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I have a love/hate relationship with Atari's 16-/32-bit line of computers. I've owned quite a few Atari 1040 STs over the years as they were relatively common here in the U.S.A., but I never owned one when they were "current." The hardware was not of the greatest quality but generally passable (except those junk mice, yuck!). The games, applications, and operating system were all a little different than anything on a PC, though. I could never put my finger on exactly what felt different about games, but there was something...
In 2000, I had the chance to buy an Atari TT030, complete with 16MB TT RAM and 4MB ST RAM for only $100. I jumped at the opportunity, and now I'm the owner of a heavily upgraded TT030.
The TT030 system box is a fun, little desktop pizza box. It's fun, but not especially interesting. The ports, though, are a delight. Like its cheaper breatheren, the TT has MIDI ports, an insane-looking floppy connector, and the ASCI port, which is really only useful for Atari laser printers with this computer. Unlike the cheaper machines, though, it also features a true 25-pin SCSI port, a VGA port, four serial ports, two of which hide a VME connector for a single expansion card. The presence of a VGA port instead of Atari's proprietary monitor connector is such a relief. I usually connect mine to a big, old Dell flat panel these days. Having SCSI means I can connect (what used to be) common, commodity hard drives to this beast. Mine sports a 9GB 10k SCSI drive that is far too fast for this little machine.
My TT does have some upgrades, though. I ditched the Atari 16MB RAM expansion for a much bigger 64MB RAM expanstion, a MagnumTT board, I think. I also purchased a very early prototype of a Galaxy VME graphics card (serial number 3) new from its designer in the early 2000s. With these upgrades, I was almost able to use this 68030 computer as my primary computer.
It seems important to point out now that, even though this machine was considered "professional," it still came with a detachable keyboard that was miserable to use and a regular, old Atari mouse. Both of these are awful and unusable. If I had bought a TT for, I don't know..., $3000 new, I'd be pretty furious.
Atari computers ran an operating system called TOS, which was a mishmash of something called GEMDOS (basically the equivalent of MS-DOS) and GEM, Digital Research's GUI entry from the '80s. Basically, TOS looks like a really ugly, unpolished Macintosh ripoff. It also feels "squishy," which is not how you want a user interface to feel. I still feel that with a lot of Linux desktops and recent versions of macOS even though there are multiple cores at many GHz powering them. Windows generally doesn't feel like that unless it decides to upgrade, scan for viruses, or report to Microsoft the last keyword you typed when searching for porn.
Plain TOS stinks, especially if you're trying to do something modern-ish these days. My TT030 runs an operating system called MiNT, which used to mean "MiNT is Not TOS," but now means "MiNT is Now TOS," I guess. MiNT is basically a shimmed-in BSD kernel (far from any of the modern BSDs, so totally unrelated at this point) to provide preemptive multitasking. Oddly, this wasn't the only Atari-compatible preemptive multitasking operating system for Ataris; there was also MagiC, a commercial alternative which one of my friends insisted on using. It felt cleaner, honestly.
So MiNT doesn't actually provide an interface, so you have to load on top of it a whole shit-ton of modules to get an Atari user interface up. Historically, I would run:
The whole thing is like stacking blocks one on top of the other. Thankfully, most of the commercial software from the early 2000s when I bought this nonsense new was pretty stable and functional. Back then, there was still a trickle of new software being released, and FreeMiNT gave me a complete UNIX-like command line as well to mess with. I enjoyed it.
Recently, I pulled the old TT out again to play and decided to do some more upgrades. I bought a NetUSBee expansion to get Ethernet and USB (so I wouldn't need that damn Atari mouse) for fun. That's when I entered the world of "current" Atari operating system software.
The damn USB drivers weren't introduced until FreeMiNT 1.18, and the keyboard and mouse drivers are only available in nightly builds of 1.19, which isn't stable. Fantastic... That meant a software upgrade. Guess what else didn't work? N.AES would no longer work with modern FreeMiNT, so I was forced to use XaAES. XaAES is part of the FreeMiNT project, but its historically buggy as hell. It has improved, but I hate it. It feels like it was developed to "just barely working on my machine" and then left alone. Also, really common things like the ISO9660 driver hasn't been around since the early 2000s, apparently, so forget about connecting the SCSI CD-ROM here.
After the upgrade, the operating system stack now feels like stacked stones rather than blocks, all uneven and ready to topple in a brisk wind. The USB drivers for keyboad and mouse definitely disappointed me; the keyboard wasn't usable because of how polling was used to check for key events.
The most common way to install FreeMiNT is using the EasyMiNT distribution, but that author took off years ago, leaving a pretty old collection of rpm packages that make these computers pretty unusable by todays standards.
There are a few people who still patch and release updated GNU compiler archives, but they've been pretty hit-or-miss (mostly miss) as to whether they work at all. After a few months, I couldn't take it any longer. The TT is back on a shelf until I forget how bad the software situation is.
I did chat with a few Atari users regularly on Mastodon. They were great! I was posting little pictures of a GEM worm game that I had written, and we conversed a bit now and then. That was fun!
One Atari developer, though, found my rant about the NetUSBee. He quickly pointed out that he couldn't replicate the bonkers issues I was seeing with the keyboard driver (it wouldn't recognize the key release because it was too busy to poll, ugh) on his TT that had an entirely different USB interface device. He also pointed to an error I had in a screenshot compiling Bash that was because I had a "buggy make utility." It's the one that came with EasyMiNT...
The next time I heard from him was when I was tagged on a GitHub bug report about my USB issues that was "Closed" by him because it couldn't be replicated. That forced me to speak up and point out that I was not trying any new builds because at least the damn software stack booted. Also, saying that the USB drivers worked but occasionally dropped keys does not constitute a working USB driver. It was all very odd and came off as quite aggressive.
I've had run-ins with Atari community members in the past. Generally, I try to steer clear of them. I just want this computer to work, though with a modern software stack, it barely does. Best to leave it in the closet.