38
votes
Accepted
How did early computers handle mice?
How exactly did early computers like the Amiga, Atari ST and Macintosh handle the mouse while also carrying out demanding tasks?
In case of Amiga and Atari ST it was achieved by not low level ...
- 208k
33
votes
Accepted
Looking for a 90's sorcery game on Atari ST
I guess your are looking for "Spectral Sorcery" from Jeff Makaiwi, and your drawing is absolutely on point ;)
Screenshot with scanlines
Screenshot with scanlines
Screenshot with scanlines
...
- 376
27
votes
Accepted
What was novel about the Atari ST? Did it introduce any innovations?
As well as being the first colour Mac-like, the Atari ST was absurdly competitive on price, being the first mainstream 68000-based home computer. The Amiga wasn’t relaunched for the home market until ...
- 35.6k
26
votes
Accepted
How did the original Apple Macintosh and Atari ST use protected mode?
The (plain) 68k never had anything directly comparable to the Intel x86 range's Protected Mode. When Intel introduced the Protected mode (PM) to its x86 range of CPUs, this lifted a number of ...
- 32.4k
24
votes
Adjusting focus for old CRT monitors
The EHT (extra-high-tension) circuits used to drive colour CRT displays run at 25kV (kilo-volts), and the capacitors contain enough stored charge to kill you stone dead if you touch the wrong thing, ...
- 2,809
22
votes
Accepted
Can a stock/original Atari ST boot from a hard drive?
All models of the Atari ST1 had code in ROM to attempt to read and run a boot sector from the first sector an ACSI2-attached drive. The bootloader3 contained in that sector would4 load the hard disk ...
- 9,260
19
votes
Why do some Atari ST motherboards include many Inductors?
They are not really inductors. They are EMI noise filters for suppressing electromagnetic interference that conduct out of the unit via the wires. These kind of EMI filters usually have two ferrite ...
- 27k
18
votes
Accepted
Could some 200 line displays have been pushed to 240 lines?
If the monitor’s phosphor mask is fine enough to handle the increased vertical resolution, then the rest is mostly about timing, and typical components at the time were capable of handling a 20% ...
- 117k
16
votes
Looking for ATARI-ST Graphics Image
Looking for either "rose.neo" atari or "rose.pc1" atari in Google images with an exact requested size of 320x200 yields this result, which seems to match your description pretty well.
Could it be ...
- 271
15
votes
Accepted
Why do some Atari ST motherboards include many Inductors?
There are versions of the Atari 520ST, and perhaps the 1040ST, that differ in having many discrete inductors attached at the I/O port lines for serial, parallel and floppy ports.
Essentially all ...
- 208k
14
votes
Accepted
Atari ST DRAM timing puzzle
How two 260ns RAM accesses could fit in 500ns?
By using a 250ns (*1) tRC cycle?
And yes, strictly that's out of spec. Still chances are very good that each and every chips will make it, as the timing ...
- 208k
14
votes
How did early computers handle mice?
It's rather simple, the earliest mice were just outputting digital pulses from a quadrature encoder, and these pulses were not counted in software but hardware. How it basically works is that for each ...
- 27k
14
votes
Could some 200 line displays have been pushed to 240 lines?
Just to summarize, some points which people may sometimes not fully realize about analog video:
The kind of analog video signals referred to in the question are based on the concept of raster scan, ...
- 2,002
13
votes
Accepted
How does the Atari ST's VDI polygon filling algorithm work?
The following is from Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes. Considering that this text was the "bible" of computer graphics during the 1990s, I ...
- 15.7k
11
votes
Looking for a 90's sorcery game on Atari ST
I'm almost certain you are talking about Hex by Mark of the Unicorn. The only difference between your description and the actual game is the shape of the "squares", which were, as the name ...
- 19.1k
10
votes
Accepted
What was this game with a "Conan" style character on Atari ST?
You may be referring to Barbarian and Barbarian II from game developer Psygnosis.
- 59.9k
10
votes
What was novel about the Atari ST? Did it introduce any innovations?
Tommy's answer mentioned it just "en passant":
You could buy one of Atari’s laser printers plus the ST, and DTP software for quite a bit less than Apple’s LaserWriter alone.
but that was ...
- 3,189
10
votes
Can a stock/original Atari ST boot from a hard drive?
Question: Can a bare stock, original Atari 520ST, with TOS 1.0x ROM, boot from a connected hard drive, without any special boot floppy or 3rd party driver?
Yes, as long as it's fitted with a proper ...
- 208k
9
votes
How to backup/dump Atari 520st floppy disks on modern hardware
There are two problems here: dumping the disks, and loading them in your emulator.
The general answer
To dump Atari ST disks, you can use Pasti on your Atari computer; the advantage is that it works ...
- 117k
9
votes
Does "Heart of the Alien" use the same game engine as "Another World"?
Here is an unofficial port to the Amiga, known as "Heart of the alien Redux". To my knowledge it uses the original engine with the data of the SegaCD version. No idea how much work there was ...
- 860
9
votes
How did early computers handle mice?
Here's a concrete example of Amiga low-level mouse reading from a programmer's perspective:
As mentioned in other answers, the Amiga board handles counting X/Y mouse movement on its two joystick/mouse ...
- 11.3k
8
votes
Polygonal 3D game for the Atari ST featuring spaceships
I'd say Zarch or as it was way more popular Virus.
The game was originally conceived for the Acorn Archimedes, but soon ported to basically all platforms of the late 80s 16-bit era. There was a real ...
- 208k
8
votes
Accepted
Polygonal 3D game for the Atari ST featuring spaceships
I'm virtually positive the game was Thunderstrike released in 1990 for the ST, Amiga, and DOS. The version I had was probably an early demo since I don't recall the various splash screens (besides ...
- 9,260
8
votes
How did the original Apple Macintosh and Atari ST use protected mode?
68000 had a protected mode as well (i.e. a special mode allowing the use of privileged/supervisor instructions not normally available to user code).
Err, no. At least don't call it protected mode, ...
- 11.4k
8
votes
How did the original Apple Macintosh and Atari ST use protected mode?
So far as I recall, the Macintosh System Software didn't bother with the user versus supervisor mode distinction. Even after the release of System 7, which supported virtual memory, virtually ...
- 682
8
votes
Accepted
Videoprocessor with custom horizontal sampling
The Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC) supports custom horizontal sample rates, even Amiga's PAL:Super-HiRes (1440×283) mode.
- 17.4k
8
votes
Accepted
Were external floppy drives for Atari ST and Amiga inter-compatible?
On both the Amiga and the Atari, external floppy drives don’t contain any “intelligence”, and the connectors are pin-to-pin. However the Amiga uses a 23-pin D connector whereas the Atari ST uses a 14-...
- 117k
8
votes
Accepted
Does the Atari 1040 STE work with the Atari SM124 monitor?
The SM124 is compatible with essentially all Atari ST - after all, the clean B&W video mode was one of the main selling points for the ST series - at least in Europe, were it had a strong stand as ...
- 208k
8
votes
Could some 200 line displays have been pushed to 240 lines?
Given sufficient memory to hold the larger frame buffer, the only limitation is the flexibility of the display controller.
As you alluded to in your question, the video timing standards (NTSC/PAL), ...
- 59.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible