Atari ST

The Atari ST is a line of home computers made by Atari in the 1980s and 1990s, first made in 1985, around the time when Jack Tramiel went to lead Atari after leaving Commodore and purchasing Atari's home computing and game console divisions from Warner. It was based on the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors and was the first personal computer to come with a bitmapped color GUI, using a version of Digital Research's Graphics Environment Manager (or GEM for short) via Atari TOS. The ST stood for Sam Tramiel, Jack's son and president of Atari.

Alongside the Amiga, the Atari ST was one of the first 16-bit home computers, and although it didn't catch on in the United States, it enjoyed a big popularity in Europe.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The computer has a library of over 2,400 titles.
 * 2) While it lacked the custom chip support of the Amiga, the Atari ST was much cheaper than the Amiga.
 * 3) The ST's Motorola 68000 processor was 1 MHz faster than the Amiga's, meaning that some games, particularly ones that use 3D polygons, run somewhat better on the ST.
 * 4) Due to its affordable price, the Atari ST became particularly popular for gaming. Among the many notable programmers for Atari ST games are Jeff Minter, Peter Molyneux, David Braben, Archer Maclean, and many more.
 * 5) The Atari ST had built-in MIDI ports, which allowed users to plug in MIDI devices, and some games took advantage of the MIDI ports, allowing for superior sounding music. This made the ST very popular amongst musicians, like Tangerine Dream, Darude and White Town.
 * 6) Like the Amiga, it's an easy computer to mod, particularle the STE models, which can be upgraded to have more RAM available.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Like the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, it was more popular in Europe, thus most of the games are optimized for PAL machines.
 * 2) Some Atari ST games that were also on the Amiga looked inferior compared to the Amiga versions due to lack of custom chips.
 * 3) On some Atari ST models, the joystick ports are located under the computer, which is a rather uncomfortable placement, as it meant that joystick wires can stop working after an extended period of time, unless an extension cord is used.
 * 4) The Atari ST has inferior sound quality compared to the Amiga, as it uses similar sound capabilities to the Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum, however, this can be fixed with some games that support MIDI devices like the Roland MT-32.

Trivia

 * The Atari ST was originally going to have custom chips, as Jack Tramiel wanted to strike a deal with the Amiga team (which had ex-Atari engineers), who were working on their Amiga line of computers (then codenamed Lorraine), but Commodore bought the Amiga company at the last minute for $500,000, cutting the Atari and Amiga deal short.

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