4 ms·

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 th

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]
  - mrandish 1y ago
    > excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor While that was an advantage for the Atari ST, the Amiga standard desktop was in a non-interlaced 640 x 200 4-color mode that could do 80 x 24 text for productivity apps (word processing, spreadsheets) as well as decent graphical interfaces for creative tools like video editing, 3D rendering and music sequencing. Of course, having 200 more vertical lines would enable some increased detail assuming the app GUI supported it but it wasn't a huge difference (and on the Amiga the colors could also be useful for GUIs). All the Atari owners I knew opted for the color monitor (which had the same limit of 640 x 200 res and 4 colors (from a smaller palette than the Amiga)) but I didn't know anyone solely dedicated to music production. Given the vast majority of ST systems had color monitors, I assume the Atari's music software interfaces were designed to work with 640 x 200 as well as 640 x 400. Not having used those tools on the Atari I don't know if the publishers went to the trouble of creating separate GUI screens that significantly utilized the extra 200 vertical lines for 640 x 400 monochrome monitor owners to fit more information into fewer different screens or if the increased vertical res just made the text edges look nicer. On the Amiga virtually no software ever ran GUIs in interlaced mode because high-contrast single pixel horizontal lines would flicker. The Amiga interlaced modes were used for displaying organic content like photos and video, which didn't have any elements that flickered (or, at least, not any more than organic imagery on a high-quality TV). Some software used the Amiga's hardware support for switching resolution modes mid-screen to show interlaced 640 x 400 content on the top with 640 x 200 GUI on the bottom. With the Amiga 3000 and 4000 Commodore added support for 31.5 Khz non-interlaced 400 line monitors. Commodore did release the A2024, a non-interlaced super high-res monochrome monitor for all Amigas in 1988 in 15-inch and 19-inch sizes. It displayed 1024 x 800 in 8 grayscale tones, however it wasn't very popular and little software other than the Amiga OS, desktop publishing and word processing ever redesigned GUIs specifically to exploit the A2024's increased resolution. My two points being: 1. I agree having the option of the monochrome non-interlaced monitor was a definite advantage for the Atari ST vs the Amiga but it wasn't an advantage for most Atari ST users because most chose the Atari color monitor (except for some dedicated music or DTP installations). 2. Interlaced mode on the Amiga wasn't a disadvantage vs the Atari, it was a feature imaging, animation and video software could optionally use to display organic image content. I bring this up because I once saw an Atari ST fan put the Amiga into interlace mode and show the desktop windowing GUI (which flickered) as an "Aha, gotcha!" example, which was silly because interlace mode was never meant to display interfaces nor did Amiga users use it that way (in fact, the Amiga desktop GUI looked vertically squished in interlace modes until the OS was redesigned to support higher vertical resolutions with the release of the A2024 monitor, A3000 & A4000). Anyway, my goal isn't to rehash an ancient 'platform war' no one cares about anymore because I don't even care about it anymore. I currently still own three different models of Amiga AND three different models of Atari ST and I love them all. There were a few scenarios where the ST had real advantages over the Amiga but they were limited to a smaller subset of users primarily in music and DTP. The overwhelming advantage of the ST over the Amiga was price. And dollar for dollar, the ST was a remarkably capable system at a tremendous value. However, the Amiga simply had better hardware (at a much higher price until the A500). The Atari was designed over a period of 5 months out of off-the-shelf components to be a low-cost leader, while the Amiga was designed over three years with highly sophisticated custom chips and the A1000 sold (initially) at almost twice the price. Of course the Amiga was better at more of the things most of the target users cared about. Arguably, the most favorable Atari ST + monochrome monitor comparison in 1985 is with the Mac for dedicated desktop publishing use cases. It was 1/3 the price ($800 vs $2500), had more memory, higher resolution and a large monitor. There was no DTP-relevant spec the Mac was better at although, arguably, the ST's keyboard was a notable weakness in all use cases.

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]
- mrandish 1y ago
  > excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor While that was an advantage for the Atari ST, the Amiga standard desktop was in a non-interlaced 640 x 200 4-color mode that could do 80 x 24 text for productivity apps (word processing, spreadsheets) as well as decent graphical interfaces for creative tools like video editing, 3D rendering and music sequencing. Of course, having 200 more vertical lines would enable some increased detail assuming the app GUI supported it but it wasn't a huge difference (and on the Amiga the colors could also be useful for GUIs). All the Atari owners I knew opted for the color monitor (which had the same limit of 640 x 200 res and 4 colors (from a smaller palette than the Amiga)) but I didn't know anyone solely dedicated to music production. Given the vast majority of ST systems had color monitors, I assume the Atari's music software interfaces were designed to work with 640 x 200 as well as 640 x 400. Not having used those tools on the Atari I don't know if the publishers went to the trouble of creating separate GUI screens that significantly utilized the extra 200 vertical lines for 640 x 400 monochrome monitor owners to fit more information into fewer different screens or if the increased vertical res just made the text edges look nicer. On the Amiga virtually no software ever ran GUIs in interlaced mode because high-contrast single pixel horizontal lines would flicker. The Amiga interlaced modes were used for displaying organic content like photos and video, which didn't have any elements that flickered (or, at least, not any more than organic imagery on a high-quality TV). Some software used the Amiga's hardware support for switching resolution modes mid-screen to show interlaced 640 x 400 content on the top with 640 x 200 GUI on the bottom. With the Amiga 3000 and 4000 Commodore added support for 31.5 Khz non-interlaced 400 line monitors. Commodore did release the A2024, a non-interlaced super high-res monochrome monitor for all Amigas in 1988 in 15-inch and 19-inch sizes. It displayed 1024 x 800 in 8 grayscale tones, however it wasn't very popular and little software other than the Amiga OS, desktop publishing and word processing ever redesigned GUIs specifically to exploit the A2024's increased resolution. My two points being: 1. I agree having the option of the monochrome non-interlaced monitor was a definite advantage for the Atari ST vs the Amiga but it wasn't an advantage for most Atari ST users because most chose the Atari color monitor (except for some dedicated music or DTP installations). 2. Interlaced mode on the Amiga wasn't a disadvantage vs the Atari, it was a feature imaging, animation and video software could optionally use to display organic image content. I bring this up because I once saw an Atari ST fan put the Amiga into interlace mode and show the desktop windowing GUI (which flickered) as an "Aha, gotcha!" example, which was silly because interlace mode was never meant to display interfaces nor did Amiga users use it that way (in fact, the Amiga desktop GUI looked vertically squished in interlace modes until the OS was redesigned to support higher vertical resolutions with the release of the A2024 monitor, A3000 & A4000). Anyway, my goal isn't to rehash an ancient 'platform war' no one cares about anymore because I don't even care about it anymore. I currently still own three different models of Amiga AND three different models of Atari ST and I love them all. There were a few scenarios where the ST had real advantages over the Amiga but they were limited to a smaller subset of users primarily in music and DTP. The overwhelming advantage of the ST over the Amiga was price. And dollar for dollar, the ST was a remarkably capable system at a tremendous value. However, the Amiga simply had better hardware (at a much higher price until the A500). The Atari was designed over a period of 5 months out of off-the-shelf components to be a low-cost leader, while the Amiga was designed over three years with highly sophisticated custom chips and the A1000 sold (initially) at almost twice the price. Of course the Amiga was better at more of the things most of the target users cared about. Arguably, the most favorable Atari ST + monochrome monitor comparison in 1985 is with the Mac for dedicated desktop publishing use cases. It was 1/3 the price ($800 vs $2500), had more memory, higher resolution and a large monitor. There was no DTP-relevant spec the Mac was better at although, arguably, the ST's keyboard was a notable weakness in all use cases.