Atari ST - the MIDI computer: models, Cubase, C-Lab, music hardware

I somehow got drawn into researching everything about the Atari ST series of computers which THE standard and each and every recording studio.
Links:
Kawai K4r (using Steem to emulate K4 editor): • New life for old synth...
The History of the Atari ST: • The History of the Ata...
Yamaha YM2149 3 voice chip: en.wikipedia.o...
C-Lab Falcon MKX: www.soundonsou...
Firebee Clone: firebee.org/fb-...
MiSTer (FPGA): www.retrorgb.c...
Infos about Ataris: www.atarimuseu...
Hatari Emulator (Linux, Macos, Windows): hatari.tuxfamil...
Steem Emulator (Linux, Windows): steem.atari.st/...
EmuTOS: emutos.sourcef...
Software:
Atari International TOS Software Catalog Winter 1992: www.atarimania...
Atari Database: www.atarimania...
Software Database: www.atariuptod...
Magazines & Books:
German Atari ST Magazine: st-computer.or...
Breaking the Borders (book): microzeit.com/...
Atari History Books: zafinnbooks.com
Software: sites.google.c...

[@mossgraber]

0:00 Introduction 1:10 History & Development 1:46 Hardware: 130ST, 260ST, 520ST 3:30 Hardware: Versions, Versions, Versions 5:05 Hardware: The Mega ST 6:05 Hardware: 4160STe 6:34 Hardware: TT 030 7:10 Hardware: STacy + STBook 7:50 Hardware: STPad + STylus 8:16 Hardware: Falcon 030 9:18 Hardware: C-Lab Falcons 10:32 Hardware: Modifications & Extensions 11:54 Clones: Apple Ad (MagiCMac), Hades, Milan, FireBee, FPGA 13:28 Atari PCs 14:00 TOS - The Operating System, MultiTOS 15:34 Emulators 15:56 Games 16:58 Music-Hardware: SMPTE & Dongle Adapters 18:40 The dawn of the DAWs: Cubase (Audio), C-Lab Creator, Emagic Logic 22:10 (Music) Software Sources 22:44 The HOTZ MIDI Translator 24:36 Magazines & Books

[@enitalp]

Nice Video. I was an Official Atari Developer (I met Tramiel at the Falcon launch in Dusseldorf) then, and I still have my 130xe, 400, 800, 520stf, Mega ST4 with its hard drive, TT030 8Mo with its laser printer, and Canon scanner. A portfolio, jaguar. Sadly, no lynx. And my falcon was lost by my brother...

[@mossgraber]

I am impressed! 🙂 Just checked the prices for 2nd hand Falcons. Insane 🤣

[@JohnSmith-pn2vl]

as a 18y old school dropout, Steve Jobs was hired as Atari employee #40, as a technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs to be able to afford some acid and a trip to india. there was no dress code at Atari, people smoking weed all day, peak innovation :)

[@mossgraber]

Yes, it is very interesting that the whole Silicon Valley evolved out of the Hippie movement. Not somethig one would expect 🙂

[@atariexplorer1545]

Nice video Jurgen, great to see more Atari based videos on YT - Long live the ST! Thanks for mentioning my books, much appreciated. BTW, your book order left Ireland today for beautiful Germany. Best regards, Karl.

[@mossgraber]

@@atariexplorer1545 Can’t wait! 😃

[@enitalp]

You should check out the "Fatboy Slim Atari" video; he shows his Cubase tracks on Atari of his famous tracks.

[@mossgraber]

Added to my playlist!

[@enemysub9057]

That would be C-Lab Creator rather than Cubase.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

Oh those good old days. 1990 me & my Atari 1040STe with Cubase ;) Mach's gut!

[@gerselent]

Wow, so amazing Video. The ATARI 1040 ST/FM was my first Computer and I have so many sweet memorys. And the last was the ATARI Falcon, but in a Tower ;D Thanks for the Video and have a nice Day ;D

[@mossgraber]

2nd hand Falcons have now crazy prices, would love to check out one!

[@reptilespantoso]

Opcode Vision Pro (last version 3.5) was there for Apple's early/middle nineties. Competing with the Atari's C-Lab.

[@thelanavishnuorchestra]

I had an Atari STe in the late 80s. I loved programming on it. I made a 3D graphics program and would program a series of frames and saved the individual individual frames to make little 3D movies. I also created Mandelbrot set zooms and other such things. To make this work nicely, I built a set of widgets, text boxes, sliders, spinners, etc. so I could make interactive UIs. I've reused that approach for web design and creating Linux apps with the same approach for GTK for standardized UI elements. I loved using the Blitter chip and made a MIDI synth that used the Blitter chip as a sound card. I did find TOS pretty lacking and had to write utilities for it. I had Cubase, but hated it.

[@mossgraber]

That's where I learned programming, too and it was so unbelievably expensive to get information about how to do it without the internet.

[@mnemo70]

Ha, it's a small world. This video was linked on a retro computer Discord I'm on. Great work, Jürgen. Remember our time on Paula? ;-) Greetings from Bremen!

[@mossgraber]

Mr. M? It is an honour to have you on my channel! 🙂

[@mnemo70]

@@mossgraber The one and only. 😀

[@OdoSendaidokai]

Very interesting to see the history, even I had an Amiga. Thank you for this overview!

[@mossgraber]

Did you know that the Amiga was designed by the guy who designed the Atari 600/800? Which means that the companies basically switched the main people. 😂

[@OdoSendaidokai]

@@mossgraber yes, but only recently because golem had some weeks ago a episode about the Amiga, where they mentioned it. Very interesting how ideas and people were floating between companies that times.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@mossgraber also fun fact is that Jack Tramiel as Commodore CEO got proposal from Amiga but he was not interested so Amiga folks went to ATARI that funded their development. And when Tramiel got kicked out of Commodore, Commodore gave money to Amiga to pay back ATARI in time so the Amiga will not end up as ATARI intellectual property as per the contract. Tramiel didnt know about this since this was Warner (ATARI owner) era contract, but probably would not jumped on Amiga anyway since the ST was half done at that time and was much cheaper to make and was even better computer then Amiga, so he would not bother... So at the end we got two great computers instead of one.

[@FSK1138]

i would love to see the Atari falcon covered in a series the falcon and Ensoniq eps / asrx were the home studio equalizer

[@mossgraber]

Yes, the Falcon is really intersting, especially I was totally unaware of its capabilities since I had switched to PC before its release.

[@Lordxfx]

This was a shitload of fun. So many ileterations of the Atari machines, never knew. Takes me back to the days where a tape deck was next to the computer. Recording data through radio transmissions. Play the data to the computer and you had a computer game. Magic back then. I still have my first computer, the TRS-80.

[@mossgraber]

Wow, never heard of the TRS-80! More things to read and learn 🙂

[@Lordxfx]

@@mossgraber To be specific a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 26-3011 Micro Color Computer. This was my father's version of a Commodore 64 . The first time I cried me a river. But it did get me in to basic programming though. : ))

[@EgoShredder]

Maybe do a video showing the IPS feature of Cubase in action? I used this back in the 1990s and will again. Pretty easy to use and gives amazing results sometimes, e.g. interesting chord progressions etc. If I remember, you could just give it a bassline and have it generate a complete chord sequence from it. You can download the pdf of "The Complete Cubase Handbook" from the Internet Archive. It has a chapter devoted to using IPS. There is both editions of the book on there; 1992 and 1995.

[@mossgraber]

Ah, good old IPS! 🙂 I forgot why they removed it but I think there was a story about it too! Thanks for the tip!

[@EgoShredder]

@@mossgraber The developer who wrote it, was no longer allowed to include it in the newer Cubase versions. Something like that. He explains it on his YT channel.

[@mudi2000a]

You forgot to mention that C-Lab later changed its name to Emagic, then at one point released a software called "Notator Logic". Then they were bought by Apple and now we have "Logic Pro".

[@mossgraber]

I mentioned the Apple buyout in the video but I was totally unaware that Emagic was formed from previous C-Lab people who took Notator with them. Thanks for pointing that out!

[@mudi2000a]

@@mossgraber ye I heard that later … I wrote the comment early on in the video.

[@DeadCat-42]

I just build an mp32 pi , sounds great on my old Atari.

[@mossgraber]

Nice!

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

Jurgen, you did some research but next time do it more exact. Lots of inaccuracies and missing details. Allow me to correct this, please. Jack Tramiel was not just working for Commodore, he was the founder and CEO of Commodore. Shiraz Shivji was working on ST for much longer then 5 months, the work started around may 1984 when he was still employee of Commodore, thats why Commodore sued Jacks ATARI. While the DRI did develop the OS for ST initially and it was based on CP/M-68, ATARI decided not to use is due to many limitations and wrote own OS, what was used was GEM GUI and some layers needed to bind it to lower levels of the OS. When ST was released in spring of 1985 in Germany and in July 85 worldwide, it was only one version, the 520ST. The 260ST came later end of September 85 and was not a stripped down version of 520ST, it was identical to 520ST. The difference was that while the 520ST was sold as a bundle with monitor (either SM124 or SC1224), mouse and floppy drive, the 260ST was sold as a computer only and you could buy all the peripherals by yourself. It was sold as far as I know in Europe only. The YM sound chip was not that crap for its time, while there was better SID chip and even the POKEY chip was better in some areas, the YM is still a proper synth chip unlike crap Amiga Paula chip. The best chip of the time was Apple IIGS chip from 1986... but I think the idea of MIDI in ATARI ST was that you could buy some Yamaha external box to have MIDI synth music in games, like it become standard a decade later in PC clones world, the cheap box promised but that never came. Check out the YM tracks made in maxYMiser to see its not that bad, check out the work of Ultrasyd (R.I.P.). The 520ST+ actually came out together with 260ST and was identical to 520ST and 260ST (had same mainboard) with the difference that it had another set of RAM chips soldered on top of the chips on mainboard, so technically the name 520ST+ was maybe a good name, since it was "just" a hacked 520ST. The 1040ST had new mainboard where every RAM chip had its own position on PCB, also it brought the new concept with the floppy build into the vedge shaped computer all-in-one design. T-as a thirty two bit is not coming from the instruction set, it is the size of registers inside the CPU. E- as enhanced, while yes it had the BLiTTER on board (but that was already on board on MegaST two years earlier), and yes it had wider palette of 4096 colours, but this was not the end of enhancement, it also got Genlock capability without need for "hacking", it got enhanced joystick ports (Jag Pad ports), but most of all and I wonder that you as a musician missed that, it got new audio shifter with stereo PCM sound that surpassed the Amiga Paula capability by far. MegaST line did not come out after STE, it came out two years after OG ST, one year after STFM and it was the ATARI approach to professional computer with external keyboard (best keyboard ST ever had), BLiTTER to accelerate the 2D graphics and expansion slot (MegaBUS) so you could upgrade without the need for soldering. And yes initially it came out as 4MB and 2MB version, the 1MB version following later. Due to fact that 1MB was bare minimum for programs like Cubase, the 2MB version was very much used in studios. Who got the ATARI SLM 804 laser printer (the worlds first GDI printer) appreciated the 4MB version. The 4160STE was not really a prototype, it was just a regular 520/1040STE that already had 4MB SIMMs installed and yes ATARI was playing with the idea to ship it like this out of factory (520/1040/4164STE models), but at the end it didnt make any sense since the SIMM upgrade was easy task for the user and it was cheaper to have fewer variants (and optically cheaper on shelf). Some fully expanded 4160STE were made and shipped to software developers, so those are not really prototypes. Today many owners of 520/1040STE often upgrade the RAM to 4MB and purchase the 41060STE tag from Poland... TT030 was introduced in 1989 in Germany, worldwide in 1990. It was developed as a UNIX V workstation project, but in time it was ready UNIX world moved up to RISC based CPUs like SPARc or MIPS, so ATARI simply used the TT030 project as a "standard" ST family evolution. The planed use case dictated the appearance of the TT003, if you look closely you can "connect" keyboard to the case so it really looks like 68k workstations from mid 1980s like AT&T PC7300 for example... The first TT030 introduced in Germany had 16MHz clocked CPU which was swiftly exchanged to 33MHz version via small CPU board that was pushed into CPU socked on mainboard. At the introduction the TT030 was the fastest Motorola based computer on market, not for long... The design is the best looking ATARI in may eyes. Also you omitted the fact that even TT030 had the audio shifter with stereo PCM like STE, and SCSI port as addition to ACSI and the biggest improvement was inclusion of Eurocard slot better known as VMEbus. Many labs (including audio research) used this slot for addon cards giving the TT030 abilities surpassing the Falcon in some scenarios. Mega STE, this is the computer you missed completely and is interesting. It is STE inside TT030 case, with SCSI port option, 16MHz cached CPU (instead of 8MHz), fast serial ports (good for comlink to audio/sampler/MIDI devices), VMEbus like TT030 The STacy was very often used by musicians as a stage gear, yes it needed power plug (so did the keyboards) but it was all in one compact design, easy to travel with and the display could be operated without emitting distracting light. In fact vast majority of STacy computers was bought by musicians. Atari STylus (1992) prototype, nope... this is not a tablet computer, this is a regular touch tablet/pen tablet, in fact it is called ATARI TOUCH TABLET and was mass produced since 1983 for 8-bit ATAIR computers. Falcon 030: no, the addition of DSP was not the reason you could do audio recordings with Falcon, in reality it was Falcon Audio chipset that allowed that, it was a combination 16-bit A/DC and 16-bit D/AC, mixer chip and small RAM buffer that allowed this, for the time this alone was the marvel for given Falcon price. The on board DSP chip allowed a lot of tricks with digital audio, like real time effects (reverb, flanger, hall...) or HDD recording/playback with real time compression but sampling was not the feature of DSP. The MagicMac is not just a emulator of ST for Mac, in fact the MagiC was a preemptive multitasking OS for ATARI ST line of computers and when the ATARI announced their parting with computers, MagiC was adopted for Macintosh computers since they were based on MC68k CPU family and there was no need to emulate the CPU, just the TOS/AES/MagiC routines. Well behaved programs that do not "hammer" the ATARI hardware directly do run pretty well on MagicMac. It was seen as savior for ATARI fans where to go after ATARI no longer supported computers. The thing is that ATARI users were always more tech savvy then Amiga or Mac users, and quickly understood that power without the price is the PC clone way... DTP and musicians as a more creative and less technical people so they went mostly for Mac. While you are correct that the TOS+GEM was single tasking environment, it had so called Desk accessories, smaller programs you could boot with and open up from desktop menu over your main running application, so there was some multitasking there to some degree, to be fair MC68000 with 512KB RAM could not do much more effectively. The first GUI based preemptive multitasking came out in 1990 and was called MiNT which later in 1992 become MultiTOS. There was also Magi!X renamed to Magic and also parallel multitasking Gemini to name some. The beauty of the OG TOS was that it did fit in ROM including the GUI so you could run a computer with GUI that didnt need HDD or more then one floppy drive for comfortable work, you didnt have that with other 16/32 bit systems. When you spoke about TOS versions maybe you should have mentioned the GNU TOS version called EmuTOS, which is free and has many features OG TOS versions didnt have. Yamaha CBX-D5, here you are completely wrong, there was no need for this Yamaha if you had a Falcon, in fact Falcon mostly surpassed functions of this Yamaha recorder. CBX-D5 and all alike recorders were actually adding Falcon030 out of the box capability to other computers without Falcon functions, you could connect it to any ST, TT030 or even Mac... There was also similar and more often used gadget from SoundPool for OG ST line. SMPTE standard, fun fact that is not know by many computer users, thanks to SMPTE and great SM124 monitor the ST was THE computer in cinema studios and TV stations controlling the audio and video synchronization and cutting on professional base. It was more used then Amiga with VideoToaster (not that they both got used for same task). Otherwise very nice and good to watch video, thank you.

[@mossgraber]

Thanks for the very detailed comment and clarifications! I did not want to dig into the whole Commodore/Atari topic, which would be a video of several hours on its own, that's why maybe the brief intro is not fully accurate. Regarding the 260ST, I thought it was clear that I was referring to the stripped down memory, but could have been phrased better. Since the 4160STE was never released I think it is fair to call it a prototype. Yes, the STacy clearly had its place and for the time it made a lot of sense. Up to my knowledge the STylus was a proper computer (e.g. see here: www.atarimuseum.de/stpad.htm) and was based on the STBook. The ATARI TOUCH TABLET is a different product. The whole TOS topic could be enlarged a lot (also with all the alternative system replacements like NVDI), maybe I will do so, if there will be a follow up video. I just found it a bit too boring ;-) AFAIK Cubase Audio requires the CBX-D5 but sure you can use the Falcon without it but I am not aware of any other solution besides Cubase Audio which gave you 16 audio tracks.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@mossgraber no the 260ST is not stripped at all, it has the very same mainboard with very same amount of memory then 520ST, the only difference is the badge. The 4160STE, again no, those were not prototypes of any sort, those were regular production or pre/production STEs equipped with 4MB RAM. Nothing to do with prototyping. Those you find and do have original badge are in fact small run production mostly supplied to developers, but that makes them released for special purpose and not prototypes. STpad yes, it is a legit concept of a pen controlled tablet based on ST hardware, few pieces were made and yes thats what we could call a prototype. But what you showed right after STpad as a 1992 model (at 8:11 timestamp) is not a computer, it is a regular pen tabled for ATARI 8-bit computers called ATARI TOUCH TABLET, I have it here. NVDI is not a system replacement, it is a VDI replacement (N-ew V-irtual D-evice M-anager) which is not a part of OS, it is a part of GEM GUI and it is the "bonding" layer between OS and GUI. No Cubase Audio Falcon does not require CBX-D5, how did you get this idea? Again, Falcon hardware is surpassing Yamaha CBX-D5 in any metric or function. I never mentioned 16 audio tracks, but that is a limitation of software and SCSI HDD+SCSI fix. If CAF can do it any other SW can do it, it is using DSP for real time compression, otherwise only 8 channels are possible. But this has nothing to do with CBX-D5. Also in fact you can do even 32 tracks at once in CAF, you just need two Falcons 😉

[@mossgraber]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 You are right, 8:11 has the wrong image. Yes, I know about NVDI, I just wanted to mention that there are much more things to talk about TOS, like PARTIAL replacements. ;-) When I start Cubase Audio it complains about the missing CBX-D5 and then exits. Could it be that this is a special version? I think I read that the was an update which could handle 16 audio tracks but not fully sure, need to check.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@mossgraber OK, my CAF does not, maybe you have some driver for CBX-D5 installed, check the MROS modules and .acc. The CAF does not need CBX-D5, what it does need is some timer for audio chipset since the Falcon default audio sample rate is 51KHz and you need either 44.1 or 48KHz for CAF, so you either need the Steinberg CAC (Cubase Audio Clock), the FDI or some card like Speed Resolution Card that is providing the alternative clock. But even without it I think it should load up. Maybe you are right and the version of CAF you have was some kind of bundle to Yamaha, but here I really dont know. For 16 tracks if Im not mistaken you dont need update, you need hardware mod called Clock Patch and SCSI harddrive fast enough to do so.

[@mossgraber]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Just came across a new interview on the Steinberg site about their history. In it they talk about that there was a version with 16 audio tracks and that there was a specific Cubase Audio version for the CBX-D5: www.steinberg.net/de/stories/charlie-steinberg-manfred-ruerup/ Could only find the German version.