top of the screen and on the sides? Hmmm...
I love the feel of those old keyboards. All these modern, made in China keyboards don't come anywhere close.
Excellent Video, I wonder if the Atari Falcon 060 is the most powerful Atari Computer ever made. I am very curious, because I changed to IBM and my last ATARI was the 130 XE. Now I regret for abandon ATARI, I should keep both lines.
Those slanted F Keys look very familiar. I remember those well, although i can't remember where I have played with those before...when i was probably 7 yrs old.
It's LCD or LC Display but not LCD Display.
Liquid Crystal Display Display
I don't know what you mean, but I'm gonna stick with my RPG grenades in my RPG games and FPS shooters.
Also, i'll read my DC comics in PDF format on my tablet with LCD display while using an ATM machine.
Tomasz Wota
Don't forget your PIN number with that one.
ST full screen was done by direct addressing to the display memory, In the days before Google, Memory map information was difficult to find.
Please do one on the C64 demoscene! Wonderful music, graphics and programming!
ST Pad? Well before that in the Atari 8-bit days, Atari did make a tablet device and a drawing software for it. Also a lot of 3rd parties made similar products like the Koala pad.
I had an Atari ST at home. A black, white, gray only one though.Played lots of Oxyd, Pong and Flight Simulator on it... threw it away. It still worked perfectly fine.:(
Falcon's are so rare and expensive to obtain, and sadly, there's very little software available that can actually take advantage of it. I would like to own one, but the $3,000 US Plus price tag is getting too expensive for my budget. Nevertheless, I own several models of ST and simply adore their existence. I still remember first booting up Dungeon Master and literally dropping my jaw in complete awe. At this time, being the late 80s, there was simply nothing in the market comparable to this. So many games followed that were simply improved copies of this FPS - like dungeon adventure. Anyway, a fantastic video thank you.
Atari forever !!
Great informative video pal, really enjoyable.
Teletext used to take advantage of the over scan on TV sets to send data. :)
The Falcon costs more now than it did then!
Could the tablet revolution have happened decades earlier? No, the technology just wasn't there. Everybody attempted it back then, even Apple, but nobody could make it work very well.
Arguably, the hardware technology was there, but the comprehension of exactly how to make it work was not.
Being able to sense where a big fat finger has made contact with a display has been possible for an awful long time. And that's all that was really needed to get the very basics going (multi-touch, without doubt, vastly expands the possibilities - pinches, zooms, etc. - but it's not necessary for the most primitive of operations, like selecting options from a menu or swiping and the like).
But user interface design, software, display technology and the like needed to reach enough of a maturity for comprehending how to do the touch properly, intuitively and well.
But the touch itself, in hardware terms, has been technologically possible for decades beforehand.
KlaxonCow I beg to differ.
Go check out a laptop fom the end of 90', for reference.
The hdd is not shock proof, and there was no sd/ssd.
The memory chips was bigger and lot less efficient, same with cpu, what mean more power, and heath.
The lcd panels was horribly expensive, and awfull quality with todays eye, no contrast, no proper light level, so you can barely see it.
There was no mobile networks, to prowide that mutch needed data connection.
And the biggest reason imho, our accu tech was well below todays, li-ion was inwented in 91, so it was horribly expensive. So i guess one could build a fortune costing unresponsive abomination with led batteryes, but who would pay for a mobile tombstone?
***** yes, so it's not sellable... thats my point
***** i did not sad it was not possible, i sad it would be a horrible user experience, for tonns of money.
Have you ever spent 4 days setting up a mouse on Debian back in the 90's? :D
KlaxonCow The problem was the hardware, but not the hardware that probably comes to your mind.
The practical tablet was made possible by the dense capacitive touch display. Before that, the resolution and accuracy of touch just wasn't good enough to be usable. Once they learned how to make a dense transparent matrix of capacitors, touch become much more usable.
Seems like half the time a hardware manufacturer snuck a DSP into a 90s computer or console it ended up being used to crank out 3D vertex calculations just as often as it was used to decompress audio codecs.
computing has sucked ever since I sold my Amigas - it's like I swapped a hobby for a tool.
8:35
OPINION:
No, it wouldnt have, because the tablet revolution is pretty much the revolution of internet. connectivity makes them popular mostly.
Since they wouldnt have been as functional then, as they are now, it wouldve never really been the big thing it is in the modern day
amiga vs st would have been a more interesting contest if the ST was chunky-pixels instead of bitplanes
Very interesting.
I picked up the 512 ST before the ROM was available. I had to boot the OS from disk and after loading basic as well, I had less than 20k left to write code in. Less than my old Atari 800. If lack of memory serves me :)
As fun as these old computers are, I'm really glad the idea of all-in-one PCs fell out of favour in the desktop world. Not being able to custom build would make desktop PCs no better than consoles... maybe worse. The horror! D:
Amazing. I always wanted a falcon
The "tablet revolution" didn't happen because of the tablets. It happened because of what you can do with them. What good would a tablet be without wi-fi? Tablets in the 90s could've been just for word processors, drawing stuff and organizing.
Still got my 520 STfm & 1040 STe
8:36 No, for the same reason that the Apple Newton and Windows tablet extensions were not successful: too ahead of the hardware.
I remember Future Crew.
Great vid ! You could have removed the high pitch noise coming from the monitor =(
The ST was designed to use Atari's dedicated monitors just like the one in the video. The gigantic borders on its default display have more to do with lame design decisions than television behavior. Other computers/monitors of this era worked without massive borders.
One of the first hardware hacks of many ST owners I know (including myself) was to open the monitors and carefully adjusting potentiometers to enlage the image while minimizing those borders. Then came graphics cards and multisync monitors. :-)
HMmmmm was the Falcon actually part of the ST family? I always thought it was a completely new computer that was placed into an ST style case in order save costs.
It started life as a processor replacement for the STe (combing a 68030 and DSP in place of the 68000), if you google for 'Atari Sparrow' (the codename it was built in) you could find some photos of the machine during development where it is very similar looking to the STe. Either way, both it and the TT attempt to be ST compatible and run the same OS (albeit modified for the extra hardware capabilities).
Thanks for the info. :)
This guy has a cool shirt. The purple shirt has a slight shiny iridescence.
PLEASE COVER AMIGA, THE SUPERIOR OF THE TWO PLATFORMS!
16 bit is so not oldskool. It all started on 8 bit (C64) - the demo scene that is.
Yeah, but the Demoscene was so much superior on Amiga, even compared to PC.
The borders around the screen were actually a consequence of the ST's somewhat cheap design.
The vertical borders are because there's slightly less vertical resolution being filled by the ST than there could be - only 200 pixels height in colour and 400 in monochrome. Compare this to say, the Amiga, which depending on the mode would do 256 pixels height or 512. I assume this was because Atari designed the machine to work on the lower resolution American TVs, and unlike Commodore, didn't want to spend the money developing a real PAL version. Honestly a better decision as the difference on amigas broke software compatibility quite badly for the unfortunate Americans.
Horizontally, it's because the ST's video hardware is straight up just actually wrong.
TVs work by drawing the picture left to right, one line at a time. The TV does this at a constant speed, and it's up to whatever is producing the signal to keep up with it. Unfortunately, the ST sends each line too quickly, meaning that the TV ends up finishing drawing that line of the picture waaaaaay before it reaches the side of the screen. To make up for it, they did at least add a long delay before each line so that the picture would be centered.
You can compare this with say an Amiga. Like the Atari it also does 320 or 640 pixels wide screen. But using the Same TV or monitor, the Amiga's picture will totally fill the screen, while the Atari's has the horizontal border. It's the same number of pixels, just shrunk. So if you have a crappy TV it can't display this higher DPI picture properly, and is hard to read filenames.
This was done because there's timing signals in the computer which control stuff like this. And Atari went with the cheapest way to make it work, even if it's wrong.
Its a fun quirk, and means of course that you have these border areas you're guaranteed everyone can see. So if you know how to use them, you get a higher resolution screen for free.
It was much harder than he makes it out to be though. People thought drawing stuff in the left border was impossible for years
Hm, would it be possible to write games specifically for the 72Hz monitor? Or are you just stuck with 50/60hz?
The 72 Hz "Hi-Res" monitor was monochrome, which is why it appears so crisp. (It didn't have a shadow mask.) When an Atari ST was connected to it, the computer would switch to 1 bit-per-pixel mode, much like the early Macs. Each pixel would either be black or white, as the ST didn't have enough VRAM to display grayscale at the higher resolution the Hi-Res monitor utilized. There probably are some ST games that are compatible with the monochrome monitor, but I can't think of any offhand; my ST had the color monitor.
Shmeh Fleh Well I was talking about framerates, not graphics quality/"crispness"
IE, is it possible to write a game that actually updates at 72Hz, or are you stuck to normal refresh rates?
I would imagine you'd be stuck at the normal refresh rates, if you could even use the games on the monitor. Speeding things up like that would probably affect the very particular timing these sorts of games depended on.
Kick Off 2 wasn't fullscreen?
cool video but I'm surprised you went into all that detail on the demo mode and totally left out the fact that programmers figured out how to display full color GIFs by flickering the display rapidly.
My brain is an ST, just like a flueter, fluting, mellows, how it goes, and the wind blows, and the ozone hole grows...
Rhyme and Reason remix of Satan.. someone please upload
weird talking about the demoscene in past tense..
I had the exact same idea when I was watching this episode. The demoscene is still very much active. Maybe computerphile could spend some episodes about the demoscene, by talking to active sceners.
When I saw "pushing the limits" I didn't think it would be about the borders on the screen XD