The ST used the PC/MS-DOS 720kB disk format. You should be able to read 'em on any PC. You may want to recover those media now -- magnetic media deteriorate with age.
The Atari 8-bits did indeed have great graphics for the time, but I wouldn't call them flops. They did well for years. Here's a particularly inspired hack:
The Atari XL/XE chipset's designers went on to build the Amiga, while under Commodore's former boss, Atari ended up building the ST in response, out of relatively cheap COTS parts.
As I said in a previous post, I consider the ST to be what the Sinclair QL /should/ have been: a well-made budget 68000 box.
But Atari entered an established market, and the signs were clear what to do. GUIs were the new big thing, and there was a space between the Mac (clever OS, monochrome, mono sound, expensive and very proprietary and unexpandable) and the Amiga (whizz-bang graphics and sound using fancy chips, fancy multitasking OS, but cheap and expandable).
The ST was cheap and expandable. It had a fancy GUI, using an off-the-shelf bought-in OS. It has colour graphics and sound as good as the previous generation of 8-bits, if no better. It was good enough, and at least $100 cheaper.
The QL was too early. It predated the Mac, although not the Lisa, but then, the Lisa was a flop. It wasn't yet clear that GUIs were the future, so the QL was a sort of super-turbo 8-bit with multitasking.
The problem seems to be that they're single-sided disks.
Maybe I was a bit harsh on the 120XT, but I ended up wishing I'd bought an Electron (there were dirt-cheap second-hand ones around then) or saved up a bit and bought a BBC Micro. It wasn't bad as a games machine (I spent some happy hours with Missile Command), but it got eclipsed by the Commodore - and later by the ST, of course.
I guess I always had a soft spot for them. All the models were good in their way. CBM only had a few hits & many many failures and flops.
In the '70s, the PET. In the early '80s, the VIC-20 and C64 (the latter in various models). Then the Amiga and that was it.
And there were downsides, especially to the C64. The VIC-20's 20-column text was horribly blocky. The C64 had a terrible BASIC, the disk drives were dog-slow, etc.
The Atari 8-bits did indeed have great graphics for the time, but I wouldn't call them flops. They did well for years. Here's a particularly inspired hack:
http://www.bytecellar.com/2012/08/03/liber809-the-motorola-6809-gets-a-new-platform/
The Atari XL/XE chipset's designers went on to build the Amiga, while under Commodore's former boss, Atari ended up building the ST in response, out of relatively cheap COTS parts.
As I said in a previous post, I consider the ST to be what the Sinclair QL /should/ have been: a well-made budget 68000 box.
http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46833.html
But Atari entered an established market, and the signs were clear what to do. GUIs were the new big thing, and there was a space between the Mac (clever OS, monochrome, mono sound, expensive and very proprietary and unexpandable) and the Amiga (whizz-bang graphics and sound using fancy chips, fancy multitasking OS, but cheap and expandable).
The ST was cheap and expandable. It had a fancy GUI, using an off-the-shelf bought-in OS. It has colour graphics and sound as good as the previous generation of 8-bits, if no better. It was good enough, and at least $100 cheaper.
The QL was too early. It predated the Mac, although not the Lisa, but then, the Lisa was a flop. It wasn't yet clear that GUIs were the future, so the QL was a sort of super-turbo 8-bit with multitasking.
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Maybe I was a bit harsh on the 120XT, but I ended up wishing I'd bought an Electron (there were dirt-cheap second-hand ones around then) or saved up a bit and bought a BBC Micro. It wasn't bad as a games machine (I spent some happy hours with Missile Command), but it got eclipsed by the Commodore - and later by the ST, of course.
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https://strecover.codeplex.com/
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I guess I always had a soft spot for them. All the models were good in their way. CBM only had a few hits & many many failures and flops.
In the '70s, the PET. In the early '80s, the VIC-20 and C64 (the latter in various models). Then the Amiga and that was it.
And there were downsides, especially to the C64. The VIC-20's 20-column text was horribly blocky. The C64 had a terrible BASIC, the disk drives were dog-slow, etc.
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