Zogging Hell

I think the real reason that the Amiga eventually won the race with the ST is that rabid Amiga owners carried on talking up their machine till most ST owners committed suicide and the rest fell into comas!

Yes but does this actually mean the Commodore was a worse or inferior computer to the Atari offering. I would argue not, much as I like the 800 (again I have three), but the Commodore 64 worked bloody well out of the box and in a lot of cases looked better graphically than the 800.. I would say it was an equal computer in terms of the capabilities an average user would see to the 800/XL etc and it cost a whole a whole lot less as well. In some parts it is a better machine. (I should point out I don't want to be quoted on that!)

Well yes, the Amiga's expansion capabilities are very credible, much better than the soldering solutions the average ST user had to put up with to get extra memory or a faster processor. There are however a few problems with this argument. For starters how many users actually bothered with the expandability. I imagine those left using the Amiga are enthusiasts and did expand the computer to it's limits. But I imagine 10 fold more didn't bother so the fact it was expandable made no difference between it an the ST, which enthusiasts expanded as much as possible. Moreover I suspect a lot of the more loyal Amiga users abandoned the 500 as soon as a more powerful base model came out (i.e. 1200). To the end user a computer is just as it comes. Regardless of its potential. The argument over the planning of the Amiga to be a whole range of products is interesting, but despite the fact Atari allegedly designed the ST just to be a box of bits, it didn't stop it evolving into a myriad of different products the Falcon, TT and Stacy included. I would argue the ST developed into as many different products as the Amiga, and would have even more, if the talk of Stylus's and ST consoles had come to pass. Atari may not have planned future scalability but it did not stop the line continuing in the slightest. The Falcon and TT (which I think it is time to talk about) address much of the expandability problems of the original ST. One of the reasons we have a 68060 processor on the Falcon is thanks to a plug in adaptor, which fair enough isn't on the side of the computer, but is easy enough for even a technical numpty like me to add bits onto.

I think our point is, unless you were that boring un-remembered bloke who was in charge of Commodore, why would Amiga owners not admit that despite it's 'superiority' (although I would suggest slightly more advanced technical capability in the sound and graphics front might be nearer the mark) that in some aspects that do not concern game playing, graphics or having a 'built in' genlock, the ST is actually a better machine? Come on, we are mature enough to admit the Amiga has it over us in some respects but sometimes it seems the reverse it true the other way round, and Amiganoids would rather be burnt at the stake than admit their machine wasn't perfect. I cite here the general outrage that appears whenever any ST owner mentions midi, DTP or the fact the ST has a marginally faster CPU, meaning 3D and other mathematical calculations are slightly faster. I mean a sound chip is great for games, but not everyone thinks games are the be all and end all of computers. Thankfully the pop hits of the eighties were free of Amiga chip tunes (as they could have been even worse!). And I apologise to the North American Amiga guys again as I'm again using the Amiga 500 as a comparison. If you want the more flashy models then we'd have to add the TT and Falcon into the mix and that is going to get complex..

Ok, if you say so. In MY experience, the heavily advertised systems were the 520ST launch systems - $800 monochrome and $1000 color. These are the ones people bought the most, in my experience. I bought a $300 SF314 720K drive the next year, and I kept having to copy stuff to 360K discs to pass to friends. Atari 520ST customers (including myself) were not told in the $799/$999 ad that they were purchasing - at that price - totally inadequate storage (and they were). The people I knew who bought STs were attracted by those prices, bought those configurations, and wouldn't have been eager to cough up more Ben Franklins to correct the inadequacy. Even after the 1040ST launched with 720K drive, they were still selling 360K drives with 520ST. Hell, they built 360K drives into the 520STfm at first. Only the later 520STfm had 720K drive. By then, the lowest-common denominator 360K standard had been cast. Every one of the 520ST games I had back in the day were single sided. I used to run the 720K as a second drive, and used the worthless 360K drive for gaming to keep the miles off the decent one. I find it difficult to believe that game producers would have abandoned the 360K masses that comprised the lowest common denominator. They certainly didn't want to abandon those folks and develop STe-specific games, did they? I bailed from the ST around 1990 so maybe the 720K drive was popularized by then.....as I was weaning off my PC's 1.44M drive and moving to CD-ROM (I had been reading about in Atari publications since 1985 but never saw). So maybe I didn't notice. I think ST Format had an article on the first double sided only ST game, which if memory serves me correctly was 'Quest for the Time Bird'. That would be 1989, and most ST's in the UK had been double sided for a while before that. My STFM (purchased in 1988) was double sided. I've brought about 12 or so pre STEs over the years and only once came across a single sided drive (with a deliberately retro original ST with external disk drive). In my experience (and it is a UK/ European one sorry) ST's were usually double sided with 512k till about 1990/1 when everyone started to upgrade to 1mb to cope with the newer games (Marpet Xtram anyone?). Amiga (500s) were usually 1mb machines, as the larger amount of colours and other gubbins in the programmes meant they needed more memory to be able to run (before anyone starts I remember reading this somewhere, basically due to something or other the ST has more of its initial RAM left from 512k than the Amiga hence the need for 1mb. I could be totally wrong here however and I'm sure I'll be corrected if necessary). Presumably this was why the ST got away with being 512k for longer than the Amiga.

Was that a standard 8 MHz 68k machine? Those would have been 32-bit Amigas, probably with 68060 accelerators and probably PPC coprocessors as well. (and there were similar upgrades for ST I beleive, at least for some models) Even the A4000 came with a 68040 stock. (I think the tower version of the 3000 might have as well) Yep plain vanilla ST. A CT60'd Falcon would have considerably less issues..

No, that's next door. This is getting hit on the head lessons.... desiv No it isn't... See the following link for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM

I think the only games that really used MIDI were the Kings Quest/ Sierra ones. The main problem with using MIDI is that different machines use different arrangements in MIDI with regard to voices. My Yamaha keyboard for example has MIDI but the line up of instruments is so weird that to use it with the ST you have to change a lot. I think Roland machines offered the best compatibility and were what a lot of the ST music programmes were designed to work with.

lol wasn't that mid nineties, i.e. the ST was already dead (commercially)? Next thing you'll be raving about NASA and that chap from Mary Poppins and Diagnosis murder being a Amiga nut! I was thinking of the Cyberstudio suite, which paved the way for modern 3D packages. Were all those tv things done on early Amigas? Good god they must have had the patience of saints! The rendering must have taken decades.. Babylon 5 was rendered I believe using Lightwave and renderfarms, so not just on a single Amiga, but a whole bunch of them networked, and I could be wrong but I think they also used a Raptor or 2, which was a super fast (for the time) CPU + RAM designed for that sort of work. Ah I see, I was just remembering the last time I used POV on the ST and it took about a day to render a reflective bauble! I thought the CGI was quite good in Babylon 5 at the time, haven't seen it for a while though.

Openening the case is trivial, the problem is when you're not just adding cards to expansion slots, but having soldering involved. (piggybacking if the case may be) Didn't that happen with the Amiga as well, catering to the 512 kB base A500? (and rarely having HDD installable games) Not to mention taking advantage of newer chipsets just like games with the ST blitter (albeit rather little changed in terms of game capabilities until AGA). That's all typical lowest common denominator stuff, it happened on every platform. ... -_- The ST was a computer, NOT a game console! And it would have made a rather poor dedicated games console for the time (had gaming been a paramount feature the design would have been rather different, like the Amiga or X68000) On top of that, the statement about being in a time of game console manufacturers not profiting from 3rd party licences is also incorrect, that's one of the tings the 7800 fixed (featuring lockout), granted it wasn't popular enough to really take any advantage of that (other than discouraging piracy), plus the NES got lockout soon after (I think th epre-release models may have lacked it), and the Master System had it as well. (albeit no region locking) It's no different today, Apple and various PC hardware manufacturers don't profit from game licences... Hasn't he heard of Babylon 5. OK, maybe he meant 3D capabilities in games on standard basline Amiga vs ST. (ie A500 compared to 520 ST) For polygons the ST's a bit better I think with raw CPU power, but other "3D" games using scaling and such might be able to take advantage of the blitter (ie for wolfenstein 3D type games, or other scaling/rotating usage for psudo 3D). Maybe the blitter could provide some help with texture mapping as well, I don't know about that though. lol wasn't that mid nineties, i.e. the ST was already dead (commercially)? Next thing you'll be raving about NASA and that chap from Mary Poppins and Diagnosis murder being a Amiga nut! I was thinking of the Cyberstudio suite, which paved the way for modern 3D packages. Were all those tv things done on early Amigas? Good god they must have had the patience of saints! The rendering must have taken decades..

See it worked then.. Easy, I actually quite like the Amiga (and yes I do own one) but I don't have to agree with you that it was a better machine (in terms of overall package for the price). Free country (planet) after all. Er I have to compare the Amiga 500 with the STFM as they were contemporary and around the same price point. I do not think the STFM is the earliest ST or the 500 the earliest Amiga. They did however shift the most units. As far as I'm aware the 500 does have an external power box. The STFM i.e. the one that most people brought does not. I'm sure the later and the more expensive earlier models had internal power supplies. I also wouldn't be entirely suprised if the Amiga eventually did get some better software, after all in time frame terms you are talking years later.. That's hardly fair is it. It's like comparing a 32bit PC running Windows XP to a 486 running Windows 3.1. I also don't even remember mentioning Cubase. I do enjoy the way Amiga owners always seem compare the Atari ST to the whole family! Things could get a bit more interesting with the others.. Falcon anyone.. TT. ST laptops.. And yes it does have multitasking, of sorts in GEM and all the replacement operating systems have proper multitasking. Amstrads ha, now that is funny! As far as the Amiga 500's high res goes, well yes if you can handle premature blindness then yes it does win. As for monitors. Er multisync anyone. And the ST with a monitor was still only about as expensive as a Amiga 500 with a black and white TV. Anyway, I'm only teasing you Amiga boys a bit, the idea was to pull out some classic arguments, which I doubt either of us can really say we'll win on this one. Not really dissing your box. Much Anyway that Sharp 68000 kicked both our arses..

Far be it from me to stick up for the ST here, there really are too many Amiga fanboys on this forum! I've had and use(d) both machines in my time, so I thought I'd my two pennys worth. I still go with the ST being the better machine. Why? 1. Out of the box in the early days GEM was the better operating system. Sure it only had a primitive effort at multitasking, but it was clean simple and did what you needed to do. Yep the Amiga broke new ground with its multitasking and (garish) colour icons, but you needed two disk drives to make it work, the icons looked like they had been drawn by a child and gave me a migraine within three seconds (especially if you stuck the thing on a tv). Multitasking was a nice idea but it was badly implemented on the early machines (really, pulling down the whole window to change apps?!??) You also needed to have plenty of ram to run anything decent at the same time and the processor simply wasn't up to the job. I find the comparisons between late GEM and the later versions of Workbench a bit off, mainly because any ST user worth his salt would have switched to Magic or Geneva by the time any decent version of Workbench had come out and they are light years ahead. 2. High res. No comment needed here 3. The graphics issue. Er I can barely tell the difference these days (bar the odd bit of smoother scrolling) and certainly can't see the justification for half the price again. The extra colours really don't make that much difference to my older eyes. Guess with hindsight the extra power in those chips isn't really that obvious... And I won't mention 3D... 4. Sound. Yep the Amiga without doubt wins this, although the chip music is sometimes (rarely) better, thanks to its haunting qualities, the Amiga really does win out here. Still MIDI here we go 5. Apps. If you count out the games, the ST hammers the Amiga for serious apps. Cubase, Calamus, Papyrus, 3D programs, they all poop all over the Amiga's best offerings. And let's face it programs make a system, not hardware. 6. Early games (i.e. the ones that don't over push the system) are generally better on the ST. Ditto 3D games. So what we're left with are a load of games which are trying to compete with the SNES and Megadrive. And erm no they don't very well. Streetfighter being a prime example. Or virtually any late platform game. When my ST began to fall down as a games machine I brought a SNES (which handily came out at that point) and carried on using the ST for the serious stuff. I didn't even consider getting an Amiga, which I viewed as old hat. 7. Less cables. Er yep I don't really want a hotbox to toast my feet on. Or a big box sticking out the back just so I can plug it into a tv. 8. Price. In the UK, at their peek, the ST was £299 and the Amiga £399. An extra £100 for a few tracker tunes and some nicer scrolling... no chance! I know this is based on the entry level units i.e. STFM/E and Amiga 500 but lets face it only a few of us fan boys (myself included in that) bought the other models. Otherwise the world would be a different, altogether better place. Now maybe I should turn this on the PC and Mac (which really do deserve a kicking, unlike the ST)... So how's that for a bit of Amiga fan baiting No offence intended, just felt I had to stick up for the ST a bit!