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, ha

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.