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I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this because I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. My take is that both the Amiga and the Atari had a pletho

I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this because I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. My take is that both the Amiga and the Atari had a plethora of expansions and, without having any numbers to show, I think the Amiga won out in the expansion race, from 040 cards for the A500 (AFAIK no 040 was available for any Atari until much later) to the Video Toaster. Both machines were hard to evolve because both their designs encouraged software that was tightly tied to the hardware. VIDEL and AGA were both desperate and, ultimately, fruitless attempts at having the cake and eating it: sticking to custom chips was needed to keep backwards compatibility, but they made the machines both too expensive and too underpowered to be competitive.

thorianus 6y ago
Well, that was the problem. Atari had the MIDI (pro music) and DTP from the start. The mono 640x400 monitor - ultra sharp was a great gig. Amiga went the road of being console turned computer, and the expansions only created havok with support. Even A500 Plus had issues. Sadly - it also affects community - the IP rights for Amiga are mess, the recent issue with Terrible Fire extensions - for some reason a lot of bad blood in a very bold and interesting system made by Atari engineers.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The upgrade path for the Amiga chipset ended up being complicated. The 500 and 600 had the ECS chips, that allowed some video modes that were not tied to NTSC, at the cost of a reduced palette. The chipset also competes with the CPU for memory access and this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower ("chip RAM" was slow, "fast RAM" was the RAM outside the reach of the chipset that the CPU has exclusive access to). After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible). And, of course, there was what seems like a cocaine-fueled endless sequence of management blunders that drove the company into the ground.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    > this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower ECS could address more chipmem but wasn't slower than OCS. You couldn't add fastmem in the trapdoor port, but that didn't matter much since those expansions weren't good enough to impact the speed (trapdoor fastmem was usually called slowfast). The problem was rather one of incompatiblity: some programs written in the 512+512 kbyte era simply assumed they could allocate fastmem, which typically wasn't available on the 500+ and 600. > After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible). AGA, like ECS, could address 2 megs of chipmem. However, it had higher bandwidth and was much faster than ECS. My point is that even though the ST/e was, as you say, a simpler design in many aspects, Atari still had to equip the Falcon with a YM chip and put support for planar 15 kHz video in VIDEL to maintain backwards compatibility. They faced the same problem as Commodore: their machines were mainly home computers used for games and other software that banged the metal and people expected this to work when upgrading. They also shared a lot of the same problems when upgrading the architecture even slightly, such as with the A3000 and TT030: programs that didn't work with newer versions of TOS/DOS and programs that didn't work with 020/030. Both platforms are expandable with things like RTG graphics cards, sound cards, CPU cards etc. (in fact I'd argue the Amiga architecture with Zorro, video slots and CPU daughterboards was designed to be vastly more expandable than the Atari) but for most users that didn't matter: if the games they wanted to play didn't work, what point was a 24-bit display that cost more than the computer itself? Besides, even without keeping backwards compatibility, rolling your own silicon was no longer a viable option financially. Tramiel's vertical integration was a good idea in the 1980:s but the hardware market had shifted. Commodore could've made a triple-A machine but it still wouldn't have been competitive, neither in price nor in performance. The niche markets utilizing the unique features of Atari (MIDI) and Amiga (DTV) weren't large enough and a new architecture that would deprecate all or most existing software (and many peripherals) used by hobbyists would probably only serve to push the home user base towards the PC anyway.
alexisread 6y ago
The Amiga was much more closely tied to the hardware than the ST, by dint of it's bus system sharing between the blitter and CPU for chip RAM. Additionally, having the copper, sprites, scrolling, HAM and planar graphics modes meant that backwards compatibility is harder - just look at the difficulty of emulation for both of them. The Amiga graphics layout is also (slightly) more difficult to work with, there's a trick for the ST to do quick chunky-to-planar (C2P) conversion, check out the texture mapping in Thunderdome demo (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503) All said, yes the Amiga had more expansion cards for it, but the central bus system was a bottleneck as for the majority of Amigas, you had to use the built-in graphics, if you look at the a1200, the AGA chipset was a poor upgrade over the original chipset, hampered by backwards compatibility and the expense to needing to add a separate (fastram) bank to bypass the system bus for speed. As far as retargetable graphics goes (ie. VGA-style cards), the ST was ahead as GEM allowed this from the start. That combined with the much simpler design allows a newer machine to be much more powerful as it has to worry about backwards compatibility less. The Atari Falcon bears this out, a stock Falcon can manage to run Quake2 at 10FPS odd, a stock a1200 even with fastram can't get close. The Falcon was actually developed using an ST with a processor socket, bearing out the simpler architecture could be abused more :) TBH the Falcon could have been much more, but Atari were broke and cheaped out on the 16bit bus, could've had 24bit VIDEL at 800x600 and run Quake2 at 15-20FPS for £500 in 1992. Add a cdrom with multiTos (effectively unix with a GEM frontend) and you'd have a competitive machine even against the PC of the time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
gallier2 6y ago
The question is also to consider when and at what price. A Amiga 2000 had indeed quite the extension possibilities, but they were expensive. An Amiga 500 was a whole other story. The expandibility was limited and only in later times was it possible to add a lot of RAM and disks, etc. and RAM it needed a lot, much more than than Atari, but the Ataris didn't need as much memory, but they were also less greedy with it.

thorianus 6y ago

Well, that was the problem. Atari had the MIDI (pro music) and DTP from the start. The mono 640x400 monitor - ultra sharp was a great gig. Amiga went the road of being console turned computer, and the expansions only created havok with support. Even A500 Plus had issues. Sadly - it also affects community - the IP rights for Amiga are mess, the recent issue with Terrible Fire extensions - for some reason a lot of bad blood in a very bold and interesting system made by Atari engineers.

rbanffy 6y ago
The upgrade path for the Amiga chipset ended up being complicated. The 500 and 600 had the ECS chips, that allowed some video modes that were not tied to NTSC, at the cost of a reduced palette. The chipset also competes with the CPU for memory access and this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower ("chip RAM" was slow, "fast RAM" was the RAM outside the reach of the chipset that the CPU has exclusive access to). After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible). And, of course, there was what seems like a cocaine-fueled endless sequence of management blunders that drove the company into the ground.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  > this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower ECS could address more chipmem but wasn't slower than OCS. You couldn't add fastmem in the trapdoor port, but that didn't matter much since those expansions weren't good enough to impact the speed (trapdoor fastmem was usually called slowfast). The problem was rather one of incompatiblity: some programs written in the 512+512 kbyte era simply assumed they could allocate fastmem, which typically wasn't available on the 500+ and 600. > After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible). AGA, like ECS, could address 2 megs of chipmem. However, it had higher bandwidth and was much faster than ECS. My point is that even though the ST/e was, as you say, a simpler design in many aspects, Atari still had to equip the Falcon with a YM chip and put support for planar 15 kHz video in VIDEL to maintain backwards compatibility. They faced the same problem as Commodore: their machines were mainly home computers used for games and other software that banged the metal and people expected this to work when upgrading. They also shared a lot of the same problems when upgrading the architecture even slightly, such as with the A3000 and TT030: programs that didn't work with newer versions of TOS/DOS and programs that didn't work with 020/030. Both platforms are expandable with things like RTG graphics cards, sound cards, CPU cards etc. (in fact I'd argue the Amiga architecture with Zorro, video slots and CPU daughterboards was designed to be vastly more expandable than the Atari) but for most users that didn't matter: if the games they wanted to play didn't work, what point was a 24-bit display that cost more than the computer itself? Besides, even without keeping backwards compatibility, rolling your own silicon was no longer a viable option financially. Tramiel's vertical integration was a good idea in the 1980:s but the hardware market had shifted. Commodore could've made a triple-A machine but it still wouldn't have been competitive, neither in price nor in performance. The niche markets utilizing the unique features of Atari (MIDI) and Amiga (DTV) weren't large enough and a new architecture that would deprecate all or most existing software (and many peripherals) used by hobbyists would probably only serve to push the home user base towards the PC anyway.

alexisread 6y ago

The Amiga was much more closely tied to the hardware than the ST, by dint of it's bus system sharing between the blitter and CPU for chip RAM. Additionally, having the copper, sprites, scrolling, HAM and planar graphics modes meant that backwards compatibility is harder - just look at the difficulty of emulation for both of them. The Amiga graphics layout is also (slightly) more difficult to work with, there's a trick for the ST to do quick chunky-to-planar (C2P) conversion, check out the texture mapping in Thunderdome demo (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503) All said, yes the Amiga had more expansion cards for it, but the central bus system was a bottleneck as for the majority of Amigas, you had to use the built-in graphics, if you look at the a1200, the AGA chipset was a poor upgrade over the original chipset, hampered by backwards compatibility and the expense to needing to add a separate (fastram) bank to bypass the system bus for speed. As far as retargetable graphics goes (ie. VGA-style cards), the ST was ahead as GEM allowed this from the start. That combined with the much simpler design allows a newer machine to be much more powerful as it has to worry about backwards compatibility less. The Atari Falcon bears this out, a stock Falcon can manage to run Quake2 at 10FPS odd, a stock a1200 even with fastram can't get close. The Falcon was actually developed using an ST with a processor socket, bearing out the simpler architecture could be abused more :) TBH the Falcon could have been much more, but Atari were broke and cheaped out on the 16bit bus, could've had 24bit VIDEL at 800x600 and run Quake2 at 15-20FPS for £500 in 1992. Add a cdrom with multiTos (effectively unix with a GEM frontend) and you'd have a competitive machine even against the PC of the time.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

gallier2 6y ago

The question is also to consider when and at what price. A Amiga 2000 had indeed quite the extension possibilities, but they were expensive. An Amiga 500 was a whole other story. The expandibility was limited and only in later times was it possible to add a lot of RAM and disks, etc. and RAM it needed a lot, much more than than Atari, but the Ataris didn't need as much memory, but they were also less greedy with it.