Foebane

That's what happens when you try to sell the world's first truly multimedia computer, when the term hasn't even been coined yet. Where it made history. Seriously? The man was a ruthless cutthroat businessman, only interested in profit rather than progressing technology. As he said himself, "I don't believe in compromises, I believe in winning." His business clout and skill helped make the C64 the best-selling home computer in history. Good for him. But how did the Atari ST sales do under him?

Then what, to you, is a commercial success? A company that is still going to this day? Is that how you personally define it?

I'd put that down to harsh deadlines imposed by the games companies on the development teams and not knowing what the Amiga's capabilities were, even though there were books available. The games companies simply wanted to get a product out of the door, cheaply and quickly, and didn't care about the unique abilities of each platform their teams worked on. This mentality is also true of many, many 8-bit ports across the Speccy, C64 and Amstrad at the time, and I suppose most of them didn't develop for the A8 because they saw it as not commercially viable and too difficult to program, with the Display List and everything else. If you look at the text and interface displays for Lemmings on Amiga, you'll see hi-res graphics used extensively, even with dozens of colours on-screen at once for the messages, all thanks to the Copper. I'd say that's excelling in the visuals for some part. The golden age of the A8. Unfortunately, as time went on, they decided that the A8 was not commercially viable because of how expensive the machines were and thus how many fewer users there were, compared to the cheap sales behemoths that were the Big Three, as I call them. If you stop comparing the Amiga with the ST, then there's all the Team 17 games, as well as many others that actually RTFM and developed solely for Amiga. You can directly blame the Commodore management at the time for that, not the hardware. They had a unique platform that practically landed in their laps, and they didn't know what to do with it. The idiots decided that the Amiga should be used strictly for business (hence the A1000) and leave the gaming to the C64. They were just totally blinkered and wasted time and resources on trying to sell the Amiga as a consumer device like the CDTV or minor hardware updates like the A500+ and A600, and not focus on the Amiga's primary multimedia strengths, which should've been obvious to them. It was a minor miracle that AGA was developed at all (which should've been so much more) despite the management's incompetence and the Commodore design team at the time (and all of us Amiga fans) directly blame Mehdi Ali, the guy at the top, for all of this debacle. Thankfully, other companies developed versatile software and hardware for the Amiga that made it famous in industries like desktop video and gaming, and a lot of Commodore subsidiaries, like the UK, were more successful at promoting the hardware.

How exactly did the Amiga fail commercially? Last I heard it sold millions in Europe. Jay's team designed the custom chipset that was revolutionary for its time, it doesn't matter what the units they went in were, they still all performed and SOLD very well, especially in Europe and outside North America. Any problems with the Amiga sales can be put down to the idiotic, incompetent management at Commodore, the hardware was not to blame. The C64 was only 8-bit and had a questionable colour palette, Commodore wanted an upgraded computer at 16-bit, and they got it in Amiga.

Maybe my Amiga zealousness is showing, but Jay Miner's hardware is my personal preference.

EXCUSE ME!?! NO-ONE, and I mean NO-ONE, beats Jay Miner or his teams in the computer engineering department. What you said is sheer BLASPHEMY! What's more, when Jay wasn't designing revolutionary computer designs, he was designing pacemakers to save lives! I'd like to see this "Shiraz Shivji" do the same thing!

What irks me is that because the ST came first and made headway into the market in the mid-to-late 1980s, the Amiga got saddled with a whole bunch of sub-par ST ports of games when it was capable of so much more. It's a bit like forcing a university professor to take janitorial jobs. I bet my Amiga-hating friend loved the fact that the Amiga was being "kept on its knees" and fed scraps from the dinner table whilst the ST reigned supreme and dined finely, and was more than a bit worried that Shadow of the Beast broke the Amiga's chains and allowed it to overthrow the ST. Maybe a bit over-dramatic, and it is really simply down to lazy and ignorant programmers, but that's how I feel about the situation, sometimes. AMIGA RULES! A8 RULES! End of.

They both represent the swansong of the independent home computer manufacturers, those companies who did their own thing rather than be IBM PC clones, and we miss them dearly. RIP Atari and Commodore

So the ST had a head start, so what? The Amiga, the BETTER machine, won out in the end. Ultimately, it was the PC that killed both of them, and the Falcon was a latecomer that drowned in the PC ocean.

I know it uses both the PCM chip (in stereo for the thumping backing track, which is the best part of it) and the AY for the general tunes, what I meant to say is that there are only a few long samples for the backing track. It's a great demo, albeit peculiar in its content. That's Jack Tramiel for you, he always did everything on the cheap, like the C64.

I always figured that the bickering was simply down to the fact that you didn't own the machines you were bashing, so you had to defend the hardware you had and feel better about your ownership of it. But surely emulators have solved that problem, since you can now effectively "own" every single retro computer there ever was, like a rich sonofabitch - right?

(chuckles) Yes, I've noticed that about modern consoles: the XBox One and PS4 graphics look identical to me, or as near enough to be as who-gives-a-shit as possible. Same for the audio abilities. So I cannot figure out what they're arguing about these days.

I have to admit, like my ST-owning friend was about the Amiga, I was actually jealous at the time I heard of the Falcon030's specs, and even furious about it. But in the end, the Falcon didn't sell as a gaming machine (unlike the A1200) and whilst it had Chunky and Hi-Color and DSP Audio, that really wasn't enough to save Atari's home computer division. Could've been the price, could've been poor marketing, or both, I can't remember. I will admit, since the start, Atari having to settle for a sub-par sound chip BUT then including MIDI sockets as standard helped to secure Atari's place in the music industry, and of course, the Falcon would continue that tradition, with superior audio and still including MIDI as standard. I sense Jack Tramiel's marketing nous behind the decision.

The key passage here is "but unfortunate it was to late so software wise, it was never showed what hardware was capable of", thus rendering everything before in your post moot. And I was thinking of the high-end A4000 030/040/060 rather than just the A1200, so really, the Falcon lost everything... except maybe audio, which was its only real advantage.

Yes, the Falcon, which was flawed and crippled from the start and which no-one bought nor remembers, whilst Amiga (Paula) sound still improved with more memory and 14-bit audio and AGA was relatively successful.

If I remember correctly, he had a ZX Spectrum first, then the Atari ST, and finally his family got a PC for gaming, and this was around 1993. I come round to his house early in 1994 and he shows me Doom, and I am blown away by its awesomeness, and a couple of years later, after Commodore goes bust, I get a PC so I too can play Doom. Then we became equal, in a way. So I'm not really sure I want to bring up something from the past again. As you said, it was probably just jealousy, although I remember him telling me a few things back then, like he and his friends would hang around the local computer shop and "dissuade" potential Amiga buyers, he said that he thought AmigaDOS/Workbench was flawed in some way, and he once tells me flat out that the SID was the best sound chip out there (including Paula). A couple of years later, I admitted to him that it was harder to program for Amiga than it was for ST, and that cheered him up, it seemed. During my school years, I didn't experience all this Spectrum/C64 rivalry because I had an Atari 8-bit, although I made friends with a fellow A8-er and we shared games, much to my Dad's annoyance. But I think the ST/Amiga rivalry was the first time I experienced it first-hand, but to be frank, as I said, we became relatively "equal" with the PC, so all that animosity went away then. I think it's probably left buried in the past, even though I'm madly into Amiga again, recently. I don't even recall the last time I played a modern PC FPS, only Quake 1/2.

Exactly, far more constructive! This friend of mine is on Facebook, he joined a few weeks ago. I wonder if I should friend him on there and ask him his reasons for hating the Amiga, after all these years?

I never thought of it that way before, but thank you. I have had a whole set of ST demos and games until now, which are almost visually identical and sonically inferior (mostly) to the Amiga versions I also have in my collection. I decided to get rid of the ST stuff because, as I said, lately I've found the AY audio to be hard to listen to, and the ST demos have this strange tradition of accessing their multiple parts with platform games, not to mention the PCM reasons explained above. I only had the ST stuff in the first place because I owned a 520STFM for about four months in 1990. Also, I've had problems with the emulation itself: Hatari has never worked properly for me, and Steem SSE has recently dropped in functionality and usefulness in the latest version (it's always been hard to use) and to be honest, I'm not sure I care about using any software made by a developer who is obsessed with action movie stars (SSE means Steven Seagal Edition). I never got into the ST Demoscene back in 1990 (I never even heard of demos properly until shortly after I got my Amiga A500) but I do have fond memories of playing and completing games like Carrier Command and Damocles, and I loved how games like E-Motion and Vaxine looked so close between ST and Amiga. But it was not to last. However, about a year after I got my Amiga, I became friends with a guy at college who DESPISED Amigas (almost irrationally, I thought) and always berated me about my "Crappy Amiga" whenever he could. I wonder what would've happened if I still had the ST when I met him...

Um, "We Were @" is NOT playing a mod, it is simply playing back several long samples, one at a time, in various patterns. It sounds repetitive and dull (and annoying with AY accompaniment) and it seems to be a hallmark of STE PCM audio in demos. Frankly, I'm staying away from the ST/E for games and demos as the AY chip causes my ears physical discomfort with its utter basicness and primitiveness, and I realise now the shortcomings of the PCM chip that, to be honest, was far too little, too late. I made the mistake of choosing an STFM as my first computer in many years after an Atari 800XL, I hated it from day one. I must've made a very convincing case to my parents to allow me to get an Amiga 500 instead, and I only wish I'd chosen it in the first place. I don't even recall asking for a demonstration of both in the local computer store, but was still blinkered by my Atari enthusiasm. I had no idea how much both Atari and Commodore had changed in the meantime.

Seems like a lot of work for the STE, when the Amiga can handle it with practically no effort.

I read somewhere that the PCM chip used in the Atari STE that aims to give the computer Amiga-style PCM audio is actually limited to two channels rather than four, with no individual or master volume control among other capabilities. So does this mean that the Atari STE has to rely on the AY sound chip as featured in original Atari STs? I have heard a lot of demos on Atari ST that have STE sampled tracks with AY accompaniment, with long samples for the PCM tracks because of the 2-channel limitation limitation (although it sounds good in stereo) whilst the AY chip plays the main tune on top. Unfortunately, the repeating nature of the samples leads to repetitive soundtracks which are quite dull after a while. "Talk Talk 2 - Church of Excellence in Art" by XIA and various DHS demos have this repetitious problem with their mixed soundtracks, although the only STE demo that really stands out to me is DHS's "Sea of Colour" whose entire soundtrack is a huge long sample, streamed from the HDD, and it sounds much more varied. It also looks amazing, too. So what's the story and features of the PCM sound chip in the STE, and am I right in my theory?

Yes, when I compared the ini files before and after the change of path, there were two changes, these ones you've mentioned, and the second one mentioned MRU. However, I'd rather just change the one I mentioned, it should suffice. Thank you once again.

So it's not what I said? What do you mean? I don't understand.

I found the entry, after using a file comparison tool called Diff Checker to compare before-and-after configurations. The entry is: [User\Software\virtualdub.org\Altirra\Saved filespecs] "6c6f6164" = "" And of course, because it was blank, it was defaulting to Altirra's path. But I am now able to choose whatever path I like. Thanks for your info, it helped!

I see. Can you tell me what I should be looking for in the Altirra.ini file itself?