| ▲ | zabzonk 8 hours ago |
| > But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time. The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master. I think many others may have similar thoughts. |
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| ▲ | rjsw 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications. |
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| ▲ | sys_64738 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| GEM was in TOS on the later Atari ST models. TOS was named after Jack Tramiel, Tramiel Operating System. |
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| ▲ | car 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones. As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe. |
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| ▲ | zabzonk 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe. Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something. | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle. Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle. | | |
| ▲ | msephton 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale. |
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| ▲ | TMWNN 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms. |
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| ▲ | zabzonk 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time. | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time. | | |
| ▲ | TMWNN 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | >I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all. Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989. | | |
| ▲ | msephton 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC. | |
| ▲ | zabzonk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > WordPerfect beat them all. It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones. I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work! | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late. https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php | | |
| ▲ | TMWNN 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero. Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product. |
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