Nowadays, the Atari brand belongs to Ex-Infogrames.
Used to build 8 and 64 bits consoles (Atari 2600/5200/7800, Atari Lynx, Atari Jaguar), 8 bits computers, the famous Atari ST (16 bit) and less famous Atari Falcon (32 bit)
8 bit
16 bit
The Atari ST were released in 1985-86...
They were famous for being :
- Inferior to the Amiga yet still better (the war still rages on nowadays).
- A hardware Midi Port : this spawned a generation of Musician Geeks.
- used widely in Amstrad CPC software developments (mostly games ?).
Its use in CPC development (Cross Development) had many advantages :
- Quite similar Video Resolutions : 320x200x16.
- Possibility of a good GUI : easier, really.
- Same Sound Chip : almost.
- Quite powerfull to calculate sweet Data Compression (used in Xyphoes Fantasy)
The original machine was followed up by the Atari STE which added new features:
- 4096 instead of 512 colour palette
- Horizontal and Vertical hardware scrolling (also called hardware windowing of large virtual screens)
- Blitter
- 8 Bit DMA stereo sound (Up to 50 KHz replay rate)
- 256KB EPROM containing the TOS, socketed
- Four 30-pin SIMM-slots, for up to 4 MB RAM
- Extended and analogue capable joystick ports
Links
- Atari Mania Games database of everything Atari
- Atari at the English-language Wikipedia
8-bit
- https://atariwiki.org Atari 8bit wiki
- Altirra Hardware Reference Manual Latest (09/2024!) Atari XL hardware documentation
16-bit
- https://www.atari-wiki.com Atari ST Wiki
- Media:Atari ST - Hardware Specification.pdf
- Atari ST Internals
- Atari STE Service Manual
- Atari Documentation Archive
- Atari image file formats documented
- Motorola MC68000 CPU User's Manual
- Yamaha YM2149 SSG datasheet
- Western Digital WD1772 FDC datasheet
- Motorola MK68901 MFP datasheet
- Hitachi HD6301 IKBD datasheet
- 6850 ACIA chip
- Atari ST forum