Dutch legend has been running his campsite since 1986 using an Atari ST:
If there's one thing YouTuber Viktor Bart likes, it's retro computers: his channel is dedicated to videos about building old machines, their functions, cool oddities, and just generally the joy of these beige things. Even Mr. Bart, however, was surprised by what he found in Koningsbosch, in the Dutch province of Limburg: a campsite that's been run since 1986 on an Atari ST.
[Ed note: Is there anybody here who has an Atari ST? Please share your experience in the comments.
I bought its predecessor, an Atari 800, in 1980. Even got an expansion cartridge to boost memory from the on-board 8 KB RAM. Yes, I spent countless hours playing Star Raiders. It was not as capable as the Atari ST, but it was a fun system that booted up instantly!]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday October 03 2021, @05:59PM (21 children)
The Atari had one large fault that was quite hard to get passed. It wasn't an Amiga. If things had been somewhat different tho in ye' old corporate structures there might not have been an Amiga or well the Amiga would have been an Atari and that would have been that.
I can't really share any user experiences. After all I was an Amiga guy and the Atari was the sworn enemy that was at the same time inferior in every way shape and form. I do have an Atari 1040ST in a box, bought it at some thrift store (or whatever they are called) a few years ago for cheap. Figured I would one day do something interesting or have a look at it. Beyond that I don't really have any ATARI experiences beyond arcades and early pong consoles.
Still news like this pops up from time to time. Some place uses ancient machine to do something. I recall some news about some polish garage that still used a C64 (2) , there was that school somewhere that had an Amiga to run the heating system (1). So for him to run his own camping site on a machine seems in line. Uncommon and funny at the same time. The interesting thing here is that he either maintains it himself or that machine is one day away from probably total breakdown.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-06-14-amiga-controls-school-district-hvac.html [engadget.com]
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2017/11/27/auto-shop-poland-still-using-commodore-64-run-shop/ [geeksaresexy.net]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Sunday October 03 2021, @06:26PM (2 children)
Lmao. Yeah, that was the Win/Mac; Android/iPhone fanboy thing of the late 80s.
The Amiga was over twice the price, and had stability issues as it was released prior to being fully baked for financial reasons. It had a multitasking OS far ahead of any other consumer system, and more possibilities for expansion and upgrade. The video toaster was a big deal.
The Atari had built in Midi (was visible in musician equipment racks for years). It had a laser printer that'd use the Atari for some of the heavy lifting via an external DMA port for faster render times. The printer cost 1/2 of a Laserjet and could print complex pages in half the time. (a friend typesetting a mail order magazine ad - less than 20 min for the Atari+Atari laser vs 45 internally on the LJ - it was a complex ad). The system chips apparently used the 68K in 'reserved for future use' ways that prevented the use of later processors while maintaining compatibility. It did catch on in Europe more than in the US so I was using terminal server access to get files via kermit/telnet back then. (and play on Muds - Darker Realms!)
Oids and Dungeon Master were two stand out games for it. (SpeedBall is excellent too)
I've still got one working. The original 5 1/4 half height ST251 84 meg SCSI drive died with a bang and cloud of smoke this year. I replaced it with a 1 gig Conner 3 1/2 drive I set aside in case of need. Sadly the Conner is just as annoyingly loud at idle, but without the neat jet engine start sounds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03 2021, @09:10PM
Whoah flashbacks. Darker Realms! Lambdamoo! RetroMud!
Good times. Not quite as old as LoTRD or OO][ levels but still.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @03:34PM
I hard crashed the Atari ST on one of my first uses. I don't even think I was trying to crash it. Desktop GUIs weren't that stable in those days.
But yeah, what I remember the Atari ST being popular for was the MIDI stuff.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Sunday October 03 2021, @06:28PM (11 children)
Lots of hacked hardware is available for the Atari ST. I'm using a Joystick->USB mouse adapter. The original mouse tails were poor quality and I just got the adapter when my last good one failed.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday October 03 2021, @06:44PM (10 children)
I'm sure there are a lot of nice new "hacks" available for it just like there is for the various Commodore machines, early Apple machines and the Speccy. In some regard it's almost funny that a lot of them have better (and more powerful) hardware in them then the actual machine but I guess that is besides the point.
I stopped doing mechanical harddrives for the old machines and went with various SCSI2SD or IDE2SD solutions. They are fast, fairly cheap to build etc. The main issue I have with them is that it doesn't appear that SD cards are really designed for being used as harddrives or harddrives in such settings cause they have a horrific failure rate so it becomes a bit insecure in that regard. But then if it fails you just get another SD card and stick it in there and things are fine again (if you kept backups of all your data and such).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ncc74656 on Sunday October 03 2021, @08:16PM (9 children)
Case in point: the VidHD is an HDMI adapter for the Apple II. It's an Orange Pi Zero running on a carrier board (with a second ARM-compatible microcontroller and level shifters to go between 5V and 3.3V) that sits in an Apple II slot, monitoring the bus for accesses to soft switches and the various chunks of memory that hold the text and graphics screen contents. All Apple II and IIGS video modes get redrawn in 1080p, with various options for rendering colors in the 8-bit modes: monochrome, NTSC, IIGS RGB (which was slightly different from NTSC), and possibly some other options that don't come to mind right now.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday October 03 2021, @08:54PM (8 children)
I would say that the Raspberry in one for or another seem to be a core component of most of these little hacks. Be it to fix the video or to increase processing power or to create "fake" harddrives etc. They are wonderful in that regard in that they are small and cheap and fairly easy to work with. The various HDMI adapter and so are common I would say for all the 8-bit and 16-bit machines now. Some of it has to do with crisper images but a lot of it also has to do with just finding a monitor to connect it to that works since new televisions and monitors doesn't always want to sync to various old graphic signals. After all it's not like they are really offering up HD quality graphics or anything. But you can get "pixel perfect" images etc. Which is nice.
This works with RGB2HDMI for most of the old Amigas.
https://github.com/c0pperdragon/Amiga-Digital-Video [github.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 04 2021, @04:15PM (7 children)
The Raspberry Pi is a great example of why one shouldn't hold on to museum/junk pile pieces of technology anymore. Unless, you're really just collecting the tech. As opposed to, I might want to use X program / play X game in the future. You are much better of emulating / using better, newer hardware, that doesn't use the same amount of power and produce as much heat as a heater.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @04:49PM (6 children)
If it was just about that then yes there are usually always things that are better from that point of view, if the emulation is proper etc. Sometimes there are differences.
That said a large part of the old hardware is nostalgia and quite frankly the Pi doesn't induce nostalgic feelings when using, at least not in me. That said I am aware that it might be a bit of hypocrisy involved in getting then various kits to "enhance the experience" so to speak instead of sitting there say inserting floppies or playing tapes instead of just pushing a button and skipping the whole load time that was the previous norm. But it's super convenient to have like a cartridge with an SD card in it that can more or less contain every piece of software ever written for the platform in question etc.
In some regard it's kind of messed up cause the machine can now do things it couldn't when it was current or do things that was very much out of my reach (money and access vise) back in the day.
So yes a lot of it is nostalgia, other things (for me) is that I like the old machine cause in some regard I can actually follow what is happening and that I know the machine. The newer and more modern it gets the less connected I feel to hardware.
I see it as my dad has his vintage car(s), he likes them. He can work on it and fix all the things etc. He can take it out for a ride when he likes etc. He has a new car to, electric and everything. But he still keeps the Thunderbird around.
I like to have my old computer, I can fix it and do things with it. Inducing warm fuzzy feelz (or sometimes massive levels of annoyance). Something running MAME, UAE or Vice or whatever emulation you want to run doesn't do.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 04 2021, @05:08PM (5 children)
My wife likes to curb stomp my warm fuzzy feelings about old technology, that I am never going to use. Also, something like a Raspberry Pi is massively superior in performance, headache reduction, etc. than original hardware.
Most of the nostalgia for me was the software. I like not having to lug around 15 inch monitors that weigh 50 pounds. Unfortunately, there is no Raspberry Pi like x86/x86-64 device, at least not in that price range. I'm not interested in paying $200-$300 for a system that can't play modern games.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @05:45PM (2 children)
Ah you upgraded to far. Girlfriend (or fiance or whatever) thinks all I do is cute and charming (or so I pretend), I fear that the wife upgrade will change all that.
I'm not monitor nostalgic, I don't care for CRT in that regard. I don't miss like having that 50kg of tube on my desk. That said I have fond feelz about for monochrome monitors (monochrome orange > monochrome green > monochrome black/white).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 04 2021, @09:01PM (1 child)
Fiance is when you ask them to marry you and they say yes. In the event that's not happened and there's no wedding planned, still a girlfriend.
Though, in some places (most places?), if you've been living together for X period of time, it's called a "Common Law Marriage". In which case, you may as well be married.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 04 2021, @09:06PM
Apparently a woman is called a Fiancée, while a man is a Fiancé. Pronounced the same, but written different. I probably learned that at some point and promptly forgot.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Monday October 04 2021, @08:20PM (1 child)
There's the Rock Pi X, with an Atom x5-Z8300. With 4 GB RAM, prices start at $65. (1 and 2 GB RAM configurations are also available.) The most expensive configuration is still under $100. I have one running as a Kodi box that (unlike the Raspberry Pi) can play video in a web browser. This makes sites like Rumble and Odysee usable on it, where a Raspberry Pi can only play YouTube, and only with the YouTube plugin for Kodi.
As for "modern games," wouldn't you just use any run-of-the-mill PC for those? Shoehorning them into running on an SBC seems pointless.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 04 2021, @08:58PM
Ah, that was in reference to a $200-$300 computer.
The only Rock Pi X in stock that I could see was some random Amazon vendor for $126. E-bay wasn't much better, either. Whereas I can get a $55 Pi 4 4GB shipped from the USA.
This is what I was thinking of when I was thinking x86/x86-64 Single Board Computer. https://shop.udoo.org/en/bolt-boards/ [udoo.org]
Which kind of stretches that definition a bit as the RAM is sold separately, but uses standard RAM sticks.
I did eventually find this thing, though: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N298F2B/ [amazon.com]
Too bad, you have to wire your own power supply and/or buy a breakout board to do so. Which is partly why I've never given it too much thought. I do have a soldering iron now, though.
Something like the UDOO Bolt would be awesome, but again, it's a $300-$400 computer. The go-to example Rock Pi X, I've never actually seen in stock or at the Pi4 price level.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03 2021, @06:59PM
The biggest problem with the Atari for me was the name. My parents wouldn't buy me an Atari computer because they thought it would be too much for games. At least I finally got a C64, and used it... for games, but learning too. I think the Atari may have been just as open as the C64, with the ability to PEEK and POKE stuff, unlike that lousy TI/99-4A which AFAIK wouldn't let you access the hardware like that without a pricey expansion card. It took at least a year of begging, maybe 2 to get that thing replaced and it set me back. Because of the expensive peripherals, I was limited to what I could type in and run (in BASIC) before the machine was shut off for the night or somebody wanted to watch something on the TV! Not knowing anything about computers, my folks got pulled in by the Bill Cosby ads. I was hating Cosby years before many other people, for an entirely different reason.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03 2021, @08:40PM (4 children)
Back in the day, a friend of mine had an Atari ST and I had an Amiga 1000. We would good-naturedly argue about which was the better system, but in all honesty I had to admit the Atari ST was way better than the Amiga for sound and music production. My friend did things with sound on his machine that the Amiga couldn't match, while the Amiga of course whipped the Atari in the graphics department.
But what it came down to, was that he loved his Atari, and I loved my Amiga, and that was that. Today's machines aren't fun, they're just spy devices for our dystopian would-be overlords.
God I'm old. And bitter, don't forget bitter.
(Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Sunday October 03 2021, @08:48PM (1 child)
... are you sure you are not just blitter? I'll be here all week ...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @12:21AM
... Say goodnight Agnus ...
(Score: 1) by crm114 on Sunday October 03 2021, @10:02PM (1 child)
10 print "This TRS80 is overpriced and this store stinks"
20 goto 10
I miss the old days.
[another old geezer]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @12:16AM
(S) was the start address of the video ram
(M) was how many bytes of it there were
(T) was the total amount of memory
I used to know these numbers, but I don't remember them now. Getting old. :(
10 For X = 1 to 10000
20 Print ;
30 Next X
40 For Y = 1 to 10000
50 C = rnd * 255
60 L = (S) + rnd * (M)
70 Poke (L, C)
80 Next Y
90 C = rnd * 255
100 L = rnd * (T)
110 Poke (L, C)
120 GOTO 90
The first for loop would rapidly clear the screen and then make it sit there for a couple of minutes looking like it was doing nothing while you wandered away across the store. Then for a couple of minutes it would draw random spots all over the screen until it was fully trashed, then the last GOTO loop started randomly poking memory until it had a *really* hard crash.
Probably a criminal offense these days under CFAA.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Monday October 04 2021, @12:27AM (3 children)
I used an Atari 1024STe in the 1992/1994 period, mainly for music production. It had dedicated MIDI ports. You could put the Atari down on the desk, plug in the power, the monitor and your stack of MIDI equipment and you were ready to rock. To this day, nothing comes close to its simplicity and reliability for sound production. We may be able to do multi-channel at ten times the bit-rate, but nothing yet compares to my level of trust that the Atari would perform exactly as expected when required.
That being said, when someone kicked the power cable out, the machine would take a solid ten minutes to load the software from floppy (I never got to use an Atari with a hard disk). To put that into perspective, 1994 was the year I saw my first gigabyte hard disk - a SCSI unit connected to a digital audio recorder that probably cost as much as a decent used car.
Those Ataris were also "blessed" with a dongle slot.
GEM was an absolute dog of an operating system. It somehow managed to combine the worst features of an operating system with the worst features of a graphical environment. You had to use the mouse. Everything was made needlessly complicated. And it was ugly.
My other prevailing memory of the Atari 1024STe was the keyboard. It felt like you were typing into a sponge and it sapped the energy right out of your fingers. It wasn't sweet as the Apple IIe or snappy like the IBM Model-M, but fluffy and horrible. I'm glad I never had to type an essay on that machine.
Debian has a emulator called hatari. (And now I will be humming Henry Mancini's _Baby Elephant Walk_ from the film Hatari! for the rest of the day!)
I do not miss the days of single-tasking, clunky computers and the constant sound of floppy drives chugging away. I am glad I saw that era because whenever I sit down at my computer, I simply flick the mouse and I am ready to work, connected to the greatest collection of human knowledge ever assembled... an I briefly remember how far we have come.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @01:25AM (1 child)
Interesting story about the 1MB Atari ST, this was created in Europe, possibly Germany, and sold at the time as the "Mega ST". Got back to the US after seeing it all over the place and couldn't see it for sale in the US at all. Called Atari US and they'd never heard of it, "we don't make a 1MB ST". They eventually released an equivalent in the US as the 1040ST, which was different from the German(?) Mega ST. It was quite a surprise to me at the time that something that seemed to be everywhere in Europe didn't even exist in the US where Atari was based, and that Atari US, or at least their customer support people, seemed to have no knowledge of it.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @01:34AM
Just re-read the story:
He could well have bought the 1MB ST in 1985 because it would have been the German(?) version that Atari US didn't know existed. OTOH I remember the branding as "Mega ST" not "1040 ST" and from the video the badge says "1040 ST", so who knows...
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday October 04 2021, @02:26AM
The keyboard is indeed a spongy mess. The mega detachable keyboard was at least a bit better.
Gem: If you loaded TurboST it replaced the code for some of the OS graphics routines for a significant performance boost. Not perfect, but no longer too annoying.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday October 04 2021, @01:10AM (5 children)
Yeah, we took a giant step backwards in that department. Now we're back to the old days of waiting for the TV to warm up. I mean, really, software drivers? 600 megabytes to run a printer??
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @04:38AM (3 children)
When you can put your entire OS on an eprom or two it really does wonders for the loading speed, certainly compared to floppies or harddrives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @04:37PM (2 children)
The Amiga had a fully multi-tasking operating system in less than 880K. If you stripped it down to leave space on the floppy you could get it under 400K.
I put a 40MB GVP hard disk / memory unit on my A500. 1 meg chip ram + 8 meg fast ram and it went from power off at the wall to fully booted in 12 seconds. It is a beast of an A500. :) I might have to look into one of those raspberry PI video upscalers though, the 1084S is getting a bit fuzzy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday October 04 2021, @04:51PM (1 child)
Might I also suggest looking into building a PiStorm accelerator for the A500.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:54AM
Cool. You might have just determined my next project when I get some free time. I'll try it on a spare A500. (I have about five. People kept giving them to me when they downgraded to PCs. :) )
(Score: 3, Touché) by Marand on Monday October 04 2021, @02:01PM
Depends on your hardware and OS. I can get from GRUB to login in about 5s on a Ryzen laptop with NVME storage, which isn't *instant* but is close enough. It actually takes longer to get past the UEFI "bios" than it does to boot Debian, but only because it's intentionally delaying for user input. Also none of those insane printer driver packages Windows has, either.
It's taken decades but we finally got back to suitably fast boot times, assuming you don't use a toy OS whose only real value is playing PC games.
(Score: 2) by optotronic on Monday October 04 2021, @01:48AM
I bought an Atari ST in the late 80's, I think, as an upgrade from my Atari 800XL which was upgrade from my Atari 400 (like martyb, I played a lot of Star Raiders). It was much more powerful and faster. Eventually I got a hard drive connected to it, as I recall.
I used the machine for college classwork, including several programming classes. C development was a lot easier than on the 8-bit Ataris because the C compiler was much closer to standard, compiling was faster, and the editor was a lot better. I did some preliminary programming using GEM, although developing for early GUI environments was a real chore back then with the available tools.
When I got my first real programming job, the Atari ST was less interesting because I was spending so much time on PCs and Macs and learning ST development seemed like a dead end. When I moved out of state in the mid 90's I sold all my Atari hardware.
My friend and former business partner used his ST in a band because of the MIDI capabilities. I remember him telling stories about the band leader having to buy time between songs so the new music could be loaded from floppy.
I think I miss my 8-bit Ataris more because I learned (and did) so much more on them than the ST. But now a Raspberry Pi is so much more powerful and putting up with 8-bit programming quirks is more tedious and frustrating compared to current practices.