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Amiga or ST?


JohnW

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Midi, the Amiga had it, the programme Bars and Pipes was common used, not as popular as Cubase but people like Jean Michel Jarre was very keen on it, I got to meet him when he was doing a concert in Docklands and my friend was mates with the councillor involved in organising it all, Kevin got him to come around to his house and mr Jarre loved how easy it was on Bars and Pipes. As for the difference in ST to Amiga, I remember being at a computer show and I looked at GoldRunner on the ST, it was very nice but sounded like an 8 bit, on the next stall Linel were showing Insanity Flight which was a clone of Goldrunner but from the silky smooth starield on the intro to the sampled music and the copper list fx I was sold. Also the Amiga OS apart from being multi tasking was so damn easy to use. When Directory Opus was being dev'ed me and Kevin got to be official beta people and boy was that the most important bit of software I ever used on the Amiga, I could control pretty much every thing from that one screen and fortunately they later released it for the PC and its the best bit of paid for software I have purchased, its the core of my PC, every thing runs from the Opus screen.

 

The problem is that both companies were trying to market their machines as business items which by then the PC was out and became the natural base for all things business, Commodore or Atari never stood a chance but still tried to acquire a stake in the business market, Cubase got the ST a foot in the door and the Amiga genlock and the Newtek image editing software was favoured by many in the FX market for adverts etc but neither were what we considered business machines. Shame, the Amiga was a natural games machine, with the next gen Atari OS by Jay Miner in there with its smooth scrolling, the Copper List (the next version of the Display list), excellent sound chip and Bobs (sprites) it could make some wonderful games, the day when the porting people like Pete Johnson were over taken by people who used the Amiga was a great time, no more flip screens like Robocop, proper scrolling, proper sounds, Andrew Braybrook actually went to Germany (I think) to hang out with the Amiga coders so he could pick up on how to make use ofthe Amiga properly and we were treated to Fire and Ice from him, a top quality platformer...

 

Yeah, the Amiga was better... :)

Better at games doesn't make it "better".

 

The ST was a much more useful machine for years before decent apps appeared on the Amiga (it was first, after all). The ST was better suited for desktop publishing, the "killer app" of the time, word processing, and of course, music composition.

 

Considering both machines were going after the "serious" business market and were actively avoiding the appearance of being a game machine, it could easily be argued the much less expensive ST was the winner of the two platforms in that regard, with the exception of video editing.

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It depends on what you purchased it for as to what is better, I wasn't in to DTP or music, I was and still remain a gamer so for me the Amiga was better.

 

As for who was the better machine, clearly the PC, its still going and evolving while our old machines apart from some add on's have suffered at the hands of time :)

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As for who was the better machine, clearly the PC, its still going and evolving while our old machines apart from some add on's have suffered at the hands of time :)

 

Right, and don't forget according to Foebane:

 

"4. The Amiga cost more because it had so much more, that's how pricing works."

 

So by that argument, the PC was much better, and the Apple Lisa was freakin incredible :)

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For me it was an ST.

 

When the ST came out, I was just on my way to college, and an entire summer working in a pub brought me enough shekels to purchase a brand-new 520 ST and mono monitor. That computer saw me through 3 years of Physics at Imperial, with me eventually buying a 20MB (yes, Megabytes) hard drive at an Alexandra Palace computer show.

 

I took Lab in every year at college - I was good at it (compared to, say: quantum chromodynamics) and I'm convinced my ST was a significant contributor to my degree. The lab reports I produced had a huge easy-draw graphic that would be relevant to the specific lab-module on the front page, making it into a title-page, and then gorgeously (for the time) DTP'd text on the inside. That presentation was worth at least 20% IMHO.

 

Example: one lab was to do with numerical instability: "Consider a metal plate at a uniform 100 degrees C when the heating method is removed. Choose some points (one at the center, one on an edge, one at some point in air at a distance from the plate. Simulate and plot the temperature progression over time of all these points and give a reasoning as to the behaviour. Describe the reasons for your choices in simulation environment". In this case if your time-step or x,y steps were too large, you could get numerical instability and the results wouldn't be accurate.

 

GFA-Basic to the rescue, with nice 3D-modelled temperature gradients over time all imported into the report. I still have that somewhere :)

 

Another one was population dynamics, and dynamical systems in general: Consider the planet WATOR, which has two species, sharks and fish. Fish can breed, and can over-breed (resulting in death). Sharks can breed (slower) and can die out if they don't eat sufficient fish within a time-scale per shark. Model the environment and derive generalisations to describe it".

 

Again, GFA-Basic with a display of a cartesian world (donut-shaped for ease, since that wraps on both edges) and the fish/shark populations graphed over time, and plotted onto the cell-grids as well for good measure. Lots of pretty graphics to go into the report.

 

You still had to do the maths, but the pretty graphics really helped, IMHO :) For me, the killer feature of the ST over anything else out there was the "high-res" (ok, for the time) mono monitor. It was clear as day, and representative of what would be finally printed. I had friends with PCs, and none of them could match my reports - the easy-access of BASIC interpreters for doing the actual work (and GFA could be compiled for more speed as well) combined with the DTP available was damned hard to match

 

And, of course, the ST was a lot cheaper than the Amiga... starving college student... yada yada yada :)

 

 

 

I had a TV linked up to it as well, for games, but for me it was mainly a workhorse for the courses.

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Right, and don't forget according to Foebane:

 

"4. The Amiga cost more because it had so much more, that's how pricing works."

 

So by that argument, the PC was much better, and the Apple Lisa was freakin incredible :)

 

I mean compared to the ST. Don't put words in my mouth. :P

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Coleco Gemini ... 2600 Jr ... 800XL ... IBM 486 (OS/2) ... AMD/Cyrix Slackware ... 3DO/Jaguar ... AMD Duron BeOS/Redhat ... Mac OS 9/X ppc G3 G4 ... Windows Phone 8 ... Android ... Athlon XP Fedora/MX/Xubuntu

 

The evolution continues. I've owned /tinkered with a few other systems but were very short lived.

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Have used my 1040STfm really A LOT ... Back in the days I really loved the machine. Very nice system, with some very powerful tools (I used Cubase and Score Perfect on a daily base)...

 

But.... the ST was not cool enough to keep. I love my atari 8bit way more than I loved the ST.

 

Never owned Amiga though.

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1984 or 1985: got an Atari 800XL from my parents at XMAS

199x: got a 386PC (33 Mhz) from my parents who got a 486 PC (66 Mhz) from my uncle

199x: got the 486 PC (66 Mhz) from my parents, who bought a Pentium

200x: got a Pentium 2 from my friend

2005: girlfriend (2007 my wife!), who owns NES and SMD,

played Super Mario (NES) and Sonic for the first time !

2010 or so: bought a Dual-Core AMD PC

2016: bought a used Wii-U for my two kids, they love it!

today: still use a Dual-Core PC with an ancient OS to surf even more ancient Atari 8Bit webpages

 

Did never own/buy ST/STE/TT/Falcon nor any Amiga and therefore saved a lot of money (and also never needed or read any of the ST or Amiga or Nintendo or Sega magazines). Got most PC's for free when they were old/outdated from my parents or a friend. Did own an Atari Jaguar with: Jaguar console, 2x Pro Controller, 1x Catbox, 1x CD-ROM, several games and sold everything for the price you pay for just a Jaguar console today (200 or 250 Euro ?), ouch. Thus most games of the 16 Bit and 32 Bit era are unknown to me and I do not mind if any of them get ported to the 8Bit Atari...

Edited by CharlieChaplin
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Midi, the Amiga had it, the programme Bars and Pipes was common used, not as popular as Cubase but people like Jean Michel Jarre was very keen on it, I got to meet him when he was doing a concert in Docklands and my friend was mates with the councillor involved in organising it all, Kevin got him to come around to his house and mr Jarre loved how easy it was on Bars and Pipes.

 

 

I call BS on this. Jean Michel Jarre switching to the Amiga? I find that very hard to believe since he was always a big supporter of the ST.

 

Hmm. Now that I read it again more closely, I notice you said he was "keen" on Bars and Pipes, but did not end up buying or switching to it. Looks like as he delved more into it, Bars and Pipes was not as good as his first impression.

 

Yeah, the ST was better... :)

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For me, it was the Atari ST because I was not a good graphic artist, did not have time for games, and needed a computer that had good productivity software. I was also interested in music.

 

I was a big gamer on the 8-bit but as I got older, I had less time to spend on games and spent more time on homework, reports and other school stuff. I still had a color monitor for games, but didn't spend as much time or money on them. I also went into piracy rehab :grin: and went clean on the ST. I didn't want to see it die like how piracy was a big factor in destroying the 8-bits.

 

I loved collecting and playing AMS music files on the 8-bit, but when I tried to make my own, it was hopeless. I read standard music notation, but AMS used this archaic DOS-like command input interface that I never understood. I tried, but everything turned out sounding like garbage because it wouldn't do things like tying or slurring the correct notes. The ST version of The Music Studio was the answer. I didn't have to spend money on a MIDI interface. I used that money to buy a quality synthesizer that was better than both sound chips in the ST and Amiga. There was lots of quality music software to choose from if I needed to upgrade.

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I call BS on this. Jean Michel Jarre switching to the Amiga? I find that very hard to believe since he was always a big supporter of the ST.

 

Hmm. Now that I read it again more closely, I notice you said he was "keen" on Bars and Pipes, but did not end up buying or switching to it. Looks like as he delved more into it, Bars and Pipes was not as good as his first impression.

 

Yeah, the ST was better... :)

 

As you reread, I never said he switched but I was there and he liked what it could do, I'm not musical, Kevin showed him it doing some stuff and he liked it, perhaps he was being polite, I don't know be the impression was that he liked what he saw. If you want to know more then write to Jean and ask him, I'm sure he will remember because of the concert. I can't imagine a man like him would make a total switch of his creative base just because he saw something on another system.

 

The point was that Bars and Pipes was popular, not as much as cubase but it had a loyal following and people who saw it liked what they saw....

 

And please, I never BS, I may get by age some wordings wrong or slightly miss remember things but if I say it happened then odds on it was as I'd said. I really don't have the time or inclination to BS and then try and remember crap I'd said so I was a consistent liar, sometimes I say I saw something like Adam Michael Bilyards early games before launch and it sounds "yeah anyone could say that" but Adam actually came on here and confirmed it and I even reminded him of an old game he had started and told me about and then forgot, he dug out his disks and there it was. (it was going to be Q ball but he turned to the ST and Amiga to dev it on).

 

Paul..

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For me, it was the Atari ST because I was not a good graphic artist, did not have time for games, and needed a computer that had good productivity software. I was also interested in music.

 

I was a big gamer on the 8-bit but as I got older, I had less time to spend on games and spent more time on homework, reports and other school stuff. I still had a color monitor for games, but didn't spend as much time or money on them. I also went into piracy rehab :grin: and went clean on the ST. I didn't want to see it die like how piracy was a big factor in destroying the 8-bits.

 

I loved collecting and playing AMS music files on the 8-bit, but when I tried to make my own, it was hopeless. I read standard music notation, but AMS used this archaic DOS-like command input interface that I never understood. I tried, but everything turned out sounding like garbage because it wouldn't do things like tying or slurring the correct notes. The ST version of The Music Studio was the answer. I didn't have to spend money on a MIDI interface. I used that money to buy a quality synthesizer that was better than both sound chips in the ST and Amiga. There was lots of quality music software to choose from if I needed to upgrade.

 

With computers I use the analogy re sound systems, you can pay out for the best named system and spend loads or you can find a budget system that sounds really nice and buy that, its whatever you like the most and not about price or name.

 

Clearly the ST was great for you, I myself was always a gamer and for me the games (when they bothered) were better on the Amiga and being that I floated between the dark side and the actual sales side (we were a dealer) I got all the software I ever wanted and most of it was dross but my links I was never short of stuff. We can all play the whats the best computer but its totally personal and that's the way it should be, Fan boys miss out on so much by sticking to one company, I never made that mistake :)

 

Go where the goodness is and enjoy it all...

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I had neither, back in the day. I went straight from an Atari 8bit in '93 to a 486dx. My town did not have much in the way of Amiga support, and the one ST dealer was a giant toolsack. I'd have gotten an Amiga if they were more widely available.

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I remember being impressed by the 520ST when it was announced. Then I read about the "Amiga Lorraine" in Creative Computing. Seeing its capabilities, and that it was a followup from the same designers as the Atari 8-bit. That was enough for me. Even though I was an Atari brand loyalist, I saved my pennies, sold my 800 (mistake in retrospect) and bought an Amiga 1000.

 

The multitasking OS on the Amiga was really wondrous and leagues ahead of everyone else at the time. But truthfully, you needed to upgrade RAM and especially get a hard disk to make multitasking useful for more than demos. Attempting to multitask on a floppy-based system would just cause the drive to grind and grind. (Carl Sassenrath, the designer of the Amiga Exec, said the OS kernel was multitasking by necessity, in order to support all the asynchronous features of the Amiga chipset).

 

All that said, the ST line offered way more tech than Macs and PCs of the day and a better value. It was impressive Tramiel's crew put together such a well-rounded and powerful system and got it on the market in less than a year. The ST would have been the no-brainer choice if the Amiga had not existed.

Edited by FifthPlayer
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The ST did have multitasking of sorts though the Desk Accessory interface.

 

You could load up accessories like a Mod player, a text editor, a graphic viewer app and access them while running any other Gem app. They would run in parallel too, so it wasn't like preemptive multitasking where only the top application runs and the others suspend.

 

But it was limited in that you couldn't load/unload desk accessories at any time, only at boot. You could only have six running at once, only designated .acc files could be loaded, etc.

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The ST did have multitasking of sorts though the Desk Accessory interface.

That does not mean the same.

On the Amiga you could run a full working Demo while writing and printing .... In some cases it is simply wrong to name it just Multitasking. The sound, graphics, and program code could run at the SAME time. That is a kind of Multiprocessing, not just Multitasking.

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That does not mean the same.

On the Amiga you could run a full working Demo while writing and printing .... In some cases it is simply wrong to name it just Multitasking. The sound, graphics, and program code could run at the SAME time. That is a kind of Multiprocessing, not just Multitasking.

They did run at the same time on the ST as well. I would open multiple desk accessories on the screen, and they'd all be doing their thing at the same time-- unless they were coded to sleep when they weren't active. For example, you could print from one while typing in another.

 

But it was limited to GEM. Any proper Gem app, you would be able to call up the accessory menu on the top left (Fuji symbol) and access them. But you were running a non-GEM app, you would not be able to access the accessories. So it had several significant restrictions compared to Amiga's multitasking.

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They did run at the same time on the ST as well.

No, just no! Copper is a real Coprozessor, running it's own code. Same to Paula and AGNUS. They would do the same with a much weaker CPU aswell. In the ST everything is CPU dependent. Nothing happens without a CPU tick. Only the ADSR processor in the YM chip was doing some processing in parallel to the CPU.

On the Amiga, the only bottleneck was the Chip RAM. So the RAM Access was one after the other (programs won't be influenced) . But, as soon as Fast RAM was installed , which was a common thing back then, the CPU and the CHIPS worked in parallel.

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With computers I use the analogy re sound systems, you can pay out for the best named system and spend loads or you can find a budget system that sounds really nice and buy that, its whatever you like the most and not about price or name.

 

Clearly the ST was great for you, I myself was always a gamer and for me the games (when they bothered) were better on the Amiga and being that I floated between the dark side and the actual sales side (we were a dealer) I got all the software I ever wanted and most of it was dross but my links I was never short of stuff. We can all play the whats the best computer but its totally personal and that's the way it should be, Fan boys miss out on so much by sticking to one company, I never made that mistake :)

 

Go where the goodness is and enjoy it all...

 

I owned both. I still do.

 

When did you own an ST? Since you speak with such certainty about it, I'm curious how long did you own one, and what compelled you to get rid of it?

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