The STe has a 4MB limit, just like the Mega ST and Mega STe. Atari produced Mega ST models with 4MB I believe. But STe models (including the Mega) all had regular SIMM sockets.
>> The ICD program was limited and there is another program put out by a German programmer which overcame most of the limitations of the ICD one. It's well-known in ST forums. <<
> I'm not following you here... ICD produced a lot of accessories for the Atari and Amiga, but they're most known for their multitude of Atari hard disk adapters.{Quote}
I was referring to the ICD program which came with most ICD HDs. IIRC it was called AHDI, and was also supplied with the Link 2. There was no implied criticism of ICD which produced some superior peripherals for the ST but had some drawbacks because of the time, including the 20meg maximum of a HD partition. The groundbreaking German program was "HDDriver" which did away with most of the problems and is still available.
> There's a lot wrong here. First of all, Atari didn't use a true SCSI port for a number of reasons, but the oft-quoted reason is that SCSI was not yet a "standard". The SCSI standard wasn't released until
1986, long after the first ST's were released. Furthermore, they were shooting for a computer under $1000. Adding SCSI chips, especially experimental ones, was an expensive undertaking. If anything, they should be congratulated for even having the foresight to include a hard disk port.
Also, the ASCI port was used for a few other things. The ASCI port allowed for DMA, which meant peripherals could read/write directly into ST RAM. This functionality is why Atari was able to produce such cheap laser printers; the printers themselves had no memory whatsoever. They relied on the Atari's RAM for everything.
Obviously, once the SCSI standard was finalized, Atari was stuck. They had already created their ASCI standard, and it couldn't be just dropped. That's why Atari TT's have ASCI and SCSI ports.
Atari had no licensing fees on the port. Anyone could produce ASCI peripherals, and a lot of companies did. ICD is just a single example.<
What you are saying is undoubtably true, but misses what most critics and former Atari technicians maintain, which is that Tramiel was convinced that the profit was in the peripherals. One example is the Portfolio which was produced by DIB, which had nonstandard ports. Tramiel rejected the Portfolio 2 which Sharp scooped up, and called the PC3000 but of course the designers had already included the same non-standard ports which could have
only been demanded by Tramiel, despite the standardization which had already occured in the industry. Similarly when Tramiel was the CEO of Commodore the Parallel port on the CBMs and Pets was non-standard long after it had been accepted by the industry.
The STe included many major inovations and changing to a SCCI port would have not produced much additional costs. Then comes the pitiful expression of advertising for the Jaguar(which was a superior gaming machine for it's time) for which Tramiel abandoned the TT and the Falcon, seeing gaming as a more lucrative field for fast cash. The winding down of Atari was disgusting in it's methods including the sale of games to Hasbro and had no sense of pride in the Atari line, but simply getting out with as much cash as possible.
>I never understood the Tramiel bashing, though. They brought us the ST line of computers along with the C64. They were cheap, sure, but that was their business strategy. Atari fought an uphill battle and made some missteps, but they probably would have been doomed regardless.
