The differance between ST and Amiga

[goldman]

Heard some jerks going on the other day some joint I was hanging at carrying on about how the Amiga was better than the ST! I was wondering, being the fact you know about hardware you could point out the advantages of owning the Atari ST over the Amiga?

[Maverick[RAM]]

Heard some jerks going on the other day some joint I was hanging at carrying on about how the Amiga was better than the ST! I was wondering, being the fact you know about hardware you could point out the advantages of owning the Atari ST over the Amiga?

Well you'll see, Amiga computer was better in everything. And that is because it was equipped with 3 processors

Atari on the other hand only had one poor processor...so what happened

The Atari coders learned how to use their code more efficiantly and
learned how to optimize to the max

So in any comparison Atari will loose. But it doesn't matter cause
almost all atarians, at least they who were in the "war" between amiga users and atari users, were quite certain that the amiga were cheating by
using three processors instead of one. And that determination was the driven force to allways come up with faster and faster code.

I am a huge fan of Atari. Don't get me wrong when I say that Atari did loose in any comparison. That's a fact. But the real interresting part is that both Atari and later on regular coders of Intel, I am talking about the
standard processors of 486, and so on. They made faster code than both Amiga dudes and Atari dudes could process. I know of a bloke, a coder
he was the first in sweden to do plasma. On the same night he did
real calculating cube 3D vector with bouncing effect and plasma, playing a modul a four voices and managed to do a real time zone on one of the sides. And he even had time for a quite cool scroller too on a 486 computer.

He went to a convent with it, Can't remember which now and he came third.
There was three mathspecialist from a university who became winners. they made a chessbord, At first it was just some squares and pieces. then the screen faded out
all in 2D at first. Then the sides have switched. Now as an amazing effect
those "bastards" just flipped the board and everyone could see that it was a actual 3D screen. But wait there is more to it. Just about time when we who saw the screen had just realized it was actually a 3D screen the camera started to fly over the chess board, and just zooming in on the pieces. And while this was happening the whole board rotated and such.
Of course there was a module going and regular scroll and so on. And then it started to display other thing. It was a multipartdemo of the best kind.
Ok so this bloke who coded the plasma screen he asked them how they did it. and after an hour of listening he still didn't understand how they have managed to code that beautiful screen. He just realize that he did not have all the skills in math to pursuit such a clever demo.

So by all rambling here I just wanna say that it's has been a great era of coding and competiton due to facts of the two brands. Atari and Amiga, not to forget mention the good old Intel.

[goldman]

Hmmmmm that figures, Heh! What a bunch of turds!

[Ayreon]

Advantages of the ST over the Amiga 500.. hmmm it's kinda hard to find some. The Amiga is better in a lot of ways with it's "gaming" hardware.

It had no midiports, so no midimace for them

It's power supply was big and unhandy. It looks a bit like the old Atari xl power supply but Atari was smart enought to put the power on/off switch on the computer and not on the PSU. You either have to have that thing in reach and sight or dive under your desk or whatever to switch it off.
Oh and the cabel between the PSU and connector that plugs into the Amiga breaks rather easely. Near the plug or near the PSU.

I never understood the memory thing.. only1 or was it 2? MB real memory and 1 or was it 2?MB fast ram. Now i'm no programmer but i can imagine that having all memory accesable for all chips would be easier for certain things.. on the other hand i guess fast ram does have some advantages as well.

Some personal things i don't like on the Amiga. The keyboard. The mouse.. yeah i know most complain about the ST mouse, but i think the amiga mouse is even worse. The diskdrive made even worse noises than the ST. I used to call it the perferator cos it really does sounds like it's chewing up the disc.
Having to use a bloody bootdisk all the time to get rid of that annoying hand pushing that disc in your face.

[Maverick[RAM]]

Advantages of the ST over the Amiga 500.. hmmm it's kinda hard to find some. The Amiga is better in a lot of ways with it's "gaming" hardware.

It had no midiports, so no midimace for them

It's power supply was big and unhandy. It looks a bit like the old Atari xl power supply but Atari was smart enought to put the power on/off switch on the computer and not on the PSU. You either have to have that thing in reach and sight or dive under your desk or whatever to switch it off.
Oh and the cabel between the PSU and connector that plugs into the Amiga breaks rather easely. Near the plug or near the PSU.

I never understood the memory thing.. only1 or was it 2? MB real memory and 1 or was it 2?MB fast ram. Now i'm no programmer but i can imagine that having all memory accesable for all chips would be easier for certain things.. on the other hand i guess fast ram does have some advantages as well.

Some personal things i don't like on the Amiga. The keyboard. The mouse.. yeah i know most complain about the ST mouse, but i think the amiga mouse is even worse. The diskdrive made even worse noises than the ST. I used to call it the perferator cos it really does sounds like it's chewing up the disc.
Having to use a bloody bootdisk all the time to get rid of that annoying hand pushing that disc in your face.

He he he Exellent, I couldnt agree more

he he he LOL LOL

Best Regards

[Maverick[RAM]]

Hmmmmm that figures, Heh! What a bunch of turds!

Who do you mean? I don't quite follow

[Batman]

hmmm, I might be wrong here but I think I have read some amiga specs somewhere saying that the cpu clockfrequency was lower then 8mhz. Don't know if I remember correctly or if it makes any difference?

Batman

[Maverick[RAM]]

hmmm, I might be wrong here but I think I have read some amiga specs somewhere saying that the cpu clockfrequency was lower then 8mhz. Don't know if I remember correctly or if it makes any difference?

Batman

It should because the frequency of the clock is essential for how fast the
processor interpret the instructions.

A processor does the following in an atari ST

Check all interrupt
Check all memory handling
Updates any information

When the processor have left thru these three mainfunctions we can
for simplicity called it a full cycle lap. It is not quite thru
It sure does many other things too, but as I said for every cycle

So when the three tasks above have been executed
then you can say the processor has done one lap

With 8 MHz/s that would be 8 million lap or as it should be called
cycles per second

Quite fast.

So if the Amiga is using a lower frequency this would mean that
it would be slower according to the ST. Or in easier words not been
able to rerun the tasks as many times as the atari does.

It is even more complicated but for now this will do.

Because of different types of memory, processortype and so on
and memory busses, the different processors have different clock cycles intervalls. This mean that not for every lap it would check all tasks but maybe one, and not until 3 or 4 empty cycles it would check another tasks. Thats because all of the tasks take different times to perform.

Well one fun thing is
The Commodore 64 allows a programmer to check for interupts on every clock cycle if they want to. that's why they have managed to make quite remarkable demos for the Commodore 64 that sometimes have the techniques of the atari and amiga demos. Impressing. But the main reason for this is the fact that they can themselves run a interupt on every cycle if they choose.

Why? Simple because the larger processor where at least back then to fast for memory access and all other interupt activities. So they by hardware forced the processors to wait for a cycle or two, sometimes up to 4 cycles, which is a very long time (for cycles and timing issues)

Finally! Think it like this. The speed is how fast a car will go (8 MHz)
The intervall in cycles are how many errands you must do on each trip
they sure alternates from short stop to fill up the gas to shop at the mall.

Best Regards

[goldman]

What I mean was that they cheated by using 3 processors just to even come close to the ST. Why.. I'll bet theyd stink bomb compared to even Commodore 64! (Don't Get me wrong! C64 still ha a place in my heart ) BUT THEY CHEATED!

NOW!....... As I was saying.... http://gscentral.net/spell.rm

[Ayreon]

The 68000 in the Amiga indeed has a lower clock frequency. YES!
Around 7 Mhz. Some sources say 7.2Mhz others mention 7.12 , 7.14, 7.16 so thats pretty unclear, and pretty strange that they all say something different.
So without using the costum chips it would be slower than the ST.
Luckely for the Amiga it does have a set of excellent chips that make up a lot more than the loss of 1 Mhz in a lot of cases.

[goldman]

And if you think that was rotten check this out!

http://www.gscentral.net/anne.rm

I wonder how many other people use 3 instead of 1.

[Guest]

I really don't see why using 3 processors' instead of one would be cheating? Does that mean that ant time someone builds a computer system with more than one processor that they are "cheating" too? Atari could have added a custom processor or two to the machine to make it better, but they were short-sighted in order to get the machine out FAST (6 months after the Tramiel's took over), they later added such processors like the blitter (which the Amiga already had a version of). I wouldn't even consider it cheating by hacking the hardware to make it better, but when you show it off, tell people it's not stock! Cheating would be saying or implying that there's less computer there than in reality. The ST was better in Value for the money and extras like the midi ports, more memory and still less (1040ST vs Amiga 500), etc.
I've always been an Atari computer fan since I bought my first 130XE in 85', but I bought Atari because it seemed as good AND better in many ways than the Apple II/E/C or C64, and it was less money and within my budget. I've owne other computers like the C64 since, but it's advantages over the Atari didn't seem to add up to the Atari's advantages of the C64. It goes both ways. I know he Amiga is more poweful, but I prefer the ST. Plus, I'm a hardware hacker and intend to upgrade my 1040 in any way I can. (32,000 color pallette, more memory, blitter and newer TOS/GEM roms to stat with...)

[Gunstar]

Sorry, my post above, I forgot to sign in...

[Maverick[RAM]]

Gunstar Wrote:

I really don't see why using 3 processors' instead of one would be cheating? Does that mean that ant time someone builds a computer system with more than one processor that they are "cheating" too? Atari could have added a custom processor or two to the machine to make it better, but they were short-sighted in order to get the machine out FAST (6 months after the Tramiel's took over), they later added such processors like the blitter (which the Amiga already had a version of). I wouldn't even consider it cheating by hacking the hardware to make it better, but when you show it off, tell people it's not stock! Cheating would be saying or implying that there's less computer there than in reality. The ST was better in Value for the money and extras like the midi ports, more memory and still less (1040ST vs Amiga 500), etc.
I've always been an Atari computer fan since I bought my first 130XE in 85', but I bought Atari because it seemed as good AND better in many ways than the Apple II/E/C or C64, and it was less money and within my budget. I've owne other computers like the C64 since, but it's advantages over the Atari didn't seem to add up to the Atari's advantages of the C64. It goes both ways. I know he Amiga is more poweful, but I prefer the ST. Plus, I'm a hardware hacker and intend to upgrade my 1040 in any way I can. (32,000 color pallette, more memory, blitter and newer TOS/GEM roms to stat with...)

Love your article and explanation.
But before this is getting way out of hand.
All you good people must understand
that the "WAR" was just the war in the scrolls and BBS!

There were no real harm done in any way.

I for instance used to hang out with pretty cool dudes, and they were
awsome in the grafpix department and use the Amiga to the fullest.

So I repeat that there were no hard feelings whatsoever

Infact at different coding partys we used to bungle up both Atari and Amigas in a great mix. All in all twenty people and we even took in some
PC also to join us. We were a big happy family

Best regards to you all, Both Amiga and Atari Fan

[goldman]

I was just saying the only reason Amiga got thorugh well was the fact that it used three processors. I am thinking that using 3 processors on ST would have been real cool. See the fact is the reason Amiga seemed to eck out in front was only because it used 3 while we used one.

I can only imagine how much Amiga would have sucked using one! The fact they had to use 3 just to compete tells us we had somthing going!

I was only juxtaposing this situation anyways. That's really all. I got nuttin else to say. Im off now to my um... well my... thing yeah whatevr it is I decide to do this saturday morning.[/quote]

[Ayreon]

An Amiga without its costum chips would erh.. some sort of ST

I think that what the Amiga coders could do on the Amiga was a big inspiration for a lot of ST coders to do the same effects on the ST. So without the Amiga i don't think the evolution of ST coding would have been at the point as it is now. You can argue about Amiga coders being lazy/less inventive then the ST coders since the Amiga had the hardware to do a lot of work for them... i guess thats why they started to focus on design earlier and more. ST- coders were more busy with profing the ST could do the same (and more) as the Amiga.
It's true that ST-coders can virtually do any effect that the Amiga can do, but not as many and not at the same time.

Correct me if my thoughts on this are wrong

[Maverick[RAM]]

An Amiga without its costum chips would erh.. some sort of ST

I think that what the Amiga coders could do on the Amiga was a big inspiration for a lot of ST coders to do the same effects on the ST. So without the Amiga i don't think the evolution of ST coding would have been at the point as it is now. You can argue about Amiga coders being lazy/less inventive then the ST coders since the Amiga had the hardware to do a lot of work for them... i guess thats why they started to focus on design earlier and more. ST- coders were more busy with profing the ST could do the same (and more) as the Amiga.
It's true that ST-coders can virtually do any effect that the Amiga can do, but not as many and not at the same time.

Correct me if my thoughts on this are wrong

Nope you are right...except for the fact that they did all grapics
and effect just as fast...What made the whole thing different
where the sound effects and the modules and over all music
since the amiga soundchip paula where left on her own
and therefore could use all the time she wanted to produce those
effects. If you read earlier articles in here they mention about
the Mhz, and that's why the Atari coders are able to keep up.

But one "scary" thing is that the hardware of the processor in C64 is buildt
so that it can check for interupts every cycle if they want to.

Read about the cycles in earlier post in this HardWare section.

So in conclusion...The C64 did produce great stuff but it wasn't until the
Amiga and Atari gave them some inspiration with different demos and
such. Later on the Amiga people started to do excellent
pieces and Inspired, just like you said the Atari Coders.

One exemple of many (this is one I remember more clearly than others)
A great game called Indy 500 (Indinapoli 500) Whatever
When I saw it on the Amiga I was shocked. And then I had only seen the
graphcis and the speed of the car

Then my friend (the owner of the amiga) said, wait, you got to listen to
the sound. Man i was beat.....I was stuck in that game for weeks

On the Atari came a beautiful cool game called StuntCar Driver
It had awsome graphics and gameplay. And then I tuned up the speaker
and was shocked once again over the "AWFUL" sound

It was the worst sound ever. But the 3D routs were just as fast as the
indy 500. Later on came Vroom and others

But Vroom had strange enough a real cool sound and an
exellent gameplay.

And then I was stuck in weeks with that game.....

So therefore is it two major concerns
The MHz and The Processor
If a game is gonna be fast enough or good gameplay
but it then allways comes down to the coders.


Best Regards

[Gunstar]

Ok, I have a question for you, but first I want you to know that I do realize the Amiga sound is superior. My question is; what was that sound on the Amiga coming from? Was it a monitor speaker or seperate speakers, e.g.-PC speakers or other stereo speakers? I ask, because I just did a mod on the ST by adding an external RCA jack for audio, and even though it is still mono, it sounds 300% better on my PC speakers and when I turn on the virtual surround on my speakers, it sound superb, compared to the monitor speaker. The overall sound is MUCH richer with higher trebles and deeper basses. I suggest anyone with a standard ST do this...I'm just saying that ST music sounds great, if you use good speakers. Maybe the difference in quality wouldn't have been so vast for you.

[Ayreon]

RCA connection on ST is really cool. There must be a schematic for a stereo connection wandering around. A lot of ST tunes sound pretty cool in stereo. Unfortunatly it's crap for Samples and tracker music. Somehow splitting up the channels for stereo messes up the mixing or combining channels for playing samples and gives some serious noise over the sound. Building in a switch to switch between mono and stereo is a must.

Anyhow a good set of speakers and/or amplifyer makes a big difference.

[soviet]

1)First the Amiga have stereo sound output (and 14 bit sound output)
far better than the atari 1040st
2)The video output
Amiga Genlock,Overscan to 740x580 in interleaced with up 32 colors
Atari 1040st, no genlock,640x200 mono, no interleaced no overscan
3) Amiga 500, 1 mb of sound and video memory
Atari 1040st, 32k video memory
4) Floppy drive formats Amiga standart to 880k
Atari 720k
5)Amiga 500mb have blitter chip, atar 1040 not
6)Colors (the amiga can do 4096 colors in HAM mode at the same time)
And 64 colors simultanius (most games use 64 colors)
Atari 1040 stfm 16 colors max.
7)Atari st keyboard (chiclet keyboard with calculator style feeling)
Amiga Keyboard (real mechanic keyboard)
8)Amiga default mouse (is crap)
Atari default mouse (bettter than the amiga one but not much)
9)If you take a look at the demos (i see lots of atari ones and amiga ones) you gona find that the amiga demos are much much prettier and far more impressing than the atari ones)
10)The amiga chipset is lot better than the atari 1040 one
you could see at graphic in games, the amiga ports of games have better backplanes and backgrounds more colors are fasters and have better sound.


I love the atari 1040stfm (i have one and i use it every day)
but the true is that the amiga 500 is far better than the 1040 stfm.

[manicx]

1)First the Amiga have stereo sound output (and 14 bit sound output)
far better than the atari 1040st

Wrong. The Amiga has 8bit Stereo PCM sound just like the Atari STE. The 14bit output is achieved through AHI which uses the CPU to achieve this. Even a 68030 struggles to achieve this output. I've installed this on my Amiga 4000 and still have problems to get the max out of it. Not to mention that output volume is lower.

2)The video output
Amiga Genlock,Overscan to 740x580 in interleaced with up 32 colors
Atari 1040st, no genlock,640x200 mono, no interleaced no overscan

Let's face it, both the ST/E and Amiga 500/+ lacked in proper higher resolutions. Atari goes up to 640*400 in mono @ 72Hz that was a fantastic resolution to do some serious stuff. Unfortunately, you were limited to 2 colours. The Amiga on the other hand, had higher resolutions BUT they were INTERLACED and were unusable to a normal video monitor like the 1083/4 because of the Flickering. You had to use a flicker fixer to fix that. The Amiga resolutions were made with video in mind. The max resolution on the Amiga, is the max resolution you get on your TV. Using these resolutions with a Genlock to output the signal to a video source, worked like a dream. These resolutions though were useless for all users who didn't bother with video stuff. BTW, I used to work on a TV station back then, and I know this very well.

3) Amiga 500, 1 mb of sound and video memory
Atari 1040st, 32k video memory

I think you need to understand in full how the Amiga uses memory.

4) Floppy drive formats Amiga standart to 880k
Atari 720k

Well, the Amiga had better disk drive in general but the capacity doesn't matter. It is the whole idea behind the FDD. Yes, the Amiga had a better FDD even though it was clicking once every 3-4 secs...

5)Amiga 500mb have blitter chip, atar 1040 not

Atari STE had a Blitter Chip. It was inferior to the Amiga's Blitter but still, it was capable of decent stuff. Pitty, it was not utilised properly on the STE.

6)Colors (the amiga can do 4096 colors in HAM mode at the same time)
And 64 colors simultanius (most games use 64 colors)
Atari 1040 stfm 16 colors max.

HAM was only for static screens. Atari has similar modes that can display 512 colours on the ST and 4096 on the STE. Most Amiga games use 32 colours and older releases (pre 1990) only 16 as they were ported by the ST. The reason for using 32 colours was that programmers used the standard resolutions. To achieve 64+ colours you need to do certain tricks and play with the hardware. Same could achieved with the ST. Games like Enchanted Lands, Wings of Death, Lethal Xcess had tons of colours on the ST, not to mention the excellent scrolling, no of sprites, stereo sound etc.

7)Atari st keyboard (chiclet keyboard with calculator style feeling)
Amiga Keyboard (real mechanic keyboard)

Both keyboard sucked big time, but I still love the Function keys on the ST.

8)Amiga default mouse (is crap)
Atari default mouse (bettter than the amiga one but not much)

Thanks to the Amiga, the ST mouse looks great...

9)If you take a look at the demos (i see lots of atari ones and amiga ones) you gona find that the amiga demos are much much prettier and far more impressing than the atari ones)

Well, I am itching after that. The Atari demos were a scene on their own. The Atari demo scene proved that a machine with known limits can be pushed beyond them. That's why I loved and still love the ST. Because of the demo scene. The atari demos, are unique in any platform thanks to the unique menus that you have to choose where to go, what to see etc. Another thing with the ST demos is the scrolltext. If you knew the scene, every demo was like reading a magazine. The famous ST demo wars were fantastic with the groups 'fighting' with each other. At the same time, the Amiga demos were just amazing audio/visuals but nothing more. Pretty boring stuff. Every demo on the ST was treated like an expensive book. Each demo is a brick on the ST history wall. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the Amiga. 80-90% of the Amiga users have no idea about demos. 80-90% of the ST users had at least 2-4 demos. When I bought my ST, I got to the demo scene a week later. That was part of the ST.

10)The amiga chipset is lot better than the atari 1040 one
you could see at graphic in games, the amiga ports of games have better backplanes and backgrounds more colors are fasters and have better sound.

Nobody says the opposite. I think though that you missed the point here. The ST was not about being better than the Amiga. This was an Amiga users complex. The ST was about computing. To tell you the truth, the more I see it today, the more I can say that if the ST didn't have a 68000, it would have been an ordinary 8bit machine. BUT, users with creative minds pushed this computer so far that it was actually an equal opponent to much better computers like the Amiga and Archimedes. The ST is not about hardware, it is about home computing at its greatest.

I love the atari 1040stfm (i have one and i use it every day)
but the true is that the amiga 500 is far better than the 1040 stfm.

Well, I do have plenty of computers, but to tell you the truth, I miss the ST days and the ST parties we had back then. I miss being creative. I miss sleeping once every 4 days because of the stuff we were doing with my pals on the ST. I never had such a good laugh since then...

Finally, just need to add something. The Amiga has no 3 CPUs as I read before. It has one CPU surrounded by custom chips. These chips do certain stuff leaving the CPU to do the basic calculations.

As for the CPU speed, the Amiga run in lower speed than the ST because of one reason: Compatibility with video equipment. The NTSC Amigas were running slightly faster than the PAL ones simply because of the different syncs...

[Ragstaff]

Bah, the Amiga crews can have their 3 processors... I'm glad the ST didn't have them!
What we've got is a nice simple computer, easier to program than the Amiga, less complicated, cheaper.... and after all that, it isn't *that* far behind! In fact, it's better in some ways!

If an Amiga programmer were to use all the co-processors available in an a500, they'd find it pretty hard - all these processors would be generating interrupts that need handling by the CPU. That doesn't leave much time for the processor to get much else done.
My point is that all this extra hardware isn't easy to use efficiently, and using it all at once can be just plain impractical

Anyway, Douglas Littles' "Photochrome" was better than any HAM modes

Atari disk access was much faster than the Amiga. Atari could read MS-DOS formatted disks too...

[simonsunnyboy]

Actually I'm feeling not that good when reading this thread.
Instead of forgetting the old wars, they are still fought here.

Yes the ST is technically inferior. We all know and I suggest ending this thread here. Why can't people learn from the past?!?

[Gryzor]

simonsunnyboy: I don't think it's a matter of flames and wars; I guess most of us are much more mature now and this discussion is not heated -actually, it's pretty cool. As a matter of fact, I learned quite a few things from this thread... so let it be

manicx: great posting, thanks for all the info (:

As for the cheating issue,Strange nobody ha sput it on its substantial base. *Obviously*, using three processors is not cheating. I remember reading about a demo where the keyboard controller of the ST was used to compute some stuff; if this is real, is it cheating? No, it's really great. If more processors make a computer's output and productivity better, then it's for the best, it's not cheating. *However*, and that's where the issue lies in, it is a matter of costs. How much did you pay for your Ataris back then, and how much would you pay for the Amiga? I don't really remember the actual prices, but I do think the Amiga was always quite pricey, while the ST was very affordable... I think, strategic marketing-wise, this was part of Atari's success: give the people what they want at a price they can afford. Anyone remembers that magazine add quoting the prices for an Apple-based word processing (or was it DTP?) unit and an Atari one, complete with printer etc etc? That was the issue...

Cheers
Gryzor

[manicx]

Just need to clarify this:

CPU=Central Processing Unit

Atari=MC68000
Amiga=MC68000

The Amiga had ONE cpu. The others were chips like Paula (it is not just a sound chip), Fat Angus, Denise and so on. These are chips that do certain things and leave the CPU less loaded to do the main computations.

Regarding floppies, the Amiga could read PC floppies. Crossdos, a fantastic program that was incorporated in WorkBench allowed you to do that. With an Amiga with a HD FDD, you can easily read 1.44 PC floppies.

As for the price, the Atari was initially cheaper. The reason was that the first Amiga released was the A1000. Later on, with the release of A500, prices drop. A500 was initially priced at 599 GBP but was later reduced to 360 GBP. Eventually this dropped even further to 299 GBP and 249 GBP but the prices were actually balanced with the release of the STE.