Atari ST vs. Amiga

[Lynxpro]

What gave you the idea of 6 fire buttons back in 1991/2, the SNES?

The genesis didn't get 6 buttons until 1993 with the release of Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition, so it's not that obvious all that long before the Jag was released... The 3DO opted to omit one of the SNES's buttons in favor of a sort of hybrid layout of arcing 3-buttons like the MD/Genesis pad and the SNES's shoulder buttons.

 

Oops, I already answered that last year on here...

 

 

 

And from another post question, both the stand up and sit down versions of Atari's "Star Wars" arcade game used the yoke and not a joystick. I just know I performed better with the stand up units...

 

 

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.

 

 

If that's the case, then how can iPod Shuffles even play 256Kbps AAC files considering they are only using the Motorola DSP in them without the advantage of a 680x0 processor to boot?

 

I'm very impressed with what I saw on YouTube of a Falcon owner with a CT60 adapter installed playing both Quake 1 and Duke Nukem 3D on it. Both seemed to be twice as fast as my Pentium rig from the era those games debuted. Granted, there's no specs available as to how much fast RAM the owners had in their Falcons nor whether they had modified them with other video cards and such...

Edited December 11, 2011 by Lynxpro

[Lynxpro]

Depends whether we're talking straight up GEM on a plain vanilla 520STFM, in which case that answer would be a no. If we're talking about one of a zillion desktop upgrades for a plain vanilla STFM then a slightly less colourful equivalent of that could be achieved without too many probs. See I think while Amiga owners mainly only ever really used Amiga OS as their main operating system, ST owners ended up having to branch out into replacement software to get something really nice looking. Desktop environments could be selected from Neodesk, Teradesk, Magicdesk, Thing, Gemini, and best of the lot Jinnee plus a wealth of others. And multitasking OS/AES combos can be any of the following Mint + XaAES, Mint + MyAES, MultiTOS, Geneva or Magic plus a few other lesser ones. All of these things can be plonked together, and I can't imagine a lot of Atari users were/ are using straight up GEM on its own. It all depends on how much memory or power you want/ed to use or how geeky you wanted to get. Magic and Jinnee can produce a thoroughly nice working environment, but it's a bit resource heavy. What I liked about plain vanilla GEM is though is; it's simple to use, and does just enough with a nice clean interface which makes it clear what's going on. It doesn't get in the way of the real reason to use a computer. The programs. In fact you didn't even have to see the desktop, just set the program to autorun and that was it.

What resolution is that desktop of yours running in btw, my Amiga 500 looks horrendous compared to that. Does it impact performance? I suspect the answer is no, but be honest!

 

Hold I've been lured back into this undying thread again... AAArrgghh!

 

 

You forgot to mention Crystal which was a GEM add-on that was sold through Antic/STart's infamous catalog of software...

 

The first thing I did with the Falcon desktop was change the background to blue. I always did prefer blue to green but I don't know if that counts as a point in the favor of Amiga...

Edited December 11, 2011 by Lynxpro

[Lynxpro]

So if you had seen a screenshot of CAD 3d you'd have been on the other side! For me getting the falcon was non negotiable. It was a crappy -by now falcon standards- 3d demo that did it.

 

Christos, umm, one problem... I doubt a PC was multi-tasking or animating in 4,096 colors......or had stereo sound... or, much of ANYthing at this point...First off, PC's cost a minimum of $1000. at that time, double that of the A500... Second, even this early , the Amiga had CAD programs, can't tell ya how good they were, tho...

 

And LOL!

 

 

Tom Hudson's CAD-3D was out on the 520ST in, what, 1986? And he went on to write some rather famous graphics software on the PC. So the ST had CAD programs almost from day 1 as well.

 

Some of the guys who worked at ComputerTime - a computer store in Citrus Heights/Sacramento that sold both STs and Amigas - wrote some big paint program on the ST after having to deal with DeluxePaint on the Amiga for 2 years. I can't remember if that was Spectrum 512 or not.

 

ComputerTime pimped both lines but they went heavily into Amiga after Atari bought Federated, especially since there was a Federated right across the street from them. Now one thing I remember about their Amiga displays - and this ties into the discussions earlier about Amiga video being "fuzzy" - for their primo Amiga system, they had it connected to a Sony RGB monitor and some pretty sweet JBL speakers [the same speakers I believe Apple later bundled with the //GS]. Come to think of it, another big Commodore/Amiga dealer in Sac [Put's] also connected some of their Amigas to Sony monitors. I remember they had an Amiga 2000 hooked to a really nice non-Commodore monitor and they showed off that famous "Walker" demo [of an AT-AT walking downtown firing off its blasters] which was so large at the time it had to be loaded from one of those 44MB cartridges [what was that standard...Bertoli or something, like the MegaFile 44 on the ST side]... 'cept the Amiga 2000 had one of those installed in its 5 1/4" drive bay... I recall them pimping Iomega's first big product...the flopticals...

 

I remember the Amiga 1000 being what lots of people lusted for back in 85-86 but it wasn't cheap and it looked like Atari was taking down Commodore due to sales as well as the court case. Of course Commodore came back with the A500 and flipped the tables for the most part. It also didn't help at first that the Amiga was released by Commodore and most Atari fans hated Commodore with a passion no matter that Jack's crew now owned "Atari". I despised the C64 back in the day even though I didn't have an 8-bit and all but one of my friends had one [the other friend had an Apple //c]. My grandmother got a Commodore Plus 4 for free in 1984 [or 85] for having gone to a real estate seminar and that was a pile; had she gone one month before [as I had pled for her to do] she would've had an 800XL for free [my parents also refused to go]. My aunt went to one at that time and got a full TI-99 4/A with voice modulator for free. It was cool picking up AtariSoft titles for it at Federated in 1987 for 99 cents a piece. I'm still kicking myself for not having purchased the Atari/LucasFilm titles for the 5200 there that cheap since they are now collector's items.

 

 

 

(as IBM swapped Commodore their REXX language in exchange for source code of Amiga multitasking kernal to create their OS kernal for OS/2 I doubt it's shit)

 

I kinda wish I would've had an Amiga back in the day for ARexx considering REXX is still used in mainframe environments used by government institutions.

 

Do Amiga enthusiasts consider Mac OS X's AppleScript language a copy of ARexx functionality? I mean it's obvious that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's "multi desktop" feature is a copy of an Amiga function from circa 1987...

[marcfrick2112]

So the Amiga and ST had CAD programs from nearly the beginning... at least by 4th quarter '86, for the first Amiga package I remember..

LynxPro... What can AppleScript do regarding inter-process communication, and those odd issues, like , e.g. running several instances of a program concurrently? Is it a full-fledged programming language?

...

AREXX, especially on a OS 3.5 or better Amiga, is TOTALLY tied into Workbench itself as well, not too mention hundreds of other programs.... OK, am Amiga COULD easily have 2 copies of DirectoryOpus running... but HOW does AREXX tell them apart? Each occurrence of a program is given a '.1' '.2' at the end, and so on.... so even different copies of the same program can be controlled independently via AREXX ....Note; some programs just won't allow that.. like HD toolbox, for example...

 

I even have AREXX scripts to disable my 'un-needed' commodities, and window Tile, Stack, and Close All by AREXX control.. or, I can just click the menu item, LOL

 

As an example of something done in AREXX: One could instruct ImageFX to draw a semi-random doodle, or something, then launch DeluxePaint5, or PPaint, load that pic as 24-bit, process.. or don't.. assemble and re-name an animation automatically as it is being generated, frame-by-frame...

 

Now, if I can only learn to program in it!! LOL!

 

Edit: ACK! those 44MB carts were the first Syquest drives! LOL!\

Edited December 11, 2011 by marcfrick2112

[Lynxpro]

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

 

I'm close to 37 so I remember a lot of that era. I remember the PC World also had GEM but Microsoft muscled it out of the way with the inferior Windows. GEM/3 was pretty decent on a 286. Didn't Ventura Publisher on PC use GEM exclusively?

 

As for "layering", I don't have a problem with that. It could be argued that GEM was overlayed atop GEMDOS [or CP/M 68K as the previous plan], I'm sure an Amigan would say WorkBench was layed atop AmigaDOS [although I'm probably wrong there], and of course Mac OS X is sitting atop FreeBSD.

 

That all sounds fascinating. I'm surprised a lot of these old Atari employees didn't publicly mention to the computer press what they had worked on that got canned due to the dismantling of AtariInc. Classnet sounds like it would've been a viable competitor to AppleTalk and perhaps it would've been as capable as Ethernet if it was the same as the other networking system Atari was working on named in honor of Alan Kay you chronicled. But alas, that's one more thing the Tramiels blew it on apparently. Yep, that AppleTalk network port really came in handy on my Falcon...

 

Any pics of Eskimo or Atari Explorer?

 

 

So the Amiga and ST had CAD programs from nearly the beginning... at least by 4th quarter '86, for the first Amiga package I remember..

LynxPro... What can AppleScript do regarding inter-process communication, and those odd issues, like , e.g. running several instances of a program concurrently? Is it a full-fledged programming language?

...

AREXX, especially on a OS 3.5 or better Amiga, is TOTALLY tied into Workbench itself as well, not too mention hundreds of other programs.... OK, am Amiga COULD easily have 2 copies of DirectoryOpus running... but HOW does AREXX tell them apart? Each occurrence of a program is given a '.1' '.2' at the end, and so on.... so even different copies of the same program can be controlled independently via AREXX ....Note; some programs just won't allow that.. like HD toolbox, for example...

 

I even have AREXX scripts to disable my 'un-needed' commodities, and window Tile, Stack, and Close All by AREXX control.. or, I can just click the menu item, LOL

 

As an example of something done in AREXX: One could instruct ImageFX to draw a semi-random doodle, or something, then launch DeluxePaint5, or PPaint, load that pic as 24-bit, process.. or don't.. assemble and re-name an animation automatically as it is being generated, frame-by-frame...

 

Now, if I can only learn to program in it!! LOL!

Edit: ACK! those 44MB carts were the first Syquest drives! LOL!\

 

I have/had no idea of the power of AREXX on the Amiga when compared to AppleScript. That's why I was asking about it.

 

Wouldn't inter-process communication between apps and the OS be a security no-no in the modern computing world which is moving to more sandboxing of apps?

 

Syquest! I don't recall them having any "click of death" issues like the later ZIP drives...

 

 

Oh, and Gauntlet on the ST was awesome. My friends and I [mistakenly] thought back then that possibly the arcade game had been programmed on the ST originally because it seemed so close to the original. Of course, the Amiga's version of Marble Madness was also a masterpiece.

 

Now according to the Wired interview with the creator of Asteroids and the Atari Games/Tengen version of Tetris, he/Atari Games was definitely aware of the ST because he said he had played the ST version of Tetris before creating the Atari Games version, so it is conceivable that perhaps some of the Atari Games Corp programmers had STs at home despite the new found rivalry between the two corporate Ataris at that point. That was an angle mentioned in "Game Over" that the two Ataris mutually hated each other until Steve Ross apparently found them both common ground on suing Nintendo in court. Curt can correct that it if isn't/wasn't true...

Edited December 11, 2011 by Lynxpro

[oky2000]

Kickstart roms contain equivalent of PC BIOS and DOS or half of the GUI based WinNT OS (low level functions like line drawing function and various base level graphics for the GUI as well as the Kernal etc) and the Workbench disk is the actual higher level OS application.

 

Load Workbench 1.3 on a Kickstart 2.0/3.0 ROM based Amiga and it looks nothing like Workbench 1.3 GUI wise but the Windows/Icons etc all look like Workbench 2.0 OS.

[Lynxpro]

Good gawd...

 

For those who think the current Atari [ahem, "Infogrames", so to speak] is continuing to ruin the "Atari" brand, it could be worse. Head over to amiga.com and just look at the travesty that guy is committing against that brand. $98 junk Android tablets with the Amiga name on them but without, like, a classic Amiga emulator all while certain older games for the classic Amiga are being ported to iOS? Why won't that guy just sell the rights to the Amiga name and get out of the way instead of continuing to drive it into the ground?

 

I mean, sheesh...at least the Tramiels unloaded the "Atari" brand and disassociated themselves from the "company's" legacy. If Amiga could only be so lucky.

[Tempest]

Good gawd...

 

For those who think the current Atari [ahem, "Infogrames", so to speak] is continuing to ruin the "Atari" brand, it could be worse. Head over to amiga.com and just look at the travesty that guy is committing against that brand. $98 junk Android tablets with the Amiga name on them but without, like, a classic Amiga emulator all while certain older games for the classic Amiga are being ported to iOS? Why won't that guy just sell the rights to the Amiga name and get out of the way instead of continuing to drive it into the ground?

 

I mean, sheesh...at least the Tramiels unloaded the "Atari" brand and disassociated themselves from the "company's" legacy. If Amiga could only be so lucky.

Seriously. I've been following some of the more recent developments via the English Amiga Board. The stuff that they're doing to the Amiga brand is a travesty. Although to be fair this has been going on for awhile now.

[Lynxpro]

Good gawd...

 

For those who think the current Atari [ahem, "Infogrames", so to speak] is continuing to ruin the "Atari" brand, it could be worse. Head over to amiga.com and just look at the travesty that guy is committing against that brand. $98 junk Android tablets with the Amiga name on them but without, like, a classic Amiga emulator all while certain older games for the classic Amiga are being ported to iOS? Why won't that guy just sell the rights to the Amiga name and get out of the way instead of continuing to drive it into the ground?

 

I mean, sheesh...at least the Tramiels unloaded the "Atari" brand and disassociated themselves from the "company's" legacy. If Amiga could only be so lucky.

Seriously. I've been following some of the more recent developments via the English Amiga Board. The stuff that they're doing to the Amiga brand is a travesty. Although to be fair this has been going on for awhile now.

 

 

McEwan [sic] is the anti-Steve Jobs of the Amiga world.

 

That website doesn't even look up to 1994 web standards for graphics.

[AtariDude]

The Amiga was the better machine but it makes sense since they took several years in developing the product. When Tramiel took over and created his version of Atari, he made the ST model from readily available parts and not the custom parts that needed to be created for the Amiga to be what it was. It did make it easier to get the ST in the marketplace sooner but once the Amiga was out, more and more graphic professionals went with Amiga. The ST was large in the music industry and for a short time, the ST was big in the chess world since Chessbase, a database on recording, analysing, and other features relating to chess was first released on the Atari ST and Garry Kasparov asked for a copy of the program and an Atari ST to run it on. Now Chessbase is a standard in the chess world and runs on Windows.

 

By the way I owned an Atari 520 ST with a color monitor that I bought in 1986 and used through 1993 when I got my first PC compatible. I did get an upgrade to 1 MB of memory but that was the only thing I changed. I did go to a local computer show that has a Amiga user group that showed off the Amiga from 1990 to around 1994 they stopped showing up to the show. It was however a much more expensive machine which is why I never owned an Amiga. If you want to experience a nice turn key system for your Windows, Go to http://www.amigaforever.com/. Pretty slick little package.

Edited December 18, 2011 by AtariDude

[oky2000]

Good gawd...

 

For those who think the current Atari [ahem, "Infogrames", so to speak] is continuing to ruin the "Atari" brand, it could be worse. Head over to amiga.com and just look at the travesty that guy is committing against that brand. $98 junk Android tablets with the Amiga name on them but without, like, a classic Amiga emulator all while certain older games for the classic Amiga are being ported to iOS? Why won't that guy just sell the rights to the Amiga name and get out of the way instead of continuing to drive it into the ground?

 

I mean, sheesh...at least the Tramiels unloaded the "Atari" brand and disassociated themselves from the "company's" legacy. If Amiga could only be so lucky.

Seriously. I've been following some of the more recent developments via the English Amiga Board. The stuff that they're doing to the Amiga brand is a travesty. Although to be fair this has been going on for awhile now.

 

 

McEwan [sic] is the anti-Steve Jobs of the Amiga world.

 

That website doesn't even look up to 1994 web standards for graphics.

 

The actual name is all they have left now hence Amiga tablets and "Commodore" USA with their fake Amiga (PC running Win/Linux and an emulator)..

[oky2000]

The Amiga was the better machine but it makes sense since they took several years in developing the product. When Tramiel took over and created his version of Atari, he made the ST model from readily available parts and not the custom parts that needed to be created for the Amiga to be what it was. It did make it easier to get the ST in the marketplace sooner but once the Amiga was out, more and more graphic professionals went with Amiga. The ST was large in the music industry and for a short time, the ST was big in the chess world since Chessbase, a database on recording, analysing, and other features relating to chess was first released on the Atari ST and Garry Kasparov asked for a copy of the program and an Atari ST to run it on. Now Chessbase is a standard in the chess world and runs on Windows.

 

By the way I owned an Atari 520 ST with a color monitor that I bought in 1986 and used through 1993 when I got my first PC compatible. I did get an upgrade to 1 MB of memory but that was the only thing I changed. I did go to a local computer show that has a Amiga user group that showed off the Amiga from 1990 to around 1994 they stopped showing up to the show. It was however a much more expensive machine which is why I never owned an Amiga. If you want to experience a nice turn key system for your Windows, Go to http://www.amigaforever.com/. Pretty slick little package.

 

Or just download the actual WinUAE foolproof Amiga emulator for FREE and save money

[AtariDude]

True but you can always buy the basic $10 package and thus not have to worry about the legality of having the Amiga Kickstart Roms since Cloanto has gotten the rights to the Roms and they have a nice collection of games and demos that you can use. The games they got permission to include in the distribution from the copyright holders.

 

You also know that you are helping to support a company who is trying to keep Amiga alive for those who might wish to relive those memories or for people like me who never had an Amiga and they created a nice push button system that allows me to run things without having to know the internals of how the Amiga worked.

[Lynxpro]

True but you can always buy the basic $10 package and thus not have to worry about the legality of having the Amiga Kickstart Roms since Cloanto has gotten the rights to the Roms and they have a nice collection of games and demos that you can use. The games they got permission to include in the distribution from the copyright holders.

 

You also know that you are helping to support a company who is trying to keep Amiga alive for those who might wish to relive those memories or for people like me who never had an Amiga and they created a nice push button system that allows me to run things without having to know the internals of how the Amiga worked.

 

 

And it's money McEwan isn't getting his hands on either.

[AtariDude]

They are even being nice and helping me to get the Mac version of UAE to work. They do not have to do that but they are helping me and I am almost done. I have to ask them about creating a virtual disk image and I will be set. I currently run it through Parallels while running Windows 7 and it works but there is a noticeable issue with speed which is why I am trying to run a native Mac emulator.

[KiwiArcader]

The Amiga has a soul

The Atari ST has a soul

 

But the IBM PC can be both an Amiga and a ST so it must have 'Double soul'.

[AtariDude]

If you mean PC compatibles, then you are correct that there are powerful enough machines now that can emulate both machines. IBM has not produced a stand alone computer since they sold their laptop to Lenovo. The thinkpad series was a popular laptop for IBM but they only seem to want to be a services company for now.

[Tempest]

Which system had the best RPGs? Not the most RPGs, but the best RPGs? I know the Amiga had more simply because it lasted longer, but it was also missing some influential ones like Sun Dog, the Dungeon Master expansion pack, Wizards Crown, and oddly enough Phantasie II (why???).

[AtariDude]

I can't talk about the Amiga side but I know that the ST had Dungeon Master and I also played and finished Phantasie II. I think there was a version of Dungeon Master for the Amiga. If you look at Amiga versus the ST, there are videos that compare the same game on the 2 systems. Of course, Amiga always seems to have the nicer looking game. The question was always if someone was willing to pay the higher price of the Amiga vs. the price of the ST. This is part of the reason that Commodore released the Amiga500. They wanted a lower cost system so that it would hopefully draw in more customers.

Edited December 20, 2011 by AtariDude

[maiki]

Atari ST (not STE!) has no

 

- 4 channel 8bit Digi DMA sound

 

And thanks god it has not. I will take any AY buzz over low res sampled rubbish any time. Amiga's audio hardware was the wrong thing at the wrong time. There is not enough memory in the whole Amiga system to get a reasonable quality in this kind of "audio". And building the whole audio system just on samples playback with such a small RAM... I see no sence in this. Shame.

[desiv]

The Amiga has a soul

The Atari ST has a soul

 

But the IBM PC can be both an Amiga and a ST so it must have 'Double soul'.

No, it has NO SOUL.. That's why it's trying to grab the soul from the ST and Amiga...

 

It wants a SOUL.. ANY SOUL!!!

 

Poor IBM PC..

 

 

desiv

[mc6809e]

Atari ST (not STE!) has no

 

- 4 channel 8bit Digi DMA sound

 

And thanks god it has not. I will take any AY buzz over low res sampled rubbish any time. Amiga's audio hardware was the wrong thing at the wrong time. There is not enough memory in the whole Amiga system to get a reasonable quality in this kind of "audio". And building the whole audio system just on samples playback with such a small RAM... I see no sence in this. Shame.

 

It wasn't as bad as all that. The samples could be waveform tables of length two bytes to 128K bytes. The values were output as a loop and at a rate determined by a frequency divider. A square wave could be stored in just two bytes, for example.

[w1k]

hmm, on amiga exist game flashback.. exist on st?

[+DarkLord]

I don't think so, just like the wonderful game "Oids" doesn't exist on the Amiga.

 

You can get Flashback on an Atari though - Atari Jaguar.

[Lynxpro]

I can't talk about the Amiga side but I know that the ST had Dungeon Master and I also played and finished Phantasie II. I think there was a version of Dungeon Master for the Amiga. If you look at Amiga versus the ST, there are videos that compare the same game on the 2 systems. Of course, Amiga always seems to have the nicer looking game. The question was always if someone was willing to pay the higher price of the Amiga vs. the price of the ST. This is part of the reason that Commodore released the Amiga500. They wanted a lower cost system so that it would hopefully draw in more customers.

 

 

Not always true. Predator looks like it plays better on the ST than the Amiga, although the audio on the Amiga version is a lot better...

 

I've come to terms with the Amiga after many years and having been an ST owner back in the day. The Amiga has Atari DNA through and through, it's just a brother from a different mother...granted, she was a street walker but I digress! I'll still welcome an Amiga in my home.

 

 

Edit: If I end up with an Amiga, that Commodore logo is gonna get removed...

Edited January 16, 2012 by Lynxpro