8 ms·

The Commodore Amiga was better at everything but the Atari ST had a MIDI port. I saw Atari ST used in music studio well into the 2000s and not for nostalgic pur

The Commodore Amiga was better at everything but the Atari ST had a MIDI port. I saw Atari ST used in music studio well into the 2000s and not for nostalgic purposes: they were silent. Back then ultra loud PCs (PCs were ultra loud back then) were an issue in music studios, so some kept using Atari ST way past they're prime. I remember in the late 80s a neighbor's friend would bring his Korg synth and hook it up to my neighbor's Atari ST. That was quite something. Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. One of the very best video games of that era. FWIW that little FTL studio then went on to make another incredible hit: Dungeon Master (best selling Atari ST game ever and an incredibly prescient video game). For whatever reason Dungeon Master got ported to the Amiga but Sundog: Frozen Legacy never did.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Things better on the ST than the Amiga: The monochrome monitor & mode was way better for productivity than interlaced Amiga high res. MS-DOS compatible floppies. Price. By far. In any case I don't see them as directly comparable machines. The ST was made to be a cheap Macintosh or PC competitor ("Jackintosh"). Not a multimedia games machine. It wasn't terribly great at games, but it was a great productivity (and MIDI as you say) machine.
- lproven 2y ago
  Absolutely. Other things the ST was better at: • single-floppy operation (because the OS was in ROM) • being useful for productivity with only 1/2MB RAM (ROM again) • being more affordable until a price war that killed both companies Me, I owned an Acorn Archimedes. But I used them all. A single-floppy Mac or Amiga was a massive PITA to use. More RAM helped but didn't cure it. Until adding a hard disk didn't triple the price (end of the 1980s, early 1990s) you needed dual floppies for Mac or Amiga. ST was... OK with one.
  - lproven 2y ago
    I'd also add a footnote that Amiga stability was awful, and the Mac not much better.
    - icedchai 2y ago
      I had Amigas from around 1989 (starting with an A500) through 1994 (A3000.) The system stability improved incredibly with OS 2.0. However, fundamentally, there were problems that could not be fixed. The entire OS was based on shared memory and message passing based on pointers. Tasks (processes) would read/write each others memory all the time. There was basically no way to implement memory protection without breaking all compatibility.
      - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
        Exactly this. As much derided as the ST's OS is by Amiga fans, in actuality its fundamental architecture had more potential for future improvement than the Amiga's, though that never happened (in the mainstream, there's now FreeMiNT and friends). Why? Because it implemented syscalls through proper TRAPs, for one. While the actual implementation of the core OS wasn't multitasking or even have re-entrant syscalls, others came along and made it so (MiNT, etc) while retaining syscall compatibility. And the thing can be made to use memory protection, etc. even. The problem with the whole Amiga package is that it was brilliant for 1985, but extremely dated for the mid-90s and the reliance on the custom chips arch there just really couldn't evolve well.
        rjsw 2y ago
        You could do cooperative multitasking on the ST by compiling apps as GEM desk accessories, I modified MicroGNU Emacs so that I could have it running alongside other things.
  - weebull 2y ago
    One thing in the STs favour was that it's core processor was clocked slightly faster. It needed to be because it didn't have the coprocessors for memory copies and sound that the Amiga had. However, if those processors weren't useful for the task, the ST would be a little quicker. This manifested in 3D games where the processor did all the rasterisation. If the Amiga could bring it's blitter to bare, it won every time. If not, the ST would squeak it.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      The approach the ST took with the original "Shifter" chip of just doing video as memory mapped raw bitmap barely squeaked out for games. Frame rates were pretty bad. 8mhz 68000 and that bus speed wasn't responsive enough to really kick it. That era still really needed dedicated blit HW support. (As the Amiga showed). But that approach only really mattered until clock speeds went up and memory became slower than CPU speed. It's a shame the Blitter chip that came with the STe never shipped with the original ST (wasn't ready in time) and just never really got large market penetration after that. It was actually a decent design. The STe feature-wise is quite competitive with the Amiga overall, while keeping the simplicity of the ST's architecture. There just wasn't enough of them shipped for software houses to bother making games that used it. That, and I have a couple Atari Falcon 030s here, and they're really amazing. They really nailed it with that machine, before packing it in. Better (and very good) video modes, amazing sound, onboard 56k DSP chip & S/PDIF audio, both IDE & SCSI drive support, 68030 processor, up to 14MB RAM.
  - mitjam 2y ago
    Oh yes, I sat in front of a small Grundig TV, with a Data Becker book full of bug ridden code trying to learn C. I needed to swap disks three times for each compilation on an Amiga 500.
- m-i-l 2y ago
  > "Price. By far." In the UK, the Atari ST was originally £299 while the Amiga was £499, so it's not really fair to compare the two. I was able to save up for an ST with various weekend and school holiday jobs, but there's no way I could have saved up for an Amiga (and the only classmates I knew with Amigas had their parents buy it for them).
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Exactly. At 13 or 14 I got a used 520STfm + mono monitor with my own hard-earned cash from returning bottles to the bottle recycling repo and other chores. Amiga 1000 + monitor was basically double. There's no way I could afford it. For me the choice was Atari ST or Commodore C128 (which I was set to buy until I learned about the ST) Amiga 500 evened things out a little bit, but it was still a step up. Price per mhz/MB was better than anything else out there.
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
I'll guess your friend had the Korg Wavestation, which would sync to midi clock. Additionally, we would independently set off two 1040s and they would stay in sync all night. One of the first cracks for the atari was the "Mike Hunt" 2.1 version of Cubase, a musical program, that is still going strong. I am now using a (paid for) version 13 on PC - which is why i won't convert to linux.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
> Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. Oh, man, that brings back memories. I didn't much get into games, but I did play Sundog on my ST quite a bit.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Aww Sundog... The better Elite :-)

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

Things better on the ST than the Amiga: The monochrome monitor & mode was way better for productivity than interlaced Amiga high res. MS-DOS compatible floppies. Price. By far. In any case I don't see them as directly comparable machines. The ST was made to be a cheap Macintosh or PC competitor ("Jackintosh"). Not a multimedia games machine. It wasn't terribly great at games, but it was a great productivity (and MIDI as you say) machine.

lproven 2y ago
Absolutely. Other things the ST was better at: • single-floppy operation (because the OS was in ROM) • being useful for productivity with only 1/2MB RAM (ROM again) • being more affordable until a price war that killed both companies Me, I owned an Acorn Archimedes. But I used them all. A single-floppy Mac or Amiga was a massive PITA to use. More RAM helped but didn't cure it. Until adding a hard disk didn't triple the price (end of the 1980s, early 1990s) you needed dual floppies for Mac or Amiga. ST was... OK with one.
- lproven 2y ago
  I'd also add a footnote that Amiga stability was awful, and the Mac not much better.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    I had Amigas from around 1989 (starting with an A500) through 1994 (A3000.) The system stability improved incredibly with OS 2.0. However, fundamentally, there were problems that could not be fixed. The entire OS was based on shared memory and message passing based on pointers. Tasks (processes) would read/write each others memory all the time. There was basically no way to implement memory protection without breaking all compatibility.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Exactly this. As much derided as the ST's OS is by Amiga fans, in actuality its fundamental architecture had more potential for future improvement than the Amiga's, though that never happened (in the mainstream, there's now FreeMiNT and friends). Why? Because it implemented syscalls through proper TRAPs, for one. While the actual implementation of the core OS wasn't multitasking or even have re-entrant syscalls, others came along and made it so (MiNT, etc) while retaining syscall compatibility. And the thing can be made to use memory protection, etc. even. The problem with the whole Amiga package is that it was brilliant for 1985, but extremely dated for the mid-90s and the reliance on the custom chips arch there just really couldn't evolve well.
      - rjsw 2y ago
        You could do cooperative multitasking on the ST by compiling apps as GEM desk accessories, I modified MicroGNU Emacs so that I could have it running alongside other things.
- weebull 2y ago
  One thing in the STs favour was that it's core processor was clocked slightly faster. It needed to be because it didn't have the coprocessors for memory copies and sound that the Amiga had. However, if those processors weren't useful for the task, the ST would be a little quicker. This manifested in 3D games where the processor did all the rasterisation. If the Amiga could bring it's blitter to bare, it won every time. If not, the ST would squeak it.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    The approach the ST took with the original "Shifter" chip of just doing video as memory mapped raw bitmap barely squeaked out for games. Frame rates were pretty bad. 8mhz 68000 and that bus speed wasn't responsive enough to really kick it. That era still really needed dedicated blit HW support. (As the Amiga showed). But that approach only really mattered until clock speeds went up and memory became slower than CPU speed. It's a shame the Blitter chip that came with the STe never shipped with the original ST (wasn't ready in time) and just never really got large market penetration after that. It was actually a decent design. The STe feature-wise is quite competitive with the Amiga overall, while keeping the simplicity of the ST's architecture. There just wasn't enough of them shipped for software houses to bother making games that used it. That, and I have a couple Atari Falcon 030s here, and they're really amazing. They really nailed it with that machine, before packing it in. Better (and very good) video modes, amazing sound, onboard 56k DSP chip & S/PDIF audio, both IDE & SCSI drive support, 68030 processor, up to 14MB RAM.
- mitjam 2y ago
  Oh yes, I sat in front of a small Grundig TV, with a Data Becker book full of bug ridden code trying to learn C. I needed to swap disks three times for each compilation on an Amiga 500.
m-i-l 2y ago
> "Price. By far." In the UK, the Atari ST was originally £299 while the Amiga was £499, so it's not really fair to compare the two. I was able to save up for an ST with various weekend and school holiday jobs, but there's no way I could have saved up for an Amiga (and the only classmates I knew with Amigas had their parents buy it for them).
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Exactly. At 13 or 14 I got a used 520STfm + mono monitor with my own hard-earned cash from returning bottles to the bottle recycling repo and other chores. Amiga 1000 + monitor was basically double. There's no way I could afford it. For me the choice was Atari ST or Commodore C128 (which I was set to buy until I learned about the ST) Amiga 500 evened things out a little bit, but it was still a step up. Price per mhz/MB was better than anything else out there.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago

I'll guess your friend had the Korg Wavestation, which would sync to midi clock. Additionally, we would independently set off two 1040s and they would stay in sync all night. One of the first cracks for the atari was the "Mike Hunt" 2.1 version of Cubase, a musical program, that is still going strong. I am now using a (paid for) version 13 on PC - which is why i won't convert to linux.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

> Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. Oh, man, that brings back memories. I didn't much get into games, but I did play Sundog on my ST quite a bit.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

Aww Sundog... The better Elite :-)