Those function keys were bad but why have the joystick and mouse ports underneath in that location? Awful.
Re:Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
by robinsonb5 on Sunday June 01, 2025 @10:42AM
(#44151228)
Ironically, speaking as an Amiga guy, those diagonal function keys were an aspect of the ST I really liked!
I don't know if they were consistent with the other keys in terms of feel, but they were a striking, unique design feature that instantly identified the machine as being Atari without compromising practicality.
Yeah, I forgot about that. But I suppose you didn't need to replug them very often, and it wasn't much worse than plugging into an IBM PC before USB came along. And at least the Atari had lots of useful ports.
Re:Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
by cmrdporcupine on Sunday June 01, 2025 @07:58PM
(#44154728)
Mouse cables and ports routinely broke on those machines because of the poor design.
I guess the idea was to have a clean design with cables out of the way, but it really was a bad place for them.
Laser C or Lattice C maybe?
Re:Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
by grumpyprole on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @01:13PM
(#44172289)
GEM was in ROM on the Atari ST and it was fantastic. It was light years ahead of where Windows was at the time. It was Amiga Workbench that was somewhat limited by being on a floppy disk.
Things I remember about about the 520ST:
- Those horrible diagonal function keys. There was no reason for them to be diagonal, rather than normal keys as they were on the IBM. But I've always hated function keys.
- Games like Dungeon Master (really still quite a good game today).
- Not a bad C compiler, but I can't remember who by - LightSomething?
- The GEM GUI was not so bad, but using it with a floppy disk was.
But all-in-all I was quite happy to get my PC-compatible to do serious work with.