> 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.
TMWNN•46m ago
> Not so sure about this.
WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
zabzonk•20m ago
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.
tengwar2•45m ago
I can't say I'm wild about a world where Digital Research won. When they were dominant with CP/M, the tools and documentation were bad to the point where most machines had Z80 processors and DR only provided an 8080 assembler, so you had to DB significant bits of code to get the missing opcodes. Developing RSXs to access bank-switched memory under CP/M 3 could have been so much easier with a few examples and perhaps debugging tools. MS/DOS was just so much easier.
zabzonk•32m ago
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
chasil•41m ago
I only used GEM in the form of Xerox Ventura Publisher. I used it to write all my undergrad papers.
zabzonk•57m ago
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.
TMWNN•46m ago
WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.
zabzonk•20m ago