Atari ST Software Accelerators
Turbo ST, Quick ST, Warp 9 and NVDI
The Atari ST had been out for about 4.5 years when I got my first one, a 1040ST. By this point developers were really starting to understand its inner working and some clever software and utilities were appearing on the market.
Also about this time, the Mega ST was available and it had the Blitter chip that helped speed up graphics operations, which helped give them improved performance over a standard ST that otherwise had the same 8Mhz 68000 CPU.
Although GEM was nice and easy to use, no one would call it speedy. Since it was quickly ported to the ST in late 1984 and early 1985, there was not a lot of time for optimizations. And because it is embedded in ROM as part of TOS, updating it is not trivial. By this point there had been only a single update after the 1.0 ROMs became standard in late 1985: TOS 1.02, which was the version that shipped with the Mega ST and eventually made it into the other ST computers. This version was mostly bug fixes with few performance improvements.
My 1040STfm that I got in January 1989 had TOS 1.02.
However, developers figured out that they could optimize things themselves and soon software accelerators started appearing to help speed up GEM. The first of these was Turbo ST.
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