![](http://16bitcreative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_20171203_123041929_HDR-1024x768-1.jpg)
I had an initial idea to do some kind of far out, surrealist inspired type photo and video shoot with an Atari ST back in late 2017, not long after I’d first launched the 16BiT Creative brand in September of that year, I’d been running with some creative ideas for around 6 weeks prior to deciding on the beach shoot at South Shields, Tyne & Wear in early December. My early computing roots with the ST started back in 1990 in a village located in the Tyne Valley of Northumberland, although I think it would be fair to say my initial spark of interest and curiosity of this machine started back in 1988 when I saw one for the first time.
Not long after I’d just launched the 16BiT Creative brand, I was inspired to put an Atari ST on the beach and do a photo and video shoot, as the brand was pretty far out and operating within the niche of vintage computing, then I felt this surreal shot would fit perfectly
In the mid-80s, my Dad moved to Riding Mill, a very exclusive village and full of interesting people, as well as some pretty nice places to explore, I used to find the people of the village very interesting and I’d always be made to feel welcome when I’d go over for the weekend, a lot of eccentrics, well heeled professionals and well off retired people lived in the village, with some very nice houses too, it was certainly a very unique place, it was kind of like a little piece of magic I could tap into at the weekends during my childhood.
One friend in particular I had over there, lived in the next village along called Broomhaugh, he lived in a detached bungalow closest to the river, so we could walk out of his front door and we’d literally be straight on to the path that led down to the Tyne, there were a few locations on that section of the bank where we put rope swings over the river, and with the help of his Dad, we’d find the best tree that swung over and with a set of ladders, we’d attach the rope, but you needed strong arms, as when you swung over, you had to make sure you held on tight, otherwise you’d end up in the drink.
This particular friend had an ST quite early on back in 1988, so when we weren’t messing around down by the river, we’d spend time playing the games from the Super Pack, which had quite comprehensive selection to go through, the games from this early era always had a very metallic look to them on the 16BiT Atari and the YM sound chip (although quite basic in comparison to the Amiga) very much had a charm of it’s own, the 3 channel square wave delivery had a very oriental sound to it, which you could hear in a lot of the game music, so that, combined with the metallic graphics, were the early contributing factors to what got me curious and initially interested in the ST, and some of those games that bring back some magical memories are the classics from the early era of Atari ST games, stuff like Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh, Marble Madness, Xenon and Zynaps.
![Xenon by The Bitmap Brothers on Atari ST](http://16bitcreative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/xenon.jpg)
Xenon, Atari ST, developed by The Bitmap Brothers, released 1988. This particular game had a certain purity over its sequel and it would be fair to say that this graphical style epitomized the early era of 16-bit metallic look games, along with smooth scrolling and arcade quality gameplay
I received the Atari ST Discovery Pack in 1990 for Xmas from my Dad and his wife, the 520STFM model, which was the 512k (half a megabyte) option with an 8MHz Motorola 68000 CPU. This machine was where computers clicked with me, the early GUI GEM desktop, a mouse and windows based system, essentially the blueprint of what modern Windows desktop machines evolved into years later, but the ST was from the early group of personal computers that set this new standard back in the 1980s, along with the Apple Mac, Commodore Amiga and Acorn Archimedes, the former two also like the ST, being based around the Motorola 68000 CPU, the latter being based around Acorns own ARM architecture processors, a CPU technology that has now evolved today into being used in a range of consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, multimedia players and other mobile devices as their reduced instruction set requires fewer transistors, therefore enabling a smaller sized integrated circuitry.
![Atari STe with hard disk and high res monitor](http://16bitcreative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/atari-ste-external-200mb-scsi.jpg)
In 1985, Atari offered a high resolution monitor option capable of 640 x 400 @ 71 Hz, making it a genuine cost effective Apple Mac alternative, so Jack Trameils 16-bit Atari machine was given the nickname ‘Jackintosh’
Even though in 1990, the ST had been around a few years, it was still current and the green GEM desktop did have a very going forward feel at the time, a feeling that I still get today from using modern desktop PCs and Macs over 30 years later. In 1985, the Atari ST offered a high resolution monitor option capable of 640 x 400 @ 71 Hz, and together with the GEM GUI, made it a genuine cost effective alternative to the Apple Mac and perfect for DTP and other applications, including MIDI. I do have some pretty tasty high resolution setups today in my wonder workshop in Newcastle Upon Tyne, although back in the day, like many of us, I was using the ST with a colour portable TV and for me, it was the same Matsui 14″ that had been on the journey with me from the Atari 2600 days, Moon Patrol, Pole Position, you know the score.
Focusing back to my activities with my early days of ST ownership, then the good thing about the Discovery Pack was the range of creativity software that was bundled with it, which included STOS – The Game Creator and Neochrome. STOS – The Game Creator (or STOS BASIC) was a dialect of the BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language, like many of us from a certain era, then when I was attending comprehensive school from the late 80s till the early 90s, I enjoyed using the BBC Micro computers, there was something deeply philosophical about the command line and BBC BASIC, which was just there and available from the system at startup, so you were straight into it, the way the machine felt certainly contributed to and aided the computational learning process, so that was when I first started with BASIC, during break times, myself and a group of friends would often get the keys to the AV room, so we could go in there and mess around with the BBCs and BASIC programming.
So, coming to STOS in 1990 when I was the new owner of an Atari ST, then I was able to pick it up well, as it was based on BASIC, but with extra high level commands for graphics and sound, so you could create games and multimedia programs using the BASIC programming dialect, and I don’t believe anything had ever been done with BASIC like this, until the Atari ST came along, being able to create such like programs in a high level language, as achieving these sort of results were previously the domain of close to the metal 68000 assembler, so we have to give credit to the developers Francois Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos for what they did here.
![STOS The Games Creator](http://16bitcreative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/STOS-the-game-creator-Atari-ST-1024x576-1.jpg)
STOS – The Game Creator manual from 1988, the first BASIC dialect to allow high level game orientated commands for graphics and sound, essentially democratizing game development
We have to give thanks to STOS, as it was the start of democratizing game development, where it had previously been the reserve of those in the priesthood, who had knowledge of 68000 assembler, so therefore STOS gave kids like myself who had an Atari ST, the opportunity to have a play around with game and multimedia type commands using the BASIC dialect, and the perfect companion to STOS was an early colour bitmap graphics program called Neochrome, released in 1985 and written by Dave Staugas, programmer at Atari Corporation and co-author of the STs operating system.
If I was to recall some of the things I used to dabble with myself in a creative capacity with STOS back in the early 90s, then I recall at the age of 13 using Neochrome to draw out a Space Harrier inspired landscape with two futuristic metal orbs, each attached and secured with lamp post sized metal poles attached to the ground, blue electricity was coming from each silver orb, I done this by using sprite commands, STOS had it’s own sprite editor, which you would use to design the sprites and then you’d write the commands with the BASIC dialect to animate, move and position the sprites on screen, so the static landscape with standing metal orbs, I created with Neochrome, then I simply positioned each sprite on each of the metal orbs via screen positioning and then ran a sprite animation sequence on each one, this provided the animation for the blue electricity around the metal orbs, at the end sequence of the electricity animation, the words ‘INFINITE DESIGNS‘ would appear.
Another friend, who I had in the village of Broomhaugh, had a Commodore Amiga 500+ around 1991/92, I must say I was always impressed by the Amiga, the machine had some very clever custom chips to handle graphics and sound and one thing that often inspired me with the demoscene style stuff I was chipping away at on the ST with STOS, was something I would refer to as an Amiga sky, which I’d often see on Amiga platform games using a parallax scrolling effect, and the sky section used a raster effect, which gave the appearance gradual blend of colour hues at different points of the sky. When I’d get back home to the ST, then I’d fire up Neochrome and have a go at creating these sky effects, although with a maximum of 16 colours on screen at any given time, I soon learned that I’d run out of colours quickly just on attempting to emulate this effect, but you have to remember the Amiga had some very special custom hardware inside it, to be able to do these techniques and the ‘Copper‘ chip could pull off some clever tricks, the Atari ST for example could achieve this effect through the use of hardware known as ‘Timer B’, which allows (amongst other things) individual palette entries to be changed on a per-line basis, but nothing really at the time could match the Amiga in terms of what it could do with its custom graphics and sound chips, it was a very smooth operator.
A few other things I recall messing around with STOS on the ST were graphic/text adventure games, they were pretty simple to create using the STOS BASIC dialect and you kind of made up the story/script as you went along, as well as the graphics, which were again produced with Neochrome, myself and a friend would take turns in designing the screens, while the other one of us wrote the code. I did also put together a GUI, which made it easier to navigate my way around file access commands, so rather than use the command line orientated method included with STOS, again using Neochrome to draw a static image with icons and then mapping certain screen position so that if those mouse was clicked then it would execute the desired command that would normally be called from the STOS command line, I recall this being some of the very last stuff I done with STOS back in 1994 before selling both my STe and STFM.
So then, if you’ve read this far, then you’ve probably worked out why the brand is called ’16BiT Creative’, I felt it was important to get the ethos of my early computing roots into the brand, so I’d like to thank you for staying with me this far and would like to welcome you to the website, some of you may already know me for doing things like putting Atari STs on beaches and some of you may know me for the work I have been involved with since launching the brand back in 2017, to read more about the history of the brand then please visit the ABOUT section.
The 16BiT Creative logo shoot on South Shields beach, December 2017, a 3D logo print was created from the original branded concept, which a 3D print was then produced by Jason Chau from Chau Digital Hong Kong