Atari ST vs Amiga?

[Nebulon]

As another person who likes both platforms, I don't think that one rules and the other sucks. I think they both have their good and 'less-good' points.

 

When it comes to reliability, my Amigas have been good. Crashing is very unusual, unless I'm running some questionable PD stuff. Two of my A500s have never needed any work done on them in all these years. One A2000 and one A4000 needed a bit of fidgeting, but it was my own fault for stuffing them full of expansion cards and a few 'questionable' modifications.

 

For an example of an OCS Amiga doing some pretty nifty stuff, consider checking out a Tetris-esque game called Vital Light.

 

 

As for the ST, I still have my STE and a friend of mine has a very cool TT030. I really do wish the original Amigas had a high-rez productivity mode like on the ST/TT machines.

 

 

I'm glad both platforms existed at all (especially during the early PC and Mac years). Otherwise, the 16-bit and 32-bit era of computing would have been sooooooo borrrrrring.

 

 

[eightbit]

I love them both. I always have. I owned the 520STfm new, as well as the Amiga 500. I did different things with each, and I repect each for their strengths and weaknesses. This "battle" is an old one. Now they aren't $1000 each, so why not own both

Edited February 11, 2014 by eightbit

[English Invader]

I own both, but I have a strong bias in favour of the ST. I was recently at a crossroads between the two machines. I have an UltraSatan for the ST and was thinking about an IDE CF for the Amiga, but then an opportunity came up to buy a Blitz Copier for the ST so it was a choice between getting an equivalent flash HD for the Amiga or taking a step towards disk preservation for the ST. I went for the copier.

 

I freely admit that the Amiga is the superior machine, but the ST is where my heart is.

[Muzz73]

Exactly! I love both platforms and own both types of machines. I had Amigas first and ST's later.

 

I totally agree that both machines have their good and not-so-good points.

 

I have an A500, dual floppies, 1084, 2MB RAM, ECS and KS 1.3/2.04. This machine is great for games. More capable pound-for-pound than my ST.

 

My ST is a Mega ST 4, PS3000 & SM124, SF314, TOS 2.06 and a few other odds & ends. I use this machine for everything, including games. Why? Because although the capabilities aren't as spectacular as the Mig, there's a lot more software available for it and though I'm not really sure why, I just enjoy it more.

 

Back in the day, there was a lot of mud-slinging and every discussion turned into a flame war. If you liked both machines, both sides ignored you. It was crazy!

 

Wow... flashbacks of my youth and the 80's BBS scene... "Mycomputerisbetterthanyourcomputer!!" LOL

[Rybags]

TBH, both OSes at least in the earlier implementations are somewhat unstable and can make Windows look ultra-reliable.

 

Amiga being worst in that department, often the behaviour was unexpected/almost random. Generally bomb screens on the ST were the program's fault almost entirely and once encountered a few times could sometimes be avoided.

[Zogging Hell]

TBH, both OSes at least in the earlier implementations are somewhat unstable and can make Windows look ultra-reliable.

 

Amiga being worst in that department, often the behaviour was unexpected/almost random. Generally bomb screens on the ST were the program's fault almost entirely and once encountered a few times could sometimes be avoided.

Which version of Windows is this? I take it you mean something of the NT onward vintage, as Windows even up until at least 98 was a flakey as a ST that has been stored in a lake for a year

[Nebulon]

I recall Amiga OS 3.x running really smoothly during the Windows 3.1 and 95 years. And I sure recall the Windows problems, since I had to provide tech support for Windows end-users at the time.

 

The only thing that I found to be a headache in Amiga OS was editing startup scripts and mounting devices. That seemed to be a bit complex for most casual users.

 

Oh, and the annoying Amiga OS/Workbench issue of the error message that wouldn't go away when a diskette or hard drive is 100% full. THAT is one thing that drove me crazy.

[+slx]

Coming from an 800, the main reason to choose the ST over the Amiga probably was brand loyalty. I was simply inclined towards buying "the next Atari" and little did I know at the time that the Amiga was much more of a "next Atari" than the ST. As I was moving from high school to university and writing papers for the high school final exam with Letter Perfect had been revolutionary (no one else did) but still compromise-ridden on the 800s 40 columns, the crisp high-res ST high mode must have been second. Whether I did more work and less play (and programming) on the ST than I had on the 800 was due to new needs, or dictated by my not having good games and the lack of a built-in/included programming language I can't say with certainty. (I have a certain suspicion that programming was at least partly replaced by ever fiddling for the perfect file/folder/Desktop setting/etc. setup, disk defragmentation, etc.....

 

Compared to the crisp black and white hi-res of the ST the Amiga with its various coloured windows (at least that's the way I remember them) did not seem as appealing although I have to admit I never actually played with an Amiga before choosing the Atari.

 

I did enjoy the ST which became a lot more appealing once I had added lots of ACCs and NeoDesk and remember moving characters in Signum!, waiting for TeX to calculate pages and for BinkleyTerm to load my daily dose of mail and web gossip. So much did I like the ST that I replaced it with a (used) TT and only fell for the lure of the PC after the advent of the Internet.

[scarrabri]

15 years ago? LOL Try 23 to 24 years ago! It was like a religion! You had Atari, Commodore and Apple owners squaring off all the time! Ah, the wonderful, fun memories. It was short lived through, the 386 started moving users over and by the time the 486 came out, the game was all but over. Thank goodness people still keep the arguing alive via the Internet today. Too bad not one of us are using any of these systems to post online today even though we so love to argue about it LOL.

 

Speaking of which, anyone still using a 386 or 486 to surf the web on here?

 

I know this reply is a little late but I am new to both Amiga and Atari and I love both ,my 1200 is stable and surfs the net most days and is equally as good as a controller.as indeed my Atari is ,like wise my Atari plays games very well and both are as stable as a mountain goat ,my Atari is the Ste 4mb and the Amiga 1200 and best two items I ever bought ,best wishes Brian.

[Muzz73]

This sort reminds me of when someone asked me if I'd rather have Win95 or Mac OS 9. I answered "DOS." LOL

 

After all, when you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

 

Anybody remember this one? "In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?"

 

Har har...

[oky2000]

Probably said this before but I had a 520STM months after release, and Neochrome was probably the finest bundled app that people have never heard of/don't remember

 

If all you wanted to do was play games then shoot me if you like but I felt the C64 was a more polished game playing experience due to some horrible coding in ST or Amiga games vs quality of % of machine's potential extracted in C64 games (which seemed to push the barriers constantly from birth to death and beyond for Commodore Inc).

 

The two absolute worst machines you could own in 1985 was PC XT (and compatibles) and of course the NES which is hilarious because neither sold here in the UK at all!

 

When people tell me the ST was terrible for games I point them to the £40 NES carts of Commando, Defender of the Crown, Ghosts and Goblins and Gauntlet 1. and in 1987 the 520STFM was only £100 more than the crappy NES deluxe set

 

I also laugh when people tell me computers were slow and unreliable then too. My Amiga NEVER crashed unless I ran badly written PD utils or games not tested for 1mb A1000 Amigas vs 1mb A500 Amigas. XP being the closest MS ever got to writing an efficient useable OS needs reboots every few days....my Amiga running 3 professional Apps was on for weeks and boots up faster than my phone even today

 

The original ST (not FM models) with the expensive Fujitsu feeling soft touch keyboard is also one incredibly nice professional system in use, I have one I am building a studio around. If Tangerine Dream could make such iconic albums with just an ST then clearly there is no reason why you can't use it today...because music today in the charts is pure and utter crap...bit like Windows 8 on an i7 for professional use

[atarian63]

having never been an amiga fan, I will say they (ST and Amiga) are cheap and fun, so I own both, for games and nostalgia and the odd new game or demo that comes along, those were great days, the last hurrah of the wild wild west of computing and I really do miss those days. Myself and many other dealers of these back then really believed we could beat the PC and Mac. Considering how bad the PC was in 85 it was easy to see why.

[Muzz73]

Exactly! I had a friend who bought a used '386 from an engineering firm back in 1990 for $3,000. He was so proud of his machine, that he spent more money upgrading it to VGA, adding commercial memory management software for his 4.5MB RAM, etc. He had almost $3,500 into it, when I pointed out that my A500 system was under $1,000 and did things his engineering PC couldn't comprehend.

[oky2000]

I never really understood the whole CGA PC + NES combo that 90% of households settled on in the 80s.

 

I was at college in 86-88 and we had an EGA 8086 class machine (Research Machines Nimbus PC). Now we all know that even a 512kb Amiga 1000 with colour monitor and 2 disk drives was half the cost of a basic 256k PC XT clone so there is no excuse for that.

 

However many people have said the NES was cheaper than the ST but then ST games were £20 in the early days and if you had a family member with a business you could get the 520 STFM for £260 in 1987. Now pick 4 games which were far far superior on the ST like Commando, DotC, Ghosts n Goblins and Gauntlet 1 and subtract the £80-90 saved over the NES cart prices and the two cost the same so far...so when you buy a copy of something intellectually stimulating like The Pawn you're already better off with both the machine and the cost of ownership IMO.

[oky2000]

Exactly! I had a friend who bought a used '386 from an engineering firm back in 1990 for $3,000. He was so proud of his machine, that he spent more money upgrading it to VGA, adding commercial memory management software for his 4.5MB RAM, etc. He had almost $3,500 into it, when I pointed out that my A500 system was under $1,000 and did things his engineering PC couldn't comprehend.

£3,500 is a lot! Just to compare in summer of 1990 I bought my first Amiga 2000 after selling my first business (and why not?! lol) and the 2000s were never a bargain. My machine had 9mb of RAM (1mb Chip 8mb Fast) and a very fast SCSI 48mb HDD on a Supra hard card. I even tacked on Dpaint 3, Dvideo 2, Digi-Paint 4, 1084SD monitor (the one that looks like the curvy original A1000 monitor) a Rombo Vidi unit plus colour splitter and internal Genlock etc etc and the whole lot cost £2,700 before negotiating a discount. The things you could do on this machine was so far ahead of any PC at the time...like grabbing 200+ frames of a scene from Battlestar Galactica and using them as animated brushes to paint with to make my own space battles

 

I don't have any musical talent myself but my friend built up a home music studio with a 4mb STE and Cubase and with the money he saved vs Mac/PC system he could spend it on some very cool MIDI instruments too.

 

And both machines were much nicer to use with Spreadsheets or WPs too. The reality was most people chose not to buy these machines due to the logo...more fool them! I mean Windows printers (dumb laser printers using the PC to do the processing pre-printing) is not even a new thing...Atari were doing this first with their SLM/Mega ST packages too and ditto CAD stations based on Amiga 2000s using flicker fixers and the newer 1280x576 resolution of the Amiga ECS chipset.

 

People say to me 'but computers today are much faster' and I say to them if I throw turds at you at 150 mph not 50mph does it make it a better experience? You can't improve a turd like Windows by polishing it (Vista/7 AERO GUI) OR by moving it faster a la chucking turds at people...if anything you get even more of a mess

Edited April 16, 2014 by oky2000

[Muzz73]

It was about $3,500 USD, which was probably more like £2,000 at the time. Still, would you pay that much for a PC?! Even now?! Sheesh!

 

I know what you mean, though... I have two Windows PCs and a MacPro at my desk at work, which is why I have an ST on my desk at home.

[GadgetUK]

I love both platforms. They both have different feels completely. The Amiga is more advanced regards graphics and sound imo, but the ST certainly feels more retro to me. I do remember when I built my first PC (286) from bits I accumulated from my job and despite the PC being pretty powerful it was no where near either the ST or the Amiga regards gaming. I remember playing the Fate of Atlantis on 286 with VGA and whilst it looked better than both systems the sound wasn't great (adlib) and scrolling etc back then left a lot to be desired. Of course everything changed as soon as the 386, and 486 came out, with VESA Local Bus (and later PCI) etc. All this talk of old PC's is making me want to build a PC from that era now lol.

Edited April 17, 2014 by GadgetUK

[Keatah]

Muzz73, on 16 Apr 2014 - 12:58 AM, said:

Exactly! I had a friend who bought a used '386 from an engineering firm back in 1990 for $3,000. He was so proud of his machine, that he spent more money upgrading it to VGA, adding commercial memory management software for his 4.5MB RAM, etc. He had almost $3,500 into it, when I pointed out that my A500 system was under $1,000 and did things his engineering PC couldn't comprehend.

 

Ha! I know how that goes fer'sure. In the very late 1990's and early 2000's I spent literally thousands of dollars building up a single lighted "Battlefield" Gamerz case. I was so green I was worse then the stench of puke itself. I thought I was bad-ass and everything with handmade fanz and purple radiator fluid for cooling and 1GB of 1066 RAMBUS on a 3.06GHz Pentium IV and GeForce 4 graphics card. I just can't believe I actually spent $499.00 on what was a piece of shit old server case that should have cost me like $9.95 from the scrap heap. It was cool looking though and I got taken for a ride! Right up my ass! Doing it the modderzboize waiz!

 

I spent like $900 on the RAM alone, and I can absolutely tell you I was *THE* only person on the block to have a memory subsystem that fast. It was so exotic that whenever I talked about it I had to go into detail to an understanding across. And to make matters worse, I wanted to the processor before the stores got it. I asked some guy at the computer shop and offered him like $400 cash on the side to get it pulled from the distro channel early or something. That 400 was on-top of the $639 that was being charged by intel for the then top-of-the-line speed grade chips.

 

Then there was the paint. The case was already black, but I had to sand it, prime it, and re-paint it. Again at the cost of about $150.00. Not forgetting the blue LED lights, I wanted a special color aqua and cobalt blue. I spent 8 dollars each, for over 100 of them! Special order, before anyone had ever seen blue LED's, practically.. Sound card, Audigy and Harmon Karden amplifer and speakers. Only the best would do. Chalk up another 4 grand. And then there was the Viewsonic 20" LCD @ $4,500. I gold-plated the switches and had custom wire looms and those plastic wire protector tube things like they use in cars. The tough-looking battle stuff you know? And military-grade connectors and plugs and water-proofing on the motherboard.

 

Today it would be worth more as raw material or scrap. Crazy times, ridiculous times. And I had more fun with my Apple II+ and //e than I did that piece of shit. I even had more fun with my 486, which was at least appropriately economical as I only spent about $4,000 - $5,000 on it and all the accessories cumulatively over it's lifespan. Still have that machine today.

 

thomasholzer, on 21 Mar 2008 - 10:02 AM, said:

The Amiga was designed as a gaming machine right from the start, as it was to be a console-only at first (no keyboard) (source: Retro Gamer magazine).

 

Ahh that explains why the Amiga sucked so hard. It should have stayed a gaming console for it was as worthless as my ridiculous PC project.

[Lynxpro]

Probably said this before but I had a 520STM months after release, and Neochrome was probably the finest bundled app that people have never heard of/don't remember :)use

 

It really was a mistake for Atari to stop bundling NEOchrome. It certainly didn't come with my 1040STf! But I used 1st Word almost on a daily basis! I wonder how many users upgraded to First Word Plus? I never did. I used 1st Word exclusively until I bought my Falcon030 which had AtariWorks bundled.

 

The only PC envy I had until 1993/4 was with a 286 my high school purchased for the library in 1990/91. It was a SunMoonStar PC clone and it had GEM/3 included and a CDROM. So I got to mess around with an updated GEM we should've had available for the ST plus a CDROM that Atari basically promised to produce for the ST way back in 1985 but never delivered. I even think the encyclopedia was Grollier's (sic) which again Atari showed for the ST originally.

 

In retrospect, there's so many missed opportunities with the ST line. Just imagine if:

 

*The SF354 wouldn't have been released and the SF314 would've been the base drive.

*The CD-ROM drive would've been released by Q1 1986.

*The 1040STf would've shipped with BLitter and 68881 slots and an AMY audio chip. And Atari Corp had made good on the promised BLitter upgrade that never happened.

*TOS 1.02 had included GDOS.

*The Mega ST2 and 4 had shipped with a 68020 and had finally matched the Amiga's graphics modes.

*Atari Corp and DRI had maintained 680x0 GEM on parity with the official x86 releases.

*Atari Corp had hired the Gribnif guys to add NEODesk features to Atari's GEM/TOS.

*The STe line had featured VGA graphics.

 

All of that would've been realistic and would've greatly strengthened the platform, IMHO. Of course, we'd probably still have a viable third computing platform today had Tramiel and Gould had buried the hatchet with the 1987 lawsuit settlement and had agreed to merge the ST and Amiga into a shared single platform.

[oky2000]

Just so we can identify fanboy comments from others please can negative comments like "Amiga sucked so hard" be backed up with evidence.

 

As a creative tool there is no comparison to a PC even in the 2000s let alone 1980s. Even today you can't even find a paint program that will let you take 256 frames of a BSG Viper Mk2 and use the mouse to draw a brush animation over multiple frames. As for the hardware, my A1000 had better build quality than my mid 90s Pentium PC costing £2000+ from a very famous brand. Oh and 99% of PCs have terrible keyboards too...and given they ran a CLI based DOS as your interface that is pretty retarded Some 520ST/STM models and some A500 (usually KS 1.2 red LED) had keyboards as good as very expensive Cherry keyboards as did all the professional machines from both Commodore and Atari too. So no, the absolute depravity and retardedness of even using a PC is nothing like using even some of the bottom of the range budget STs or Amigas in either OS ability to stay up or quality of components compared to budget PCs.

 

 

Yes the Amiga was intended to be an ultimate games console technically but not a restrictive toy one like the NES, it was always meant to have a keyboard, a floppy drive to load games and expandable memory (clearly visible in the prototype case designs). In fact Jay Miner and co had to deceive Commodore management to ensure the front and side expansion slots for memory on the A1000 stayed in the final prototype, you don't need expansion facilities for a mid 80s games console if it is going to be a toy like the NES for young children.

 

I suppose it was comparable to a console like the PS3 today (had an OS from launch, loaded games from HD not just BD DVDROM and keyboard and mouse support built in) as opposed to the Xbox 360 RRoD design MS launched.

[Zap!]

Back in 1987 and 1988, my mom used to give me lunch money five days a week as a freshman in high school (I think it was $4 or $5 a day back then). Well, I used to starve myself and go the entire school day without eating. My friends used to say "Ter, you're not eating today?" I used to answer "Nope, saving for the Amiga."

 

Turns out I never was much of a saver. Didn't get a powerful computer (by powerful I mean more so than the XE Game System I had at the time) until 1991. Around that time I became a classic gamer, and was extremely loyal to Atari. I would up with an Atari 1040 STe, and published Zap! on it that September.

Edited April 23, 2014 by White Knight

[rabindranath72]

From all the reviews I read back in the day, it looked like the Amiga was the "most powerful" on paper (at least, graphics and sound.) I would have wanted one, but it cost way too much. So I asked my dad if I could have an Atari 520ST (I was 16 at the time.) Compared with my previous C128 and VIC-20, it was another planet! But it was a good machine also for doing "serious stuff" (even more when I later bought the mono monitor.) Then, the A1000 only had 256Kb ram, whereas the 520 had double.

A friend bought later an A500, and he used to be somewhat envious of the speed and usability of my ST for word processing, programming (I learned to program on the Atari!) and technical design; even without an hard disk, the fact that the OS was in ROM was a huge boon. My friend often complained a lot about having to swap disks on his Amiga even for the most trivial operations. I kept my ST until 3rd year of university (computer science master) then I had to buy a PC because most of the required stuff ran on the PC

 

I have recently acquired an A1200 just to have fun toyin with an Amiga. It is indeed a good system, but without an hard disk (I have installed a CF inside,) I don't think it would be very usable, apart from games.

[oky2000]

The ST seemed to load in pictures faster from the hard drive (well the ones at the Middlesex Atari ST user group did) and with a software 'blitter' like Turbo ST the GEM apps were nice and fast too so it was a nice machine to work with. I also wrote quite a few business style apps for college work using the FAST BASIC cart which could do nice GEM apps easily which looked a lot nicer than 80s PC business software in the mid-late 80s.

 

The earlier games for the ST that didn't come out on Amiga were sometimes real nice ones too, like Road Runner and Gauntlet 1. Also with my copy of Elite for the ST I made a new ship instrument/view overlay in Neochrome and changed the palette....I hope I still have that somewhere. Just a white disk with Elite in pencil written on it

 

I wish Jack had chosen a nicer sound chip but to be honest 90% of Amiga games use the same god awful mid 80s samples from Soundtracker instrument disks anyway so most of the time you either hear CPC music (ST) or naff sampler like music (Amiga) lol they really screwed us with games prices vs effort put into it!

 

For your A1200 you purchased may I suggest you find the Amiga 1200 version of Lotus III. It's still the same graphics as the A500/1000/2000 release as is the CD32 version but unlike the A500 version the framerate is lightning fast just like Lotus II was on the A500 etc so you can really enjoy the track creation element with it and not give up the frame rate or get a mortgage to get the CD32 disc.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Generally, disk speeds were much better on Atari ST than on Amiga 500 - floppy, hard disks too. That's not surprise, because ST has dedicated chips for. I watched couple time WHDLoad in action on some shows, and it was terribly slow in most cases.

I guess that someone will now come, and say something like: "Amiga is made for pleasure, not some mindless rush"

[oky2000]

Amiga is designed to control the electron beam on a CRT and control the movement of the magnet in a speaker It's a refinement of all of Jay's work really.

 

I did have a really nice Supra 48mb hard card inside my Amiga 2000 and that was fast but not for the low end machines and really expensive (think PC XT Compatible type price) on the side expansion slot...especially Commodore's cheese wedge stuck on the side of the melted Commodore 128 (Amiga 500 lol). Still I was just a teen then and wages=credits to buy more top end non Apple/PC tech so who cares it cost as much as my first half decent car too haha