Atari ST vs. Amiga

[FastRobPlus]

Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

 

For all intents and purposes the ST didn't if the only monitor available was the monochrome monitor. In my case, I also had the RF modulator and used my TV as the color monitor and did word processing and so-forth on the monitor. I had to be content with total cack output in medium resolution but it was a financially accessible way for me to run in my teenage years.

 

Thats not a accurate statement then. You can not honestly and accurately say

the ST didn't have color because you had a mono monitor! That would be equal

to me declaring that the Amiga had no picture at all because I didn't have a

monitor!

 

Please be more careful about making such misleading statements.

 

Thanks.

 

I agree with you but I remember the article he's referring to. The complaint a the time was that with only mono monitors available at first, only mono apps would come out. It didn't actually turn out that way but this was the first time it sunk in with people that apps written for color would not necessarily run in mono, so buying a mono monitor was locking you out of some future software (games most obviously.) Remember too that the 520ST did not have RCA color output at that time.

In hindsight this was no great surprise. But at the time there were people who were begging for a good color emulator that just allowed the running of color software on a mono screen in dithered B&W. We had the same request all the time for users of MGA and Hercules wanting to run CGA games on their DOS clones. Unfortunately, while some apps did come out to do this, none did it well enough to prevent users from buying two monitors if there were "must have" programs in color and they already owned a B&W monitor.

 

-edit-

One of the best peripherals ever to come out for early STs (and STacy) was the progressive Video Key. It added color composite and rca audio out so you could run casual color software but keep the mono monitor as your primary.

Edited December 26, 2009 by FastRobPlus

[frogstar_robot]

[

Thats not a accurate statement then. You can not honestly and accurately say

the ST didn't have color because you had a mono monitor! That would be equal

to me declaring that the Amiga had no picture at all because I didn't have a

monitor!

 

Please be more careful about making such misleading statements.

 

Thanks.

 

What part of "for all intents and purposes" is misleading? If my machine wasn't RF modulator equipped which many were, I would have had to do without color at all. Anybody with half a brain knew the ST was a color machine but it was possible to have one operating in such a way that color wasn't an option. In the same post, I mentioned using the TV for color and this was because I couldn't afford a color monitor not because I didn't believe they exist.

[kool kitty89]

I agree with you but I remember the article he's referring to. The complaint a the time was that with only mono monitors available at first, only mono apps would come out. It didn't actually turn out that way but this was the first time it sunk in with people that apps written for color would not necessarily run in mono, so buying a mono monitor was locking you out of some future software (games most obviously.) Remember too that the 520ST did not have RCA color output at that time.

In hindsight this was no great surprise. But at the time there were people who were begging for a good color emulator that just allowed the running of color software on a mono screen in dithered B&W. We had the same request all the time for users of MGA and Hercules wanting to run CGA games on their DOS clones. Unfortunately, while some apps did come out to do this, none did it well enough to prevent users from buying two monitors if there were "must have" programs in color and they already owned a B&W monitor.

 

-edit-

One of the best peripherals ever to come out for early STs (and STacy) was the progressive Video Key. It added color composite and rca audio out so you could run casual color software but keep the mono monitor as your primary.

 

They should have allowed the monochrome monitor to display the lower-res color modes in grayscale (as tehy would on a B/W TV set via RF, except better as it would be striaght luma, no degridation from the color subcarrier or RF noise, and on a monitor with finer dot pitch than a TV set). It would have to be a multisync monitor of course, but only accept the highres mode for monochrome plus standard NTSC/PAL compatible resolutions. (hell, they could have dropped the progressive mode and allowed interlacing instead -using only NTSC/PAL compatible video, but that elliminates the major advantage of progressive scan over high-res modes on the Amiga)

 

In the early 90s, out famly PC had VGA graphics but a grayscale monitor, which actually worked fine for a lot of stuff when I was little. (we ended up upgrading around 1994/95 because I got 3D Dinosaur Adventure, and the stereoptical 3D was useless in grayscale)

 

 

Also, having only composite out is still pretty useless for many users who don't want to buy a second monitor, you'd need RF output to work with common TVs up to the mid/late 80s. (even then lower-end sets didn't have composite video or audio inputs, but that trend persisted -of course, one could use a VCR with RCA A/V inputs to modulate it into RF)

[atarian63]

Well, anecdotal of course, but I have personally seen A1000's crash often (Guru meditation numbers).

 

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the biggest reason for such things is some dodgy software... Don't forget that you are running a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with absolutely no memory protection. One bad bit of code is going to wreck havoc on the machine.

 

That is my whole point, that and the fact that in this 1 week I have had to forcibly shut down both my Win7 and Vista machines due to a speck of dust on a DVD-R whilst burning it. You can write software to totally kill ANY multi-tasking OS on a desktop priced machine even to this day. Like I said the only things that did crash my Amiga was badly written software, running those 4 or 5 applications and not having any issue with Guru meds for almost half a decade on KS 1.2/1.3. Rumours mean nothing to me 99.9999% of the time it is down to games/badly written PD utils and hacks or just plain ignorant users.

 

In fact as far as crashes go I had far more problems with later games crashing on my STM and earlier games crashing on a 1040STF and some that I owned and used with my 520STM and bought again on ebay not working at all on it (and yet work fine on STFM I have...like Gauntlet 1). At least I can only remember 2 games that wouldn't work on an A1000 during the A500/2000 era, one of them being Ghosts n Goblins....don't ask me why it wasn't even a 1mb game.

 

Dropping your new 'state of the art' 16bit computer from 4 inches above the desk to 'reseat' the ROM chips was a real pain in the ass too.

 

Commodore supplying KS 1.1/WB1.1 to the first customers is really less of a bodge than the ST TOS boot disk, at least on the Amiga it goes into special write once memory that is protected and only needs to be loaded once even after a reboot....the ST on the other hand is using the main RAM. Very early STs also had NO COLOUR OUTPUT.

 

What a load of utter bollox@ A1000 256k upgrade problems, only a moron would have a problem with a plug in cartridge any VCS owner of the past could install themself. I have never in my life heard of anyone anywhere in the entire Amiga user group with 25 A1000 users ever having a single problem with this simple elegant upgrade solution.

 

Thanks but I'll take the A1000 with the odd hiccup over badly written games/demos as a day to day machine, the price of not having multitasking for a non games playing computer user is far too high AFAIC ST was a nice machine but it was built more cheaply, the difference in the keyboard is the first thing you notice using an ST compared to an A1000, Mac or PC. Only the Mega's got decent keyboards.

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

[+DarkLord]

 

<snip>

 

One of the best peripherals ever to come out for early STs (and STacy) was the progressive Video Key. It added color composite and rca audio out so you could run casual color software but keep the mono monitor as your primary.

 

Hehehehe, I always figured that anyone who could afford a STacy at that time

could have afforded the color monitor as well, since the STacy could output

directly to it. Of course, an SC1224 is not exactly portable.

[JamesD]

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

Once the kickstart loads on the 1000 the kickstart memory is protected so you can reset as many times as you want without reloading it. If you turn off the machine then you have to reload.

 

There were kickstart ROM upgrade kits for the 1000. I installed a few.

They consisted of some updated PALs and ROMs. The 1000 was originally designed so it could take ROMs and the RAM version was probably only intended for development but the OS wasn't stable enough by the release date.

[atarian63]

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

Once the kickstart loads on the 1000 the kickstart memory is protected so you can reset as many times as you want without reloading it. If you turn off the machine then you have to reload.

 

There were kickstart ROM upgrade kits for the 1000. I installed a few.

They consisted of some updated PALs and ROMs. The 1000 was originally designed so it could take ROMs and the RAM version was probably only intended for development but the OS wasn't stable enough by the release date.

I was aware of the Rom based Kickstart mods, some local had them. Should have been that way from the start but with competition (atari) and timelines it was rushed.

Problem for most people was that when the A1000 would Guru you couldnt always reset to WB and had to power off and start with KS again.

[FastRobPlus]

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

Once the kickstart loads on the 1000 the kickstart memory is protected so you can reset as many times as you want without reloading it. If you turn off the machine then you have to reload.

 

There were kickstart ROM upgrade kits for the 1000. I installed a few.

They consisted of some updated PALs and ROMs. The 1000 was originally designed so it could take ROMs and the RAM version was probably only intended for development but the OS wasn't stable enough by the release date.

 

 

And a side benefit of that upgrade: 768KB of RAM, not the 512KB you got by upgrading an ST with ROMs.

[JamesD]

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

Once the kickstart loads on the 1000 the kickstart memory is protected so you can reset as many times as you want without reloading it. If you turn off the machine then you have to reload.

 

There were kickstart ROM upgrade kits for the 1000. I installed a few.

They consisted of some updated PALs and ROMs. The 1000 was originally designed so it could take ROMs and the RAM version was probably only intended for development but the OS wasn't stable enough by the release date.

 

 

And a side benefit of that upgrade: 768KB of RAM, not the 512KB you got by upgrading an ST with ROMs.

But the RAM wasn't supported by AutoConfig so you had to use AddRAM if I remember right.

No biggie... just add the command at the beginning of the startup-sequence.

 

Wow... can't believe I still remember that. I probably haven't turned on my miggies in over 10 years.

I wonder if my 3000 still boots... I'd hate to loose all the developer stuff I had and source code. I should put a CF card kit in my 3000 to replace the hard drive.

Edited December 30, 2009 by JamesD

[oky2000]

Just out of curiosity, what ST's did not have color output? I've never heard this before. Can you post some links

to articles I can read about this? Thanks.

 

For all intents and purposes the ST didn't if the only monitor available was the monochrome monitor. In my case, I also had the RF modulator and used my TV as the color monitor and did word processing and so-forth on the monitor. I had to be content with total cack output in medium resolution but it was a financially accessible way for me to run in my teenage years.

 

Thats not a accurate statement then. You can not honestly and accurately say

the ST didn't have color because you had a mono monitor! That would be equal

to me declaring that the Amiga had no picture at all because I didn't have a

monitor!

 

Please be more careful about making such misleading statements.

 

Thanks.

 

I agree with you but I remember the article he's referring to. The complaint a the time was that with only mono monitors available at first, only mono apps would come out. It didn't actually turn out that way but this was the first time it sunk in with people that apps written for color would not necessarily run in mono, so buying a mono monitor was locking you out of some future software (games most obviously.) Remember too that the 520ST did not have RCA color output at that time.

In hindsight this was no great surprise. But at the time there were people who were begging for a good color emulator that just allowed the running of color software on a mono screen in dithered B&W. We had the same request all the time for users of MGA and Hercules wanting to run CGA games on their DOS clones. Unfortunately, while some apps did come out to do this, none did it well enough to prevent users from buying two monitors if there were "must have" programs in color and they already owned a B&W monitor.

 

-edit-

One of the best peripherals ever to come out for early STs (and STacy) was the progressive Video Key. It added color composite and rca audio out so you could run casual color software but keep the mono monitor as your primary.

 

 

If I find the [Atari User] article I will scan and attach it here but definitely there were some original 520ST units sold at launch which didn't work on colour monitors at all, a limited run but they existed even in PAL territories like the UK hence the article. I think from memory Atari did the decent thing and swapped them for customers though but they did exist nonetheless.

[oky2000]

Well, anecdotal of course, but I have personally seen A1000's crash often (Guru meditation numbers).

 

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the biggest reason for such things is some dodgy software... Don't forget that you are running a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with absolutely no memory protection. One bad bit of code is going to wreck havoc on the machine.

 

That is my whole point, that and the fact that in this 1 week I have had to forcibly shut down both my Win7 and Vista machines due to a speck of dust on a DVD-R whilst burning it. You can write software to totally kill ANY multi-tasking OS on a desktop priced machine even to this day. Like I said the only things that did crash my Amiga was badly written software, running those 4 or 5 applications and not having any issue with Guru meds for almost half a decade on KS 1.2/1.3. Rumours mean nothing to me 99.9999% of the time it is down to games/badly written PD utils and hacks or just plain ignorant users.

 

In fact as far as crashes go I had far more problems with later games crashing on my STM and earlier games crashing on a 1040STF and some that I owned and used with my 520STM and bought again on ebay not working at all on it (and yet work fine on STFM I have...like Gauntlet 1). At least I can only remember 2 games that wouldn't work on an A1000 during the A500/2000 era, one of them being Ghosts n Goblins....don't ask me why it wasn't even a 1mb game.

 

Dropping your new 'state of the art' 16bit computer from 4 inches above the desk to 'reseat' the ROM chips was a real pain in the ass too.

 

Commodore supplying KS 1.1/WB1.1 to the first customers is really less of a bodge than the ST TOS boot disk, at least on the Amiga it goes into special write once memory that is protected and only needs to be loaded once even after a reboot....the ST on the other hand is using the main RAM. Very early STs also had NO COLOUR OUTPUT.

 

What a load of utter bollox@ A1000 256k upgrade problems, only a moron would have a problem with a plug in cartridge any VCS owner of the past could install themself. I have never in my life heard of anyone anywhere in the entire Amiga user group with 25 A1000 users ever having a single problem with this simple elegant upgrade solution.

 

Thanks but I'll take the A1000 with the odd hiccup over badly written games/demos as a day to day machine, the price of not having multitasking for a non games playing computer user is far too high AFAIC ST was a nice machine but it was built more cheaply, the difference in the keyboard is the first thing you notice using an ST compared to an A1000, Mac or PC. Only the Mega's got decent keyboards.

Very fex St's had the boot disk, whereas A1000 always had it (KS) and then another (WB) St were rarly crashed and if they did. reset it and in a instant you are back at desktop. With Amiga you had to start all ove with Kickstart then Workbench and long troublesome process.

 

A1000 kickstart was not a kludge though, the protected WORM 256k RAM was always intended to be used in that way, it was a design decision and not a quick fix like the early ST. So from KS 1.1 to 1.3 all you did was get a new disk from the dealer for free...as opposed to opening up a machine to replace ROMs or losing 192kb from main 512kb RAM (which an A1000 didn't suffer from as a 512kb A1000 had 768kb in total to allow for KS loading by design)

 

There are pro's and cons to it but either way with write once protected memory for the KS on the motherboard it was not a quick fix due to late development of the OS but a design feature of the machine like it or lump it

 

(personally I liked it, made the A1000 more compatible with some games which did require KS 1.2 not 1.3 to work)

[oky2000]

I agree with you but I remember the article he's referring to. The complaint a the time was that with only mono monitors available at first, only mono apps would come out. It didn't actually turn out that way but this was the first time it sunk in with people that apps written for color would not necessarily run in mono, so buying a mono monitor was locking you out of some future software (games most obviously.) Remember too that the 520ST did not have RCA color output at that time.

In hindsight this was no great surprise. But at the time there were people who were begging for a good color emulator that just allowed the running of color software on a mono screen in dithered B&W. We had the same request all the time for users of MGA and Hercules wanting to run CGA games on their DOS clones. Unfortunately, while some apps did come out to do this, none did it well enough to prevent users from buying two monitors if there were "must have" programs in color and they already owned a B&W monitor.

 

-edit-

One of the best peripherals ever to come out for early STs (and STacy) was the progressive Video Key. It added color composite and rca audio out so you could run casual color software but keep the mono monitor as your primary.

 

They should have allowed the monochrome monitor to display the lower-res color modes in grayscale (as tehy would on a B/W TV set via RF, except better as it would be striaght luma, no degridation from the color subcarrier or RF noise, and on a monitor with finer dot pitch than a TV set). It would have to be a multisync monitor of course, but only accept the highres mode for monochrome plus standard NTSC/PAL compatible resolutions. (hell, they could have dropped the progressive mode and allowed interlacing instead -using only NTSC/PAL compatible video, but that elliminates the major advantage of progressive scan over high-res modes on the Amiga)

 

In the early 90s, out famly PC had VGA graphics but a grayscale monitor, which actually worked fine for a lot of stuff when I was little. (we ended up upgrading around 1994/95 because I got 3D Dinosaur Adventure, and the stereoptical 3D was useless in grayscale)

 

 

Also, having only composite out is still pretty useless for many users who don't want to buy a second monitor, you'd need RF output to work with common TVs up to the mid/late 80s. (even then lower-end sets didn't have composite video or audio inputs, but that trend persisted -of course, one could use a VCR with RCA A/V inputs to modulate it into RF)

 

To be fair to Atari they specifically chose their 70hz 30khz v/h mono screen mode to remove flicker for the SM124 displays for business users. This is simply a sign of different target audiences. Flicker free double scan mono on ST was perfect for serious software but the the Amiga was designed as the ultimate PCB to drive a CRT tube and hence it used industry standard broadcast quality 720x576 full overscan PAL resolution right out of the box, something that PCs needed another decaded to even display let alone do frame and scan line accurate controls (which they can not do even to this day when outputting an SD composite or Y/C s-video signal due to the design flaws in a PC)

 

That's why the Amiga was always king in desktop video over any other machine sold.....today we use digital to digital so it's not really an issue for PC's, everything is rendered to a target resolution digitally so not an issue and nor is NTSC/PAL issues as in the days of the analogue video toaster hardware.

[oky2000]

 

Wait... do you mean fuzzy as in blurry (what I and most others have been assuming), or "fuzzy" in the asthetic sense, not of a blurry display, but of icons/art used for the OS that have a "fuzzy" look to them? (rather than fuzzy in the sense that the text or idividual pixels are hard to make out and such)

 

He's talking rubbish, better to ignore the fanboy FACTUALLY UNFOUNDED comments of this member I have never needed glasses as I already said my eyesight is at the maximum level tested at the time (30% better than average or required for 20/20 vision), if people purchase rubbish monitors in his 'shop' and can't even tell that 320x200 on a screen with massive borders on a different sized screen entirely anyway is no basis for comparison then his arguments are pretty worthless.

 

I tried BOTH machines on the SAME monitors and the result apart from pixel aspect ratio IS IDENTICAL. Like I said at 320x200 or whatever lo-res screen you want to choose on the Amiga, using an RGB cable and the same Trinitron 14" tube you can count the individual pixels with identical ease. Seeing as cables are not readily available for the SC1224/Thomson ST monitors to use on an Amigas and vice versa for 1084/1081 monitors and ST cables.

 

Respected magazines like Byte and PCW would have mentioned a problem like this being highly technical publications with an even handed testing and benchmarking of all equipment. NONE of these magazines ever indicated either above or below average video output quality for either machine, both were as specified and produced an image as expected in the testcard benchmarks for image quality. These are engineers like myself and therefore I would tend to believe them over an Atari fanboy who has no factual argument agreeing with a 1000 of his fanatical fanbase.

 

I have to say, after reading the 1986 article in AW (or was it '85?) regarding how to make the Amiga more professional and therefore more appealing versus the primary competition (Apple's Macintosh), it really got me thinking how we could leverage this to sell more units.

 

You see, AmigaWorld and MacWorld shared a lot of the same headcount in the first year or so and the Amiga staff would have been very attuned to what the Mac did that was perceived as being "Better"

 

So thinking along these lines, I spend the latter half of a day grabbing a few PD utilities from fish disks, sliding colors around, and editing icons. The result was something that did not have name back then, but nowadays would be called a "skin" or a "theme."

 

I took a freeware tool to put a background image onto workbench and changed the color scheme to medium contrast grayscales with color highlights only when I wanted some visual "bang." I also added something called a "fuelbar" and a 3D effect tool for the gadgets and drawers. The result was something that Commodore themselves would do a year or so later with kickstart 2.x, but I felt it looked professional and would surprise people who used Macs primarily.

 

 

I distributed this Workbench to the affiliate Software Centre (sic), Upgrade! and TechStar franchises, where it was widely used. Sadly, I do not have a copy anymore, just this printout I printed of the desktop circa 1988 or so to demonstrate the inkjet printers we were selling at the time. The only elements of this particular theme I still see on disks the wild are the disc.icon, ramdisk.icon and the directoryworks icon.

 

It think it was groundbreaking what Amiga was doing as early as 1986. There was nothing else like this at the time. The other computers were just playing at having a modern GUI at this stage.

 

-edit- I just noticed the similarity between my Scenery Animator Icon and the Windows XP wallpaper!

except it was crash happy in 1986. Problem plagued machine that was rushed to market before being ready. The gui looked more complete that some but did not work well. Compared to mac or ST most customers found it unprofessional looking and confusing to use.

 

Like I said I used to run Dpaint, Digipaint, Digiview a sampler all at once and had less crashes than on any other machine I have owned. (My ST having the phantom loose rom chips problem being the main problem mind, but certainly a lot less than on any version of Windows I've had the misfortune to use). Also as my original machine from 86 is still working and has never failed (nor has my A1200 or A2000) I don't know anything about unreliability issues at all personally.

 

Games or dodgy PD stuff crashing a multitasking OS is not counted, otherwise Windows 7 is still worse than WB 1.1 as it crashes on a duff DVD-R everytime required a hard reset from the power switch to even stop the DVD burner setting fire to your discs in the drive haha.

This problem was mainly confind to the A1000 era but that was a long 3 years.. The reputation stuck somewhat even years later after problems were solved.

 

I only ever used an A1000 due to its superior build quality to anything built in 1985/86 and had no such problems like I said, the machine even to this day is still running strong and I wish my Vista/XP/98/2000/ME machines of later years were anything like as silent elegant and reliable as my trusty A1000 sitting on my desk right now.

 

Problems generic to ALL multi-tasking machines are not the fault of the Amiga, that's like asking a cable company to build a broadband modem that transmits/receives data faster than the speed of light! It is not their problem or in their design remit. You can have crap badly coded routines bring down any multi-tasking OS including Win7 instantly or you can have the inferior solution of no multi-tasking at all, which is hardly a solution at all

 

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

[kool kitty89]

They should have allowed the monochrome monitor to display the lower-res color modes in grayscale (as tehy would on a B/W TV set via RF, except better as it would be striaght luma, no degridation from the color subcarrier or RF noise, and on a monitor with finer dot pitch than a TV set). It would have to be a multisync monitor of course, but only accept the highres mode for monochrome plus standard NTSC/PAL compatible resolutions. (hell, they could have dropped the progressive mode and allowed interlacing instead -using only NTSC/PAL compatible video, but that elliminates the major advantage of progressive scan over high-res modes on the Amiga)

 

To be fair to Atari they specifically chose their 70hz 30khz v/h mono screen mode to remove flicker for the SM124 displays for business users. This is simply a sign of different target audiences. Flicker free double scan mono on ST was perfect for serious software

Yeah, they'd have lost the advantage to the Amiga in that sense. Though 60 Hz progressive scan would be pretty "flicker free," it's what I'm stuck with on my laptop's LCD and what I was using on my CRT monitor last summer. (granted the flicker is somewhat more noticable on a CRT due to the desplay mechanism)

 

Regardless of that, that doesn't change my statement about the monochome monitor supporting NTSC/PAL luma signals. (it would have to have to suport ~15 kHz hsync for that, so maybe having a multi-sync monitor would have made the cost too high)

 

 

the Amiga was designed as the ultimate PCB to drive a CRT tube and hence it used industry standard broadcast quality 720x576 full overscan PAL resolution right out of the box, something that PCs needed another decaded to even display let alone do frame and scan line accurate controls (which they can not do even to this day when outputting an SD composite or Y/C s-video signal due to the design flaws in a PC)

Huh? PCs were beating that resolution by 1987 with IBM's 8514 allowed 1024x768i in 1987. (plus the XGA standard in 1990) Unless you mean on standard definition televisions specifically, in which case you've got video scaling and such to deal with as well as transcoding (unless you have a TV with RGB inputs) opposed to early 320/160x200 modes which just needed to be trancoded from RGB to composite and then modulated into RF.(hence CGA PCs and Tandy-1000/PC Jr supporting composite and RF output) I don't think anything after EGA supported video modes using NTSC/PAL compatible frequencies (ie ~15 kHz hsync).

 

And what's that about Amiga and a "CRT Tube" (redundant tersm, but that's just being nitpicky), you've said this before and it's really misleading. You obviously mean the Amiga was designed to output specifically to Standard Definition television frequencies (240p/480i/60Hz NTSC, 288p/576i/50Hz PAL), but saying "CRT" means nothing since most monitors until the last few years were CRTs, so standard TV resolutions, not CRT. (not to mention there are HD CRT TVs as well)

 

That's why the Amiga was always king in desktop video over any other machine sold.....today we use digital to digital so it's not really an issue for PC's, everything is rendered to a target resolution digitally so not an issue and nor is NTSC/PAL issues as in the days of the analogue video toaster hardware.

Oh, OK, but the problem wasn't so much a flaw in PC displays, but just that they moved away from using TVs as desplays very rapidly and focused mainly on higher, incompatible resolutions. (the original CGA did work at Television resolution/frequencies -and indeed was ment to be usable with composite/RF output, I think the 200 pixel high EGA modes do as well)

 

 

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

Heh, but "back in the day" a lot of games wouldn't even have the blue error screen (ie DOS gams) as most supported direct booting (boot disk), so no OS after installation. (let alone games not requiring installation) This is out of context of course. (but actual windows specific games didn't really catch on until after the Amiga had fallen)

 

As for viruses, I can't se way any low market share OS would be particularly vulnerable, I mean anything other than windows should be significantly better off due to the relative obscurity. (hence why Mac OS and Linux users have much less to worry about in that respect)

 

In terms of bloat/inefficiency, wouldn't that hold true against some older PC OSs as well. (like NT or Win2000, not to mention OS/2)

Edited December 31, 2009 by kool kitty89

[Crazyace]

If I find the [Atari User] article I will scan and attach it here but definitely there were some original 520ST units sold at launch which didn't work on colour monitors at all, a limited run but they existed even in PAL territories like the UK hence the article. I think from memory Atari did the decent thing and swapped them for customers though but they did exist nonetheless.

 

That would be interesting to see - even the developer ST I used from Atari UK in 85 was able to connect via RGB to my Amstrad monitor. Maybe you're thinking of the composite video on pin 2 of the connector - that may not have been connected on early machines, but RGB was always present.

[Rybags]

Sounds like crap to me... a number of people in the user group I went to imported early build machines with external floppy before the PAL markets got supplied.

No mention was ever made of them not working on a colour monitor.

 

No composite or chroma/luma - sure... there's mods around to give the early STs that capabilty, all they do is add the MC1377 IC as used in Amiga RF modulators and later *M STs to convert the RGB to composite and chroma/luma.

[+DarkLord]

As for viruses, I can't se way any low market share OS would be particularly vulnerable, I mean anything other than windows should be significantly better off due to the relative obscurity. (hence why Mac OS and Linux users have much less to worry about in that respect)

 

Hmm, considering the number of high priority systems that Linux and Unix run on, its a target. I agree it might not be as much of a "reach the highest proliferation" target. Otherwise, its because 'Nix is just inherantly so much more secure from the ground up than Windoze products its not even funny.

[+wood_jl]

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

 

Use Linux.

[+DarkLord]

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

 

Use Linux.

 

Amen brother.

[oky2000]

They should have allowed the monochrome monitor to display the lower-res color modes in grayscale (as tehy would on a B/W TV set via RF, except better as it would be striaght luma, no degridation from the color subcarrier or RF noise, and on a monitor with finer dot pitch than a TV set). It would have to be a multisync monitor of course, but only accept the highres mode for monochrome plus standard NTSC/PAL compatible resolutions. (hell, they could have dropped the progressive mode and allowed interlacing instead -using only NTSC/PAL compatible video, but that elliminates the major advantage of progressive scan over high-res modes on the Amiga)

 

To be fair to Atari they specifically chose their 70hz 30khz v/h mono screen mode to remove flicker for the SM124 displays for business users. This is simply a sign of different target audiences. Flicker free double scan mono on ST was perfect for serious software

Yeah, they'd have lost the advantage to the Amiga in that sense. Though 60 Hz progressive scan would be pretty "flicker free," it's what I'm stuck with on my laptop's LCD and what I was using on my CRT monitor last summer. (granted the flicker is somewhat more noticable on a CRT due to the desplay mechanism)

 

Regardless of that, that doesn't change my statement about the monochome monitor supporting NTSC/PAL luma signals. (it would have to have to suport ~15 kHz hsync for that, so maybe having a multi-sync monitor would have made the cost too high)

 

 

the Amiga was designed as the ultimate PCB to drive a CRT tube and hence it used industry standard broadcast quality 720x576 full overscan PAL resolution right out of the box, something that PCs needed another decaded to even display let alone do frame and scan line accurate controls (which they can not do even to this day when outputting an SD composite or Y/C s-video signal due to the design flaws in a PC)

Huh? PCs were beating that resolution by 1987 with IBM's 8514 allowed 1024x768i in 1987. (plus the XGA standard in 1990) Unless you mean on standard definition televisions specifically, in which case you've got video scaling and such to deal with as well as transcoding (unless you have a TV with RGB inputs) opposed to early 320/160x200 modes which just needed to be trancoded from RGB to composite and then modulated into RF.(hence CGA PCs and Tandy-1000/PC Jr supporting composite and RF output) I don't think anything after EGA supported video modes using NTSC/PAL compatible frequencies (ie ~15 kHz hsync).

 

And what's that about Amiga and a "CRT Tube" (redundant tersm, but that's just being nitpicky), you've said this before and it's really misleading. You obviously mean the Amiga was designed to output specifically to Standard Definition television frequencies (240p/480i/60Hz NTSC, 288p/576i/50Hz PAL), but saying "CRT" means nothing since most monitors until the last few years were CRTs, so standard TV resolutions, not CRT. (not to mention there are HD CRT TVs as well)

 

That's why the Amiga was always king in desktop video over any other machine sold.....today we use digital to digital so it's not really an issue for PC's, everything is rendered to a target resolution digitally so not an issue and nor is NTSC/PAL issues as in the days of the analogue video toaster hardware.

Oh, OK, but the problem wasn't so much a flaw in PC displays, but just that they moved away from using TVs as desplays very rapidly and focused mainly on higher, incompatible resolutions. (the original CGA did work at Television resolution/frequencies -and indeed was ment to be usable with composite/RF output, I think the 200 pixel high EGA modes do as well)

 

 

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

Heh, but "back in the day" a lot of games wouldn't even have the blue error screen (ie DOS gams) as most supported direct booting (boot disk), so no OS after installation. (let alone games not requiring installation) This is out of context of course. (but actual windows specific games didn't really catch on until after the Amiga had fallen)

 

As for viruses, I can't se way any low market share OS would be particularly vulnerable, I mean anything other than windows should be significantly better off due to the relative obscurity. (hence why Mac OS and Linux users have much less to worry about in that respect)

 

In terms of bloat/inefficiency, wouldn't that hold true against some older PC OSs as well. (like NT or Win2000, not to mention OS/2)

 

Quick non-edited replies.

 

1. The ST was using the 30/32khz H refresh so it was a design decision by Atari that Mono was not intended as just another higher resolution but specifically for business/serious software.

 

2. The comment about PC and 720x576...well it's about what the PCs could output to a TV...the very first PC graphics cards with composite or Y/C output to TV only did so in 256 colours and @ 640x480 which is completely the wrong aspect ratio. Also any PC can not do Copperlist/Raster effects because there is no accurate timing controls for the electron beam on the CRT to be tracked. That's what I meant by Amiga being the ultimate CRT controlling device, it lived breathed and ate CRT scanning specifications for breakfast and the CPU will always be secondary to what the custom chips wanted to do with the display. On PCs you can't halt the CPU beyond Vsync at best.

 

3. All my comments about Windows are about versions sold while Commodore was still in business. Even Windows 3.11 was bigger than 3.1 with limited improvement or no improvement in execution speed over 3.1. Windows Millenium and Vista being probably the worst bloatware ever.

 

Win2000 actually is efficient in terms of execution speed but chugs on virtual memory too much because it is intended for servers and the default setup runs badly on a desktop machine with IDE...XP which is the same core even with 192mb is faster and smoother (and better/more reliable than 98 or ME). Memory was always the issue with 2000/XP but even so it's not like Vista where laptops became junk because the max ram capacity was say 1 or 1.5Gb and really even 2gb on some versions of Vista is a virtual memory thrashing your hard drive to death shitfest that 2000/XP can not dream of. XP is as close to MS got to getting it right (with some modifications)

[oky2000]

The reputation is generated by fanboys, from PCs generally, who then go home and play with their Blue Screen of Death loving shite the pathetic losers. Same thing with viruses on the Amiga....and which machine REALLY has a virus problem after all....could it be PCs? LOL never get away! haha

 

The simple fact is Windows is crap, Microsoft has done SWEET FA to improve OS technology since Amiga DOS and in the 25 years since KS/WB was released by now my PC should have artificual intelligence features built in...instead we are running a load of bloatware inefficient crap from M$ that does nothing better 1/4 century later than Amiga did....progress huh?

 

Use Linux.

 

Amen brother.

 

Linux is fine, as are other non MS OS installs (OS X, OS4 etc etc) but it's more than just how many viruses/crashes you suffer.

 

Comment goes hand in hand with the fact that after 25 years nothing has really changed in the OS from GEM/Mac OS/Workbench. Icons, and menus and mouse cursor blah blah. Add to that the other 25,483mhz a modern PC has over an ST or Amiga or Mac I expect it do things that you would expect from Artificial Intelligence. Errors should also be a thing of the past and an OS that fails to start due to one or two corrupt files is also a bunch of crap. If I download ever week at the same time an episode of Lost my OS should recognise this and offer to do it for me (incrementing the google search parameter by one each week) OR if I am renaming loads of random files from .DIVX to .AVI it should notice this and offer to do it for me blah blah.

 

Even urgent updates like OS level control of the sound output volume of individual applications (don't want MSN pings ever to be as loud as my media players do I?) took until 2007 to appear. And we still don't have OS level control at the kernal layer of internet bandwidth allowed per application.

 

No multitouch no nothing. Where is the innovation in ANY OS today? You can forgive a team in single numbers developing really obscure OS like OS4 making it faster and better than anything else, but Windows/OS X with millions of $ and 10000s of employees on the payroll? No excuse other than lack of talent and imagination. My ST/Amiga were already as simple and more reliable than Vista/Win7....so I see no progress. Hardware is stupidly more powerful today...but the OS?...erm

 

But it's OK because we now have 32bit transparency for the Window borders in Vista...panic over LOL

[oky2000]

As for viruses, I can't se way any low market share OS would be particularly vulnerable, I mean anything other than windows should be significantly better off due to the relative obscurity. (hence why Mac OS and Linux users have much less to worry about in that respect)

 

Hmm, considering the number of high priority systems that Linux and Unix run on, its a target. I agree it might not be as much of a "reach the highest proliferation" target. Otherwise, its because 'Nix is just inherantly so much more secure from the ground up than Windoze products its not even funny.

 

Agreed, the number of very tasty businesses running LAMP or Apache etc (credit card companies, banks, google etc) is a very tempting and high profile to a real hacker who wants 'respect'. And remember Windows usually ships with gaping wide open security too...hence all the silly service packs for Win2000 (intended as a server OS...22 at the last count...all to be installed incrementally too ooof!) so really there is more to it than 'can not be bothered to write an OS X virus' as I'm sure not every hacker wants to have Steve Job's babies or lives an iExistence

[oky2000]

Sounds like crap to me... a number of people in the user group I went to imported early build machines with external floppy before the PAL markets got supplied.

No mention was ever made of them not working on a colour monitor.

 

No composite or chroma/luma - sure... there's mods around to give the early STs that capabilty, all they do is add the MC1377 IC as used in Amiga RF modulators and later *M STs to convert the RGB to composite and chroma/luma.

 

Well I read it [in Atari User UK I'm pretty certain] and clearly such a Pro-Atari (read some of their reviews for crap games getting an 8 and very arse licky news reports!) and it was an issue. The machines did not produce a colour image at all, not on a monitor not with a hacked cable for scart nothing...it was a fault on the motherboard on first generation hardware. Never said it was 100000s of machines but it did happen in the UK and it was addressed with returns under warranty when people had saved up for an SC1224 or Thomson colour monitor....which is why it was 'news' to be reported.

 

As there is no FREE Atari User UK scans to download (and the scanned ones sold are pretty shit quality) anywhere well how am I supposed to link it? It's not the kind of thing you forget though considering I could have been affected (so I waited for the STM rather than risk getting some old stock faulty ST and finding out the hard way!)

[oky2000]

If I find the [Atari User] article I will scan and attach it here but definitely there were some original 520ST units sold at launch which didn't work on colour monitors at all, a limited run but they existed even in PAL territories like the UK hence the article. I think from memory Atari did the decent thing and swapped them for customers though but they did exist nonetheless.

 

That would be interesting to see - even the developer ST I used from Atari UK in 85 was able to connect via RGB to my Amstrad monitor. Maybe you're thinking of the composite video on pin 2 of the connector - that may not have been connected on early machines, but RGB was always present.

 

We are talking 100s, and given Mono ST's will use the same output and the power supplies were external it could be anything, but we're talking a faulty batch rather than faulty design issue I guess. Was only an issue I believe when some people added a colour monitor to their previously bought mono package sold and nothing happened...problem was found months later by early adopters that's all I remember. I'm guessing Atari test out dev kit anyway.

 

I had a Mega STE stuck in mono mode and when connected to a non-mono monitor you still got a garbled image on screen so it was something past the port pins/short of pins...ie on the m/b logic.

[+poobah]

Agreed, the number of very tasty businesses running LAMP or Apache etc (credit card companies, banks, google etc) is a very tempting and high profile to a real hacker who wants 'respect'. And remember Windows usually ships with gaping wide open security too...hence all the silly service packs for Win2000 (intended as a server OS...22 at the last count...all to be installed incrementally too ooof!) so really there is more to it than 'can not be bothered to write an OS X virus' as I'm sure not every hacker wants to have Steve Job's babies or lives an iExistence

 

Well, I'm no microsoft fan, but I gotta throw the bullshit flag on this one... 22 service packs for Windows 2000? Come on. Windows 2000 is on service pack 4.

 

Now are there other fixes and patches post service pack 4? Absolutely. Since 2000, how many patches or updates have there been for just the LAMP suite? Patches and such are normal in this day and age. It's the current stuff that DOESN'T get patched that worries me.

 

(LAMP or Apache? how's that work, unless you run Apache on Windows... and why on earth would you do that?)