Atari 8bit is superior to the ST

[atariksi]

That's a bit 80's thinking. "If gfx/sound sucks, it's a business machine". I think gaming was a key feature for all those home computers, some were just better at it than others.

...

From manufacturer's point of view, gaming wasn't a key feature for Atari ST; they didn't bother putting sprites in nor other blitter-type enhancements to ANTIC. However, they did know consoles like A7800 needed sprites.

That might be contributed to the requirement that they had to release the ST earlier than the Amiga.

...

That's your speculation. They could have used existing GTIA chip if they didn't want to invest in a new design.

 

Utter rubbish. You made same invalid point before in another thread. Your idea sucks. It's more expensive to implement, it's planar and chunky and would require more instructions to implement depending on mode and more hardware to implement. EGA was prominent at the time and it used planar to save memory and allow easy upgrading to higher color depths. Standard VGA also used planar in 640*480*16. You don't see them die out because of planar mode.

It uses exactly the same memory, it does save several bitplane pointer registers and the bitplane DMA becomes less complicated because you don't have to care for the different bitplanes and their use of different DMA cycles.

...

No, see previous post.

 

There are also some advantages of planar which you forgot about.

There are no advantages.

Bullcrap. I gave examples of advantages before to you. Here's one (let's see how you can deny it):

 

Move.l #$7f7f7f7f,(a0) ;modify colors of 32 pixels

 

Now tell me the equivalent in chunky mode that's better or equal.

[ataridano]

I'm somewhat surprised at what I've been reading here. Our family's first computer was a 1040ST, I didn't get an A8 until many years later when I had taken an interest in retrocomputing and found a 600XL for $4 at a thrift store, and thought, what the heck, and bought it. I was blown away when I learned more about the machine I had brought home. The one huge difference I see between the A8 and ST is simple: expandability. Of course the ST has more CPU power and better graphics, as it is quite a bit newer. The A8 uses handlers for it's I/O... if I want to use a VGA monitor as an 80 column screen, I can. If I want to boot from SD card, I can. One thing that bugged me at the time was that I couldn't install a high density floppy in the ST (maybe there's a way, but I didn't know of one at the time). With a Black Box I can have high density floppies on the A8. All of this is without any special drivers or hacks too. The way the A8's OS is written is simply amazing to me, I still can't believe that someone had the forsight to design all of this for a home computer in 1979!! I'm sure there are ways around these limitations on the ST as well, but the A8 was actually designed this way from day one. Just my two cents worth I guess.

[atariksi]

There are also some advantages of planar which you forgot about.

There are no advantages.

 

In the context of the ST that would seem so (with 1, 2, and 4 bpp display modes), but in the Amiga's case, it facilitated the 32-color (5bpp) mode, plus the 64-color halfbrite mode and HAM I think. (unless I misunderstand the nature of HAM and it's not 4,096 colors per scanline, but palette swapping every scaline like the Apple IIgs does and atari ST and consoles like Mega Drive can do as well -with software at least)

...

He just hates bit planes but doesn't have any good reason for making his absurd claim that they have no advantages. Obviously, it has its advantages and at the time they were in use by PCs, Amigas, etc. one reason was because they give more flexibility with memory useage. You can easily do a 3 bitplane (8-color) mode using less memory than use a 4-bit/pixel chunky and use only 8-colors and slow things down and hog up more memory.

[ataridano]

 

How is that when the ST came out first? Amiga upon release did not sell well and was full of problems, this went on for at least the 1st 6months or so.

They are different machines completely. Neither is a copy.

 

True, though from what I understand of the ST/Amiga history, one could argue that the ST is a copy of sorts. Amiga's introduction was delayed due to lack of funds, but it seems possible that the ST was intended to be a similar computer (CPU and memory-wise anyway) intended to take some of Amiga's market share.

[kool kitty89]

CGA only has 640*200 mono and 320*200 chunky (4 colors so 4 pixels per byte). EGA is planar at 640*350 a bit worse than Amiga's planar mode though. However, the EGA RAM can be upgraded from 32K -> 64K -> 128K so the 640*350 mono can use up to 4 planes without having to modify the hardware in addition to being able to disable planes you don't need. On the Amiga side, the planar helps in the ability to squeeze planes wherever in memory by using bitplane pointers.

 

What about the 320x200 16-color mode in EGA (restricted to GCA palette), or the similar extended CGA modes of PC Jr. and Tandy 1000? (are those packed pixel?)

 

He just hates bit planes but doesn't have any good reason for making his absurd claim that they have no advantages. Obviously, it has its advantages and at the time they were in use by PCs, Amigas, etc. one reason was because they give more flexibility with memory useage. You can easily do a 3 bitplane (8-color) mode using less memory than use a 4-bit/pixel chunky and use only 8-colors and slow things down and hog up more memory.

 

For games the issues with scrolling are problematic though, worse with the ST being software driven. (though the NES does use planar organization, I'm not sure about others, I know the 8-bits use chunky displays, I think C64 does as well, and TMS9928, I know the SMS, PC Engine, Genesis, and SNES use chunky displays)

 

Again, though, the Amiga took advantage of another aspect of planar organization with bit depts unfreindly with chunky organization, facilitating the 32-color display. (of course, not a factor with the ST's mono/4/16 color modes) And did I interpret halfbrite and HAM correctly as using added bitplanes, or does HAM involve swapping paletes between scanlines?

 

With the AGA chipset's 256 color mode lost many the advantages of planar over chunky display though, although it did facilitate HAM-8. (with 18-bit pixels, rather than the more common 16-bpp highcolor modes around)

[MEtalGuy66]

 

How is that when the ST came out first? Amiga upon release did not sell well and was full of problems, this went on for at least the 1st 6months or so.

 

 

That's funny I owned a huge STACK of A1000s some were very early releases as evident by the internal build, versus others..

 

I've never experienced any of the problem prone behavior you speak of.. All of them functioned pretty rock solid as far as AMIGAs go.. One thing I will say is that being a full blown multitasking, 32-bit OS model from day one, and lacking the feature of protected memory-space (which most modern OSes have,) if you were negligent enough to run the system out of resources, there are many ways to crash it.. For a user who's mindset is stuck in single-threaded TOS mode, I can see how you could interpret the machine as being "problematic".. But such operation is not the machine's fault.. If you give a monkey your car keys, and sit him in the driver's seat, your probably gonna end up with a crashed car.. To say that Workbench and AmigaDOS were less "end-user" and more "power-user" oriented than GEM/TOS would be the gross understatement of the century.. But nonetheless, if all you were doing is inserting a floppy, booting it, and running the single application stored on it, the AMIGA was absolutely no less trouble-prone than the ST, even for a "monkey"...

 

They are different machines completely. Neither is a copy.

 

That's for damn sure.. The AMIGA was a huge custom LSI hardware development with a totally custom OS and GUI built around it, and custom tailored to it..

 

The ST was a pretty "plane jane" 68000 machine with a minimum of custom LSI chips, a bastardized version of CP/M for an OS, and a GUI that was licensed from Digital Research Inc, whose origins had nothing to do with the Atari ST...

 

If the ST was a "copy" of the AMIGA, they sure did a piss-poor job of it..

 

To say either is a copy of the other is a totally proposterous statement..

 

To say that Trameil's boys had to hurredly slam together some kind of 16bit machine, to keep ATARI in the competitive home computing market, well... That seems like a no-brainer.. Jack didnt buy ATARI with the intention of loosing his ass.. And really, for what it was, the ST didnt do too terribly bad.. It managed to spawn a platform that kept atari in the home computer business for many more years, and actually it out-survived commodore by at least a year or two..

[atariksi]

CGA only has 640*200 mono and 320*200 chunky (4 colors so 4 pixels per byte). EGA is planar at 640*350 a bit worse than Amiga's planar mode though. However, the EGA RAM can be upgraded from 32K -> 64K -> 128K so the 640*350 mono can use up to 4 planes without having to modify the hardware in addition to being able to disable planes you don't need. On the Amiga side, the planar helps in the ability to squeeze planes wherever in memory by using bitplane pointers.

 

What about the 320x200 16-color mode in EGA (restricted to GCA palette), or the similar extended CGA modes of PC Jr. and Tandy 1000? (are those packed pixel?)

...

There were some nonstandard video cards around but I'm only speaking of standard EGA (and VGA) that was prominent on the PC at the time. They also had video cards for Amiga, but they also don't count as standard components (they never became standard).

 

He just hates bit planes but doesn't have any good reason for making his absurd claim that they have no advantages. Obviously, it has its advantages and at the time they were in use by PCs, Amigas, etc. one reason was because they give more flexibility with memory useage. You can easily do a 3 bitplane (8-color) mode using less memory than use a 4-bit/pixel chunky and use only 8-colors and slow things down and hog up more memory.

 

For games the issues with scrolling are problematic though, worse with the ST being software driven. (though the NES does use planar organization, I'm not sure about others, I know the 8-bits use chunky displays, I think C64 does as well, and TMS9928, I know the SMS, PC Engine, Genesis, and SNES use chunky displays)

...

C64 is a different animal; it skips bytes in both directions to save on memory for graphics so the "chunky" is more like "vector quantized". I don't think those others you mention were/are as popular as Amiga, PC, ST, etc. that used planar. So the big guns knew there were some advantages to planar otherwise they all would have done chunky.

 

Again, though, the Amiga took advantage of another aspect of planar organization with bit depts unfreindly with chunky organization, facilitating the 32-color display. (of course, not a factor with the ST's mono/4/16 color modes) And did I interpret halfbrite and HAM correctly as using added bitplanes, or does HAM involve swapping paletes between scanlines?

...

You use 6 bitplanes on HAM. The upper two bits select either a palette mode, or whether you want to modify the R,G, or B. If palette mode, then lower 4 bits is the palette index. Otherwise, it's the actual intensity of the R,G,or B (0..15). You can also swap palettes using Copper in HAM mode to improve picture quality. This is more of a compressed representation of a 4096 picture using 6-bits. Half-bright uses 32 color registers and the 6th bitplane to get half-intensity of those 32-registers. Once again, you could use a single 32-bit write to modify 32 pixels at a time in any bit depth if you had your palette organized properly. So you could update one plane and change things while having a 64 color image on the screen. Amiga OCS also does 5-bit HAM.

 

With the AGA chipset's 256 color mode lost many the advantages of planar over chunky display though, although it did facilitate HAM-8. (with 18-bit pixels, rather than the more common 16-bpp highcolor modes around)

 

VGA did go with chunky when they went to 256 color mode although internally they did use 4 planes chained up to make it look like chunky (but done in hardware). There's no 18-bit pixels on AGA.

[Fletch]

The one thing I liked about the ST was GEM. For the time it was a pretty decent GUI. THe underlining OS may have been nothing special, but the GUI worked. I also enjoyed the crispness of the display,

 

I bought an Amiga 500 years later and the GUI was rubbish. I cannot speak for later Amiga OS releases, but the version that came with the 500 was confusing. Also I found the Amiga to flicker quite a bit high resolution, but maybe that was just my particular machine. I flirted with the Amiga for a brief time, but it just didn't work for me.

 

I will say that the sound was much better on the Amiga. I always hated ST sound as I have mentioned several times.

[Curt Vendel]

Actually the Amiga is a 16bit Atari 800... that is a more correct and accurate statement.

 

 

 

Curt

 

The 800 is an 8-bit Amiga

[Curt Vendel]

The Atari 1200XL hands down is the hottest and coolest looking of all of the XL's... it is also equipped with the best damned keyboard of any computer and I mean Atari 8bit, ST, Amiga, PC, etc... it has such a smooth and silky travel when you press the key's... what the 1200XL loses out on in incompatibility and expansion is more then makes up for it in looks, styling and feel... like a super model... she may be dumb as a doorknob, but damn she's hot!

 

 

 

Curt

 

The Atari 800 also looks great too though but the 800XL is just OK ...

 

The 800XL is "just OK"?? Are you crazy? The 800XL is probably the most beautiful home computer ever made. (followed by the TI-99/4A)

 

The XE and ST look like garbage in comparison.

[Curt Vendel]

In 1988 the XE's had Diamond (a play on the term GEM) which gave the XE's the color lo-res version of GEM on the ST's and programs like Diamond Write and Diamond Paint proved that you could also have applications in a GUI on the 8bits. I wish Diamond Publish had come out, to have had an 8bit desktop publishing system on the XL/XE systems would've been cool and would've been a great step up from Printshop

 

 

Curt

 

The one thing I liked about the ST was GEM. For the time it was a pretty decent GUI. THe underlining OS may have been nothing special, but the GUI worked. I also enjoyed the crispness of the display,

 

I bought an Amiga 500 years later and the GUI was rubbish. I cannot speak for later Amiga OS releases, but the version that came with the 500 was confusing. Also I found the Amiga to flicker quite a bit high resolution, but maybe that was just my particular machine. I flirted with the Amiga for a brief time, but it just didn't work for me.

 

I will say that the sound was much better on the Amiga. I always hated ST sound as I have mentioned several times.

[atariksi]

...

32 pixels at a time in any bit depth if you had your palette organized properly. So you could update one plane and change things while having a 64 color image on the screen. Amiga OCS also does 5-bit HAM.

 

With the AGA chipset's 256 color mode lost many the advantages of planar over chunky display though, although it did facilitate HAM-8. (with 18-bit pixels, rather than the more common 16-bpp highcolor modes around)

 

VGA did go with chunky when they went to 256 color mode although internally they did use 4 planes chained up to make it look like chunky (but done in hardware). There's no 18-bit pixels on AGA.

 

I forgot to mention that in HAM the 4-bit intensity that you modify is appended to the 12-bit RGB of previous pixel's color to form the new 12-bit color value. The first pixel in the line has no previous pixel (it won't wrap to previous line's last pixel). AGA HAM8 wasn't as popular as PCs had come out with hi-color VGAs and with local buses, but it retain backward compatibility with OCS/ECS which was a big plus.

 

It's an interesting algorithm to convert 12-bit pure RGB to 6-bit HAM in real-time (as I had to do for my project).

[Mr.Amiga500]

The Atari 1200XL hands down is the hottest and coolest looking of all of the XL's... it is also equipped with the best damned keyboard of any computer and I mean Atari 8bit, ST, Amiga, PC, etc... it has such a smooth and silky travel when you press the key's... what the 1200XL loses out on in incompatibility and expansion is more then makes up for it in looks, styling and feel... like a super model... she may be dumb as a doorknob, but damn she's hot!

 

The 1200XL looks better than the 800XL in pictures, but when I actually got one I was a bit disappointed. The 800XL feels more solid and looks great from every angle while the 1200XL case has a bit of flex and from some angles looks too bulky. I don't know... maybe I'm too biased or I'm influenced by the fact that my 1200XL has yellowed while all my 800XLs look perfectly new. Or maybe I just got a bad 1200XL - there are parts variations among nearly all computers.

 

The 1200XL keyboard is silky smooth as you say - but keypresses are slightly too springy for me. I actually prefer the feel of the TRS-80 Model III, early TI-99/4A and Kaypro. (or the clicky 1984 IBM AT I'm typing this on.)

 

 

and on top of it - you can't really discuss personal tastes, can you?

is there somewhere an oracle to say what is art and what is crap? don't think so... perhaps then would be better not to make any 01 statements?

 

ps. if someone would like to poit out that i'm making such statement - there is magic word in mine, that those above lack - it is "me"

 

I can't discuss personal tastes? Is there somewhere an oracle to say what I can discuss and what I can't? I don't think so...

 

And there is no need to say "me"... or "what I think" or "in my opinion" when making a personal statement. Whenever anyone says anything that isn't quoting another source, it is always implied that it is their opinion. (It's a subtlety of English few forum posters seem to know about. )

 

If I say "this sucks", although I may consider it a fact to me personally, it doesn't make it a fact for everyone. (...although sometimes I would like it to ) It's still only opinion.

[kool kitty89]

What about the 320x200 16-color mode in EGA (restricted to GCA palette), or the similar extended CGA modes of PC Jr. and Tandy 1000? (are those packed pixel?)

...

There were some nonstandard video cards around but I'm only speaking of standard EGA (and VGA) that was prominent on the PC at the time. They also had video cards for Amiga, but they also don't count as standard components (they never became standard).

I thought EGA supported such a mode as well, that's what Mech Warrior appears to use in EGA mode. (and on wikipedia's discription it mentions that EGA supports full 16-color modes of CGA 640x200 and 320x200 -limited to the CA RGBI palette)

 

For games the issues with scrolling are problematic though, worse with the ST being software driven. (though the NES does use planar organization, I'm not sure about others, I know the 8-bits use chunky displays, I think C64 does as well, and TMS9928, I know the SMS, PC Engine, Genesis, and SNES use chunky displays)

...

C64 is a different animal; it skips bytes in both directions to save on memory for graphics so the "chunky" is more like "vector quantized". I don't think those others you mention were/are as popular as Amiga, PC, ST, etc. that used planar. So the big guns knew there were some advantages to planar otherwise they all would have done chunky.

 

I was wrong about the master System and PC Engine, both are planar (Sega switched to 4-bit chunky graphics with Mega Drive -with SMS compatibity modes retained as well). Not sure about the TMS9918 series. (though tat was certainly popular and widespread, particularly with the MSX computers)

 

VGA did go with chunky when they went to 256 color mode although internally they did use 4 planes chained up to make it look like chunky (but done in hardware).

Plus the CD32 added Akiko for hardware chunky to planer conversion, that seems like something that would have been handy to have in the other AGA machines as well.

[flashjazzcat]

In 1988 the XE's had Diamond (a play on the term GEM) which gave the XE's the color lo-res version of GEM on the ST's and programs like Diamond Write and Diamond Paint proved that you could also have applications in a GUI on the 8bits. I wish Diamond Publish had come out, to have had an 8bit desktop publishing system on the XL/XE systems would've been cool and would've been a great step up from Printshop.

I hope there's some retrospective demand for this kind of thing, since my ultimate goal is to produce a good GUI based graphical word processor/page layout system. It's something I've wanted to do for twenty years. Diamond is a really good system: the more I use GEOS on the C64, the better Diamond looks in comparison from a performance perspective. The applications, however, are incomplete. I'm torn between trying to implement a good word processor for Diamond and breaking away and writing a proprietary GUI front end for one. The idea of coming up with a new GUI desktop is appealing, but I think the job of writing a full set of apps specially for it might be a sisyphian task, especially at this stage in the day.

 

I never had Printshop, but Newsroom really knocked me out at the time. I gather it was ported over following a campaign by (Antic?) magazine readers. It was really slick and unlike any software I'd seen before on the Atari.

 

I think my STs have suffered by my not owning them twenty years ago. Had I bought one in the early nineties, I'd doubtless have used it as my main computer, started writing GEM applications, etc. However, I believe I'd still have come back to the 8-bit now: there's just more left to do on it which hasn't been done yet.

[TwiliteZoner]

The ST disk drives have been more reliable in my experience compared to the Amiga (at least the early models). The failure rate of my Amiga disks is at least double that or my ST floppies. For the record, both are the same brand of media stored in the same closet.

 

If you watch the Computer Chronicles episode for the ST, Jim Kent actually references this as a problem he had with the Amiga.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnyAVOuEZGg

Edited November 29, 2009 by TwiliteZoner

[Curt Vendel]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

 

 

Curt

 

The ST disk drives have been more reliable in my experience compared to the Amiga (at least the early models). The failure rate of my Amiga disks is at least double that or my ST floppies. For the record, both are the same brand of media stored in the same closet.

 

If you watch the Computer Chronicles episode for the ST, Jim Kent actually references this as a problem he had with the Amiga.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnyAVOuEZGg

[atariksi]

I'm somewhat surprised at what I've been reading here. Our family's first computer was a 1040ST, I didn't get an A8 until many years later when I had taken an interest in retrocomputing and found a 600XL for $4 at a thrift store, and thought, what the heck, and bought it. I was blown away when I learned more about the machine I had brought home. The one huge difference I see between the A8 and ST is simple: expandability. Of course the ST has more CPU power and better graphics, as it is quite a bit newer. The A8 uses handlers for it's I/O... if I want to use a VGA monitor as an 80 column screen, I can. If I want to boot from SD card, I can. One thing that bugged me at the time was that I couldn't install a high density floppy in the ST (maybe there's a way, but I didn't know of one at the time). With a Black Box I can have high density floppies on the A8. All of this is without any special drivers or hacks too. The way the A8's OS is written is simply amazing to me, I still can't believe that someone had the forsight to design all of this for a home computer in 1979!! I'm sure there are ways around these limitations on the ST as well, but the A8 was actually designed this way from day one. Just my two cents worth I guess.

 

Did they really use HD floppies that much? Even on Amiga, most software was using standard 880K floppy disks.

[Tezz]

I hope there's some retrospective demand for this kind of thing, since my ultimate goal is to produce a good GUI based graphical word processor/page layout system. It's something I've wanted to do for twenty years. Diamond is a really good system: the more I use GEOS on the C64, the better Diamond looks in comparison from a performance perspective. The applications, however, are incomplete. I'm torn between trying to implement a good word processor for Diamond and breaking away and writing a proprietary GUI front end for one. The idea of coming up with a new GUI desktop is appealing, but I think the job of writing a full set of apps specially for it might be a sisyphian task, especially at this stage in the day.

I'd really like to see a usable GUI system available for the A8, especially now that VBXE allows for a lot more possibilities. I thought back then that Diamond looked pretty cool although as I never saw it in action, I assumed that in reality Diamond would likely be quite a slow, cumbersome environment hogging too much memory and resourses to be very useful. I think it should be feasable today to create a nice useful GUI system for the A8. Edited November 29, 2009 by Tezz

[atariksi]

I thought EGA supported such a mode as well, that's what Mech Warrior appears to use in EGA mode. (and on wikipedia's discription it mentions that EGA supports full 16-color modes of CGA 640x200 and 320x200 -limited to the CA RGBI palette)

...

It's better to read some technical article or try it out yourself. There's no 16 color 640*200 nor 320*200 chunky modes on EGA nor VGA. Here's some code you can try to prove that 320*200*16 and 640*200*16 on EGA is planar:

 

run DEBUG from real-mode DOS and use A to assemble and G to run:

 

Mov AX,0d

Int 10

Mov BX,a000

mov ES,BX

xor bh,bh

ES:

Mov [bX],BX

Inc BX

Jnz 10C

Int 20

 

Set AX = 0d for 320*200*16 EGA (also works on VGA), set AX=0e for 640*200*16 EGA (also works on VGA), and set to 0f/10 for 640*350 modes. You will see that you cannot set colors since you are only writing to one plane. If you use mode 19 (320*200*256 VGA), you will see a bunch of colors. Also, Atari 8-bit multicolor sprites are also planar.

 

Plus the CD32 added Akiko for hardware chunky to planer conversion, that seems like something that would have been handy to have in the other AGA machines as well.

 

One other advantage I have noticed on Amiga planar graphics is that they compress better with RLE lossless compression using planes rather than if you do the similar algorithm in chunky mode.

[ataridano]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

 

 

Curt

 

 

I don't see how the ST disk format was more PC compatible than the Amigas. True, you would need a special disk controller to read an Amiga disk on a PC vs. the ST using a CP/M type format from what I understand. Both used standard mechanisms and the Amiga could read/write MS-DOS disks with no problems at all (that's the only means I have to transfer data to/from my Amiga) so it was easy to use that format for transfer of info. I think it was Apple who really wasted time reinventing the wheel with the Mac floppy system.

[ataridano]

 

Did they really use HD floppies that much? Even on Amiga, most software was using standard 880K floppy disks.

 

 

Probably not. My point was more that it could be done, not that it was common. Take it from someone who's family computer was an ST in the earily 90s, almost every PC could use 1.44M disks and when you only had one floppy and no hard drive you wished your Atari could too. Now I use an SD card with my Atari 8-bits, so even the 1.44M drive seems small

[atariksi]

 

Did they really use HD floppies that much? Even on Amiga, most software was using standard 880K floppy disks.

 

 

Probably not. My point was more that it could be done, not that it was common. Take it from someone who's family computer was an ST in the earily 90s, almost every PC could use 1.44M disks and when you only had one floppy and no hard drive you wished your Atari could too. Now I use an SD card with my Atari 8-bits, so even the 1.44M drive seems small

 

I guess the hard drives were too expensive on Atari/Amiga machines. Must not have been too many of those either as I don't see many on Ebay.

[Lazarus]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

The opposite is true: The Amiga drives are PC compatible, but the PC drives are not Amiga compatible.

[atariksi]

The proprietary format of the Amiga disks most likely hurt Amiga in many ways... The ST disk design was simplistic and PC compatible, it was a smart choice - Atari saved themselves a lot of time and energy by just using what already existed versus reinventing the wheel.

The opposite is true: The Amiga drives are PC compatible, but the PC drives are not Amiga compatible.

 

I think he meant disk format is mostly MS-DOS compatible file structure, whereas AmigaDOS has its own file structure and PCs w/standard floppy controllers cannot write to Amiga format disks.