Atari ST vs. Amiga

[oky2000]

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?)

 

My friend is a server engineer, it may not be 22 but it IS in double figures for them and their server setups. The difference is MS won't address any issues at all until you have every last line of code up to date......otherwise they wouldn't do it when they know it works perfectly in their environment. As an ex service manager I can see his point of view too.

 

edit: the support issue, the problem 99% of the time is sod all to do with updates (no suprise there then when it worked perfectly with no software/hardware change in between) and is either not addressed in the updates you just spent 24 hours putting on incrementally OR becomes a 'feature'

Edited January 2, 2010 by oky2000

[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.

 

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

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

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

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

 

as for the loose chip problem with st's.. a very short lived problem quickly fixed with new mmu and glu clips. Unlike the long period of time the A1000 had the guru problem

[+save2600]

 

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

 

as for the loose chip problem with st's.. a very short lived problem quickly fixed with new mmu and glu clips. Unlike the long period of time the A1000 had the guru problem

 

Atarian, you really should lay off mixing booze & drugs with playing 'Alternate Reality' late nights and alone in the dark

[Crazyace]

For me , the ST was cheaper - ( wasn't it $799 with a mono monitor compared to $1295 for an Amiga1000 without a monitor ) which made up in some way for the lack of the cool h/w

[JamesD]

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

 

as for the loose chip problem with st's.. a very short lived problem quickly fixed with new mmu and glu clips. Unlike the long period of time the A1000 had the guru problem

If the 1000 was a sales failure then what was the ST? The 1000 was hundreds of $ more expensive than the ST but the ST sales weren't that much higher than the 1000. Once the cheaper 500 was released, Amiga lead the ST in sales till the end. Price was clearly the issue. Besides, machine sales weren't that great on any 68K machine for a couple years.

 

"Guru problem"? I used a 1000 for over a year for development, and never had any "guru problem" in that time. The version of AmigaDOS & Kickstart that came with my machine never had an issue. It was only the version my partner showed me that had issues and I can't even be sure that shipped with any machines since it was before I got involved with the Amiga.

Not only that, but I didn't have to turn the machine off and reload Kickstart all the time (as you implied before), and you are CLEARLY spreading FUD as an Atari/ST fan.

 

There were some programs that didn't exit gracefully when the system ran out of RAM, and they would generate a guru instead of exiting and printing "out of memory". I think some developers thought GURU numbers were sufficient for errors until the public got the machines and didn't have a clue how to read the guru messages. When I added 1MB of RAM to my 1000 I don't think I ever had RAM issues again.

 

Later I upgraded to a 2000 to have everything all in one box, 68030 board, hard drive, RAM expansion, etc...

I bought a 3000 a couple years later to dump the big box and for more speed and RAM.

 

The 1000 chipset wasn't fully integrated yet and I don't think the ROM sockets were set up for the later/larger Kickstarts, but otherwise the machine functioned just as well as later machines.

[desiv]

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?)

 

My friend is a server engineer, it may not be 22 but it IS in double figures for them and their server setups. The difference is MS won't address any issues at all until you have every last line of code up to date......otherwise they wouldn't do it when they know it works perfectly in their environment. As an ex service manager I can see his point of view too.

 

edit: the support issue, the problem 99% of the time is sod all to do with updates (no suprise there then when it worked perfectly with no software/hardware change in between) and is either not addressed in the updates you just spent 24 hours putting on incrementally OR becomes a 'feature'

 

I believe he's maybe talking about critical patches, not just service packs. But you can't go by count.

Linux has many many more patches. It's not because it's less secure, it's the design aspect. Code is open, people find and fix holes. MS keeps their code to themselves, and when they patch, who knows how many things they actually fixed.

 

Which is better? Depends..

 

LAMP is pretty popular, but most "juicy targets", banks, etc., aren't using it.

 

The money is in SPAM, and most people have Windows desktops so most bad programs are designed to hit Windows desktops.

 

The "serious hackers" don't care about OS. Take the Citibank case. I'm willing to be there will have been inside information on that one, and trojans written specifically for that environment. Probably mostly Windows knowing Citi, but it wouldn't matter if it was BSD. It was very well organized and researched.

 

Hey, is this going to win the award for most off-topic post chain in a thread? :-)

(Amiga rulez!! Had to stay on topic here.. )

 

desiv

[frogstar_robot]

For me , the ST was cheaper - ( wasn't it $799 with a mono monitor compared to $1295 for an Amiga1000 without a monitor ) which made up in some way for the lack of the cool h/w

 

That's a VERY important point. I could barely afford a 520STFM and the monochrome monitor. From my point of view, the Amiga was mythic exotica. I envied them but couldn't even think about having one. Taking that 520ST up to 1MB was also financially daunting. I really have no argument with those who say the Amiga was more innovative and powerful. I agree but you really paid for it then. An Amiga was a far better value than a Mac but a reasonable starter setup could cost half again what the ST did even if you did spring for the color monitor.

[Crazyace]

That's probably why I enjoy playing on the A8 nowadays - when I had the ST it was great , but it was more of a general 'computer' , and there was nothing much to miss moving on to a PC. The A8 ( and the Amiga ) were more like game machines, with lots of custom hardware to play with.

[DracIsBack]

Back in the 1980s, I was wowed by both, to be honest. We had an IBM XT with CGA graphics and the built in PC sound. I had to use Mac 512s at school.

 

Compared to either of those, the Amiga and ST seemed pretty freakin awesome in terms of graphics and sound. I remember seeing the Amiga demos and Space Ace on the ST - and almost falling off my chair.

[Crazyace]

I didn't move on to a PC till a lot later, when 486's were common and Doom was out - Watcom C in 32 bit mode ruled

In some ways I have more impressed by some of the ST demos - there were a lot more 'impossibles' on the ST - such as border removals / scrolling

[atarian63]

 

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

 

as for the loose chip problem with st's.. a very short lived problem quickly fixed with new mmu and glu clips. Unlike the long period of time the A1000 had the guru problem

 

Atarian, you really should lay off mixing booze & drugs with playing 'Alternate Reality' late nights and alone in the dark

But it's so fun! Dont you enjoy it?

[atarian63]

it was a failure to have the machine ready at release and a sales failure. Customers hated it and it made the machine a kluge to use,unlike ST where you just turned it on and there was the os.

 

as for the loose chip problem with st's.. a very short lived problem quickly fixed with new mmu and glu clips. Unlike the long period of time the A1000 had the guru problem

If the 1000 was a sales failure then what was the ST? The 1000 was hundreds of $ more expensive than the ST but the ST sales weren't that much higher than the 1000. Once the cheaper 500 was released, Amiga lead the ST in sales till the end. Price was clearly the issue. Besides, machine sales weren't that great on any 68K machine for a couple years.

 

"Guru problem"? I used a 1000 for over a year for development, and never had any "guru problem" in that time. The version of AmigaDOS & Kickstart that came with my machine never had an issue. It was only the version my partner showed me that had issues and I can't even be sure that shipped with any machines since it was before I got involved with the Amiga.

Not only that, but I didn't have to turn the machine off and reload Kickstart all the time (as you implied before), and you are CLEARLY spreading FUD as an Atari/ST fan.

 

There were some programs that didn't exit gracefully when the system ran out of RAM, and they would generate a guru instead of exiting and printing "out of memory". I think some developers thought GURU numbers were sufficient for errors until the public got the machines and didn't have a clue how to read the guru messages. When I added 1MB of RAM to my 1000 I don't think I ever had RAM issues again.

 

Later I upgraded to a 2000 to have everything all in one box, 68030 board, hard drive, RAM expansion, etc...

I bought a 3000 a couple years later to dump the big box and for more speed and RAM.

 

The 1000 chipset wasn't fully integrated yet and I don't think the ROM sockets were set up for the later/larger Kickstarts, but otherwise the machine functioned just as well as later machines.

You always seem to be the odd one out. We sold these as a dealer and saw lots of these, heck customers would come in and ask if the crash problem was fixed. I could only tell them as time went on that ot was better. All versions did this, we had many many returns due to this and customer frustration with the O/S. As for A500 that was years later and clearly sold as a console. Most buyers bought it with the a520 video adapter as a games machine only (which was fine)

I can tell you ST sales in our area were running 3-1 and some months 4-1 ST vs Amiga during the early years. Supply became an issue with ST as they started focusing on europe. People still wanted them but I had to sell what I could get which was by that time the A500. No guru prone and overall a much better machine. Much easier to sell and cheaper. Sold lots of games on those.

As for guru messages, why the heck would a consumer have to decode that?! They wanted a machine that worked and A1000 only sort of did, incrementally over time. It was a hard sale, overpriced and crash happy. Everytime customers would come in and try to multitaskm, even simple things, we would cring as we all knew it was going to guru. Simple as that. We returned many many of the A1000 models due to this.

[FastRobPlus]

For me , the ST was cheaper - ( wasn't it $799 with a mono monitor compared to $1295 for an Amiga1000 without a monitor ) which made up in some way for the lack of the cool h/w

 

That's a VERY important point. I could barely afford a 520STFM and the monochrome monitor. From my point of view, the Amiga was mythic exotica. I envied them but couldn't even think about having one. Taking that 520ST up to 1MB was also financially daunting. I really have no argument with those who say the Amiga was more innovative and powerful. I agree but you really paid for it then. An Amiga was a far better value than a Mac but a reasonable starter setup could cost half again what the ST did even if you did spring for the color monitor.

 

These two comments underscore what I've been saying since the thread went off the rails a month or two ago.

 

There is nothing at all wrong with the ST. It's a capable home computer. It's not an Amiga no matter how much Jack's crew wanted you to group it into that class.

 

The confusion in this thread stems from the overlap between the 1040ST and the A500. When C= did what they did best - cost reduction - you found the Amiga 500 and later the 1200 eating the ST's lunch and becoming lumped in with the IIGS and the ST as the last of the home computers. But that was just because C= knew how to trim bits and make and market Amiga as a home computer.

 

The ST on the other hand was a home computer because it was purpose-built to be a home computer. Any computer introduced without an expansion bus at the time of launch was a home computer. Upscale systems like Mega, STacy, TT, Falcon were far too late. When the smoke cleared, only MS-DOS/Windows, MAC/Next, and Amiga were serious computer architecture platforms worth of moving into the 1990s. Even the mainstream magazines agreed on this point. You saw PC World, Next World, Amiga World and Mac World, but you were never going to see Apple IIGS World or ST World!

 

Unfortunately for Amiga architecture, it was still doomed because it was a product of a company that never achieved the critical mass it needed to stick around. But then, neither did Be or Next. We know from Apple's late 1990's brush with death that Apple was just barelybig enough to survive.

[+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?)

 

My friend is a server engineer, it may not be 22 but it IS in double figures for them and their server setups. The difference is MS won't address any issues at all until you have every last line of code up to date......otherwise they wouldn't do it when they know it works perfectly in their environment. As an ex service manager I can see his point of view too.

 

edit: the support issue, the problem 99% of the time is sod all to do with updates (no suprise there then when it worked perfectly with no software/hardware change in between) and is either not addressed in the updates you just spent 24 hours putting on incrementally OR becomes a 'feature'

 

I believe he's maybe talking about critical patches, not just service packs. But you can't go by count.

Linux has many many more patches. It's not because it's less secure, it's the design aspect. Code is open, people find and fix holes. MS keeps their code to themselves, and when they patch, who knows how many things they actually fixed.

 

Which is better? Depends..

 

LAMP is pretty popular, but most "juicy targets", banks, etc., aren't using it.

 

The money is in SPAM, and most people have Windows desktops so most bad programs are designed to hit Windows desktops.

 

The "serious hackers" don't care about OS. Take the Citibank case. I'm willing to be there will have been inside information on that one, and trojans written specifically for that environment. Probably mostly Windows knowing Citi, but it wouldn't matter if it was BSD. It was very well organized and researched.

 

Hey, is this going to win the award for most off-topic post chain in a thread? :-)

(Amiga rulez!! Had to stay on topic here.. )

 

desiv

 

Actually, I'd be surprised if there were only 22 post SP4 patches... SP4 was 4 1/2 years ago

 

The issue that he is missing is that the term "Service Pack" has a specific meaning in the Windows world, and saying that Windows 2000 is on the "22nd Service Pack" destroys credibility with anyone having a passing knowledge of Windows system administration. I realize it's terminology, but terminology IS important.

 

That said, I question the use of "number of patches" as an even remotely meaningful metric anyway.

 

Perhaps number of zero day exploits, unpatched critical vulnerabilities, etc. would be more relevant.

[desiv]

Actually, I'd be surprised if there were only 22 post SP4 patches... SP4 was 4 1/2 years ago

 

The issue that he is missing is that the term "Service Pack" has a specific meaning in the Windows world, and saying that Windows 2000 is on the "22nd Service Pack" destroys credibility with anyone having a passing knowledge of Windows system administration. I realize it's terminology, but terminology IS important.

 

Agreed, and there are over 35 patches post SP4, not counting the IE patches.

(Who has a browser on a server? :-)

 

 

That said, I question the use of "number of patches" as an even remotely meaningful metric anyway.

 

Perhaps number of zero day exploits, unpatched critical vulnerabilities, etc. would be more relevant.

 

Agreed, as I said

But you can't go by count.

Linux has many many more patches. It's not because it's less secure, it's the design aspect. Code is open, people find and fix holes. MS keeps their code to themselves, and when they patch, who knows how many things they actually fixed.

 

 

The best number would probably be "exploited holes", but you'll never get that kind of count. Citibank isn't even admitting they were hacked and everyone knows they were.

 

I love to SLAM MS (even tho they keep me employed), but to be fair, IF you keep your server patched daily (well, every Tuesday plus the extras) and IF you keep the app people (developers, application installers) from doing stupid things, you can have a fairly secure box. It's just more work.

 

desiv

 

p.s. Yes, people run AMP apps on Windows. I argue, but they do it. :-( Not AMP specifically, but we had some guys install Tomcat on their Windows server. The server was "hacked" (nothing happened, they just changed some text), and we found out that the Tomcat admin username and password were the same and simple. Doesn't matter how secure and up to date I had the OS.

 

p.p.s. Keeping slightly on topic, the first computer virus I ever got was a Mac virus on a Mac emulator running on my Amiga. That was a good emulator. :-) Yes, it was a pirated Mac game and I deserved it. :-)

[+wood_jl]

There is nothing at all wrong with the ST. It's a capable home computer. It's not an Amiga no matter how much Jack's crew wanted you to group it into that class.

 

I don't see why you have to try to redefine the Amiga as another "class." If they were in a Jeopardy category, they'd be "16-bit home computers from the eighties, alex." Even if the Amiga is considered superior, they're in the same class. The further time progresses and technology advances, they increasingly appear to be in the same class. Games from either - regardless of which - appear similar (or inferior) to Sega Geneis/Super Nintendo games, in relation to modern games on modern systems. Different class would be Amiga vs. C64, or ST vs. 8-bit. It's okay if you think the Amiga is vastly superior, but they're in the same class.

[atarian63]

For me , the ST was cheaper - ( wasn't it $799 with a mono monitor compared to $1295 for an Amiga1000 without a monitor ) which made up in some way for the lack of the cool h/w

 

That's a VERY important point. I could barely afford a 520STFM and the monochrome monitor. From my point of view, the Amiga was mythic exotica. I envied them but couldn't even think about having one. Taking that 520ST up to 1MB was also financially daunting. I really have no argument with those who say the Amiga was more innovative and powerful. I agree but you really paid for it then. An Amiga was a far better value than a Mac but a reasonable starter setup could cost half again what the ST did even if you did spring for the color monitor.

 

These two comments underscore what I've been saying since the thread went off the rails a month or two ago.

 

There is nothing at all wrong with the ST. It's a capable home computer. It's not an Amiga no matter how much Jack's crew wanted you to group it into that class.

 

The confusion in this thread stems from the overlap between the 1040ST and the A500. When C= did what they did best - cost reduction - you found the Amiga 500 and later the 1200 eating the ST's lunch and becoming lumped in with the IIGS and the ST as the last of the home computers. But that was just because C= knew how to trim bits and make and market Amiga as a home computer.

 

The ST on the other hand was a home computer because it was purpose-built to be a home computer. Any computer introduced without an expansion bus at the time of launch was a home computer. Upscale systems like Mega, STacy, TT, Falcon were far too late. When the smoke cleared, only MS-DOS/Windows, MAC/Next, and Amiga were serious computer architecture platforms worth of moving into the 1990s. Even the mainstream magazines agreed on this point. You saw PC World, Next World, Amiga World and Mac World, but you were never going to see Apple IIGS World or ST World!

 

Unfortunately for Amiga architecture, it was still doomed because it was a product of a company that never achieved the critical mass it needed to stick around. But then, neither did Be or Next. We know from Apple's late 1990's brush with death that Apple was just barelybig enough to survive.

Actually moving into the 90's neither St nor amiga were of a class to continue. The only reason ST sales in the u.s slowed was Jack turn production to europe. I could sell all I could get of STE and Mega ST,Mega STE, problem was that I could not get enough. What was available U.S. was the a500 and pc clones with pc clones far outselling amiga except with gamers.

As far as as Magazine there was ST World and Jerry Pourneli from Compute magazine wrote tons of articles compelling people to buy ST's.

Apple IIgs was the bastard last place step child that not even apple people loved. That machine was an example of too little too late.

By the time the 90's hit nobody really cared about St or Amiga anymore really, the world had moved on to PC's.

A1200/A600 was dead on arrival, I doubt we sold more than a dozen or so, AGA made it incompatible with games and again, too little to late. CD32 in some ways is what Amiga should have been from day one. A console game machine,with some ability to do computer functions. It would have sold very well, probably much more so that it did as a PC.

[FastRobPlus]

There is nothing at all wrong with the ST. It's a capable home computer. It's not an Amiga no matter how much Jack's crew wanted you to group it into that class.

 

I don't see why you have to try to redefine the Amiga as another "class." If they were in a Jeopardy category, they'd be "16-bit home computers from the eighties, alex." Even if the Amiga is considered superior, they're in the same class. The further time progresses and technology advances, they increasingly appear to be in the same class. Games from either - regardless of which - appear similar (or inferior) to Sega Geneis/Super Nintendo games, in relation to modern games on modern systems. Different class would be Amiga vs. C64, or ST vs. 8-bit. It's okay if you think the Amiga is vastly superior, but they're in the same class.

 

They are really too far apart to be lumped together. Like comparing the 8-bit 2600 and the NES in the category of 8-bit consoles. I also notice it often comes down to games when comparing platforms. That makes less sense with Amiga since it was a fully realized platform. One primary use was photo and video editing. Another was productivity. But for games, that could be a whole thread unto itself. I'm sure Syndicate, Killing Game Show, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder, Worms, Sim City, Alien Breed, etc were all very demonstrably better on the 16-bit Amiga than the 16-bit ST/Sega/SNES. In fact, by the time the Genesis came out my Amiga wasn't even 16-bit. It's the architecture you see. ST/Genesis/SNES were in a different class. They were closed systems. The Amiga was 16-bit only until you added a 68020 or 68030 card.

Edited January 3, 2010 by FastRobPlus

[atarian63]

There is nothing at all wrong with the ST. It's a capable home computer. It's not an Amiga no matter how much Jack's crew wanted you to group it into that class.

 

I don't see why you have to try to redefine the Amiga as another "class." If they were in a Jeopardy category, they'd be "16-bit home computers from the eighties, alex." Even if the Amiga is considered superior, they're in the same class. The further time progresses and technology advances, they increasingly appear to be in the same class. Games from either - regardless of which - appear similar (or inferior) to Sega Geneis/Super Nintendo games, in relation to modern games on modern systems. Different class would be Amiga vs. C64, or ST vs. 8-bit. It's okay if you think the Amiga is vastly superior, but they're in the same class.

 

They are really too far apart to be lumped together. Like comparing the 8-bit 2600 and the NES in the category of 8-bit consoles. I also notice it often comes down to games when comparing platforms. That makes less sense with Amiga since it was a fully realized platform. One primary use was photo and video editing. Another was productivity. But for games, that could be a whole thread unto itself. I'm sure Syndicate, Killing Game Show, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder, Worms, Sim City, Alien Breed, etc were all very demonstrably better on the 16-bit Amiga than the 16-bit ST/Sega/SNES. In fact, by the time the Genesis came out my Amiga wasn't even 16-bit. It's the architecture you see. ST/Genesis/SNES were in a different class. They were closed systems. The Amiga was 16-bit only until you added a 68020 or 68030 card.

Which hardly anyone did, as game compatibility was usually lost. SNES, and especially genesis looked lots better than Amiga at the time.

The ST and Amiga are in the same class for sure. One being primarily productivity (ST) and the other being primarily ames though both could do games well. As already covered here. ST for DTP and Music and games. Amiga for Video work, (need an A2000 or above) and games. For sure in the same class though slightly different uses for productivity,lots of overlap on games.

Many of the arcade title coverted for Amiga and ST were nowhere near as good as the Sgea Genesis. US Gold,Domark titles come to mind.

[+save2600]

The Amiga was 16-bit only until you added a 68020 or 68030 card.

 

 

No, no, no... Amiga's native 68000 architecture *is* 16/24/32-bit. When you added an 020 or better on anything other than a CD32, A1200 or A4000, you've then turned it into a true 24/32-bit machine (assuming you also added 32-bit RAM along with that card) - with only the Chip Ram and Kickstart remaining 16-bit. CD32, A1200 and A4000 had 24-bit (if I'm not mistaken, might be 32-bit) wide Kickstart chips and 32-bit Fast RAM as native.

 

[JamesD]

You always seem to be the odd one out. We sold these as a dealer and saw lots of these, heck customers would come in and ask if the crash problem was fixed. I could only tell them as time went on that ot was better. All versions did this, we had many many returns due to this and customer frustration with the O/S. As for A500 that was years later and clearly sold as a console. Most buyers bought it with the a520 video adapter as a games machine only (which was fine)

I can tell you ST sales in our area were running 3-1 and some months 4-1 ST vs Amiga during the early years. Supply became an issue with ST as they started focusing on europe. People still wanted them but I had to sell what I could get which was by that time the A500. No guru prone and overall a much better machine. Much easier to sell and cheaper. Sold lots of games on those.

As for guru messages, why the heck would a consumer have to decode that?! They wanted a machine that worked and A1000 only sort of did, incrementally over time. It was a hard sale, overpriced and crash happy. Everytime customers would come in and try to multitaskm, even simple things, we would cring as we all knew it was going to guru. Simple as that. We returned many many of the A1000 models due to this.

Always the odd one out? Look at my previous posts.

 

All versions did this or all versions while the 1000 was available? We ran a cash register off an Amiga and it ran 24/7 for YEARS and rarely had a crash. When it did crash it was usually from power issues in the building. But then we wrote the program.

I ran my A3000 almost 24/7 and multitasked the hell out of it. I'd be downloading off of a BBS, typing a college paper, have a program I was working on loaded in a text editor, and compiling a program at the same time. I almost always had 2 dos shells running when I was doing development.

 

ST outsold the Amiga mostly on price in the early years. Sales really didn't change until the A500 was released and then it was a complete reversal.

 

I think AmigaDOS 1.0 may have eaten up RAM and some of the OS utilities were buggy. If you load up too much and the OS doesn't have enough RAM to do something it would reset after a GURU. AmigaDOS 1.1 was better at recovering from a crash without resetting. I don't ever remember a return because someone had too many crashes. But then 1.1 came out shortly after I got involved so there may have been some before my time. I think setting the customer's expectations on multitasking was very important with the Amiga. You can't just load everything up on 512K and expect not to run out of memory. You also have to recognize a lot of early crashes weren't the OS but buggy applications. We got so we knew what programs had issues and warned customers. If a customer knows a program is buggy then they don't blame the computer, they talk to the software developer.

 

I do remember having customers ask if Amiga had fixed their crashing issues.

We would show how a program could crash when you ran out of memory on an unexpanded machine, then ran the same programs on a machine with extra RAM and no crash. We also pointed out that even though one program crashed we were able to save what we were doing on the other programs before resetting. Then we pointed out you wouldn't even be able to do some of what we had just done on the ST at all.

Most people seemed impressed.

 

One thing I do remember is fixing a lot of disks for people before AmigaDOS 1.2. I think a lot of the 1.2 upgrades were because of that and we sold a *lot* of 1.2 upgrades. I probably fixed over a hundred disks that had gotten corrupted by the old file system.

 

I also remember a few programs not liking FAST_RAM but we ran a PD patch on them to allocate CHIP_RAM only. Only some copy protected games couldn't be patched.

 

The "GURU MEDITATION NUMBER" was a stupid idea from the consumer standpoint. It should have been a readable system error from day one. But geeks being geeks they thought it was cool. But then they were also trying to save ROM space.

If people could see they ran out of memory, they knew they needed more memory. If it crashes with some garbage error message they can't read they just know it crashed.

 

We rarely ever sold an Amiga without a monitor so I think we were targeting a different audience than you were.

 

We also sold Amstrad 8086 PCs that came with GEM desktop for a while. It was very popular with people that wanted PCs.

[+save2600]

The "GURU MEDITATION NUMBER" was a stupid idea from the consumer standpoint. It should have been a readable system error from day one. But geeks being geeks they thought it was cool. But then they were also trying to save ROM space. If people could see they ran out of memory, they knew they needed more memory. If it crashes with some garbage error message they can't read they just know it crashed.

 

 

Good points and true, but those error numbers were explained in the original Amiga 1000 binder in Appendix 'B'. The generation back then was much more accustomed to reading books and manuals, but the visually gratifying Workbench or GEM environments probably contributed to the decline of people taking the time to look things up properly. Shame because those older computer manuals are very nicely done!

 

 

[+wood_jl]

They are really too far apart to be lumped together. Like comparing the 8-bit 2600 and the NES in the category of 8-bit consoles. I also notice it often comes down to games when comparing platforms. That makes less sense with Amiga since it was a fully realized platform. One primary use was photo and video editing. Another was productivity. But for games, that could be a whole thread unto itself. I'm sure Syndicate, Killing Game Show, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder, Worms, Sim City, Alien Breed, etc were all very demonstrably better on the 16-bit Amiga than the 16-bit ST/Sega/SNES. In fact, by the time the Genesis came out my Amiga wasn't even 16-bit. It's the architecture you see. ST/Genesis/SNES were in a different class. They were closed systems. The Amiga was 16-bit only until you added a 68020 or 68030 card.

 

Since these were graphically/sound-capable machines of their day (compared to PC/Mac/whatever), I guess we look at games since they exploit those capabilities. I think it's a bit of a stretch to separate them along the likes of the Atari 2600/NES; it's pretty easy to tell Atari 2600 Donkey Kong from NES Donkey Kong, but "Defender of the Crown" on ST/Amiga would be much harder to tell apart, although the Amiga version was the best.

[FastRobPlus]

They are really too far apart to be lumped together. Like comparing the 8-bit 2600 and the NES in the category of 8-bit consoles. I also notice it often comes down to games when comparing platforms. That makes less sense with Amiga since it was a fully realized platform. One primary use was photo and video editing. Another was productivity. But for games, that could be a whole thread unto itself. I'm sure Syndicate, Killing Game Show, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder, Worms, Sim City, Alien Breed, etc were all very demonstrably better on the 16-bit Amiga than the 16-bit ST/Sega/SNES. In fact, by the time the Genesis came out my Amiga wasn't even 16-bit. It's the architecture you see. ST/Genesis/SNES were in a different class. They were closed systems. The Amiga was 16-bit only until you added a 68020 or 68030 card.

 

Since these were graphically/sound-capable machines of their day (compared to PC/Mac/whatever), I guess we look at games since they exploit those capabilities. I think it's a bit of a stretch to separate them along the likes of the Atari 2600/NES; it's pretty easy to tell Atari 2600 Donkey Kong from NES Donkey Kong, but "Defender of the Crown" on ST/Amiga would be much harder to tell apart, although the Amiga version was the best.

 

While DoC was a bit better on the Amiga, it was an earlier game. That dev team set out to do a Ben Hur type cinematic game next (Centurion: Defender of Rome) and at the time said that they needed two double density drives, one DD drive and a hard drive, or one DD drive and a meg of RAM to make the loading less painful than in DoC (a huge complaint) They were sure that their target AMiga audience at least met the 2-DD disk drive and 1MB RAM bar, so the game came out on Amiga and PC only.

[kool kitty89]

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.

And? What does that have to do with my latter statement about the monochrome monitors supporting grayscale from the 320/640x200 modes? (having the mochrome monitors support the lower Hsync rate may have been a cost issue as I suggested, but that's not your argument)

 

 

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.

Except CGA of course, which did support comp/RF output from the start.

And aspect ratio? wtf? 640x480 is a resolution, not an aspect ratio, pixels don't have to be square (and more often than not they aren't square on a TV display -true for SD-DTV, and pretty much any video game console or computer outputting to a TV -unless the display is set-up speficically to have an immage inside of overscan with the correct resolution) Much software on such platforms didn't correct for the non-square pixels though, quite noticable in many systems using 256 pixel wide displays, or even in the 320 pixel wide display on some like the Genesis. (actually ~352 pixels into overscan, so PAR is ~.91, so things not optimized will look stretched vertically -of course non optimized 50 Hz PAL displays have a differet problem with the mich higher vertical resolution, so PAR is closer to 1.1 in that case -and further distorted for 256 wide stuff)

Not to mention there's no anamorphic displays.

 

On top of that, many PC graphics modes used non-square pixels as well. (VGA 13h being a huge example, plus the various old graphics modes as well, like 640/320x200 CGA/EGA and 640x350 EGA, not to mention MDA) Amiga stuff doesn't display correctly either, at least some, as it seems to be optimixed for non-square pixels, but not conforming to TV resolution whatsoever (but rather monitors with overscan calibrated differently apparently, such that 320x200 is shown as a 4:3 screen, just like 13h on VGA -that is unless workbench was supposed to look all stretched out)

 

 

Windows Millenium and Vista being probably the worst bloatware ever.

I don't know (other than ignoratnt people) would have chosen to use Me over 98SE as a 9x OS, otherwise opting for NT/2k beyond 9x. The only reason anyone at my hose is using vista at all is because it came stock with the systems, with XP costing more or being a pain to get instead, and transferring an XP licence from one of our other PCs can get painfull. (in my case it's only 32-bit with 2 GB, so really no advantage there, for 64-bit there was some other stuff -namely more RAM address space- and DirectX-10, of course)

 

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)

Yeah, that was kind of painful before some tweaking my setup to get vista more around 600 MB in RAM. (more cached to disc though) Edited January 4, 2010 by kool kitty89