oky2000

My old Thinkpad T23 runs Atari 800 WinPLus 4.0 (and STEem), my desktop PC runs UAE, both without slowdowns. Could you be precise and tell me wich part of the hardware of these computers modern PCs can't emulate by sheer brute force? Thorsten You need about 850mhz Pentium III laptop to run Amiga 32bit AGA games on UAE and around 650mhz for the older 16bit Amiga 500. However, the games do not scroll as smoothly or frame accurately as a real Amiga (and they still don't on a Dual Core Laptop/PC). Emulation is one thing, coding games on a machine designed to be programmed for 2D graphics with specific raster line accurate controls like the Copper chip on a fixed hardware platform are NOT the same thing at all. So they can be emulated but you will never duplicate it because a PC running Windows NEVER gives you 100% control of the machine, unlike a real Amiga running machine code. So it depends what the OP is referring to. That's true that Amiga games usually go directly to hardware registers (since they are standard) and thus give you a more efficient product. However, even if your emulator went directly to standard hardware on PCs, you'll have a hard time getting the same effects of many Amiga games since standard PC hardware wasn't designed for scrolling, sprites, timing video beam, dynamically manipulating audio registers, etc. Newer hardware has some of this stuff but it's non-standard so you have to resort to API calls which then restrict the useage. Dave Haney and Bil Herd have both mentioned in some of their online talks that modern day video cards all by themselves could easily emulate the Amiga OS and hardware. It's not the hardware on the PC Video cards that was ever the problem. Even something as old as the Diamond Viper PC graphics card could do better 2D than the Amiga's chipset. The problem is the design of the PC and the OS that runs on top of that. The Amiga was designed to work with your TV set's modes just like the VCS and A8 does. Nature of the beast VCS/A8/Amiga all rely heavily on standard TV features like interlace and work with them at set frequencies whereas a PC will always be fighting you because it was designed as a wordprocessing machine. Even today watching an AVI on a machine 1000x more powerful than the Amiga you can get midscreen refreshes causing tearing for no reason other than you will never fully control the machine and stop the OS like 'the good old day'

MY STM has a better keyboard than my 520STE so don't chuck anything away Iain

Very little for me. I liked the GameCube a lot. I actually had an XBox and GameCube and ended up selling the XBox because I was hardly playing it. I suppose the lack of online play bugged me (I had used SegaNET on the DREAMCAST) and the half-assedness of a few ports bugged me, but I liked it overall. I do think there's some "revisionist" history going on right now as people declare "the system was a bomb" and "there's no third party games etc". I see it all over the play and chuckle at the notion of a system with over 700 games, a 7-year lifespan and 22 million units sold being a called a "bomb". Jaguar (which I also like) was a bomb in that it hemoraged money, died quickly and had a tiny library of games. GameCube, which generated billions in profits (more than the XBox, PS3 and XBox 360 put together at this point) isn't what I would classify as a bomb. I liked the Dreamcast too and it was too bad Sega gave up on it even though it sold 10 million models. It would have hit the magic 20 million eventually. You are right: the Gamecube is not a bomb. It is actually number 2 behind the Playstation 2 in the previous generation as it is only the second system to post a profit (unless you are including the Gameboy Advance as well which places the Gamecube in third). Microsoft lost billions and is still losing money on the original XBox. I would not worry about the "revisionist(s)" out there as they are just towing the Microsoft PR department's line. This is after all a business first (not a PR campaign) and eventually the historians will correct them. Right now it is more of people just shooting from the lip. Probably the same people that thought Nintendo would be out of the hardware business and making software only by now too. Ease up on the Jaguar okay? LOL If the XBox is not "considered" a bomb, let us lend the same kind of generosity towards Atari's old cat and call it a hit! Show some respect for Atari okay? Crying out loud, this was in the dot com economy and losing money is not a sign of being a loser apparently! Here here! The xbox WAS a financial disaster propped up with all the money Microsoft make from Windows. They sold it for a loss and the whole operation made a loss, anyone other than Microsoft would have gone bankrupt over the Xbox even Sony. The Jaguar was better than the Sega 32X and CDi and CD32 and 3DO too (in some ways) was very tricky to code for too. Write the code in the obvious way and you got performance hits, but Virtua Fighter Remix Saturn style is likely possible on the Jag. Alien Vs Predator made Doom look like a Gameboy running Pokemon on PCs costing 4x as much as a Jag Jack was always on a backfoot with Atari as unlike when he was at Commodore he didn't have the advantage of MOS technologies making custom chips at cost price as in the £199 C64. Hardware was expensive and Jack's aggressive business style was not so easy without the tools of destruction afforded to him by owning his own chip design company. I'm sure Resident Evil's style of coding is possible quite easily on the Jag with effort too. It all comes down to how much money Atari had to spend on the project not the machines capabilities. The xbox was better and cheaper than the PS2 and yet it sold 15% of what the PS2 has sold and made a huge financial drain on the richest company in the world...so FAIL!

I personally think The STE is what the ST would have been and what Shiraz Shivji wanted it to be, but money needed to be made FAST and a new computer needed to be signed off on by Jack T after he lost out on the Amiga chipset to start paying the creditors and generating some profit simple as that. SS was involved in the VIC20 and C64 both of which have custom chips ESPECIALLY the C64 with SID and VIC-II but the 520ST (not STE) is more like an Amstrad CPC than a C64 or A8 ie a really fast processor and off the shelf sound chip but no other custom silicon. The design was there from the start to accommodate a blitter/DA converters for digital sampled sound just like the Amiga had. But Jay Miner and co were expert at this kind of thing, look at the VCS and the A8 for proof or even the Lynx with sprite scaling which was designed 2-3 years before JT sold it to you when Nintendo launched the Gameboy but RJ Michel had it finished and prototyped about a year after the Amiga prototype was finished. Plus the ST was produced a lot quicker than the Amiga. So we got no blitter, no video co-processor like A8 display lists, no hardware sprites, no hardware scrolling, no DA stereo sample sound playback and a 1/2mb disk drive with 512 not 4096 colours all of which the compatible STE addresses with minor changes to the motherboard relatively speaking. Price was an issue and so was time, so we got the 520ST and very attractive looking beast it was too and a better computer than the Mac and for that they should be proud. The Jackintosh was fantastic! For polygon games the ST is a better machine too due to simpler screen memory layout and 12% faster CPU. There isn't really much in the Amiga chipset which helps with 3D games. Look at Virus, Powerdrome, Starglider II or Flight Simulator 2 for example, it is faster on the ST clearly. However for something like Shadow of the Beast as others have said it was written more as a demo based on what is available as standard on any Amiga that was tacked on with some pretty average gameplay. But fact remains for every type of Amiga custom chip missing in the original ST that you try to compensate for by software you lose more and more CPU power to actually run the game. This is something that can not be escaped. Another thing is SotB is a horizontally parallax scrolling game, horizontal scrolling is a big drain on the CPU for the ST with no blitter assistance unlike vertical scrolling of 256 pixel width screens. Overscan is also built into the Amiga which takes up zero rasters it is just there to set. Hardware sprites are put to good use as well to add further layers of parallax. It's just not possible to play samples, run an overscaned horizontal overlapped parallax scroll, simulate hardware sprites, software blit everything via just an 8mhz 68000, use spectrum 512 style raster tricks to give you 32 colours per line and still have any CPU time left to run the game. Let's take another game that is written well for both machines, how about Lotus II Turbo challenge? Both versions are very good, the ST version is not far off the Megadrive/Genesis version and the Amiga version is just a little faster a little smoother and better sound (no music until Lotus III so not to worry about engine noises too much!) OR how about Test Drive? The presentation (pictures of cars/music playing) was better than the ST on the Amiga version but when you actually play the game apart from the engine sounds was there a big difference? not really the ST version would probably be faster slightly. I think they're better games to compare, both versions were great, one was slightly better than the other. But one machine cost 33% more than the other or more in 1986/7. So what do you expect? SotB is a conversion of a 100% Amiga game to an ST. Lotus II was designed without the specifics of either machine AND programmed well for both target machines (and Archimedes too) The true question is does it matter? The answer is no, the ST is a great machine in its own right. And if you didn't think like that you would have been stuck with an MSX/C64 or A8 for another 2 years until the A500 was as cheap as the 520STM I purchased. And that means you would not have played Gauntlet 1 (best home computer version in the world on the ST) The Pawn Backlash Starglider......see my point? Short of sound Starglider was better on the ST, The Pawn was identical except for the stupid text to speech business on the Amiga and Gauntlet 1 was NEVER released on the Amiga and none of the Gauntlet rip-offs on the Amiga were much cop and certainly not better than ST Gauntlet 1. Gauntlet II is really crap on BOTH systems too! So there you have it, at the time there were many things to consider.... if you want to do music sequencing get an ST with racks of expensive midi equipment, if you want to do desktop video and animatics get an Amiga and LOTS of expensive frame accurate broadcast video equipment, if you want to write a letter to the council/state about your parking ticket use either, if you want to write music and burn a rough copy and become famous like Betty Boop in the UK did get an Amiga, if you want to produce 3D animation get an Amiga and Lightwave and a 2nd mortgage to pay for Lightware. if you wanted to do desktop publishing get an Atari and the SLM laser printer package. If you want to play games look at the games on both including awesome exclusives on both look at your bank account and decide which you think is better value for money. When it comes to games the Amiga's blitter can't help with 3D and the ST's midi can't help with anything but cheesy midi elevator music (ie no screams or laser shots or sampled tunes like Xenon 2 blah blah) and at the cost of a midi box that cost as much as a 520STFM anyway so no use to gamers. If you ONLY wanted to play [the usual arcade type of] games you should have got a PC-Engine/Genesis AKA Megadrive or SNES AKA Super Famicom. Those machines were much better for that than either the ST or Amiga. Neither the ST or Amiga could do Virtua Racing/StarFox either for 3D so not just scrolly type games. A home computer is a compromise but a console will never let you mess about and make decent music or make decent animation. Babylon 5 exists because of the Amiga, many musicians produced our favourite music (like Tangerine Dream) thanks to their STs and midi setup. Be happy you own either/all and just enjoy the best both have to offer is all I can say. I have had many fun years using both machines and life is too short to try and force your opinion on others....life is better spent enjoying ALL games you can play on the equipment you own not trying to justify to anyone why you own the machines you own. I was first in line to grab a 520STM and SF354 and was very happy with the machine, it was cutting edge stuff. Neochrome was an awesome package and I wasted far too much of my youth doodling in 16 out of 512 colours where most other home computers gave you two or four colours at best. There is nothing wrong with the Atari ST at all as a home computer. As for the OS well the A-line graphic routines of GEM were horribly implemented and slow as hell but Turbo ST sorted that out for me so no need for a blitter for GEM. As for resilience well GEM only really crashed when using iffy PD utils or cracked/packed games not whilst typing in 1st word with an official desk accessory loaded. Sadly though Atarians comments are typical of forum specific boards like this and are just factually incorrect sorry. I have decided not to bring down the thread into a flame war though as this is an Atari forum so it's not for me to try and change people's opinions anyway (and I see the same type of comments on Amiga boards I am a member of too anyway). Some facts though....I have owned both the same 520STM and A1000 computer for about 23 years and know how to use them, how to program them in 68K ASM etc etc and can tell you for a fact that the only time the Amiga OS unexpectedly crashed, despite running a 21bit colour digitizer/Deluxe Paint animations and 4096 colour HAM paint packages simultaneously, was from the same type of badly written software (PD/utils etc) OR cracked/packed games run. So we can conclude they are no worse or better (multitasking aside but very few games run from Workbench anyway and it's rogue processes that bring down ANY multitasking OS including Vista/XP/OSX but this is not the OS that's the problem but lack of hardware protected memory being supplied which any intelligent person knows already) The look is a personal preference I like both really. Neither machine crashed for anyone I know mid game unless it was an actual badly written game that was recalled, cracked game or there was corruption on the disks or faulty hardware in the first place (loose TOS roms on the STM/blown PAL chips on the A1000 when printing etc). Kickstart/Workbench was stable as hell, more stable than any machine off the shelf today too so less of that rubbish please. And the comments about flickering screen modes on the Amiga.....well the ST has a dedicated Hi-Res 32khz non TV compatible type monitor just like a VGA PC, and if you used the Amiga in Hi-Res you should have invested in a scan doubler and suitably identical 32khz monitor. Pictures on TV flicker no more than the same images from broadcasters aired to your TV for example on weather maps with line drawings on dark backgrounds etc or even a PC with TV-output of 640x480....it's called interlace....it is not the Amiga's fault TVs were only capable of 625 lines via 25FPS of successive scanning and interlacing of two seperate 50hz fields (60 for NTSC) to make up one image of double the horizontal resolutions. The A2000 has the option of an internal scan doubler direct from Commodore for this very reason (ie people wanting to use Hi-Res for non-multimedia tv compatible output like word processing/DTP etc). Let's keep it civil and accurate please and no offence to those with an open mind here and their genuine good intentions in their comments too

This is a fault with the Mega STE trust me, I had the exact same fault with my MSTE and it nearly blew my SC1224 up before I realised what was going on. The MSTE is stuck in hires mode and it is nothing to do with the monitor or cable it is the actual computer which is holding the mono detect. Don't try anymore colour monitors on it until you solve the problem and get the MSTE repaired as you will just blow something on the colour monitor's circuits running @ 70hz mode etc I never bothered to fix mine, sold it to someone who was only interested in running Cubase etc in mono. Better than letting it go to waste as it was used and cared for for many years.

Why is it using a 16mhz rated 68000 to run at 28mhz? In fact was there actually a standard 68000 @ 28mhz rating from Motorola in that chip package? Most 68000 Accelerators were actually 16mhz anyway makes it a lot simpler to just double up the CPU or multiples of the original 8mhz cpu bus. I always wanted one when I got my STM just so Gauntlet 1 would scroll horizontally a bit better without bogging down and STeeM proved 2 decades later that it would have been disastrous for my school studies had I done that as it is a fine fine game @ 16mhz

A game that is available on all four of those machines is Gauntlet. Well almost Gauntlet 1 was programmed before the A500 was launched so only the super expensive A1000 was around and we didn't get Gauntlet 1. You could run Gauntlet 2 on Amiga and ST side by side AND then run Gauntlet 1 on C64 and Atari 8bit together. Gameplay is the same, it's just that Gauntlet 2 on the ST is cack compared to Gauntlet 1 and the Amiga version is a shitty port with no changes except what was needed to compile the source on Amiga compiler

I can confirm that! I have never had to reload Kickstart more than once per power on in 25 years of A1000 ownership It works perfectly and when Kickstart 2.0 came out the silly A500 owners who laughed at us A1000 owners with our boot roms on disk stopped laughing They needed to buy a new £40 ROM so where not very happy as they either had to open up their machine and fit a ROm switcher (games compatibility) OR lose 256k of their RAM and reboot a different kickstart with each reset using a kickstart loader (me? I just got a custom Kickstart 2 disk from Commodore for a few $) Jay Miner and co. got the Kickstart disk/W.O.M. idea spot on

LOL and here's me thinking you are supposed to use proper non-conducting little screw drivers

Please show me where I can get one for less... ebay, the trick is to do a saved search so you get emailed searched results daily. And then when you find something you like just wait until the last 10 seconds (so keep refreshing the main auction page in one window with your max bid ready to submit in another window simultaneously) before submitting your bid of a reasonable price. If the auction seems devoid of activity more often than not you will get a bargain Condition does make a big difference to price. the ST's grey/blue colour is very susceptible to yellowing and one that still actually has that original lovely blueish/greyish tint to the plastics and shiny white keys will be worth more than a yellowed piece of rubbish (even though the yellowing can be removed now)

Hey, I remember a while ago I had missed an auction where the seller claimed it had an internal hard drive. I notice that ICD do peripherals for the Mega STE and I remember that ICD also did an internal IDE 2.5" drive kit to fit inside the Amiga A500/A1000. Did ICD also make this kit for the 520ST and if so does it mater what machine it is for ie 520STM/STFM/STE? Ta for any help on this

I would love to win the lottery and just run a shop full of awesomeness like that for the fun of it until my last day of health (and yes I would have 70s style wooden shelves and wood panelling on the walls)

I can only play STE games like Super Stardust with Hatari so if it's STE specific stuff use that. Otherwise I use STeem too

Just buy a 1040/520 STE with 1mb ram for games, and a Mega ST(E) for other uses where you want to type on the keyboard and maybe use a hard drive. The keyboard on the 520STE/STFM/STM etc is pretty rubbish.

The Mega ST/STE keyboards are really nice to type on, which is how I ended up in this mess in the first place ;o) And on todays menu, chopping up a nondescript external drive to fit inside another all-in-one 16bit computer.....

Hey Alison Thanks for the link I'll try it tomorrow in case the site is having problems. Stupidly I never tried the actual keyboard that came with the Mega ST4 I bought but used my own Mega STE keyboard and it worked fine until I sold the Mega STE and tried it months later with the original Mega ST keyboard. I actually have two keyboards. One has obvious coffee stains on the bare keyboard and rust too so I figured that was a no hoper, so tried swapping round the keyboard and the control board to see if I could get one to work. Nothing happened and the power light doesn't come on when the keyboard is attached. I couldn't see an easy way to substitute the original ST keyboard onto the Mega ST's control board either As for gunk on keyboards...I sell ex-corp laptops so am quite used to seeing gunked up keyboards which is a bit yucky and it's time for the toothbrush and 'new laptop smell' aerosol from Maplins or in the worst cases pulling all the keys off 1 by 1 first Faffing about with all this retro gear is aces I agree I usually build abominations of machines though like a C64 mk2 with a mk1 motherboard, mk1 keyboard and resprayed in a colour matched version of that oh so funky C64 mk1 brown colour and a nice shiny red LED to boot (green LEDs and brown don't go!)

You paid that much for a 1040STFM without a colour Atari monitor OR a garage full of boxed games? Wow that's a lot to pay for just an STFM machine or an STE!

I have 3 520STM machines I think (too much tech to keep track of even in this huge house!) and from memory they all work but one has a broken keyboard and no charger. I could sell you the motherboard for that if that helps but they're only 512K none have any upgrades. @Techie_Alison I'm seriously tempted to get that 4mb upgrade as a treat for my mint and boxed 520STM as it's my favourite ST. Do you repair Mega ST keyboards by any chance? I've got one that when you plug it in the key press sound is just constantly repeating as if there's a stuck key and the mouse and joystick ports don't work on the keyboard so makes the Mega ST pretty useless now (although it does a great job keeping heavy doors open I guess now )

I like Commando on the 7800 too, it's a really nice game and a good all rounder. I really don't like the 7800 controllers though, but other than that the game itself is nicely done. Prefer it to Ikari myself but I also preferred the arcade version of Commando to Ikari Warriors too so it's just a personal thing I guess.

I have 4 televisions in my house and they are ALL CRT models. If I want to play HD TV programs or movies I use a lovely DLP projector and a motorised 12ft screen on a ceiling mount. I think Plasma and LCD make TV programs look worse as well as computer games. The sound is usually tinny and crap too because the sets are so slim there is no room to design in a decent set of speakers and housings. However, 4:3 sucks bad for watching 'proper' 2.35:1 films on as 50% of the screen isn't even used. 16:9 is a good compromise...minimal black bars on 4:3 games/programs and ditto for 2.35:1 DVD movies. Having said that if I will only have computers or consoles in the room with a telly I prefer 4:3 sure, and I have a 28" Mitsubishi TV that is 14 years old but still has pin sharp convergence and a crystal clear screen that Sony would be proud of Would be nice to get a nice wood effect old TV to go with the VCS/Coleco etc just to get the retro feel.

And the rev counter works on the game too, nice touch Don't make 'em like they used to!

The SMS has some sophisticated custom chips for the graphics...Hang-On gives the Amiga version a run for its money! So I don't think CPU has much to do with it but at the same time you can only overcome so much of a technical disadvantage with cunning programming alone. R-Type on the SMS is a fantastic example of what it can do (yes the sprites do flicker I know) Nintendo own the Mario franchise....so automatic bucketloads of win (even though I couldn't care less for any mario or zelda game personally) Whether the SMS or NES could do justice to Rescue on Fractalus is another matter given their higher fixed screen resolutions, so it also depends what type of games you want to talk about. The NES and SMS are very good at the games they were respectively designed to produce without too much trouble, and here is the problem because not enough resources were ever ploughed into software development on the 7800 to identify just exactly what it is best at/can possibly do at the hands of a true coding genius.

I've been looking for a table top electronic game with a cab wide enough to accommodate a Toshiba Libretto 100/110 inside it. The hope was then to hard wire the MAME keys on the keyboard to the joysticks and two fire buttons and select etc. This would be really cool as then you could get a huge amount of 80s games in there and utilise the original widescreen TFT setup in true arcade portrait mode. I couldn't find anything wide enough though to take the pieces so gave up. I really fancied the Grandstand Astro Wars casing for this

My old Thinkpad T23 runs Atari 800 WinPLus 4.0 (and STEem), my desktop PC runs UAE, both without slowdowns. Could you be precise and tell me wich part of the hardware of these computers modern PCs can't emulate by sheer brute force? Thorsten You need about 850mhz Pentium III laptop to run Amiga 32bit AGA games on UAE and around 650mhz for the older 16bit Amiga 500. However, the games do not scroll as smoothly or frame accurately as a real Amiga (and they still don't on a Dual Core Laptop/PC). Emulation is one thing, coding games on a machine designed to be programmed for 2D graphics with specific raster line accurate controls like the Copper chip on a fixed hardware platform are NOT the same thing at all. So they can be emulated but you will never duplicate it because a PC running Windows NEVER gives you 100% control of the machine, unlike a real Amiga running machine code. So it depends what the OP is referring to.

I don't have same games for all 4 platforms (if they even exist) but here's the ones I like still: Star Leaguge Baseball (Atari 8-bit)-- blocky players but very good playability and control. Arkanoid (Amiga) Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit) Donkey Kong (Atari 8-bit) Space Invaders (Atari 8-bit 4K version) Joust (Atari 8-bit) ChessMaster (Amiga) Emerald Mine (Amiga) Pole Position II and Ms. Pac-man (Atari 7800)-- any better versions of these for the 4 systems mentioned? I think Donkey Kong is better on C64 . There is (at least) 2 official port of Donkey Kong , one done by Atari Soft and the other by OCEAN. Both are very good, but i have a little preference for the OCEAN version that keeps the aspect/ratio of the arcade. Concerning JOUST , the Atari ST version was really good!! Pole Position II is also on the C64 on Youtube (I put it there) if you want to compare. Arkanoid on the C64 is a really nice piece of coding, and the music is amazing due to the sample playback on the virtual 4th sound channel. Ocean's Donkey Kong for the C64 plays pretty much the same as the arcade and for me is the best version of all 4 (don't know if the 24th screen bug happens on any home version though...the mythical kill screen)