Atari ST vs Amiga?

[Rybags]

The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.

 

The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.

 

It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).

 

Guru Meditation was a pain, but like emkay said - the Amiga at least had a complex pre-emptive multitasking OS (and years before Apple and M$), and in general use wasn't much more unstable than something like TOS or Windows 95/98.

[TwiliteZoner]

The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.

 

The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.

 

It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).

 

Guru Meditation was a pain, but like emkay said - the Amiga at least had a complex pre-emptive multitasking OS (and years before Apple and M$), and in general use wasn't much more unstable than something like TOS or Windows 95/98.

 

I hated the look of low res TOS, but the monochrome display was a thing of beauty.

[atarian63]

I don't this the ST's low resolution, green and white desktop looked very professional compared to the Amiga's medium resolution 'workbench'.

 

I know it's kind of trivial, but a computers desktop does play a part in creating its public image. Just take a look at the Apple Macintosh.

The customers used to tell me the amiga desktop looked like some little kid had made it and it appears interlaced so it flickered.

[atarian63]

The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.

 

The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.

 

It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).

 

Guru Meditation was a pain, but like emkay said - the Amiga at least had a complex pre-emptive multitasking OS (and years before Apple and M$), and in general use wasn't much more unstable than something like TOS or Windows 95/98.

it took a LONG time to get to that point. during the 1st 3 years or so it was just awful. Crash happy.

[atarian63]

Likewise, you'd need to put 2 amigas in one box to get the hard disk access, floppy access, and serial speed of an ST/TT. As someone pointed out it was a game box hacked into a computer. It seems obvious the I/O was an after thought. If you think the ST was rushed, please watch the Commadore 25th anniversary celebration and hear for yourself the words of the guy who was in charge of the amiga project. They had no real plan what they were doing either and it was also highly rushed. When they asked the guy about the worst moment of development, when he was the most worried, he discussed the amiga operating system coder. It's hilarious.

 

 

The AMIGAos really had some "C" flaws. Just like the Disk access. But a simple patch only was necessary to speed up the Disk access heavily. Otherwise than the ST, the AMIGA had a programmable Floppy interface, making a copy of the whole disk as double as fast as the ST could even think of.

Harddrive issues? Well, I bought an ICD SCSI-Controller which was also clearly faster than the megafile.

A known problem is the serial port which seems to be too "noisy" for a simple 115kb data transfer.

 

The biggest mistake commodore made was to make the Kick 2.x and 3.x incompatible to the Kick 1.x version. Or in other words: It was not possible to use "new tools" , after Kick 2.0 appeared. Even for a simple depacker you had to create a Kickstart switcher, or to buy a new machine.

So I used my A2000 until the 486(33) PC was there. And went off...

please, we did a large disk duplication job using ST and AMigas. Even the Amigoids gave up and started using ST's. we did over 7000 disks.

[atarian63]

None of this changes the fact that SOTB ST is an extremely bad conversion of an extremely bad game. I won't say they could make it as an eye candy as on amiga (and no it pushes amiga too, not just the surface) but they could make it look and play decent. They didn't. I wonder if the release is an in-house joke by psygnosis that some how got away. If they had ISO, it would have been taken away from them.

 

Hm...

 

What are the ideas of how they could have done it better?

Ok, the technical achievement got better later-> Some found the possibility for setting the screen starting adress to create 50Hz scrolling . But this doesn't help with a multi parallax scrolling-> the CPU has to do all the work.

Digi music? I don't see how it could be used in the game, thinking about the fact that the FPS are rather low.

Adding colours? Just again: Look at the possible FPS at the used "flat" colour mode.

 

I guess, the only way to make it smoother in fps and gameplay was to reduce the parallax more than it was reduced already.

 

Wings of Death (for example) is using no parallax. So it took benefit by the hardware adress changing.

Particular this game shows the real upper limits of the ST. On the AMIGA 50% stands still during the game.

In other words: While the ST was full busy with this game, in theory you could write a letter on the same screen while your friend is playing the game on the AMIGA with the joystick..

Until you get the the guru meditation error and have to reboot

[atarian63]

Please.... We were a dealer and repair center for both Atari and Amiga back in the day. As we all know Amiga was actually an Atari with a really awful commodore o/s. We sold Atari ST 3 to 1 during the entire run of both machines.

 

 

I don't see, why to blame the AMIGA OS.

I had a 1040 STF before. I bought the ST, because I really was an 800XL freak and thought, the ST was really better and the software was more serious.... And, Yes, two programs were really serious : Calamus and .... erm.... don't know

The "so much better" TOS showed me very often those nice bombs... what the heck... it was a SIMPLE single task OS, not even capable of doing a filling routine without running into a bomb screen...

They told me the TOS was a very stable thing, but there was no day passing by without a bomb. OK, except days I only played GAMES.

Because the coders put all knowledge into the game programming on the ST... because it was sold better than the AMIGA in that time.

The AMIGA had the AMIGAOS and the workbench. Having a Harddrive in it, it was easy to enhcance the features of the os. Using it was as easy as using window-based OS from today then.

Guru meditations were there, but people may oversee that the AMIGAOS was a full 32Bit multitasking system and the lacking wasn't in the OS. The CPU lacked by memory and execution protection. So, bad coded software could "overlap" with other software and put the AMIGA into the Guru's heaven (or hell)...

 

Except the fact that the ST had the 70Hz b/w display for a better "Workplace" it was a cheap product with a horrible OS.

If you blame a complex thing like the AMIGAOS for its lacks, what to say about a simple TOS that shows even (more) lacks?

Sounds like you had the loose chip syndrome, should should have reseated chips. Crashs on the ST were extremely uncommon after the first 3 months of production.

That Amiga OS was a POS.

[Rybags]

The ST was almost as "crash-happy" as the Amiga.

 

Hardware problems like loose chips aren't part of the argument - Bombs on the screen reflect the exception number that has caused the crash.

 

 

Bottom line - I was and am a predominantly Atari fan, but I knew from day one that the Amiga was going to be the better machine.

 

I bought both, although it was a few years after the ST that I got the Amiga.

 

Sad to say, but once I had the Amiga, the ST went back into it's box and mostly stayed there.

[lp060]

One of my friends went the way of the amiga, while I stuck with Atari. The amiga is for sure much more crash happy and the crashes are so severe it results in a reset often. Which is pretty sad for a unix like operating system. Even after all these years, I've progressed to MiNT and yes my friend is still fighting with his amiga and no memory protection and the fatal resets. His amiga's (he has several) make MiNT look rock solid, even today. Yes, he's upgraded the OS and so on, but still it's not anywhere near as stable as what I'm used to. If a program does not take his system all the way down, it usually ends up zombie-fied and eventually it just freezes, like a ticking time bomb. He usually panics and closes all the apps and resets it anyway. lol

 

Of course you can blame the user, he's running old apps, and it's his own fault? Improperly setup? Who knows, all I know is what I see when I'm at his place. You can't tell me every one of his machines has loose chips. If this is not the norm then my friend don't know what he is doing. I suppose that is possible. On the other hand he is happy, even though if it was me I'd not be able to tolerate that amount of instability. He's managed to have 2 ppc boards go bad, a clue?

 

In the end the "versus" threads are generally non-productive and people don't change their minds.

Edited March 22, 2008 by lp060

[atarian63]

The ST was almost as "crash-happy" as the Amiga.

 

Hardware problems like loose chips aren't part of the argument - Bombs on the screen reflect the exception number that has caused the crash.

 

 

Bottom line - I was and am a predominantly Atari fan, but I knew from day one that the Amiga was going to be the better machine.

 

I bought both, although it was a few years after the ST that I got the Amiga.

 

Sad to say, but once I had the Amiga, the ST went back into it's box and mostly stayed there.

As I said we were a repair center for both ST and Amiga and I can tell you as a fact the ST was NOT crash happy,but the Amiga was. We had alot of

Amiga hardware and especially software issues. I am sorry you had a bad experience on the ST but the Amiga Just had issues as a fact.

I have since purchased a few Amigas for games over the years and each time I have not kept it long, same for CD32. I sold them back on ebay .

My Mega ST is still setup and playing games. Built in midi rocks!

Edited March 22, 2008 by atarian63

[atarian63]

The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.

 

The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.

 

It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).

 

Guru Meditation was a pain, but like emkay said - the Amiga at least had a complex pre-emptive multitasking OS (and years before Apple and M$), and in general use wasn't much more unstable than something like TOS or Windows 95/98.

Did you ever use an A1000, even opening up 2 or 3 assy items often caused a crash. That is not stable. The green desktop looked fine and if you wanted mac just use a spectre GCR. You could do both mac and ST the mono monitor made it a mac, just faster with a larger screen.

[Christos]

My opinion on the issue is that actually those emulators did more harm then good on the atari computers. I always felt, that if I were to buy an atari to emulate a mac or a pc, why not buy a mac or a pc?

[Tempest]

My opinion on the issue is that actually those emulators did more harm then good on the atari computers. I always felt, that if I were to buy an atari to emulate a mac or a pc, why not buy a mac or a pc?

 

Because then you could have an Atari AND a Mac or PC all in one computer.

 

Tempest

[retrogeek]

This has turned into a really good discussion! Personally I never had performance issues with my Amiga (hardware or otherwise) and I've always found them reliable. Kick / Workbench 1.2 (and better) were very stable and the issues caused by Kick / Workbench 1.0 were eliminated.

 

Kickstart / Workbench 1.0 (supplied with the A1000) were terrible and very unstable. In later revisions when the OS was chip based in the Amiga500, all issues were taken care of. I owned both the Atari ST and Amiga in my later years and found both very enjoyable.

 

My father and I used to repair Atari ST and Amiga computers in the late 1980s, early 90s, and both machines had their faults. I remember the 520ST (in the beginning) having grounding issues that would literally fry the computer if you somehow ' static shocked' the system. I remember my father -- when he opened a new Atari 520ST -- plugging everything thing in, turning it on, and when he went to use the computer, he got a static shock by touching a key on the keyboard. This resulted in an instant black screen and a dead Atari ST. I'm just saying that both machines (in the beginning) weren't perfect.

 

Most Amiga repairs were chip based (Paula, Denis, Agnus chip replacements) and ST repairs usually involved bad disk drives (the single-sided drives were the worst), dead power supplies (some early 520ST Power supplies had a tendency of frying ), and (sometimes) the occasional 'dead' system that was related to unintentional static shocks that a decent grounding / shielding system would have prevented.

 

From an end-user perspective, beauty is the result of personal preference. I have always felt that both OS' suffered from a clunky, lifeless design. From the Atari ST's puke green to the Amiga's nasty blue background, I have always felt that better colors could have been used. I have to admit that the ST's desktop was easier on the eyes. I can remember many nights staring at the Workbench screen in agony because the bright blue colors were causing bad headaches.

Edited March 22, 2008 by retrogeek

[retrogeek]

Double post

Edited March 22, 2008 by retrogeek

[atarian63]

My opinion on the issue is that actually those emulators did more harm then good on the atari computers. I always felt, that if I were to buy an atari to emulate a mac or a pc, why not buy a mac or a pc?

That is possible, I often wondered the same thing when we were selling that stuff. Once the customer knew about though it was sell it to them yourself or they would buy elsewhere.

[atarian63]

This has turned into a really good discussion! Personally I never had performance issues with my Amiga (hardware or otherwise) and I've always found them reliable. Kick / Workbench 1.2 (and better) were very stable and the issues caused by Kick / Workbench 1.0 were eliminated.

 

Kickstart / Workbench 1.0 (supplied with the A1000) were terrible and very unstable. In later revisions when the OS was chip based in the Amiga500, all issues were taken care of. I owned both the Atari ST and Amiga in my later years and found both very enjoyable.

 

My father and I used to repair Atari ST and Amiga computers in the late 1980s, early 90s, and both machines had their faults. I remember the 520ST (in the beginning) having grounding issues that would literally fry the computer if you somehow ' static shocked' the system. I remember my father -- when he opened a new Atari 520ST -- plugging everything thing in, turning it on, and when he went to use the computer, he got a static shock by touching a key on the keyboard. This resulted in an instant black screen and a dead Atari ST. I'm just saying that both machines (in the beginning) weren't perfect.

 

Most Amiga repairs were chip based (Paula, Denis, Agnus chip replacements) and ST repairs usually involved bad disk drives (the single-sided drives were the worst), dead power supplies (some early 520ST Power supplies had a tendency of frying ), and (sometimes) the occasional 'dead' system that was related to unintentional static shocks that a decent grounding / shielding system would have prevented.

 

From an end-user perspective, beauty is the result of personal preference. I have always felt that both OS' suffered from a clunky, lifeless design. From the Atari ST's puke green to the Amiga's nasty blue background, I have always felt that better colors could have been used. I have to admit that the ST's desktop was easier on the eyes. I can remember many nights staring at the Workbench screen in agony because the bright blue colors were causing bad headaches.

Yes, it is kinda cool to revisit this stuff. Those were exciting times and really great. We relished in the fact we were selling non mac and non pc computers and at the time is often seemed if you could talk to a random customer it was an easy sale. Both offered more and were superior in many ways. It really is a shame that the inferior products won out. But I suppose good enough is good enough. PC's of the day were really raw, with DOS etc and limited video and sound. I suppose the vindication for the st and amiga systems is that PC's eventually adopted better sound and better graphics. For my place though we were mostly games. 3000 sku's at opening and about 98% games. Import games that we could get weeks before EB and other outlets. It was an exciting time where most users were hobbyists and really enjoyed learning the system and quirks of each. Nowadays it just a tool. like a drill or a screwdriver. Something you use to get a job done. Not very exciting.

[TwiliteZoner]

This has turned into a really good discussion! Personally I never had performance issues with my Amiga (hardware or otherwise) and I've always found them reliable. Kick / Workbench 1.2 (and better) were very stable and the issues caused by Kick / Workbench 1.0 were eliminated.

 

Kickstart / Workbench 1.0 (supplied with the A1000) were terrible and very unstable. In later revisions when the OS was chip based in the Amiga500, all issues were taken care of. I owned both the Atari ST and Amiga in my later years and found both very enjoyable.

 

My father and I used to repair Atari ST and Amiga computers in the late 1980s, early 90s, and both machines had their faults. I remember the 520ST (in the beginning) having grounding issues that would literally fry the computer if you somehow ' static shocked' the system. I remember my father -- when he opened a new Atari 520ST -- plugging everything thing in, turning it on, and when he went to use the computer, he got a static shock by touching a key on the keyboard. This resulted in an instant black screen and a dead Atari ST. I'm just saying that both machines (in the beginning) weren't perfect.

 

Most Amiga repairs were chip based (Paula, Denis, Agnus chip replacements) and ST repairs usually involved bad disk drives (the single-sided drives were the worst), dead power supplies (some early 520ST Power supplies had a tendency of frying ), and (sometimes) the occasional 'dead' system that was related to unintentional static shocks that a decent grounding / shielding system would have prevented.

 

From an end-user perspective, beauty is the result of personal preference. I have always felt that both OS' suffered from a clunky, lifeless design. From the Atari ST's puke green to the Amiga's nasty blue background, I have always felt that better colors could have been used. I have to admit that the ST's desktop was easier on the eyes. I can remember many nights staring at the Workbench screen in agony because the bright blue colors were causing bad headaches.

Yes, it is kinda cool to revisit this stuff. Those were exciting times and really great. We relished in the fact we were selling non mac and non pc computers and at the time is often seemed if you could talk to a random customer it was an easy sale. Both offered more and were superior in many ways. It really is a shame that the inferior products won out. But I suppose good enough is good enough. PC's of the day were really raw, with DOS etc and limited video and sound. I suppose the vindication for the st and amiga systems is that PC's eventually adopted better sound and better graphics. For my place though we were mostly games. 3000 sku's at opening and about 98% games. Import games that we could get weeks before EB and other outlets. It was an exciting time where most users were hobbyists and really enjoyed learning the system and quirks of each. Nowadays it just a tool. like a drill or a screwdriver. Something you use to get a job done. Not very exciting.

 

Great points, and something everyone can agree on. I think...

[Warriorisabouttodie]

None of this changes the fact that SOTB ST is an extremely bad conversion of an extremely bad game. I won't say they could make it as an eye candy as on amiga (and no it pushes amiga too, not just the surface) but they could make it look and play decent. They didn't. I wonder if the release is an in-house joke by psygnosis that some how got away. If they had ISO, it would have been taken away from them.

 

 

If you think Shadow 1 pushes the limits of the original Amiga chipset, check out SOTB 2 and 3.

[TheGreatPW]

While the Atari 8bit vs. Apple II vs. Commodore 64 is a debate that is more passionate and with merit; I cannot say the same about an Atari ST vs. Commodore Amiga debate. I find it hard to believe people still try since the systems were almost one and the same in the beginning.

 

First, few people forget that the Atari ST was born from a lawsuit between Atari and Amiga. The suit was settled out of court and sealed but most of us would agree that it basically meant that the first models would be pretty much similar since Atari funded the project and they choose to settle.

 

It is only the first models that are really worth debating because the Atari line was not upgraded (I do not count adding the disk drive to the system and calling STFM as a hardware upgrade) at all till the 90s and by then the war was pretty much won by the PC and Microsoft.

 

With very similar hardware, the difference between which system had the better version lies solely on the programmer's talents. The real difference was: the operating system which the Atari ST had a more polished one. Emkay got it right. The Amiga had a buggy system that required users to load it from a disk drive. Atari managed to squeeze their operating system into ROMs (when it released to the masses). That is the key.

 

For a brief moment (very brief) Atari had great sales vs. IBM, Apple, and Commodore. However Atari did nothing to upgrade the system till the STe and by then (as mentioned earlier) it was all over.

 

Some people were comparing their Amiga 2000 to the original Atari ST and that is just wrong. A short while after its release, Commodore changed their strategy and released a bunch of Amigas to satisfy the low end to high end group. It is clear that the Atari ST (520, 1040 and Mega) would not be able to compete with the high end models. However, I would argue that software wise, programmers mostly programmed games for the low end Amiga (entertainment software in general I am referring to) anyway to reach the most number of users and this benefitted Atari users as well since that meant that the entertainment software would not be too much different if a conversion had to be done. Btw, while we are on the entertainment subject, please stop making the Shadow of the Beast comparisons, I think most of us agree that is just a horrible way to compare (we could then go on with the Dungeon Master, etc. comparisons and it would never end). The differences were strictly tied to the programmer(s) abilities & understanding for each respective system. Sadly some developers like Sierra Online made versions that were exactly the same as the PC making the Atari and Amiga look worse (performance wise) in some respects as the PC's processor grew more powerful so both Atari and low end Commodore users lost out in these cases.

 

There are two other differences that gave Atari an advantage over Amiga when it was first released: price and memory. The Atari 520ST was far cheaper and had 512K compared to the Amiga's 256K. For those reasons along with the operating system, many of us bought the Atari ST first. Later on of course, this would not be a factor at all for Commodore users however later on is not relevant to the Atari ST vs. Amiga argument.

 

Anyone care to debate the Atari Falcon vs. the Amiga 4000? How come I never see any Falcon vs. discussions? LOL

Edited March 23, 2008 by TheGreatPW

[emkay]

Anyone care to debate the Atari Falcon vs. the Amiga 4000? How come I never see any Falcon vs. discussions? LOL

 

Perhaps it came far too late?

[Warriorisabouttodie]

While the Atari 8bit vs. Apple II vs. Commodore 64 is a debate that is more passionate and with merit; I cannot say the same about an Atari ST vs. Commodore Amiga debate. I find it hard to believe people still try since the systems were almost one and the same in the beginning.

 

First, few people forget that the Atari ST was born from a lawsuit between Atari and Amiga. The suit was settled out of court and sealed but most of us would agree that it basically meant that the first models would be pretty much similar since Atari funded the project and they choose to settle.

 

It is only the first models that are really worth debating because the Atari line was not upgraded (I do not count adding the disk drive to the system and calling STFM as a hardware upgrade) at all till the 90s and by then the war was pretty much won by the PC and Microsoft.

 

With very similar hardware, the difference between which system had the better version lies solely on the programmer's talents. The real difference was: the operating system which the Atari ST had a more polished one. Atarian63 got it right. The Amiga had a buggy system that required users to load it from a disk drive. Atari managed to squeeze their operating system into ROMs (when it released to the masses). That is the key.

 

For a brief moment (very brief) Atari had great sales vs. IBM, Apple, and Commodore. However Atari did nothing to upgrade the system till the STe and by then (as mentioned earlier) it was all over.

 

Some people were comparing their Amiga 2000 to the original Atari ST and that is just wrong. A short while after its release, Commodore changed their strategy and released a bunch of Amigas to satisfy the low end to high end group. It is clear that the Atari ST (520, 1040 and Mega) would not be able to compete with the high end models. However, I would argue that software wise, programmers mostly programmed games for the low end Amiga (entertainment software in general I am referring to) anyway to reach the most number of users and this benefitted Atari users as well since that meant that the entertainment software would not be too much different if a conversion had to be done. Btw, while we are on the entertainment subject, please stop making the Shadow of the Beast comparisons, I think most of us agree that is just a horrible way to compare (we could then go on with the Dungeon Master, etc. comparisons and it would never end). The differences were strictly tied to the programmer(s) abilities & understanding for each respective system. Sadly some developers like Sierra Online made versions that were exactly the same as the PC making the Atari and Amiga look worse (performance wise) in some respects as the PC's processor grew more powerful so both Atari and low end Commodore users lost out in these cases.

 

There are two other differences that gave Atari an advantage over Amiga when it was first released: price and memory. The Atari 520ST was far cheaper and had 512K compared to the Amiga's 256K. For those reasons along with the operating system, many of us bought the Atari ST first. Later on of course, this would not be a factor at all for Commodore users however later on is not relevant to the Atari ST vs. Amiga argument.

 

Anyone care to debate the Atari Falcon vs. the Amiga 4000? How come I never see any Falcon vs. discussions? LOL

 

 

 

 

You are totally wrong. When it comes to games the OS is of little consequence. Most games didn't run through OS anyway. The difference between the Atari ST and the Amiga (I like and used both platforms) is more than just the time a programmer puts into developement (although you are correct that makes a big difference) the Amiga's grfx/sound chipset ran circles around an ST and every Amiga had them even the very first A1000. I think a fair comparison would be A500 vs Atari 520stfm or 1040.

[Rybags]

Totally wrong all right.

 

To say the hardware is virtually the same is like saying the only difference between the C-64 and Spectrum is the CPU.

[DracIsBack]

Whew! Reading through this thread reminded me that all the snotty attitudes in debating Amiga vs. ST 15 years ago can ressurect in an instant!

[retrogeek]

Whew! Reading through this thread reminded me that all the snotty attitudes in debating Amiga vs. ST 15 years ago can ressurect in an instant!

 

 

I personally love both machines so the debate is of no interest imho. You make a good point though! I wasn't expecting this to explode into a 15 year old debate; I should have known better.

Edited March 23, 2008 by retrogeek