Would possibly have allowed Atari to step all over Commodore and the Atari/Commodore market wouldn't have been split like it was.Ģ) Not introducing a ST based console in 87/88. Things I've always thought were critical missed opportunities:ġ) The whole Amiga rights fiasco. Sam and Leonard running the company? Yikes. Jack's Atari was always too cheap, too focused on hardware (and nickel and diming it, to boot) over software, not developer friendly, and run too much like a small "family" business. Rolling the Jaguar graphics system in there somewhere would have also been really interesting, although I'm guessing the bottom would have fallen out anyway by 97/98. I've always felt that Atari had a pretty interesting gameplan with the "Sparrow/FX-1" (what became the Falcon) and a true 32 bit Falcon030/040 in a Microbox case (both with the DSP) as the next generation roadmap of machines but obviously lacked the resources to make it really happen, and were a year or two behind in introducing them if they really want to create a splash (although I can't recall the specific timelines around availability and cost of the chipsets involved). And the STe always seemed like something of an underwhelming upgrade at the time - too little, too late. What a tragedy it all ended up being.Įxpandability (or lack therefo) was always an Achilles heel of the ST. Whoof, can't even imagine the amount of ink that's been spilled about Atari's missed opportunities. Either that, or they needed to be buddies with Bill Gates and get tasty bailout money Kind of Voodoo vs Rendition, etc all over again.Įither way, competition is great! Just wish Atari and Commodore would have stopped competing against each other and tried to target other markets like Wintel systems did, so they could have survived. The original rant was about someone saying VR is a niche thing and will never catch on, and my argument was pointing out that with the mishmash of 3d accelerators and the attitudes back then, it still was adopted so much so that now VR is one of the things pushing the tech forward as 3D acceleration did back then! It's very similar cases where we have Oculus / Facebook doing their own store within a platform, requiring their hardware to get at their software library, and then Steam being the 'we don't care what hardware you use, just use something!' place. Only a handful of companies actually released STe enhanced games, and really hardly any that were STe specific back in the day.Īnyhow, just a random rant. Third party developers rarely took advantage of newer hardware for the Atari line anyhow, so maybe they thought about that when deciding how much above the ST the STe line would be. Pick a card, maybe a handful of games would provide patches or specific versions to utilize that card. Granted, anyone old enough to remember the 3D accelerator wars remember how terrible it was to be a PC gamer during that time. Imagine if everyone there had coded for 640kb, CGA and no sound card? The entire computer landscape would be different now. Other systems had development taking advantage of upgrades, especially the PC. I made a comment elsewhere in a rant about how Atari seemed to always get the short end of the stick when it came to development, as both the Atari 8bit and 16/32 bit systems were almost always targeted toward the lowest common denominator, like 16/48kb of ram for 8bit games, and 512kb in a lot of cases for the ST line (Shadow of the Beast being a prime example there). Or even if they provided an upgrade board to the Mega ST to get the TT Video Shifter and an 030 processor? Is something like that even possible? Sure seems like it would have been an awesome thing to have released! I mean I understand why the STe came out as it did (basically a catch up to the A500), but it seems if it weren't for Jack's race to the cheapest system, they could have released the STe with TT resolutions and an 020 making it a little closer (but not quite there) to the A1200 a few years before! I guess depending on all of the timing of it, was it a missed opportunity to include the TT Video shifter in the STe line? Was it a case of also needing a faster CPU to get a decent performance in the newer resolutions? Was just reading up on the TT and saw that they actually started developing it before the STe line.
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