4 ms·

> The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga I never really understood why people thought this was a big deal. I had my Amiga

> The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga I never really understood why people thought this was a big deal. I had my Amiga hooked to a DX7 synth with a serial to MIDI cable that had a couple active parts in it. MIDI is a serial protocol and the Amigas had full RS232 ports with hardware interrupts, +12v, -12v, as well as audio in and out on unused pins. The serial to MIDI In/Out cable cost around $15 more than two MIDI cables. You can still buy them today: https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interface-db25-amiga-500-600-1200-2000-3000-4000 https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interf....

Aldipower 1y ago
The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.
- mrandish 1y ago
  While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing. While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second. So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.
  - Aldipower 1y ago
    Yeah, thanks for the good write-up, maybe you're right and there's also some Atari marketing FUD. The Amiga was/is definitely an impressive machine too. That is given. :-)
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    The other story with the ST and music studios and productivity software generally was the excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor, which was far better than dealing with interlace on the Amiga. And was cheaper than an Amiga colour monitor. There were ways to do non-interlaced video on the Amiga, but just like having to buy external MIDI adapter ... more $$, more hassle. That and floppy format compatibility with MS-DOS made it easier to move data around.
    - gramie 1y ago
      That reminds me of using Twister, that optimized the position of sectors on the floppy disk to minimize seek times and speed loading dramatically (and I think they squeezed a few more sectors onto the disk so that it could hold more -- maybe more sectors on the outer rings of the disk?).
      - schlupa 1y ago
        normal 720 K floppies were very generous with the sectors on a track. It was easy to format a floppy with 10 sectors per track even without reducing the gap between sectors. On Atari it was almost standard praxis which made that floppies had generally 800K capacity. It was even possible to squeeze 11 sectors per track by reducing the inter-sector gapto a minimum. Furthermore, most floppies allowed to write on track 81 and 82 (sometime even 83). So it was possible to have floppies with up to 902K capacity (not a good idea in the long run, I recently tested such a floppy I had made 30 years ago and it had a lot of read errors athing that 720K and 800K do not).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1y ago

Aldipower 1y ago

The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.

mrandish 1y ago
While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing. While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second. So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.
- Aldipower 1y ago
  Yeah, thanks for the good write-up, maybe you're right and there's also some Atari marketing FUD. The Amiga was/is definitely an impressive machine too. That is given. :-)
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  The other story with the ST and music studios and productivity software generally was the excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor, which was far better than dealing with interlace on the Amiga. And was cheaper than an Amiga colour monitor. There were ways to do non-interlaced video on the Amiga, but just like having to buy external MIDI adapter ... more $$, more hassle. That and floppy format compatibility with MS-DOS made it easier to move data around.
  - gramie 1y ago
    That reminds me of using Twister, that optimized the position of sectors on the floppy disk to minimize seek times and speed loading dramatically (and I think they squeezed a few more sectors onto the disk so that it could hold more -- maybe more sectors on the outer rings of the disk?).
    - schlupa 1y ago
      normal 720 K floppies were very generous with the sectors on a track. It was easy to format a floppy with 10 sectors per track even without reducing the gap between sectors. On Atari it was almost standard praxis which made that floppies had generally 800K capacity. It was even possible to squeeze 11 sectors per track by reducing the inter-sector gapto a minimum. Furthermore, most floppies allowed to write on track 81 and 82 (sometime even 83). So it was possible to have floppies with up to 902K capacity (not a good idea in the long run, I recently tested such a floppy I had made 30 years ago and it had a lot of read errors athing that 720K and 800K do not).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1y ago