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Atari ST vs. Amiga


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Get some glasses and try looking at the desktops. Fuzzy,cartoonlike Amiga or Sharp Crisp ST. Not even close. Thousands can't be wrong just because it doesn't suit your own view.. ;)

 

Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

yes, the 2nd example is what customers and industry folk alike said.An asthetic sense.The display or choice of colors and scheme were not sharp or clear. We actually had returns related to this though nothing was actually wrong, just commodores screwed up choice for display and desktop. Did not help that the original 1080 monitor was a bit dull.

 

BTW, as I am currently working with PASTI on my STE, I have to admit that in med res the image also is of much lesser quality than high res on my Mitsubishi CRT (which is an EUM-1491A - a great quality monitor). And the original Workbench colour scheme didn't help either, instead it screamed "toy" at the consumers. This was mended with WB2, but as that was rejected by several owners (mostly the Amiga kiddie type with unexpanded 500s) due to incompatibilities to badly written software (several of those being hailed as "funzende Proggies" by Amiga kiddies here in Germany instead of deleted at an instance) and the 500+ and 600 both flopped...

 

 

Thorsten

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Then you either deal with a lot of blind charities or are talking nonsense ;)

 

Had you commented on the actual difference in proportional size of the pixels between both machines I might have listened to a future reply, but as far as RGB output goes BOTH machines are just as readable in lo-res and just as unreadable in med-res on a standard PAL/NTSC resolution tube :)

 

(the ST's lo-res pixels are a taller aspect ratio ie 20% taller.....which is why the buggy in buggy boy looks different between ST/Amiga...because they used the same graphics for both!)

 

I'd have to side with the others. I had an A1000 with the 1084 monitor. Compared to my SC1224 (and it is the JVC model), it was definitely fuzzier. Now whether or not it was the A1000, or the 1084, I don't know. But it was surely so. To be fair, I'll note that the 1084 was slightly bigger (offset somewhat by adjusting the SC1224's screen internally), and had stereo connectors.

 

I will readily admit [and have] that most 1084 monitors are not as good (the 1084SD that looks like the 1081 being the worst for soft image), however he is insisting it is the output signal on all Amigas ;)

 

The later 1084 released around the time of the A600 uses the same CRT tube as the Phillips 8833 etc though. None of them will touch a Mitsubishi or Sony CRT tube, Trinitron being the industry benchmark for CRT monitors and many companies like IBM licensing the technology.

 

For an ST the Thomson and SC1224 (original model) are the best in my opinion for colour output, with the borders adjusted out that is.

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Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member ;) I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

post-11578-126133293351_thumb.jpg

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper! :)

Edited by FastRobPlus
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Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member ;) I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

post-11578-126133293351_thumb.jpg

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper! :)

 

That is a KS 2+ screenshot.

 

There were loads of great tools in PD for workbench 1.2/1.3, me? I only used one most of the time...it drew a drop shadow for all open windows on the desktop...the one currently open casting the most offset shadow the window least opened or opened last in the sequence of time being the smallest offset....so like a superior version of what Vista's AERO does 1/4 century before ;) This gave a nice 3D effect and only doubled the bitplanes used by Workbench. There was also a lovely task manager like Windows uses today, showing resources with facilities to prioritise or kill any task. And there is always the background image hack but with 16 colours in hi-res there was too much delay in the Amiga reshuffling all the onscreen windows for my tastes especially in PAL hi-res....then again even today I have a solid black background on my 1080p+ screen....don't feel the need to express myself on my windows box....I have nice pictures in my house for that ;)

 

One thing I really liked about Workbench is all root directories for a storage device have a fuel gauge type display to show you visually how much space is left...Vista and Win7 does this on the main 'my computer' page but of course being Microsoft it's just a tacky add-on underneath their rubbish HD icons...certainly doesn't look elegant or available when you want it most...ie when you have an actual device window showing the root directory ;)

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Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member ;) I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

post-11578-126133293351_thumb.jpg

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper! :)

except it was crash happy in 1986. Problem plagued machine that was rushed to market before being ready. The gui looked more complete that some but did not work well. Compared to mac or ST most customers found it unprofessional looking and confusing to use.

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One thing I really liked about Workbench is all root directories for a storage device have a fuel gauge type display to show you visually how much space is left...Vista and Win7 does this on the main 'my computer' page but of course being Microsoft it's just a tacky add-on underneath their rubbish HD icons...certainly doesn't look elegant or available when you want it most...ie when you have an actual device window showing the root directory ;)

Yeah, but all you had to do was go to properties in XP (don't remember in 9x or NT/2k) and you get a nice pie chart of memory usage/available. (along with exact figures)

 

BTW, "my computer" is no longer used in Vista/7, now it's just "computer" (same for "network places" etc), kind of confusing when you first switch over, not really a useful change either IMO.

Edited by kool kitty89
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Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member ;) I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

post-11578-126133293351_thumb.jpg

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper! :)

except it was crash happy in 1986. Problem plagued machine that was rushed to market before being ready. The gui looked more complete that some but did not work well. Compared to mac or ST most customers found it unprofessional looking and confusing to use.

 

Like I said I used to run Dpaint, Digipaint, Digiview a sampler all at once and had less crashes than on any other machine I have owned. (My ST having the phantom loose rom chips problem being the main problem mind, but certainly a lot less than on any version of Windows I've had the misfortune to use). Also as my original machine from 86 is still working and has never failed (nor has my A1200 or A2000) I don't know anything about unreliability issues at all personally.

 

Games or dodgy PD stuff crashing a multitasking OS is not counted, otherwise Windows 7 is still worse than WB 1.1 as it crashes on a duff DVD-R everytime required a hard reset from the power switch to even stop the DVD burner setting fire to your discs in the drive haha.

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One thing I really liked about Workbench is all root directories for a storage device have a fuel gauge type display to show you visually how much space is left...Vista and Win7 does this on the main 'my computer' page but of course being Microsoft it's just a tacky add-on underneath their rubbish HD icons...certainly doesn't look elegant or available when you want it most...ie when you have an actual device window showing the root directory ;)

Yeah, but all you had to do was go to properties in XP (don't remember in 9x or NT/2k) and you get a nice pie chart of memory usage/available. (along with exact figures)

 

BTW, "my computer" is no longer used in Vista/7, now it's just "computer" (same for "network places" etc), kind of confusing when you first switch over, not really a useful change either IMO.

 

I was mostly on about Windows v1 v2 v3 v3.11 as these were the flavours of Windows available during the lifetime of the Amiga which didn't really have a normal desktop and windows connected to disk icons on a desktop like Win95...your programs were in Program Manager folder. It's also hilarious that Apple sued Digital Research and so GEM on PC was as rubbish as the program/file manager crippled Windows V1/2/3/3.11 setup BUT they didn't sue Microsoft for Win95 :roll:

 

I think using the left vertical strip of a main window for a disk used/unused bar chart type bar was genius still and instantly known to you...I like that kind of efficient thinking :)

 

Oh and Happy Xmas to everyone :)

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Like I said I used to run Dpaint, Digipaint, Digiview a sampler all at once and had less crashes than on any other machine I have owned. (My ST having the phantom loose rom chips problem being the main problem mind, but certainly a lot less than on any version of Windows I've had the misfortune to use). Also as my original machine from 86 is still working and has never failed (nor has my A1200 or A2000) I don't know anything about unreliability issues at all personally.

 

Games or dodgy PD stuff crashing a multitasking OS is not counted, otherwise Windows 7 is still worse than WB 1.1 as it crashes on a duff DVD-R everytime required a hard reset from the power switch to even stop the DVD burner setting fire to your discs in the drive haha.

 

Yeah, early Amigas did not crash randomly or more frequently. That was FUD.

 

It may have something to do with how early home computers crashed versus proto-modern PCs like Amiga. An Amiga would attempt to load an application and the fault would cause an error from which the OS would try to recover. A home computer (C64, A8, CoCo, ST) in the same situation would simply fail to load the application and drop to a ready prompt (or GEM on the ST)

 

You can see how that behavior would not make sense in a multitasking OS.

Edited by FastRobPlus
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Yeah, early Amigas did not crash randomly or more frequently. That was FUD.

LOL, I see someone never experienced the first release of AmigaDOS.

The first version could crash just sitting there... it was pretty ugly to work with.

Once V1.1 was released it became pretty stable.

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Yeah, early Amigas did not crash randomly or more frequently. That was FUD.

LOL, I see someone never experienced the first release of AmigaDOS.

The first version could crash just sitting there... it was pretty ugly to work with.

Once V1.1 was released it became pretty stable.

 

1.0 was out for 6 or 7 weeks as I remember. Don't recall problems but we didn't get our Amigas as soon as Creative Computers, who was the first Amiga dealer. I seem to hazily remember they had a full Amiga setup like 2 weeks before us. Perhaps they had all the crashes, reported them, and got 'em fixed in that time?

 

Sorry - trying to throw you a bone here. Our only OS growing pain was around the 1.1 to 1.2 transition where a couple of big ticket productivity applications needed updates. I do remember pulling a few titles and putting them back up for sale months later as they supplied patches. Wordstar and something by Mark of the Unicorn come to mind here.

 

We had far more headaches with the 520ST's transition to ROMs.

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1.0 was out for 6 or 7 weeks as I remember. Don't recall problems but we didn't get our Amigas as soon as Creative Computers, who was the first Amiga dealer. I seem to hazily remember they had a full Amiga setup like 2 weeks before us. Perhaps they had all the crashes, reported them, and got 'em fixed in that time?

I worked for a dealer and was a partner in two other Amiga related businesses.

I didn't start working for the dealer until a few months after the Amiga was released, and the shipping DOS by that time was ok.

But my partner pulled out some older DOS disks to show me just how bad the first DOS was.

I could crash it within a few minutes if I started clicking around, moving windows and such.

 

My partner did have some unreleased stuff he got from a friend that claimed to know the developers, so I suppose it's possible that was a pre-release version... but my partner talked like it came with the first machines he received. Maybe he got it as part of a developer package (we also developed Amiga software), but I thought all his machines were obtained as a dealer.

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We had far more headaches with the 520ST's transition to ROMs.

 

Just exactly what headaches are you talking about? All I remember is super-fast boot up times and finally, enough free RAM that you could consider it a 512K machine. I don't remember a single piece of software not working. Headaches?

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Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member ;) I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

post-11578-126133293351_thumb.jpg

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper! :)

except it was crash happy in 1986. Problem plagued machine that was rushed to market before being ready. The gui looked more complete that some but did not work well. Compared to mac or ST most customers found it unprofessional looking and confusing to use.

 

Like I said I used to run Dpaint, Digipaint, Digiview a sampler all at once and had less crashes than on any other machine I have owned. (My ST having the phantom loose rom chips problem being the main problem mind, but certainly a lot less than on any version of Windows I've had the misfortune to use). Also as my original machine from 86 is still working and has never failed (nor has my A1200 or A2000) I don't know anything about unreliability issues at all personally.

 

Games or dodgy PD stuff crashing a multitasking OS is not counted, otherwise Windows 7 is still worse than WB 1.1 as it crashes on a duff DVD-R everytime required a hard reset from the power switch to even stop the DVD burner setting fire to your discs in the drive haha.

This problem was mainly confind to the A1000 era but that was a long 3 years.. The reputation stuck somewhat even years later after problems were solved.

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Yeah, early Amigas did not crash randomly or more frequently. That was FUD.

LOL, I see someone never experienced the first release of AmigaDOS.

The first version could crash just sitting there... it was pretty ugly to work with.

Once V1.1 was released it became pretty stable.

 

1.0 was out for 6 or 7 weeks as I remember. Don't recall problems but we didn't get our Amigas as soon as Creative Computers, who was the first Amiga dealer. I seem to hazily remember they had a full Amiga setup like 2 weeks before us. Perhaps they had all the crashes, reported them, and got 'em fixed in that time?

 

Sorry - trying to throw you a bone here. Our only OS growing pain was around the 1.1 to 1.2 transition where a couple of big ticket productivity applications needed updates. I do remember pulling a few titles and putting them back up for sale months later as they supplied patches. Wordstar and something by Mark of the Unicorn come to mind here.

 

We had far more headaches with the 520ST's transition to ROMs.

Please it was over a 3 week period mostly, we had everyone taken care of and Zero problem. A1000 multitask Guru problems went on for years. A1000 amiga also had the 256k upgrade issue which was really about the same level as the ST rom upgrade. Bothe were rushed to market but ST was more ready having a less complex os.

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1.0 was out for 6 or 7 weeks as I remember. Don't recall problems but we didn't get our Amigas as soon as Creative Computers, who was the first Amiga dealer. I seem to hazily remember they had a full Amiga setup like 2 weeks before us. Perhaps they had all the crashes, reported them, and got 'em fixed in that time?

I worked for a dealer and was a partner in two other Amiga related businesses.

I didn't start working for the dealer until a few months after the Amiga was released, and the shipping DOS by that time was ok.

But my partner pulled out some older DOS disks to show me just how bad the first DOS was.

I could crash it within a few minutes if I started clicking around, moving windows and such.

 

My partner did have some unreleased stuff he got from a friend that claimed to know the developers, so I suppose it's possible that was a pre-release version... but my partner talked like it came with the first machines he received. Maybe he got it as part of a developer package (we also developed Amiga software), but I thought all his machines were obtained as a dealer.

That;s intresting. Meet very few dealers these days.

The original shipped machind and the lack of ram sure did cause the crashes. As newer KS and WB came alon the problem lessened but never quite went away for a long time. It was always easy to run a few things and get it do crash just took longer as improvemnets were made. It caused returns like crazy. The die hards would plug along and keep them or like many machines of the day. They were used for a single task like WP or tried out as a gift then shelved.

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Well, anecdotal of course, but I have personally seen A1000's crash often (Guru meditation numbers).

 

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the biggest reason for such things is some dodgy software... Don't forget that you are running a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with absolutely no memory protection. One bad bit of code is going to wreck havoc on the machine.

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Well, anecdotal of course, but I have personally seen A1000's crash often (Guru meditation numbers).

 

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the biggest reason for such things is some dodgy software... Don't forget that you are running a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with absolutely no memory protection. One bad bit of code is going to wreck havoc on the machine.

 

That is my whole point, that and the fact that in this 1 week I have had to forcibly shut down both my Win7 and Vista machines due to a speck of dust on a DVD-R whilst burning it. You can write software to totally kill ANY multi-tasking OS on a desktop priced machine even to this day. Like I said the only things that did crash my Amiga was badly written software, running those 4 or 5 applications and not having any issue with Guru meds for almost half a decade on KS 1.2/1.3. Rumours mean nothing to me 99.9999% of the time it is down to games/badly written PD utils and hacks or just plain ignorant users.

 

In fact as far as crashes go I had far more problems with later games crashing on my STM and earlier games crashing on a 1040STF and some that I owned and used with my 520STM and bought again on ebay not working at all on it (and yet work fine on STFM I have...like Gauntlet 1). At least I can only remember 2 games that wouldn't work on an A1000 during the A500/2000 era, one of them being Ghosts n Goblins....don't ask me why it wasn't even a 1mb game.

 

Dropping your new 'state of the art' 16bit computer from 4 inches above the desk to 'reseat' the ROM chips was a real pain in the ass too.

 

Commodore supplying KS 1.1/WB1.1 to the first customers is really less of a bodge than the ST TOS boot disk, at least on the Amiga it goes into special write once memory that is protected and only needs to be loaded once even after a reboot....the ST on the other hand is using the main RAM. Very early STs also had NO COLOUR OUTPUT.

 

What a load of utter bollox@ A1000 256k upgrade problems, only a moron would have a problem with a plug in cartridge any VCS owner of the past could install themself. I have never in my life heard of anyone anywhere in the entire Amiga user group with 25 A1000 users ever having a single problem with this simple elegant upgrade solution.

 

Thanks but I'll take the A1000 with the odd hiccup over badly written games/demos as a day to day machine, the price of not having multitasking for a non games playing computer user is far too high AFAIC :) ST was a nice machine but it was built more cheaply, the difference in the keyboard is the first thing you notice using an ST compared to an A1000, Mac or PC. Only the Mega's got decent keyboards.

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Commodore supplying KS 1.1/WB1.1 to the first customers is really less of a bodge than the ST TOS boot disk, at least on the Amiga it goes into special write once memory that is protected and only needs to be loaded once even after a reboot....the ST on the other hand is using the main RAM. Very early STs also had NO COLOUR OUTPUT.

 

<some parts snipped>

 

 

I'll wager that very few people ever saw or used an ST boot disk (vs the majority of owners). I bought

one of the very first ST's available, and it was already in ROM. The wiki covers this, and I already

posted it once in reply to someone else's mistaken belief concerning this same subject:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST

 

"The Atari 520ST was officially launched at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1985.[9] Due to its similarities to the original Apple Macintosh, it was quickly nicknamed the "Jackintosh". The 520ST shipped during May and June 1985 to the press and Atari User Groups[12] and then in early July 1985 for general retail sales. The machine had gone from concept to store shelves in a little under a year. Atari had originally intended to release versions with 128 KB and 256 KB of RAM as the 130ST and 260ST respectively. However, with the OS loaded from floppy into RAM, there would be little or no room left over for applications to run. The 260ST did make its way into Europe on a limited basis."

 

Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

Edited by DarkLord
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Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

 

All ST's had colour output ( RGB ) via the stupid non standard connector ( I had to poke resistor legs in on the first ST I played with as I had no connectors )

Probably the reference is to not having RF out

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I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amiga snd vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

 

From watching a friend use his Amiga a lot, I gathered that it was pretty common to run them in various interlaced modes. In his case, he was making clips intended to mixed with NTSC sources for straight to video productions. Used in that way, OF COURSE the video was fuzzy and headache inducing but he didn't use such modes for midi work and some gaming he was doing also. In non interlace, it didn't seem any more or less fuzzy than other machines we were using at the time.

 

The other thing I noticed that could be off-putting was the default Workbench tends to be gray on white with all these cartoony icons in strange aspect ratios. It was nothing a little theming won't fix but I wouldn't want to look at it very much either.

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Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

 

For all intents and purposes the ST didn't if the only monitor available was the monochrome monitor. In my case, I also had the RF modulator and used my TV as the color monitor and did word processing and so-forth on the monitor. I had to be content with total cack output in medium resolution but it was a financially accessible way for me to run in my teenage years.

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I'll wager that very few people ever saw or used an ST boot disk (vs the majority of owners). I bought

one of the very first ST's available, and it was already in ROM. The wiki covers this, and I already

posted it once in reply to someone else's mistaken belief concerning this same subject:

 

If you were in on the "pre-pay for a launch system" crowd you got one. I remember several people with them. However, it worked pretty well. They had a really colorful background in the startup screen - color ripples diagonally - that was pretty cool and showed you this was a color machine. When the ROM came out, I missed it! However, MUCH RAM was freed up. The transition to TOS ROM was completely seamless. The assertion that there was "some problem" can't be accurate. Just more RAM and faster bootup.

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I'll wager that very few people ever saw or used an ST boot disk (vs the majority of owners). I bought

one of the very first ST's available, and it was already in ROM. The wiki covers this, and I already

posted it once in reply to someone else's mistaken belief concerning this same subject:

 

If you were in on the "pre-pay for a launch system" crowd you got one. I remember several people with them. However, it worked pretty well. They had a really colorful background in the startup screen - color ripples diagonally - that was pretty cool and showed you this was a color machine. When the ROM came out, I missed it! However, MUCH RAM was freed up. The transition to TOS ROM was completely seamless. The assertion that there was "some problem" can't be accurate. Just more RAM and faster bootup.

 

The point is - there were a lot of things they could not run as they lacked RAM. And they need to be cracked open, ROMs ordered and installed by a dealer (or yourself or a user group if you felt that you didn't want your warranty)

 

I keep hearing: "Amiga didn't run well at all for the first weeks and it used disks but the ST can't have had issues in this regard"

 

If cracking open a unit to install ROMs you had to wait for Atari to produce then find a shop to install is everyone's idea of "seamless" and "can't have issues" then why the double standard re: the Amiga?

Edited by FastRobPlus
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Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

 

For all intents and purposes the ST didn't if the only monitor available was the monochrome monitor. In my case, I also had the RF modulator and used my TV as the color monitor and did word processing and so-forth on the monitor. I had to be content with total cack output in medium resolution but it was a financially accessible way for me to run in my teenage years.

 

Thats not a accurate statement then. You can not honestly and accurately say

the ST didn't have color because you had a mono monitor! That would be equal

to me declaring that the Amiga had no picture at all because I didn't have a

monitor! :)

 

Please be more careful about making such misleading statements.

 

Thanks.

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