Atari Means Business with the Mega ST

Yes, back in the days, I/O was often really low latency because memory and therefore buffers were expensive and gate count was limited, it meant more direct connections, which meant low latency.

The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the beam", updating the image while it was being drawn on the CRT monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than frames! It was necessary because the console didn't have enough memory for a framebuffer.

The Atari ST is special for the inclusion built-in of MIDI ports, and it was made cheaply, which at the time meant direct connections and it resulted it low latency.

FWIW you can get excellent latency on a modern device but only if you run everything in real mode and forgo complicated buses like USB that are effectively network link layers.

This is true, but in my opinion also misleading. Speed and latency are fundamentally different. Speed would be a Performance Feature in the Kano model, meaning there is usually a linear relationship between speed and user satisfaction.

Latency would be a Basic Feature. Once you cross 7 ms (or 5 ms, or even 3 ms if you absolutely insist) you're happy, above that everything is absolutely unusable.

Yes, I think this is a on point statement. :-)

Not really.

MIDI is a serial protocol.

At any given time only one message can be sent down the wire. [1]

So on the beat, an implementation can send either the clock pulse or note on or something else. [2]

If you send the clock everything else has to wait. If you send something else, the clock has to wait.

Now with modern computers, you are also dealing with USB which is a low priority parallel protocol and has to coordinate with everything else a modern kernel does.

Music is hard.

[1] premium hardware sequencers sometimes have two or more Midi Out to reduce contention.

[2] Midi Time Code solves this by encoding monotonic time into Midi and is how serious sync is done over Midi, e.g. in Hollywoood

There's not one word in his post where he looks down on VSTs or anything. It's just how he likes to make music, and he is unhappy with the state of modern MIDI implementations. In fact, it's the exact opposite: you are shaming him for still using MIDI.

Some musicians still like to play instruments -- for them and their listeners, ITB production is seen as a cheat and not real musicianship -- and for them the lack of a stable MIDI clock on today's hardware absolutely does matter. A trained musician can feel time difference as small as 1 ms. Any latency or jitter greater than that and a perfect track could be ruined.

As an aside, all-digital workflows take the joy out of music being made in the moment, by ear and by feel. There is no replacement, for example, for a professional sound engineer adjusting a mix strictly by the sound in their headphones and the feel of the sliders under their fingers.

MIDI baud rate is 31250, not 9600.

I had that. Later renamed Laser C. Being a poor college student I used a Radio Shack floppy disk drive for a second 3.5", hand-soldering the DIN connector the ST used. Afterwards I could have my compiler tools on one and source/object code on the other - a huge time saver.

Try and get a compiler and linker to fit in 360k these days!

The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga (I think an Amiga with a stock MIDI port would have been a homerun).

I saw Atari ST in music studios well into the late 90s/early 2000s because back then quiet beige PCs weren't a thing yet: PCs virtually all came with super noisy fans, which was a big no-no for music studios.

A buddy would bring his Korg synth to my neighbour's house and hook it to their Atari ST. Another dude I remember would play drums from Dire Straits song from his Atari ST hooked to some MIDI gear and then he'd take his guitar and play Dire Straits songs.

These were the days.

I'm not surprised some musicians still use them. If I'm not mistaken Kavinsky (who became famous after the movie Drive came out but recently had renewed interest for he performed at the Olympics games' ceremony) started doing music at a late age, on an Atari ST a friend of his game him.

As an anecdote PCs were so noisy that I asked my neighbour (an electrical engineer) if it was possible to come up with a system where the fan would slow down when the CPU wasn't too hot: and sure enough we were then modding our PSUs with "thermistors" and we'd be calibrating our tiny hack, no shit, with boiling water in the kitchen (ah clueless teenagers). Funnily enough about 10 years later every single PSU had variable fan speed.

That's the thing: we were used to quiet 8-bit and then 16-bit computers and when we had to move to these piece-of-shit PCs (but with fast CPUs / FPUs and that were upgradeable), we had to endure these painful ultra noisy CPU/PSU fans (and HDDs).

So the Atari ST just made sense. You could have these super fast (compared to Atari ST) PCs but they were noisy, fugly, piece of unbearable shits that the cool guys in music studios simply wouldn't tolerate back then.

Now of course at some point PCs became just too good and several brands started focusing on quietness and it was then possible to have a totally silent PC, both looking cool and being literally cool (big heatsink, quiet fans, etc.).

But yeah the Atari ST was and still is certainly for some a thing for creating music.

Lots of respect to the Atari ST for his MIDI port (and that comes from a Commodore Amiga owner and fan).

You can't go up and down simultaneously on a joystick anyway! The stick can't go both ways at once. So this gives you the option of reusing these signal combinations for other kinds of input.

I think what was meant was using fire+directions to trigger additional virtual buttons. Many games did this in software anyway.

On the right (ie. Mirror of the STE 15pin ports) would mean that they could keep the electrical layout ie. Connected to the keyboard, and hence a separate keyboard unit. For 2 player games you would be swapping it a lot- there were adapters just to help with this.

I agree it would be difficult to design a correct socket, but from interviews it was always the plan to have a blitter, and a socket as standard would have helped adoption.

The main thing is that the T212 is a great coprocessor, faster than the 68881 fpu and with a 2k cache. Introducing the transputer as a coprocessor would potentially have changed the computing landscape

You have a point, but the ST bottleneck during development appeared to be the software, so there was possibly space for hardware tweaks. The BOM would go up slightly but remember they would have saved on developing and shipping a separate disk drive which would cover a lot of these changes.

Realistically it's amazing the ST was as good as it was, given the 6 month development time and the kings of penny pinching at the helm :)

> when I feel like it's more the responsibility of previous generations to preserve and pass down history for them to learn from

But everything has been preserved and passed down. The entire home computing phenomenon has been archived and is available on the internet thanks to the rampant 'software piracy' which was common at the time, and detailed schematics and manuals coming with the computers (which have all been digitized and are available on the internet). Even my obscure KC85 games I wrote as a teenager and 'distributed' on cassette tapes by snail mail are available as download because some kind person(s) digitized all that stuff during the early 90s and put it on some 'underground' game download portals.

The 80s and early 90s home computer era will be better preserved than anything that came after it.

> a failure of young people to study history

The good news is that not only was almost all of it preserved, teenagers today are really interested in retro gaming. My 15 year-old daughter, who's not into computers more than any other 15 year-old girl, just asked if she could go with me to the vintage computer festival this Summer. She tells me her friends at school are all interested in running emulators to play classic games from arcade to SNES to PS2 and N64.

I guess the 'dark lining' to that silver cloud is that this interest from teens in retro gaming is partly thanks to the increasing downsides of modern gaming (cost, DLC, ads, hour-long download/installs, etc). While game graphics continue to get more and more impressive, stuff like real-time path tracing doesn't seem to excite teens as much as does me. Ultimately, it's about game play more than visuals. Lately I've been exploring the immense back catalog of N64, PS2, PS3 and x360 games via emulation and there are some incredible gems I never even heard about back in the day. It's especially great now thanks to the huge variety of mods, enhancements, texture packs, decompilations/recompilations and fan translations. And current emulators can upscale and anti-alias those games even on a potato desktop or laptop with a low-end discrete GPU.

Understandable, hence why many of my comments kind of look like mini-history lessons, and I tend to be pedantic.

However curiosity also plays a big role.

If I know so much about computing history since the 1950's, is because I do my research, and take advantage of all archives that have been placed online, certainly I wasn't around to live all of it.

I never thought that statement was actually about having an “idea”, but more about not actually having lived through the experience. Quite the opposite from your belief, no amount of study would allow them to understand what is was like.

Ironically, speaking as an Amiga guy, those diagonal function keys were an aspect of the ST I really liked!

I don't know if they were consistent with the other keys in terms of feel, but they were a striking, unique design feature that instantly identified the machine as being Atari without compromising practicality.

Yeah, I forgot about that. But I suppose you didn't need to replug them very often, and it wasn't much worse than plugging into an IBM PC before USB came along. And at least the Atari had lots of useful ports.

To say that John Carmack was ahead of the curve is quite an understatement lol