HATARI, RASTARI & STOS
Emulate and code on the Atari ST
Les Pounder shows you how to emulate a titan of the 16-bit home computer era, the mighty Atari ST.
Les Pounder
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist.
The ringing of the school bell in the 80s didn’t only signal break time - it also marked the start of a computing conflict. It started over which eight-bit computer was the best. Commodore kids battled Spectrum fans, Amstrad kids launched their surprise attack! But when the 16-bit machines came along, those battlelines were forever changed. Commodore had its Amiga range of computers and Atari had the ST, but both shared a common CPU - the Motorola 68000 - and a similar form factor. The Atari ST obviously didn’t have the custom chips found in the Amiga, but it did have a small headstart on the Amiga, due to a number of legal wrangles in the mid-1980s.
The Atari ST was announced Atari’s 520ST at Consumer Electronics Show in January 1985, initially being seen as a “typical Commodore 64 style corner-cutting product” but later that year at COMDEX Atari showed off a revision of the ST which would later go on sale for $800 for a model with a monochrome monitor. Colour took the price up to just under $1,000. For your money you got a 16-bit computer with an 8MHz CPU and 512KBs of RAM. The RAM could be upgraded to 4MB, at extra cost.
The Atari ST came in many forms, but this classic design was an icon for a pioneering era in computing.
QUICK TIP
Rastari works with all models of Raspberry Pi up to 3B+. It’s a great way to reuse an old Pi that’s gathering dust in the box. The Pi can also be housed inside an ST case if you have the skills and a broken ST to hand.
The Atari ST saw many revisions. A cost-reduced version, the STFM (the model which we used) replaced the original Atari 520ST models. The M in STFM denoted that the machine had a built-in TV modulator, unlike the Amiga 500 and its wonky modulator unit.
Another revision of the Atari ST was the STE, a mode media-focused machine that had a great palette of colours (4,096 to match the original Amiga range).
The Atari ST had one thing which the Amiga lacked: MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which was a means to control an external instrument such as a keyboard. The Atari ST could also be controlled via the instrument, enabling musicians to create music on the ST and hear it played on real instruments. Musicians of the era (Pet Shop Boys, Fleetwood Mac, Gary Neuman) found the ST a cost-effective addition to their music and there are still some bands that carry on the tradition.