Atari 8bit is superior to the ST

[atariksi]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

 

 

Curt

 

 

I don't see how the ST disk format was more PC compatible than the Amigas. True, you would need a special disk controller to read an Amiga disk on a PC vs. the ST using a CP/M type format from what I understand. Both used standard mechanisms and the Amiga could read/write MS-DOS disks with no problems at all (that's the only means I have to transfer data to/from my Amiga) so it was easy to use that format for transfer of info. I think it was Apple who really wasted time reinventing the wheel with the Mac floppy system.

 

You don't need any specialized emulation software to read a PC 720K disk on ST. At MFM level, ST and PC disks have similar format whereas Amiga has it's own custom headers in MFM format and sector ordering as well.

[oky2000]

 

How is that when the ST came out first? Amiga upon release did not sell well and was full of problems, this went on for at least the 1st 6months or so.

 

 

That's funny I owned a huge STACK of A1000s some were very early releases as evident by the internal build, versus others..

 

I've never experienced any of the problem prone behavior you speak of.. All of them functioned pretty rock solid as far as AMIGAs go.. One thing I will say is that being a full blown multitasking, 32-bit OS model from day one, and lacking the feature of protected memory-space (which most modern OSes have,) if you were negligent enough to run the system out of resources, there are many ways to crash it.. For a user who's mindset is stuck in single-threaded TOS mode, I can see how you could interpret the machine as being "problematic".. But such operation is not the machine's fault.. If you give a monkey your car keys, and sit him in the driver's seat, your probably gonna end up with a crashed car.. To say that Workbench and AmigaDOS were less "end-user" and more "power-user" oriented than GEM/TOS would be the gross understatement of the century.. But nonetheless, if all you were doing is inserting a floppy, booting it, and running the single application stored on it, the AMIGA was absolutely no less trouble-prone than the ST, even for a "monkey"...

 

They are different machines completely. Neither is a copy.

 

That's for damn sure.. The AMIGA was a huge custom LSI hardware development with a totally custom OS and GUI built around it, and custom tailored to it..

 

The ST was a pretty "plane jane" 68000 machine with a minimum of custom LSI chips, a bastardized version of CP/M for an OS, and a GUI that was licensed from Digital Research Inc, whose origins had nothing to do with the Atari ST...

 

If the ST was a "copy" of the AMIGA, they sure did a piss-poor job of it..

 

To say either is a copy of the other is a totally proposterous statement..

 

To say that Trameil's boys had to hurredly slam together some kind of 16bit machine, to keep ATARI in the competitive home computing market, well... That seems like a no-brainer.. Jack didnt buy ATARI with the intention of loosing his ass.. And really, for what it was, the ST didnt do too terribly bad.. It managed to spawn a platform that kept atari in the home computer business for many more years, and actually it out-survived commodore by at least a year or two..

 

Only 2 things I'd like to add.

 

Problems with a modern OS like GDI memory leaks famous in Win95/98 still persist even in Windows XP so to be fair what they achieved on the Amiga is nothing short of a miracle.

 

GEM for the ST was pretty much hand assembled from x86 source code by Atari technicians...D.R. gave very little input to the final code....in fact just some source code and very little technical help to transcode it to 68k and implement it on the ST within cpm 68k/TOS.

 

PS didn't Atari kill off the ST/Falcon and struggle on with those lead weights round their neck with Jaguar logos? lol

[+save2600]

And really, for what it was, the ST didnt do too terribly bad.. It managed to spawn a platform that kept atari in the home computer business for many more years, and actually it out-survived commodore by at least a year or two..

 

Lots of good stuff snipped here, but ST outlasted the Amiga? No way matey! Or do you mean as a functional company per se? Atari vs. Commodore up until the mid 90's? Ignoring the multitude of practical 3rd party products that continue to this day for the Amiga, remember companies like Amiga Technologies, Escom et al, produced Amiga systems for many years after Commodores demise. Still, the history of it all is mind boggling. Amiga really is a 'current' platform and OS for all practical intents and is supported by many companies. There's even a couple of current FPGA projects, one is an A500 clone and with the AGA patents expiring in a year or two, I bet we'll have new A1200's, etc. While the ST may not be dead-dead, pretty darn close. I don't see new cases, sound cards, video cards, usb cards or any TOS OS being developed or replicated anywhere in the world except for maybe high atop a secluded German mountain. lol But I'm sure as soon as I say that, someone will point to some link(s).... lol (I am aware of a new or semi-new IDE or SCSI interface for the ST)

[oky2000]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

 

 

Curt

 

 

I don't see how the ST disk format was more PC compatible than the Amigas. True, you would need a special disk controller to read an Amiga disk on a PC vs. the ST using a CP/M type format from what I understand. Both used standard mechanisms and the Amiga could read/write MS-DOS disks with no problems at all (that's the only means I have to transfer data to/from my Amiga) so it was easy to use that format for transfer of info. I think it was Apple who really wasted time reinventing the wheel with the Mac floppy system.

 

You don't need any specialized emulation software to read a PC 720K disk on ST. At MFM level, ST and PC disks have similar format whereas Amiga has it's own custom headers in MFM format and sector ordering as well.

 

It would take Microsoft 2 days tops to write a routine to read the Amiga's format....the problem is those routines are so low level and PCs are such a dodgy platform it's not easy to reverse engineer that part of windows. Putting in a dodgy disk on an 8 core machine even on Vista can hang it dead LOL

 

It's not as weird as the variable rotational speed Mac floppies...what a dumb idea (as usual) from crApple.

[Lazarus]

It would take Microsoft 2 days tops to write a routine to read the Amiga's format....the problem is those routines are so low level and PCs are such a dodgy platform it's not easy to reverse engineer that part of windows. Putting in a dodgy disk on an 8 core machine even on Vista can hang it dead LOL

It's not the low level software which cannot read the Amiga format, it's the PC disk controller which only starts to read data after a PC-format sync signal is encountered. If you insert an Amiga disk the controller will not give you a single bit of MFM data. You cannot fix that in software.

 

It's not as weird as the variable rotational speed Mac floppies...what a dumb idea (as usual) from crApple.

The outer tracks have far more space per bit than the inner tracks. Apple tried to compensate that by adjusting the bitrate. Btw, also the CBM 1541 is doing that.

[+save2600]

It would take Microsoft 2 days tops to write a routine to read the Amiga's format....the problem is those routines are so low level and PCs are such a dodgy platform it's not easy to reverse engineer that part of windows. Putting in a dodgy disk on an 8 core machine even on Vista can hang it dead LOL

It's not the low level software which cannot read the Amiga format, it's the PC disk controller which only starts to read data after a PC-format sync signal is encountered. If you insert an Amiga disk the controller will not give you a single bit of MFM data. You cannot fix that in software.

 

It's not as weird as the variable rotational speed Mac floppies...what a dumb idea (as usual) from crApple.

The outer tracks have far more space per bit than the inner tracks. Apple tried to compensate that by adjusting the bitrate. Btw, also the CBM 1541 is doing that.

 

Right - about the hardware aspect of the controller. We have Catweasel boards for these things. Not as easy to circumvent with software. Probably impossible.

Edited December 1, 2009 by save2600

[PeteD]

You can use 2 drives, one with a pc disk in and use that to get the track start sync which is used to get a stable per track start on the amiga disk, there is some software around (adfread, disk2FDI) that does it.

 

 

Pete

[philipj]

The Atari 1200XL hands down is the hottest and coolest looking of all of the XL's... it is also equipped with the best damned keyboard of any computer and I mean Atari 8bit, ST, Amiga, PC, etc... it has such a smooth and silky travel when you press the key's... what the 1200XL loses out on in incompatibility and expansion is more then makes up for it in looks, styling and feel... like a super model... she may be dumb as a doorknob, but damn she's hot!

 

The 1200XL looks better than the 800XL in pictures, but when I actually got one I was a bit disappointed. The 800XL feels more solid and looks great from every angle while the 1200XL case has a bit of flex and from some angles looks too bulky. I don't know... maybe I'm too biased or I'm influenced by the fact that my 1200XL has yellowed while all my 800XLs look perfectly new. Or maybe I just got a bad 1200XL - there are parts variations among nearly all computers.

 

The 1200XL keyboard is silky smooth as you say - but keypresses are slightly too springy for me. I actually prefer the feel of the TRS-80 Model III, early TI-99/4A and Kaypro. (or the clicky 1984 IBM AT I'm typing this on.)

 

I found an old XL-1200 at a local flea market about a month or two ago... That bad boy was in mint condition except the keys on the keyboard was working as well as it should've. I've been meaning to fix that, but my 1200 is yellow also so I assumed that Atari just made them that way. It's my first time owning a 1200, but I remember thinking to myself after I bought "Dam that's a good looking computer" LOL! I wish I had one when I was younger.

 

[AB Positive]

The 800 is an 8-bit Amiga

 

Winner.

 

I have an Amiga 500 and a 800XL (Thanks Orpy ) and I love them both - they really do, from a hardware standpoint, have that "Jay Miner" feel to them.

 

I've never owned an ST, so technically my vote doesn't matter but I've never really cared to get one. Same with the C64 - I know all the SID heads have somewhat of a sound argument but... I love the Pokey! A8 and A500 both get my love.

 

I'd like an ST, but I'm not killing myself to get one. It just doesn't have the flash that the 800XL does for me.

 

Also: Alternate Reality. End of argument

 

 

 

EDIT: Whoa - anyone else notice the Vectrex behind Mr. Wizard in that clip?

Edited December 1, 2009 by AB Positive

[+Stephen]

*** SNIP ***

EDIT: Whoa - anyone else notice the Vectrex behind Mr. Wizard in that clip?

Yeah - 1st thing I noticed. Still begging a buddy of mine to sell me his.

 

Stephen Anderson

[MEtalGuy66]

One thing I will admit is that reading HD floppies onan AMIGA is S..L..O..W... Because of the nature of the Disk controller in the AMIGA, HD floppies actually rotate at half the speed of normal floppies.. So yeah.. I have an HD floppy drive in mine.. and yeah.. it will automatically detect, mount, & read/write Amiga, PC, and MAC standard and HD floppies.. but GOD DAMN is it slow with HD formats..

 

The ST, using an industry standard floppy controller chip, I doubt has this problem..

Edited December 1, 2009 by MEtalGuy66

[+DarkLord]

And really, for what it was, the ST didnt do too terribly bad.. It managed to spawn a platform that kept atari in the home computer business for many more years, and actually it out-survived commodore by at least a year or two..

 

Lots of good stuff snipped here, but ST outlasted the Amiga? No way matey! Or do you mean as a functional company per se? Atari vs. Commodore up until the mid 90's? Ignoring the multitude of practical 3rd party products that continue to this day for the Amiga, remember companies like Amiga Technologies, Escom et al, produced Amiga systems for many years after Commodores demise. Still, the history of it all is mind boggling. Amiga really is a 'current' platform and OS for all practical intents and is supported by many companies. There's even a couple of current FPGA projects, one is an A500 clone and with the AGA patents expiring in a year or two, I bet we'll have new A1200's, etc. While the ST may not be dead-dead, pretty darn close. I don't see new cases, sound cards, video cards, usb cards or any TOS OS being developed or replicated anywhere in the world except for maybe high atop a secluded German mountain. lol But I'm sure as soon as I say that, someone will point to some link(s).... lol (I am aware of a new or semi-new IDE or SCSI interface for the ST)

 

I think he was just saying that Atari Corp. outlasted Commodore, the corporation itself, in its original form. Nothing about 3rd party companies, etc,...

 

FPGA project here:

 

http://experiment-s.de/en/

 

UltraSatan was the last interface I bought, for my portable Atari laptop (STacy):

 

http://joo.kie.sk/ultrasatan/

 

Teradesk is a desktop replacement still supported:

 

http://solair.eunet.yu/~vdjole/teradesk.htm

 

Lots of CD stuff here:

 

http://www.anodynesoftware.com/

 

and still lots of interesting things going on all over. Love my Atari's. I owned

some Amiga's for awhile (A1000 - love that keyboard well, A1200, nice - just felt

cheaply constructed next to my Falcon, A2000 - good "big box" Amiga". They are nice

machines, just prefer my Atari's. To each their own.

[atariksi]

One thing I will admit is that reading HD floppies onan AMIGA is S..L..O..W... Because of the nature of the Disk controller in the AMIGA, HD floppies actually rotate at half the speed of normal floppies.. So yeah.. I have an HD floppy drive in mine.. and yeah.. it will automatically detect, mount, & read/write Amiga, PC, and MAC standard and HD floppies.. but GOD DAMN is it slow with HD formats..

 

The ST, using an industry standard floppy controller chip, I doubt has this problem..

 

It must be the background disk driver/emulator that's slowing things down as it multitasks with the rest of the system. Amiga HD floppies should be transmitting at same rate as normal floppies (half rotational speed at twice the density so same data rate of 500kbits/second).

[+save2600]

Thanks for taking the time to post those links DarkLord. I'll give 'em a quick looksee here soon. Another cool thing about the Amiga right now are the new Flicker Fixer/Scan Doublers being produced, 24-bit video cards and 030/060 Accelerator cards.

[Lazarus]

One thing I will admit is that reading HD floppies onan AMIGA is S..L..O..W... Because of the nature of the Disk controller in the AMIGA, HD floppies actually rotate at half the speed of normal floppies..

Let's not forget that the HD disks also became a bit more unreliable due to that. The rotation is also there for voltage induction of the magnetized surface which ofcourse gets lower if the rotation speed is lower.

 

The ST, using an industry standard floppy controller chip, I doubt has this problem..

The controller is not the problem, but the DMA bandwidth. Amiga only had the DMA cycles for DD drive data rate reserved, so for twice the data they had to slow the drives down. I'd assume the same would happen on ST. You just can't raise DMA bandwidth by a factor of 2 if the system is not designed to do so.

[MEtalGuy66]

One thing I will admit is that reading HD floppies onan AMIGA is S..L..O..W... Because of the nature of the Disk controller in the AMIGA, HD floppies actually rotate at half the speed of normal floppies..

Let's not forget that the HD disks also became a bit more unreliable due to that. The rotation is also there for voltage induction of the magnetized surface which ofcourse gets lower if the rotation speed is lower.

 

The ST, using an industry standard floppy controller chip, I doubt has this problem..

The controller is not the problem, but the DMA bandwidth. Amiga only had the DMA cycles for DD drive data rate reserved, so for twice the data they had to slow the drives down. I'd assume the same would happen on ST. You just can't raise DMA bandwidth by a factor of 2 if the system is not designed to do so.

 

Yeah good point.. I chose not to elaborate that far, but that is the truth.. i only used the term "disk controller" for comparisson/conversational purposes.. The DMA channels would definitely be the root limiting factor.. Otherwise, C= could have easily implemented full speed HD floppy access with custom chip upgrade/replacements..

[MEtalGuy66]

Thanks for taking the time to post those links DarkLord. I'll give 'em a quick looksee here soon. Another cool thing about the Amiga right now are the new Flicker Fixer/Scan Doublers being produced, 24-bit video cards and 030/060 Accelerator cards.

060/030 accellerator cards? Those have been around since the 80s & early 90s... by the mid-late 90s, dual CPU 50mhz 060 / 233mhz 604e accelerators were fairly commonly available.. Scan doublers and 24-bit video cards have also been around for the AMIGA in a multitude of brands & designs since the 80s..

 

by the way, nice keffiyeh.. You know you are supposed to fold that in half diagonally so it forms a triangle shape, before you put it on.. It will hang alot straighter on both sides if you do that, and you'll have the ability to fold one side across your face and tuck it into the other in a sand-storm..

Edited December 2, 2009 by MEtalGuy66

[MEtalGuy66]

If anyone's got a spare 1040ST case, I'd make you an offer on it.. I'd like to cut it down and use it to house a 130XE motherboard, black-box/floppyboard, and 3.5" floppy drive...

Edited December 2, 2009 by MEtalGuy66

[Rybags]

Not sure about that. I've noticed the default speed to be higher on the ST, but using dedicated copy programs, the ST gets a slight boost but the Amiga is overall faster.

 

Normally formatted floppies only read something around 20K/second, which wouldn't be a huge amount of DMA overhead, given that both systems do 16-bit access to RAM.

IIRC the ST reserves half the available cycles for DMA anyhow, and given the somewhat lower screen DMA overhead would leave considerable number free for other things.

 

Although on the Amiga at least, I think that certain things like floppy I/O and sound DMA can only occur on specific cycles within a scanline, which would put a finite limit on how quickly I/O could be performed.

[atarian63]

Not sure about that. I've noticed the default speed to be higher on the ST, but using dedicated copy programs, the ST gets a slight boost but the Amiga is overall faster.

 

Normally formatted floppies only read something around 20K/second, which wouldn't be a huge amount of DMA overhead, given that both systems do 16-bit access to RAM.

IIRC the ST reserves half the available cycles for DMA anyhow, and given the somewhat lower screen DMA overhead would leave considerable number free for other things.

 

Although on the Amiga at least, I think that certain things like floppy I/O and sound DMA can only occur on specific cycles within a scanline, which would put a finite limit on how quickly I/O could be performed.

Our company once did a multi copy project, around 89 or 90, We used ST's and Amiga's to do this. The ST's were so much faster at least in this regard. We are talking about 7000+ copies.

[atarian63]

 

How is that when the ST came out first? Amiga upon release did not sell well and was full of problems, this went on for at least the 1st 6months or so.

They are different machines completely. Neither is a copy.

 

True, though from what I understand of the ST/Amiga history, one could argue that the ST is a copy of sorts. Amiga's introduction was delayed due to lack of funds, but it seems possible that the ST was intended to be a similar computer (CPU and memory-wise anyway) intended to take some of Amiga's market share.

Amiga had no market share yet ( and was a bit of a flop versus ST at release,though ST had about a 6 month head start) and all companies were moving towards 16bit. It was more Mac like than Amiga like. The price was killer!

[MEtalGuy66]

Well, since the AMIGA standard disk format stores about 200k more data than the ST one does, that's an "apples to oranges" comparisson.. If the ST can use HD floppies at full RPM (and relative transfer rate), however, that would be a huge speed advantage over the AMIGA..

Edited December 2, 2009 by MEtalGuy66

[atarian63]

 

How is that when the ST came out first? Amiga upon release did not sell well and was full of problems, this went on for at least the 1st 6months or so.

 

 

That's funny I owned a huge STACK of A1000s some were very early releases as evident by the internal build, versus others..

 

I've never experienced any of the problem prone behavior you speak of.. All of them functioned pretty rock solid as far as AMIGAs go.. One thing I will say is that being a full blown multitasking, 32-bit OS model from day one, and lacking the feature of protected memory-space (which most modern OSes have,) if you were negligent enough to run the system out of resources, there are many ways to crash it.. For a user who's mindset is stuck in single-threaded TOS mode, I can see how you could interpret the machine as being "problematic".. But such operation is not the machine's fault.. If you give a monkey your car keys, and sit him in the driver's seat, your probably gonna end up with a crashed car.. To say that Workbench and AmigaDOS were less "end-user" and more "power-user" oriented than GEM/TOS would be the gross understatement of the century.. But nonetheless, if all you were doing is inserting a floppy, booting it, and running the single application stored on it, the AMIGA was absolutely no less trouble-prone than the ST, even for a "monkey"...

 

They are different machines completely. Neither is a copy.

 

That's for damn sure.. The AMIGA was a huge custom LSI hardware development with a totally custom OS and GUI built around it, and custom tailored to it..

 

The ST was a pretty "plane jane" 68000 machine with a minimum of custom LSI chips, a bastardized version of CP/M for an OS, and a GUI that was licensed from Digital Research Inc, whose origins had nothing to do with the Atari ST...

 

If the ST was a "copy" of the AMIGA, they sure did a piss-poor job of it..

 

To say either is a copy of the other is a totally proposterous statement..

 

To say that Trameil's boys had to hurredly slam together some kind of 16bit machine, to keep ATARI in the competitive home computing market, well... That seems like a no-brainer.. Jack didnt buy ATARI with the intention of loosing his ass.. And really, for what it was, the ST didnt do too terribly bad.. It managed to spawn a platform that kept atari in the home computer business for many more years, and actually it out-survived commodore by at least a year or two..

I am not really speaking of A1000 being poorly made,it wasn't, It just was rushed to market without enough ram, and the o/s was crash happy. This resulted in lots of returns. It was hard to explain to the general public that paid a premium price wahy the thing wouldnt run much,multitasking basically didn't work and it "guru ed" alot. Hobbyist understood but were disappointed for quite sometime till things got sorted out.

From my own point of view I hated the O/s on the Amiga,certainly more powerful but quite a kludge to use and made selling them harder. To bad it wasn't made as a Warner Comm system as it should have been.

[Rybags]

In my experience, Amiga can be faster with it's own standard floppies. I've used DOS2DOS on DOS and TOS floppies and it's way slower than even standard OS-driven access.

 

Amiga also has the advantage in that it can do full track write operations. ST can't, as it's controller uses certain byte values to perform other functions (it can do full-track read though).

 

Results would vary on both systems depending on what software is used and what the target format is.

ST should also get a slight boost using the extended sectors per track formatting schemes.

[atarian63]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

The opposite is true: The Amiga drives are PC compatible, but the PC drives are not Amiga compatible.

But Amiga format is not a native pc format. Therefore not pc ready. ST basically is.