Atari ST serie was very popular in Europe, more popular than Mac or Amiga at the time I believe.

Good times. Remember these?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

Yes but they were nowhere near as successful as the Atari ST or Amiga. They arrived kinda late to the party compared to the Amiga 1000 (1985) or Atari ST.

You'd occasionally see one but the personal computers scene in Europe was clearly dominated by the Atari ST and the Amiga. You'd also see a few Macintosh. The Archimedes has always been a rare sighting.

Yup, why I mentioned it. I first saw a mouse on an ST, triggering much desire compared to my Amstrad CPC-464. The Amiga arrived and that was gorgeous. I would try draw the Porsche pic pixel by pixel (https://imgur.com/gallery/jim-sachs-porsche-on-amiga-OMc99EB) on my own hand-crafted drawing program but the Amstrad has a tough time of it. Finally later got an Amiga 500. Never saw an Archimedes outside of magazines but the talk of RISC was intriguing.

> Amstrad CPC-464.

This is another jewel few people in the Americas have experienced.

Called Schneider in Germany. I never could afford the disk drive unfortunately. That used 3" CF2 disks a format that nobody knows about any longer (arguably superior to the 5 1/4 disks used by the C64 which was the main competitor).

Still got one. :-)

And unlike the ST or Mac or Amiga, its OS is still around, still FOSS, still actively maintained, and runs on modern bare-metal hardware, without emulation.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

That says a lot about success and longevity.

It has the advantage of running on ARM, which is still easy to obtain. I also think there are OSs for the Atari ST that are open-source and still maintained, but unfortunately, no 68K processors are easy to come by.

That is true.

Several ST OSes have FOSS recreations. DR's layered, cleanly-layered design lent itself to piecemeal re-implementations.

Aranym runs AFROS, with multitasking thanks to MINT, which is a compilation of FOSS bits:

https://aranym.github.io/afros.html

Aranym needed a ROM and the devs wrote a skeleton with most stuff stubbed out. This has led to a full scale ST TOS recreation, with the original's limitations: it's single-tasking and so on:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

The FreeMINT OS is also FOSS:

https://freemint.github.io/

MagiC was a 3rd party commercial re-implementation:

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/AtariX

But there's no new 68k hardware. Emu68 is working on a JIT runtime for the Raspberry Pi:

https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68

Yes a solid machine.

It might have been impressive but it had to stand next to the dazzlingly attractive Amiga.

Only for Amiga fans with a complex of some kind. I was a member of a local Atari users group and none of us were comparing to the Amiga? Mac and PC were the competitors because most of us were interested in productivity software and the like. Many were running Mac emulation on the ST and the biggest uses were MIDI sequencers and DTP.

Amiga was just something else. Impressive achievement, certainly. But for what it was I had no need to pay that kind of extra $$ just to play games better.

> dazzlingly attractive Amiga.

dazzlingly expensive as well.