Sounds of the Atari ST
Listen Up!
I’ve had my Atari Mega STE set up in my office for over a year now. Although I don’t use it a lot, I really like having it behind me. It’s fun to fire it up and play a quick game or do some research for a Goto 10 post.
Playing games on it had been less fun than it could be because I did not have any speakers hooked up to it. Since I’m using a LCD display instead of a standard Atari monitor with a built-in speaker, there is no sound.
Finding Speakers for my Mega STE
Fortunately, unlike a regular ST, an STE has L/R audio output jacks. With a RCA to 1/8” cable, I was able to use headphones with it, but that just wasn’t the same.
I’m actually using a ST video output to VGA adapter, which does provide a separate 1/8” audio output jack as well. The STE output is stereo and feels like it would be better quality, though.
I really wanted to hook up some speakers, but the desk on which the Mega STE sits is rather small so there’s not much room for speakers. I recently upgrading my main Mac’s speakers to the Mackie CR2-X which meant that my older Bose Companion 2 Series 2 speakers became available.
I thought I might hook those up to the STE, but they proved to be just a bit too large for the desk. So the Atari was still speakerless.
But then I came across, in my basement of retro stuff, some old speakers that had a retro feel: the Labtec LCS-150. I could not find exactly when these were released, but I feel like they were a popular computer speaker in the 90s. Here you can see them in my setup.
These speakers are quite small and match the color of the STE case pretty well. They can be powered using C batteries (!) or a power cord. It was able to find an old Archer (RadioShack) universal adapter with a plug that works great with it, to keep the retro theme going.
In this closeup you can see that these speakers definitely have a retro look to them. They also don’t look very high-quality. And to be honest, the sound coming out of these speakers is not great. There is a “Bass Boost” button that improves the sound over-so-slightly, but there just isn’t much bass to boost in them.
Since the Mega STE pre-dates MP3s and is not really powerful enough to play them, the only things I really need sound for are games, demos and perhaps MOD files. As I recall, MOD files were fun to listen to back in the day, but I don’t have any currently. Perhaps this is something I should investigate further.
The ST Sound Chip
Getting back to the sound, the ST had a rather modest sound chip, the Yamaha YM2149F which was a slightly upgraded version of the General Instrument AY-3-8910 that was used in Spectrum, MSX and other computers and even specific arcade games such as Gyruss.
That chip provided perfectly fine sound. It was nothing special, although with the power of the 68000 it was made to do some impressive things. Still, the Amiga had better sound capabilities and even the sound chips in the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit were better in their own ways. But the ST was built for a low cost, so custom silicon for a sound chip was not in the cards.
AMY: What Might Have Been
AMY was a sound chip designed by Warner Atari and was included with the Tramiel Atari purchase. It was originally thought this would be the ST’s sound chip, but Atari was never able to get it to work reliably and had to fall back to the Yamaha chip (which also had useful I/O capability).
By all accounts, AMY could create impressive sound, but it never reached the light of day.
Here’s a quote from Creative Computing about AMY:
Calling it an "advanced music synthesizer on a chip," Kerr tagged the advent of AMY as a "breakthrough," and said that the custom processor is capable of "symphonic quality sound." It features up to eight fully independent multi-timbre voices comprised of 64 separate and software-configurable oscillators, which can easily change sonic characteristic on the fly. AMY handles 10.75 octaves, from 4.8 Hz to 7.8 KHz which encompases the dynamic range of an 88-key piano.
STE Improves Sound Slightly
When the STE was released in 1989 it had some minor improvements, some of which were to its sound capabilities. From the STE Developer Addendum, there is this note about the sound:
Sound on the STE has the ST sound as well as 8 bit stereo DMA sound with variable playback frequencies.
Back in the day, few things really took advantage of these new features. Personally, I was just happy to get the L/R RCA audio output jacks!
You can hear what the STE sound was capable of in this more modern Xenon 2 video:
Plus MIDI
No discussion of the ST sound capabilities is complete without at least acknowledging its MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) ports. Although these did not enhance the sound of the ST in any way, they did allow the ST to easily connect to and control sound equipment such as synthesizers and drum machines.
Apparently the MIDI ports were a last-minute addition after it was realized the the ST was going to have use the Yamaha sound chip. For a few pennies more, Atari added MIDI ports to give it some extra marketing bullet points.
This turned out to be a genius move as it enabled the ST to become rather popular in the music industry and kept it alive well into the 90s and beyond. I suspect there are still some folks out there using an ST with Notator even today!
After the break paid members can watch some videos of demos that I recorded from my Mega STE. There are some cool sounds and pictures to enjoy!