One significant advantage the ST had over the Amiga was its support for hi resolution monitors. When I first sat in front of one of those little screens I knew this was something special, albeit black and white the definition was amazing and no flicker! Everyone talks about music creation, don't forget DTP!

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

How is that an advantage? The ST's high resolution was MONOCHROME, and I mean BLACK & WHITE, not even TWO COLOURS! The Amiga may have had interlace, but at least it had 16 of the 4096 colours available. And people can get used to interlace!

@FDCAFOK

Ай бұрын

Seriously? I've compared game graphics between the ST and Amiga, and the Amiga beats the ST. As for the GUI, who created it, a child?..🤮

@c128stuff

Ай бұрын

@@Foebane72 Because for mid 1980s era typesetting and DTP, monochrome graphics at a higher resolution worked much better than lower resolution color. And no, if you are working 8 hours behind a CRT display, interlace isn't really acceptable, it causes headages and fattigue.

@c128stuff

Ай бұрын

@@FDCAFOK Because games and DTP are rather different use cases. Keep in mind many DTP jobs in the mid 1980s totally did *NOT* need color, and really benefitted from a higher resolution. Different use cases, different requirements, and so what is great for one use case can be bad for another.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@c128stuff That's why the Amiga wasn't really up to snuff for DTP, it was however definitely suited to Desktop Video and captioning because of its compatibility with the video signals of the time and genlocks. The NewTek Video Toaster came about as a result of this.

As a student at the time I bought an Amiga 500 mainly it's sound and graphics capabilities. I had a friend who bought an Atari 1040 ST with the monochrome screen and while I was bragging about the superior games on the Amiga I was secretly envious of the productivity software on the Atari. The Amiga had a multitasking OS but GEM looked more polished, especially on the high res monochrome display. Now, so many years later I still have my Amiga and having bought an Atari STE I love them both

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

But monochrome on any computer is terrible! Lower the resolution enough and you may as well use a ZX81! Better colour in ALL resolutions on a computer system. And GEM? What a f joke that is! So LIMITED!

@regisdumoulin

Ай бұрын

@@Foebane72 You have to see things in the light of the moment. The Amiga could display in high resolution in colour but unless you had access to a scan doubler and a very expensive monitor the image was flickering. I used it but it hurt your eyes after a while. And don't forget that at the time all professional computers had monochrome displays, the first of them all being the very expensive (some things do stay the same!) Apple Macintosh. As for GEM it looks pretty basic these days, but at the time the Atari version looked pretty close to the Apple Mac. Note : the PC version was much worse having been crippled following Apple suing for copying their system

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@regisdumoulin That was the OCS chipset on Amiga. ECS was modified to allow support for VGA monitors, as I recall, so interlace flicker problem gone! :)

@regisdumoulin

Ай бұрын

@@Foebane72 Yes, but my comparison was between the Amiga 500 and the Atari ST... Atari computers also improved with the TT and Falcon both able to display high resolution in colour... In any case both systems were doomed with the arrival of higher performance Windows machines in the mid 90's

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@regisdumoulin This is why, even though I have a Windows PC these days, I never really liked them back in the 1990s. I love those computer companies that did their own thing: Amiga, Atari, Acorn, Sinclair, Commodore, and a whole slew of others. I can relive those times on my current PC via emulation, however. Emulation is the future, as those companies are long gone and their hardware is failing over the years. It HAS to be preserved, even if just in software form, for future generations.

As a keyboard player, I loved the hell out of my Atari ST. It ran Cubase pretty solidly, the built-in MIDI ports were the thing that sold it to me. Did some programming with GFA Basic, a Basic-variant built for the ST exclusively. I upgraded to a Mega ST later, with a separate hard drive that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Good times.

@c128stuff

Ай бұрын

For years, an ST running cubase was the defacto standard for doing midi. I have owned a number of Amigas, no longer own any, and considering changing that. But I do use midi quite a bit, and quite considering getting a mega st for that, not because there isn't very good modern midi software, but having a more 'retro' machine handle sequencing appeals to me.

As a 15 y/o kid I'd have loved an Amiga. But at a time when an Atari 520STFM was £300, plugged into the 14" TV I already had in my bedroom and could be bought in the highstreet electrical shop an Amiga was over £1000 by the time you'd got the required monitor. And barely available. The Atari was simple and Atari moved quickly. By the time the Amiga 500 was released the Atari was established, that ensured too many games were ST ports and didnt use any of the Amiga hardware advantages (specifically hardware scrolling). Of course in time the Amiga took over, but for a time the ST was the 16 bit machine you actually could have. In 1986 the 520STFM was £300 and available, the Amiga 500 was 18 months away and would be £500.

The Atari ST industrial design still looks like „the future“ to me. I got all of the 32 Bit Micros including an Archimedes, they are all fantastic and inspiring.

Really nice video, thanks for making it. I think there is more to the story though, which is the chip shortage of the late 80s. This is all from memory so I’m not sure how accurate it is, as I remember… In 1985 Europe was still mostly into 8 bit tape based home computers for gaming, whereas Japan and USA were mainly consoles The ST reached a price of £299 while the Amiga was £499 , so the ST was very popular, it lacked the graphics and sound of the Amiga but was significantly better than what most Europeans had seen before so sold in large numbers. Then one of only 2 factories in the world that made a specialised glue for silicon chip packages was destroyed in a fire which pushed up global prices of chips, mainly memory chips. The shortage lasted 2 years. The ST increased in price overnight to £399 and the Amiga only to £549 , and now the price difference was such that a lot of Europeans paid the extra to get the Amigas When the prices finally came back down again the ST was no longer seen as so amazing compared to the Amiga , and the PC had started to build momentum with its games, so the ST was squeezed out. in Japan they had their own X68000 with even better graphics and audio than the Amiga, so they skipped over both if them.

The ST was Jack's least successful computer. When he left Commodore, half the computers in the world were Commodores. The C128's life mirrors the ST. It was also designed in five months, launched in January 85 and was discontinued in 1989, sold five million and was considered a failure. And more importantly, both were outlived and outsold by their predecessor the C64.

Used to repair these back in the day. We used to see at least 10 ST's for each Amiga. The mouse/joystick ports always broke, the PSU was flakey and the chips always oxidised causing crashes. On the plus side the board was much easier to work on than the Amiga! If there was no midi ports the ST would've flopped, schools used them because of the midi. Then the PC came along.....

@jasonbell8949

Ай бұрын

What would fail? From memory the one I had in the early 90s, the up input on a joystick wouldn't work, I did have a few joysticks, so it wasn't a single joystick. I haven't given it much thought in about thirty years. But I am someone who skived of school to play Terry's Big Adventure.

@hoojchoons2258

Ай бұрын

@@jasonbell8949 Normally just the solder joints, if they'd really been forced around tracks could break. It's a PITA as the keyboard has be totally dismantled to fix it.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

​@@jasonbell8949From my own experience of an ST, if the autofire on a connected joystick happened to fire the exact moment the ST was turned on, the ST would lock up with a steady tone. Took me ages and bringing the ST into a computer shop to figure this out! Stupid design!

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

Funny. I left my joysticks plugged in and never had any issues. I say “joysticks” because I had the Mouse Master device that allowed for easy switching between ST Mouse/Joystick on the shared port while the other port always had a joystick plugged in. We won’t talk about the Amiga failure rate or the high failure rate of prior Commodore systems.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@TheJeremyHolloway Failures are common on old computers, even when they're brand new. My Atari 600XL had a problem, so did my first Amiga 500, and the PSU fuse went on my ST after a few months. No big deal under warranty. How do you think X-Box and PlayStation buyers feel with their ridiculously high failure rates?

This video isn't too accurate, but kudos for the effort. in short: - Commodore went out of business 2 years before Atari, - you could buy 260 ST, and it had 512 KB of RAM, half of which was consumed by OS from floppy, MMU supported up to 4 MB. - YM chip is neither mono nor stereo, as it has 3 separate audio output pins. Noise generator isn't independent thing from other sound channels, only another operating mode for them. - blitter chip was a stock chip in MEGA series, and many STFMs were "blitter ready" (there was an empty socket for blitter chip upgrade) - don't know why the joystick ports are "MSX standard", since they are the same as in VCS2600, and were created by Atari - 'DMA port' actually was a SCSI port squeezed into 19-pin socket, so it wasn't only for HDDs and printers

I remember jumping up to the ST from the old tape driven 800 machine. The gygemm desktop (sort of windows) completely stumped me for about 4 hours . I had no idea how to get a game to work.

Ahem. Jay Miner left Atari Inc in 1979. Warner had owned Atari Inc since 1976. Atari Inc loaned Amiga Corp $500K to complete the Amiga Lorraine chipset and Atari Inc had exclusive rights to use the chipset in a console and after 1 year could release a keyboard for it to turn it into a computer as well as release a computer line based upon the chipset at the same time. Plus, the chipset could be used by Atari Inc’s arcade division…although they already had a superior graphics chip which they ultimately used. The plan was to release the console - code named “Mickey” - with 128K RAM for Christmas 1985. The agreement stipulated if Amiga couldn’t pay back the loan, then Amiga would become a division of Atari Inc and Atari could immediately use the chipset without any restrictions. The agreement was going to be amended to prevent Amiga from licensing the tech - or to sell the company outright - to Apple, Commodore, IBM, or TI. Amiga couldn’t pay back the loan. Instead of fessing up, they sold themselves to Commodore and Commodore gave them the $500K to pay back Atari INC. Amiga then defrauded Atari Inc claiming the Lorraine chipset didn’t work and handed over the check [which was not cashed]. Jack Tramiel & Co had left Commodore after the 1984 January CES and set up TTL. Commodore immediately sued TTL and Tramiel as well as several others under the false claim they had stolen IP as they exited Commodore. Warner CEO Steve Ross wanted to sell the assets of Atari Inc’s Consumer Division to Tramiel to quickly get Atari’s losses off Warner’s books but still retain a stake so it could be re-acquired later if the business turned around. That’s why Ross turned down the offers from Philips to buy all of Atari Inc from Warner. Warner sold the promising video phone division known as AtariTel to Mitsubishi while whittling down Atari Inc basically just to the arcade division which became known as “Atari Games” [as well as Tengen later] and the majority stake sold briefly to Namco. Meanwhile, after the Tramiels took control of the remnants of the Atari Inc Consumer Division [which became Atari Corp], Leonard Tramiel discovered the Amiga documents including the check. The Tramiels asked Warner to pass the legal claims over to Atari Corp and then they counter-sued Commodore. This involved tit-for-tat court orders to halt developments on both the ST and the Amiga. But the point is, Commodore started the legal shenanigans, not to mention enabling Amiga to defraud Atari INC. You also mention Microsoft Windows was originally planned for use on the ST. No. Bill Gates did try to persuade Tramiel to license Windows but it wasn’t anywhere near ready. That was not the plan. And the former Atari Inc’s Advanced Research Division’s operating system that ran atop their Dual 68000 powered Atari Gaza workstation, which was BSD with a custom GUI, wasn’t going to run on consumer hardware at that time… so they licensed DRI’s GEM along with GEMDOS aka TOS. You mention ex Commodore employees worked on theST but so did ex Atari Inc employees like Landon Dyer. The ST beat the Amiga 1000 to market and cost a lot less than the Amiga’s $1,600 price tag, not to mention it had twice the amount of RAM standard. That’s why the ST beat the Amiga in sales until the Amiga 500 was released in late 1987. The 260ST was released in small numbers but it was automatically upgraded to 512K RAM. It’s a collector’s item. It was always the intent to release a Blitter chip for the ST but it was delayed thanks to multiple manufacturing issues but later debuted in the Mega ST in early 1987. The Amiga is not special in featuring a Blitter chip. The MindSet PC featured one in 1984 and that company and its engineers were ex-Atari Inc employees. The 1040ST wasn’t released as an attempt to catch up with Amiga. It was released in 1986. The Amiga didn’t start selling well until 1988.

@RetroDawn

Ай бұрын

Thanks for adding this comment! I hope lots of viewers see this. I wrote a brief comment pointing out that the entire history given here was incorrect and just specifically refuted the most important part as an example--I didn't feel like basically giving the full history to point out all the errors, as you did. Atari Corp didn't counter-sue Commodore based on the fraud Amiga committed against Atari--they sued Amiga, as Commodore had only announced they were acquiring Amiga, but had not yet completed that. Also, I think more people would read this if it was broken up into paragraphs (just simply putting some CR's in there). The wall of text didn't dissuade me, even though I already knew this stuff (except maybe for Philips being interested in buying Atari and definitely that Gaza used BSD with a custom GUI--apparently CP/M 68k was going to be another potential option, which is interesting since Atari Corp almost selected that for the Atari ST, and GEMDOS was a somewhat MS-DOS compatible enhancement of CP/M [68k]). Supposedly, contrary to what has been believed for decades, Gaza apparently didn't have dual 68000 CPUs, but rather just a graphics "co-processor"(s). I wonder why they chose that name. Ironic to be talking about that decades-old never-fhinished machine with what's going on now.

@valenrn8657

22 күн бұрын

Atari Inc loaned Amiga Corp $500K with 1 month term. Commodore paid the loan. You ommited key facts.

@valenrn8657

22 күн бұрын

@@RetroDawn . Commodore paid the loan within the 1 month loan terms. Atari has no legal leg to stand on.

@RetroDawn

9 күн бұрын

@@valenrn8657 Amiga was under obligation to provide the chipset to Atari, by the terms of the loan. They lied and said that it didn't work and they would just pay back the loan instead. That was fraud. Commodore paying back the loan was irrelevant.

@valenrn8657

9 күн бұрын

@@RetroDawn False. If Amiga fails to repay the loan within one month, Amiga was under obligation to transfser the chipset to Atari. Your narrative is false.

The Atari OS were quite limited vs the unlimited pre-emptive multitasking OS on Amiga. Amiga OS can still do things you can't do in Windows 11.

@JesterEric

Ай бұрын

GEM worked mostly. The Amiga os was a buggy mess full of errors. That's why it was a failure as a serious computer

@V3ntilator

Ай бұрын

@@JesterEric Amiga itself weren't buggy. You could run Scala presentations on Amiga 24/7 all year without any crashing. This is why Amiga were used by so many TV channels back then. You can't blame poor programming of unstable programs on Amiga.

@valenrn8657

Ай бұрын

@@JesterEric That's BS. Both TOS and AmigaOS don't have memory protection.

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

The AmigaOS was great at multitasking multiple viruses…and crashing. Multitasking without memory protection is ridiculous. Amigans think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread because they were oblivious to MicroWare OS-9.

@valenrn8657

Ай бұрын

@@TheJeremyHolloway For MicroWare OS-9 without MMU. _Systems without a memory management unit (MMU) have no memory protection against illegal access, nor per-process memory protection, while systems with an MMU can have memory protection enabled. The module controlling the MMU can be included or omitted by the system integrator to enable or disable memory protection. This allows OS-9 to run on older systems which do not include an MMU._

There are quite a few things for which the Amiga hardware is better suited, including nearly everything related to games and multimedia (presentations). But, the ST hardware was better for 2 use cases: - DTP, typesetting, etc (because of the hires monochrome video mode) - Music production using MIDI

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

I think only a fool would argue against the ST being the dominant MIDI computer of the late 80s and into the 90s (and beyond, if truth be told).

@valenrn8657

22 күн бұрын

@@81632bit Meaningless for games.

BTW the Atari ST was more the follow up of the Commodore Plus4 (and thus the C16) which Tramiel was developing at Commodore

loved my Atari ST

Finally, a KZread video about the history of Atari & Amiga.

It's interesting looking back at things from a worldwide perspective, because the ST was the more popular machine in the United States.

The joystick ports were 9 pin Atari standard and already in use before the MSX machines launched, The "standard" actually launched with the Atari VCS but went on to be used by Commodore in the C64 as well as the MSX and others. A number of other micros and consoles used the same style of port but had different wiring though.

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

Don’t forget Commodore stole the molds for the Atari 2600 CX40 joystick and the Paddles and then slapped the Commodore brand on them and sold them as the official accessories for the VIC-20. Atari Inc sued and Commodore had to switch designs.

I agree with your analysis if you simply compare the ST to an Amiga 500, on a pure "hardware capable" basis. Yeah undoubtedly the Amiga was in comparison a much more capable machine, both for graphics and also for sound. Atari 520 STE was a more serious competitor but its advanced capabilities weren't used by most software/games for compatibility reasons with the ST (only much later, some music composition software took advantage of it, and were capable to offer 8 voices of simultaneous sound playback which is was really awesome, but too late !). That said if you take into consideration that some "key features" of the ST were, back at the time, REALLY IMPORTANT (hi resolution mode, midi ports, a simple and effective desktop in ROM, and a floppy disk format that was IBM PC COMPATIBLE !), you start to see things differently, and you can only wonder why commodore didn't put more efforts to have those features, too. I worked in the music production industry and I can tell you that, as amazing as it seems, Atari ST's are STILL USED TO THAT DAY, mainly by some musicians who re using them since the 90's, for music production. The reason for that is that there's many fantastic softwares for vintage MIDI keyboard patch management, and a lot of patch/preset banks for those softwares available on the internet too. Basically the most difficult to get today are floppy drives, and floppy disks, still required to bring those files from you windows PC computer, to the old ST ;-) The St had an edge for professional-commercial applications, as it was very capable of communicating with other devices from many constructor, using standard interfaces, and communication protocols. The Amiga had an edge in his own hardware capabilities, but aside for video production (with "the Toaster") it wasn't that much used professionally.

The Amiga and ST weren't really competitors, they were in completely different price brackets. A better analogy than ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 would be Spectrum vs BBC B.. Having used and supported a load of them it's biggest weakness was it's power supply

I recall there was an ST maze shooter game (players looked like pacmen) that used the midi port to network other ST's. IMO this should be given the credit as the first multiplayer FPS! There was also a text adventure (that I never tried, my system was B&W) that increased the no. of colours that could be displayed by switching the palette between frames. It was advertised as understanding English: "plant the plant in the plant pot" was the example used. What was it called? Was it good? Where can I get it?

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

The shooter that used the MIDI ports to network was imaginatively called "MIDI Maze". Original, huh?

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

MIDI Maze was then licensed by BPS and sold for the Nintendo Gameboy and other non-Atari systems as “FaceBall 2000”.

In 3d games the Atari ST was quite superior to the basic Amiga because of the faster 68000. But more at the end of the 16 bit era when most Amiga owners already upgraded to a PC and a smaller group to the Amiga 1200. There is another disavantage to being the cheaper computer : The people who had more money bought an Amiga and they could sell more other crap to them too. The users with less financial room had an Atari ST. So the market for software was smaller for it also.

i had back time both Atari St and Amiga , the Atari St IS with no doubt far better than the Amiga if you wanted a real computer , but if you wanted a video console with a disk drive the Amiga was at the end of its commercial life better. At start there were mainly only Atari St port on the Amiga , it started to change after 1989. .. To really appreciete the Atari ST has a computer you need to have the Hires monochrome monitor. These monitors were amazing.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

Not really.

I loved my STE for music and spent huge amounts of time making tunes on it in the 90s. The Amiga was definitely better overall and I’m guessing you could have bought a midi add-on at the time but for very little money I had a nice music set-up and made some good stuff with the aid of a simple keyboard borrowed from school and a cheap sampler.

@jasonk9779

Ай бұрын

Indeed. I had a MIDI interface for my Amiga and use that to sync trackers to external sequencers and drum machines. OctaMED was great.

@evertonshorts9376

Ай бұрын

You could; Midi is just serial with different cables. I think they were 19.99 at the time and remember thinking how expensive it seemed for something so simple, but looking back, printing circuit boards and the tooling for the case would've been very expensive, whereas now you'd 3d print the case and get the boards from a certain well known video sponsor.

@judewestburner

Ай бұрын

I heard of octamed way too late unfortunately. During the mid 90's I loved making cheesy dance tracks and moved from the Amiga to the PC and to Cubase (for a while). If I knew octamed existed I definitely would not have moved.

@evertonshorts9376

Ай бұрын

​@@madigorfkgoogle9349 So what data is it skipping? And how is the OS design or hardware architecture responsible for that?

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

The Amiga wasn’t as tight with MIDI timing as the ST because Commodore forced the Amiga to use their CIA chips - also used by the C64/128 - whereas the ST used Motorola MC6850 ACIAs which were well respected for handling MIDI data. Had the Amiga Lorraine chipset ended up with either Atari Inc or Atari Corp, the MC6850s would’ve been used by it.

The original ST would have completely killed the Amiga before the 500 ever appeared, if not for the penny pinching lack of a blitter chip (that even had a marked out space on the motherboard, it just wasnt fitted!), and the godawful Spectrum tier sound chip. The STE got it right, but by that point it was too late, and the damage was done. For $5-$10 more, Tramiel and team could have won the war before Commodore knew they had started fighting - and having a single dominant low cost 16/32 bit micro taking on the Mac and early IBM PC's, rather than splitting the market might and expending so much energy fighting each other - history might have turned out very different... Alas! Similarly, if Tramiels Atari had actually inherited the Amiga tech rather than it going to Commodore, the same may have happened, but built on the Amiga tech rather than Atari's variation on the theme.

@MaxQ10001

Ай бұрын

They didn't have a chip to mount. So it wasn't that easy. To make a blitter ready for productin would probably have delayed the project by 6-12 months. That would have been a problem. It also had a terrible sound chip with even no way to play samples in a proper way. If they had a proper sound chip and a blitter ready for launch when the ST launched, they would have probably done a lot better. But they hadn't...

I use Amiga and STs I love the Amiga but the ST has its charm, they are far from horrible machines

I would like to add a few things.... First and foremost, excellent video! With that said, I am from the US, and I have never seen either the Atari ST or Amiga 500 for sale here, ever. Now, that doesn't mean they were not for sale but that they were so obscure that I only knew one person with an Amiga. From 1985 until the 16-bit revolution, the Nes was the top of the heap. Obviously, that's ridiculous as an Atari ST or Amiga would run circles around it, but that's the way it was back then. Further, while the Amiga and ST were about 500 dollars more than the best Nes package....Nintendo's games were $50 to $65 a pop, making it far more expensive in the long run. I really wish the ST and Amiga caught on here because a lot of their games were incredible. Look at 13:53 and compare that with the best Nes or Master System games, and you will see what I mean....just wow! Note- I started gaming back in 1986 with the Nes and Master System. Finally, I noticed you mentioned the 68K in the Sega Genesis. While that is true, one thing you should note is the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive technically came out 3 years after the Amiga/ST. That in itself is also pretty wild.

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

They were definitely much more popular in Europe (The UK, Germany & France especially) than in the US. I think they just couldn't break the Apple II grip and the growing IBM PC compatible market.

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

The ST and the Amiga were both sold here in the States. Both were featured heavily in the computer press albeit rarely in tv commercials.

@Sinn0100

Ай бұрын

@@TheJeremyHolloway When? I was definitely around and a huge gamer. I knew one place that had an Amiga 500 and I live in a huge city.

Are we ready for the discussion over which fan base (Amiga or Atari ST) had more reason to be bitter?

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

Based on one commentor, I'd say the Atari one....

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

Amigans and Vegans.

Development of the ST was much longer than you suggest. Ex Commodore engineers joined Atari and brought with them work done on a Z8000 16 bit cpm based computer done at Commodore. Commodore counter sued Atari because of this

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

The ST project (as in the Amiga like 68k based system) was developed in 5 months. It may have used some work from the z8000 system, but the ST itself took 5 months.

actually a little info the atari started with 256MB not 512 and so did amiga.. i know because i owned them lol

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

The 256k model was only available very briefly, and in very limited quantities. It isn't a good look when your OS takes up 90% of the available system RAM...

@plechaim

Ай бұрын

There was meant to be a 130ST as well from what I have read

Technically it is the Amiga Technically the Amiga is the Atari st

@Clancydaenlightened

29 күн бұрын

What happens when commodore hires Atari engineers And Atari hired the commodore engineers

@81632bit

28 күн бұрын

Careful. You'll upset the fanboys....

Amiga ftw

The Amiga (then Hi-Toro and not Commodore) was carefully developed as the ultimate games system over a few years, and because of the 1983 Videogame Crash was turned into a full-blown computer. Jay Miner and his development team took their time over the Amiga project. The Atari ST was concocted IN A RUSH by Jack Tramiel once he lost the Amiga to Commodore and so it is a random hodge-podge of off-the-shelf components and it's a wonder they were able to get it out to market ahead of Commodore at all. But Amiga is the FAR, FAR SUPERIOR machine. That is all.

@JesterEric

Ай бұрын

Commodore did not have Amiga when Jack left. They were working on a 16 bit Z8000. The engineers left Commodore and used work on the Z8000 as the basis of the ST

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@JesterEric No wonder the ST was so inferior, then! I heard the CPU on the Z8000 was absolute trash compared to the Motorola 68000.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 HOW is the ST superior? I've had both, a 520STFM and an A500, and I've seen for myself the inferior spec of the ST: smaller colour palette, no sprites, no hardware scrolling, no native PCM audio (and no, MIDI doesn't count, that's just external control, not native audio). Just because it beat the Amiga to market and was marketed properly doesn't make it better, Amiga was saddled with incompetent Commodore management who didn't know what to do with the world's first multimedia home computer, and I will concede it did languish, but I wouldn't call it a failure if it sold millions.

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

He's clearly an Atari fanboy... He is convinced that known, established facts about the development of both systems (from the actual people involved at the time) are incorrect because they don't fit his personal (and incorrect) opinion.

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 hang on, your "proof" is you allegedly once spoken to Jack Tramiel randomly in Germany back in 89.... Me? I prefer to look at the myriad of interviews given over the years (feel free to search the internet for them, there are plenty out there) by people from Atari, Commodore, the software houses who developed the games. I mean, are you seriously trying to say that all the information out there is fake, and yours is the actual truth? Yeah, you are either a troll, or you have a perspective on reality that is different to literally everyone else...

The Atari ST is the reference design from Motorola, with an awfull ay3-8910 audio chip. In an alternative world were IBM chose the 68000 over the 8086, the PC AT is an Atari ST and the Atari ST does not exist

@CaptainDangeax

Ай бұрын

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 a computer with no companion chip is not superior to a computer with 3 companion chips

@CaptainDangeax

Ай бұрын

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 You're comparing the AY just able to produce 3 outputs of 50% square wave with the amiga sound able to output 4 channels of 8 bit PCM independantly from CPU. Either you don't know what you're talking about, or you're just a troll wasting my time. In any case, good night and so long

@CaptainDangeax

Ай бұрын

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Still not serious dude. I had a C64, then a ST and the sound was so horrible I sold it back after 6 month, to buy a Amiga500 some times after. I still own A C128 and the Amiga 500, along with a BMC64 in a Vic20 case. An Atari ? I won't touch any even with a sh.t shovel. And comparing 50% square with a PCM, not even to mention the SID, is just trolling or bad faith

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

The ST had the YM2149 because Atari Corp couldn’t get Atari Inc’s 8 Channel Atari AMY sound chip to work. They then approached Yamaha to sell them the YM2151 - used in numerous arcade games - but Yamaha would only sell them the YM2149 because they were going to compete with the ST with their own MSX based music computer that they packed the YM2151 in. Regardless, the ST crushed their computer outside of Japan.

hystreah :D

The entire history given here is incorrect. Among the most salacious untrue claims made here is that the Atari ST was created as a response to losing the Amiga. Atari Corp did not lend money to Amiga and Jack Tramiel already already been trying to get a 68000-based computer created at Commodore and started designing that computer (the future Atari ST) after leaving Commodore and founding a company and getting handpicked Commodore staff to join it.

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

I don't think you understand what the word "salacious" means....

Let's address the design elephant in the room, shall we? The embarrassing diagonal function keys!! In hindsight, what were Atari thinking with those fiddly non-standard and hard-to-replace keys?? Even the XE 8-bit models were saddled with them, AND the TT and Falcon! Did Jack Tramiel think they were "cool" or something? At least the Amiga keyboards looked like IBM PC ones!

@81632bit

Ай бұрын

It was a design choice, and one I quite like. It was different, and you knew immediately you were looking at an Atari computer.

@TheJeremyHolloway

Ай бұрын

Embarrassing? Maybe to you. They looked futuristic. Maybe you prefer Plain Jane designs and beige boxes.

@Foebane72

Ай бұрын

@@TheJeremyHolloway Better beige than grey.

Ugh. These were absolutely terrible machines. Crappy build, HORRIBLE OS. And I loved Atari until then, had an 800. If not for the built in MIDI port this thing would never have got a fraction of the traction it got in the market. To this day it's the one machine that isn't, nor will it ever be, in my retro collection :)