It’s an Atari STe this time. This one has 2MB’s of RAM (I think, not powered it on yet) and was the spare studio machine of a musician, who used it for Cubase 2 exclusively so is in pretty good nick unlike the Amiga 500+ I picked up last year and has barely any discoloration as far as I can tell.
I never owned an Atari computer back in the day, and all my mates had Amiga’s or PC’s so my first impressions are that’s actually quite well built. Which considering the reputation Atari had for cost cutting is somewhat surprising. The internal PSU and 4 x SIMM slots are a nice touch compared to the Amiga 500 but other than that the expansion capabilities are more limited (only a cartridge port on the side, no expansion bus for accelerators or boosters like the Amiga). In theory faster 68k series CPU’s could be piggy backed onto the 8MHz 68000 CPU, and there are a few booster kits around for that, but it sounds a bit hit & miss to if they will work well as there were quite a few minor differences between batches of machines.
Anyhow, I’m waiting for a video port and mouse adapter to arrive before I can power it up.
Here it is compared to my Amiga (which is badly yellowed and could do with a retro bright)
The transaparent box to the right is my MIST which is an FPGA which can work almost perfectly as both of these machines plus many others from the 80’s & 90’s. Behind that is my HP thin client which I use with FreeDOS and a parallel port OPL3 interface for some early 90’s DOS games.