Atari ST vs. Amiga

[+DarkLord]

Okay, I get what you're saying now. Sorry for the confusion.

 

I respectfully disagree with your assessment of the TT's (and Mega STE's as well)

look. I think that case is just awesome! Far better than any Amiga I've seen. The

only Amiga case that I actually liked was the A1000's. Now that case, with its

recessed keyboard and autographed inside cover, was cool.

[sack-c0s]

Are you saying

the Amiga 3000 ran at 8mhz? Because I could have swore that they had 2 models, one

running at 16mhz and one running at 25mhz.

The Amiga 3000 was 16mhz or 25mhz.

I think he was referring to the Acorn Archimedes 3000...

 

desiv

 

yeah - it just gets confusing when we use A3000 as a model description

 

Acorn A3000 had an 8MHz ARM 2, the A3010/3020 had a 12MHz ARM250 (basically an ARM 2 combined with the VIDC/IOC as a system on a chip).

[oky2000]

Okay, I get what you're saying now. Sorry for the confusion.

 

I respectfully disagree with your assessment of the TT's (and Mega STE's as well)

look. I think that case is just awesome! Far better than any Amiga I've seen. The

only Amiga case that I actually liked was the A1000's. Now that case, with its

recessed keyboard and autographed inside cover, was cool.

 

Yeah I should have said my opinion is.... etc sorry.

 

My favourite ST was the original 520 and original Megas. The 500/2000/4000 were pretty benign looking to me.

[Thorsten Günther]

I ended up with an Acorn Archimedes anyway,

 

I am currently regularly browsing eBay UK for an A3010 - a great computer for it's time, and it's British!

 

Thorsten

[jens]

I really like the Mega/STe and TT housing, and I'm absolutely fond of beetle's Falcon in a modded TT case.

[atarian63]

a600 was junk. a300 on were very slow sellers. Atari though they failed at least saw the handwriting on the wall and moved on to otherthings. commodore in thier usual stupid plodding way just kept going and went out of business BEFORE Atari.

[Shredder11]

There have been many A3010 on Ebay this year. Any reason why you are struggling?

[Thorsten Günther]

There have been many A3010 on Ebay this year. Any reason why you are struggling?

 

Well, had to pay € 800 for three new teeth (actually, a ceramic plated dental bridge) lately, and only had my bank account get back to its usual level with my christmas gratification. The current seller wants some 70 UKP for shipping his A3010 to continental Europe, and several didn't want to ship abroad at all. Well, I am not in a hurry.

 

Thorsten

[oky2000]

There have been many A3010 on Ebay this year. Any reason why you are struggling?

 

Well, had to pay € 800 for three new teeth (actually, a ceramic plated dental bridge) lately, and only had my bank account get back to its usual level with my christmas gratification. The current seller wants some 70 UKP for shipping his A3010 to continental Europe, and several didn't want to ship abroad at all. Well, I am not in a hurry.

 

Thorsten

 

I'm sure if you can stomach the postage someone in the UK would take delivery for you of a cheaper one from a UK seller not wishing to post outside UK and forward it on to you saving you some money.

 

Not sure about Germany but my 520ST+SF354 cost about £62 for sending by tracked/signed for delivery to Greece from my little post office in the UK!

Edited December 4, 2011 by oky2000

[oky2000]

a600 was junk. a300 on were very slow sellers. Atari though they failed at least saw the handwriting on the wall and moved on to otherthings. commodore in thier usual stupid plodding way just kept going and went out of business BEFORE Atari.

 

A500 was too large but at least the A500 had a nice keyboard (some of them any way as depended on when you bought it). The 600 lost the zorro slot so no CPU upgrade easily possible and PCMCIA was a dud firework. Build quality was OK though and it was 2mb chip ram, keyboard was not as nice, quite cheap like a £5 PC keyboard.

 

They went bust because they sacked R J Mical and Dave Needle in 1986 (who went on to produce Lynx and 3DO ha!) and then didn't listen to Jay Miner or use his enhanced Ranger chipset in 1988/89. They pissed up AGA A1200 with.......

 

EIGHT BITPLANE 256 COLOUR MODE(A 486 33mhz would struggle writing 8x addresses for 1 pixel in Doom)

NO IMPROVEMENT TO SOUND (put 2 damn Paula chips if you are too cheap to make more channels/16bit)

ALL CHIPRAM (meaning the CPU speed for polygon games stuck at 50%)

 

A3000 was a nice enough machine but it was never going to sell big because the improvements were only of use to office/utility software and none of that tech made any attempt to improve gaming potential....which is why the A500PLUS was the biggest pisstake going! Plus what? Plus f$%K ALL that's what 1280x256x4 colour.....wow I'm inspired to go and write Ant Attack from the Spectrum in 1983 on a 1990 Amiga!!!!

 

Trouble is Atari abandoned the Falcon way too early, it had potential IMO, Jaguar had the specs to beat SNES but not the games on the whole. If only they had licensed some 3rd party to convert key games to Jaguar whilst doing their VGA PC games....eg US Gold and Street Fighter 2 say? Also it was impossible to program and made the Amiga custom chipset look as easy to program as a Sinclair Spectrum.

[Shredder11]

There have been many A3010 on Ebay this year. Any reason why you are struggling?

 

Well, had to pay € 800 for three new teeth (actually, a ceramic plated dental bridge) lately, and only had my bank account get back to its usual level with my christmas gratification. The current seller wants some 70 UKP for shipping his A3010 to continental Europe, and several didn't want to ship abroad at all. Well, I am not in a hurry.

 

Thorsten

 

Ahhh sorry to hear about the dental costs; my best friend pays a lot for his dental work too and I am so glad I have no fillings etc.

 

Anyway regarding the cost of shipping for the A3010, if the weight is similiar to the ST I would expect it to be FAR cheaper than £70. I will soon be shipping one of my STe to Australia and according to the online quote, it will be £41 using http://www.parcelmonkey.de so to Germany it should be cheaper still.

[Thorsten Günther]

Anyway regarding the cost of shipping for the A3010, if the weight is similiar to the ST I would expect it to be FAR cheaper than £70. I will soon be shipping one of my STe to Australia and according to the online quote, it will be £41 using http://www.parcelmonkey.de so to Germany it should be cheaper still.

 

Yup, the guy chose FedEx instead of Parcelforce or DHL for a shipping quote. I have bought on eBay UK before, and e.g. a Spectrum 128K +3 with loads of extras also shipped for less than GBP 30.

[oky2000]

Problem is Paypal......if parcel gets lost and buyer reverses payment the seller loses the item AND money but gets to keep the bill from ebay for his troubles.

 

I could have shipped that ST to Greece for £30 sure BUT I would only accept money via wire transfer and explain the risks to buyer.

 

ebay is enough of a joke how they treat sellers as it is so I always go with trackable insured service for UK and worldwide. The buyer didn't tell me he was in Greece and those were his options

 

You can't always blame the seller if he won't take the risky cheap options

[Thorsten Günther]

You can't always blame the seller if he won't take the risky cheap options

 

I wouldn't dare calling Parcelforce or DHL "risky and cheap", as AFAIK they both have their origins in public mail services ( Royal Mail and Deutsche Bundespost, resp.). And what PayPal accepts as proof of shipping is stated directly in their terms, e.g. any registered letter receipt and any receipt from any national parcel service is acceptable proof for them here in Germany, thus no chargebacks if the seller can provide such a document (PayPal does suck, but not for this reason).

 

 

Thorsten

[oky2000]

You can't always blame the seller if he won't take the risky cheap options

 

I wouldn't dare calling Parcelforce or DHL "risky and cheap", as AFAIK they both have their origins in public mail services ( Royal Mail and Deutsche Bundespost, resp.). And what PayPal accepts as proof of shipping is stated directly in their terms, e.g. any registered letter receipt and any receipt from any national parcel service is acceptable proof for them here in Germany, thus no chargebacks if the seller can provide such a document (PayPal does suck, but not for this reason).

 

 

Thorsten

 

I meant cheaper international parcel post at half the cost as it is not tracked or insured but half the cost of DHL etc

[Lynxpro]

I've seen alot of 5200 vs. Colecovision threads, but not too many about Atari ST vs. Amiga. Just out of curiosity which line of computers do most people think was better and why?

 

Tempest

 

Oh You are so NOT dredging this up Matt?!?!?

 

The ST was a beautiful bare bones, get the job done machine, a good workhorse and out of the gate it was a great, nice features, graphics, sound and memory at a dirt cheap price.

 

Problem is that once it was out of the gate, the firm lost focus, in fact I have a memo from one of the ST's original engineers who upon resigning from Atari, pointed out that his resignation was due to the lack of focus and future growth of the ST line and the company as a whole.

 

The Amiga is a darling of a machine, good graphics and sound and while Kickstart needed a kick in the butt early on and went through several iterations to get the system stable, the architecture was elegant and having legacy ties to the Atari 800 line didn't hurt either since its chipset was architected by the head of the Atari 800's chipset team.

 

The ST found its niche, with little thanks to Hybrid Arts who consulted on getting MIDI included into the ST design and that feature was its strength.

 

The Toaster was Amiga's "killer app" giving it unbelievable multimedia capabilities.

 

The Amiga is honestly an Atari machine, with Atari engineers, design aspects carried over from the Atari 800, and $500,000 in financing from Atari in late 1983 to bring the wirewraps to silicon, the machine is really an Atari plain and simple.

 

The ST was an amazing start to finish product, thanks to aggressive and concise management by Tom Brightman at Atari, the ST design stayed on course and only slipped by several months to full production release in Sept 85, only 1 year after the Tramiels came into the firm.... this is a task of monumental proportions given the fact that Atari itself spent over 18 months between its Corporate Research Group and its Atari Products Group just trying to lay out the technical details for:

 

"Eskimo" a portable computer

"Atari Explorer" a Notebook computer (Yup, Atari Explorer was its product name way before the Magazine!)

and while GAZA and SIERRA were in the works in Corporate Research, Atari products Group was working on a machine with spec's that made the Amiga and ST pale in comparision, Called "OMNI" this system was spec'd out to be a 3D graphics system using the AMY chip for sound and other new chips like Heather, Vivian and Penny for advanced features. The use of CD-ROM technology and many other specs....

 

Whats far more bizarre is the chip designs were done and in the testing phase, what happened to it and why the machine was never reviewed and completed by the time the Tramiels took over is a mystery I am working on and hopefully will answer....

 

More details on OMNI to come in some new pages on the Atari Museum site quite soon including memo's, and other details.

 

 

Your regularly scheduled ST vs Amiga thread now continues.....

Curt

 

 

That was brilliant. So in essence the 16-bit war between the ST and the Amiga was the civil war of mid/late 80s computing. And we all lost because a viable third computing platform [Linux doesn't count] didn't survive and so we're now stuck with Windows vs. Mac, two inferior platforms to this day.

 

All of these secret Atari chipsets you keep uncovering are fascinating. What I'd really like to see is some specs and some examples of the GUI Atari Inc. created [snowCap] for its BSD based OS. If there's proof of this, it means Atari Inc. had the right idea on a next-gen OS that NeXT/Apple ultimately agreed upon years later.

 

 

I should mention my first computer was a 1040ST. Was a heavily partisan ST user back then [hey, I was a kid!] and the first computer I bought with my own money was the Falcon, only to see Atari completely abandon it the following year. While that broke my heart, I always told myself that had I bought a PC that year, it would've been completely obsolete in 6 months and I would've had to use Windows 3.1 which just totally sucked IMHO. Made the transition to Windows with Windows 95 [on a Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM] which made it finally as usable as my original 1040ST with 1MB in 1986. Now I'm 100% Mac [only considered Macs decent with the advent of OS X].

 

My Falcon is out in storage and I'm really dreading having to do the battery fix to get it running again. I plan on picking up an A8 or something to let my baby daughter learn basic computer skills on in a couple of years time...

 

I would like to see the Amiga [or a serious Atari project] rise up and challenge the other platforms but as long as the Amiga community is divided with none of the camps going the Apple route [adopting FreeBSD and basing the "new" OS on it such as OS X] - not to mention A Inc. being owned by an apparently selfish incompetent [imho] - there's just no hope. Hyperion is doing great work tinkering around with old code but again, if it ain't *nix based, what's the point? It is sad to see QNX, the folks who were originally going to rewrite AmigaOS back in the 90s, getting dragged down into the abyss that is the RIM Blackberry's death spiral.

Edited December 9, 2011 by Lynxpro

[Curt Vendel]

Well all I've found so far are some spec sheets and same outlines for these Unix OS' but we are talking 83' - 84' and remember we're not even close to getting to X-Windows yet or any kind of GUI on a Unix platform... even the GAZA which was demo'd to Warner Communications running on 2 68000's had a version of CP/M 68K running on it, and they wrote their own graphics driver just for the demo....

 

If you go back and recall... don't know your age, but if you were around and involved in computers like IBM PC's back in the early to late 80's where they lacked a GUI OS (even when Windows 3.0 and 3.1 came out, it was layed over DOS, it wasn't a self contained OS until WinNT came out) when you needed to do graphics, you had a customs graphic driver, font driver and print driver and you ran your program in that isolated environment --- great example was Harvard Graphics or even Lotus Symphony.... So if Atari's own Unix-like OS was to have been developed it probably would've been a straight command line OS and graphics drivers would've been done later for each application.

 

Now there was an internal memo by Omar Ghadir who wrote "Atari Lisa-type Machine" and actually outlined that Atari should develop its own Lisa computer system, which would've meant a GUI.... also in reference to Eskimo, Atari Explorer and one other advanced machine, the engineers all start discussing "Atarinet" to network these systems together, so it appears they were beginning to examine that prospect....

 

The Tramiels blew it on the ST's in that they owned the rights to a networking system which appears to be a hybrid RS422 design that Atari bought from MECC in 1983 and was planning on releasing "node" boxes as part of the Atari 1080 "Classnet" system which was going to be targeted at allowing computers in schools to be networked to load class assignments, share disk drives and printers.... the ST's would've benefited from having built in networking for class and office use. It was one of the strengths of the Macintosh and its Localtalk network, made it more palatable to buy a $5,000 laserwriter when you knew everyone could share it. When Atari released the Mega ST's and the Laserprinter, they should incorporated networking at that time and allowed the printer to be shared, that would've given them a lot of marketing muscle and a very competitive edge against Apple since a whole Mega ST4 system with mono screen, 30mb megafile and the Laserprinter together cost $3999.99 and an Apple Laserwriter NT cost $4999 alone.

 

 

Curt

[Lynxpro]

Ok enough postivity about the amiga.. let's flame it

 

Disk drive.. slow and made noises as if it was a disk perforating device.

 

Mouse.. even worse than the ST tank

 

Power supply.. bulky and ugly so you wouldn't want it in sight. Wich

meant you had to crawl under your desk to use the bloody on/off switch.

 

memory expansion.. 1 or 2 MB chip memory and 1 or 2 MB of fast memory (1 or 2 cos i forgot if the Amiga supported 4 MB or 2 MB in totall) Fast memory has it's uses, but i doubt if it is as usefull as real memory.

 

Why having guru's meditating if you can have bombs?

 

Don't like to have a Disk stuffed into my face when i boot my puter without a disk.

 

ok enough crap for now

 

Heh.. There was a sysop of a local ST BBS called Sac Base who had at the bottom of each of his posts 'By the light of the flickering Amiga'

 

Heh.

 

 

Sac Base? Was that a Sacramento based BBS? I swear I remember that tagline but I never participated on that one. The Gateway BBS was my favorite [bBS, specifically an Atari BBS] until the sysop closed it down when he left for college...

 

I remember one guy really favored Ratsoft BBS. He was the first person I knew who grew weed inside of a PC clone case. I think he said that finally made it [the PC] useful...

[atarian63]

a600 was junk. a300 on were very slow sellers. Atari though they failed at least saw the handwriting on the wall and moved on to otherthings. commodore in thier usual stupid plodding way just kept going and went out of business BEFORE Atari.

 

A500 was too large but at least the A500 had a nice keyboard (some of them any way as depended on when you bought it). The 600 lost the zorro slot so no CPU upgrade easily possible and PCMCIA was a dud firework. Build quality was OK though and it was 2mb chip ram, keyboard was not as nice, quite cheap like a £5 PC keyboard.

 

They went bust because they sacked R J Mical and Dave Needle in 1986 (who went on to produce Lynx and 3DO ha!) and then didn't listen to Jay Miner or use his enhanced Ranger chipset in 1988/89. They pissed up AGA A1200 with.......

 

EIGHT BITPLANE 256 COLOUR MODE(A 486 33mhz would struggle writing 8x addresses for 1 pixel in Doom)

NO IMPROVEMENT TO SOUND (put 2 damn Paula chips if you are too cheap to make more channels/16bit)

ALL CHIPRAM (meaning the CPU speed for polygon games stuck at 50%)

 

A3000 was a nice enough machine but it was never going to sell big because the improvements were only of use to office/utility software and none of that tech made any attempt to improve gaming potential....which is why the A500PLUS was the biggest pisstake going! Plus what? Plus f$%K ALL that's what 1280x256x4 colour.....wow I'm inspired to go and write Ant Attack from the Spectrum in 1983 on a 1990 Amiga!!!!

 

Trouble is Atari abandoned the Falcon way too early, it had potential IMO, Jaguar had the specs to beat SNES but not the games on the whole. If only they had licensed some 3rd party to convert key games to Jaguar whilst doing their VGA PC games....eg US Gold and Street Fighter 2 say? Also it was impossible to program and made the Amiga custom chipset look as easy to program as a Sinclair Spectrum.

You are correct of course A500 was too big but not at the time. It was a solid machine though and lots of peripherals made for it. We had many bad A600 amigas. odd though as it seemed well built. You hit the nail on the head about a3000 series. Buiness types were who we sold them to. seldom mainstream hobbyists.

The story line at cmmodore sounds a bit like Atari. Nt listening and not doing what was needed. Vert sad indeed. We are stuck with macs and pc's now. Just not like the good old days!

[Inky]

 

Heh.. There was a sysop of a local ST BBS called Sac Base who had at the bottom of each of his posts 'By the light of the flickering Amiga'

 

Heh.

 

 

Sac Base? Was that a Sacramento based BBS? I swear I remember that tagline but I never participated on that one. The Gateway BBS was my favorite [bBS, specifically an Atari BBS] until the sysop closed it down when he left for college...

 

SAC base was a Joliet, IL based BBS. It was themed after the film Dr. Strangelove. The SysOp was General Ripper (who was in reality a full time Joliet city cop)

[Lynxpro]

I was unaware that Amiga and ST could play MP3. I remember reading some (non-techy) article that said "it would be a handful" for a 386 to play one....they were boasting of the "power" in an iPod (or something) and trying to relate it in terms of "PCs not that long ago couldn't (or could barely) do this..... Article may have been way off base, then.

 

Stock ST's and Amiga's can't, afaik - some semi-rapid Amiga user can correct me on this if I'm wrong.

 

An 030 equipped Amiga, or a stock Atari Falcon can play MP3s though.

 

On my Falcon 060, running at 95mhz and with 256 megs of Ram, Aniplayer reports approx. 5-6% CPU usage

during MP3 play. Not bragging or anything like that, just posting for comparative/example purposes. I

think other accelerated Falcon users have reported even lower.

 

 

I'm only 10 pages into this thread so someone else probably pointed this out but iPod Shuffles have the same DSP in them as the Atari Falcon. That's why there's only a 5% CPU overhead when playing an MP3 on a Falcon...

 

I'm actually surprised nobody has "sourced" the Motorola 56k DSP from old discarded iPod Shuffles and made an adapter so ST/STe/TT owners could finally have sound parity with the Falcon...

[Christos]

It's 5% alright, but only if you have a 060. On a normal falcon, a 128KBps mp3 is about 60-70% cpu. A 64KBps one doesn't use cpu at all. The most my falcon managed to play was a 160KBps mp3. Those numbers fall enough if you use an external 44.1KHz clock, there is no need for resampling.

[jens]

My Falcon plays 256+ KBps mp3 files while letting me chat and FTP.

With Videl Inside setting the video to 640x400 in 16 colours it's still feels quite comfortable, but 640x480 or 768x576 in 256 colours is ok as well.

[Christos]

Falcamp? It forces it to mono when there isn't enough cpu time.

[jens]

FalcAmp, and absolutely no mono!

As far as I'm concerned FalcAmp just plays joint-stereo as mono, but I have to admit that my system is sped up by my FX-card.