Difference between Amiga and Atari 520?

[clemenza]

IMHO, and despite what everyone says, the TOS/GEM combination was much more useful than WB 1.x. Of course, when WB 2.x came out, things changed dramatically. Hardwarewise, the Amiga was years ahead of it's time (and it's competitors...)

[shoggoth]

Stopthegop,

No offence, but I don't think you have the facts right.

>That was somewhat true with the low end STs, but not so
>with its cousin, the TT030.  The concept there was a
>computer so loaded with hardware features already built-in
>that you wouldn't need to expand it.  Vintage late
>1988, Mine has:

Afaik, the TT was released 1990-91, not 1988.

>64bit memory (32 address,32 data) -- 28MB!

Yes, it's organized as 64-bits wide memory to allow the TT-shifter to access the memory fast enough. From a software perspective, it's 32-bit.

>Aftermarket memory expansion possible to 152MB!  In 1988!

Again, I don't think it was 1988. Google around.

>External ROM port
>Internal 512K ROM OS.  You can ALWAYS boot to a gui
>Independent keyboard processor
>3x asynchronous RS232 serial ports
>1 DMA rs422 port
>VGA Graphics built in
>VME slot for expansion

It did. A TT with a VME graphics card is pretty nice.

>external DMA "ASCSI" port

It also features a standard SCSI connector.

>Game cartridge port

No. It has a ROM cartridge port, but it definitely has no game cartridge port.

>Granted, the TT was expensive.  But you can't tell me that
>it wasn't state-of-the-art for its time and, imho, for
>many, many years after.  

I would agree if it had been released in '88, but it wasn't.

> forgot..
>DSP processor
>MIDI in and Out
>16 bit Stereo w/ high quality RCA jacks

This is just not true at all. The TT had the same 8-bit DMA sound as the STE, and it didn't have a DSP. There was a VME soundcard which had a 56k on it, but it didn't arrive until 5-6 years later afaik. You're confusing it with the F030, which is a completely different machine.

-- Peter

[spirantho]

Something to note about the 520ST - the actual 520ST is a very limited machine - it had 512KB of RAM but not only no blitter and custom chips, but the AY-8912 sound chip as used in 8-bits of the time and it didn't come with a disk drive! The 520 was originally designed without a TV modulator too so you had to use a monitor with it. The monitor of course could be PAL/NTSC resolution in 16 colours or VGA resolution in black and white.... so if you wanted to run serious software and games you had to have two monitors! Most music software would balk at the medium-res monitor, IIRC.

I have such a 520ST from 1984 (serial number 5000-odd I think) at home - except it's been upgraded to 1MB of RAM. How was the upgrade done? The only way was to solder new RAM chips on top of the old ones, taking the high address line via a wire connected somewhere else on the motherboard. No slot expansions here!

Of course the STf came soon with a floppy built in, along with the STm with the TV modulator, and the most common the STfm. Then the STe which even had a blitter which most software never used, and then the TT and Falcon and things came along, which are a different story. The Falcon is a really nice machine, with a pre-emptive MultiTOS and stuff on it, along with SCSI and IDE onboard. More powerful than an A1200, but no software for it practically at all.

Here endeth AtariSTs 101.

[shoggoth]

spirantho wrote:
Something to note about the 520ST - the actual 520ST is a very limited machine - it had 512KB of RAM but not only no blitter and custom chips, but the AY-8912 sound chip as used in 8-bits of the time and it didn't come with a disk drive!

It did come with a disk drive, it just wasn't built-in. The AY-8912 was an 8-bit circuit, but that's sort of irrellevant since it has nothing to do with the sound itself, just the number of data signals on the actual chip. Nevertheless, the sound sucked.

The Falcon is a really nice machine, with a pre-emptive MultiTOS and stuff on it, along with SCSI and IDE onboard. More powerful than an A1200, but no software for it practically at all.

MultiTOS wasn't falcon-only. It just shipped with it (MultiTOS was disk-based, unlike TOS).

It's hard to say if the Falcon was more powerful than the A1200, it all depends on what features you compare I guess. The falcon had a DSP and real 16-bit hicolour modes, but... the A1200 had (afaik) a real 32-bit bus. The falcon blitter sucked, in many cases it was faster to use the CPU. On the other hand, it was 030-based and features on-board PMMU. Both machines suffered from planar graphics in 256 colour modes.

The falcon had Cubase Audio, Logic Audio and some other heavyweights, but allmost no games at all. Some STE-games ran, but generally ST/STE games compatibility was pretty low.

-- Peter

[shoggoth]

You could emulate an ST on an amiga 500 but you couldnt do visa versa on an ST, says it all really!

The term "emulate" in this case isn't really 100% accurate. Afaik this was a matter of patching TOS/GEM to enable the Amiga to run GEM programs. Anything that touches the hardware directly (which was the case with 90% of all games and lots of other software) is likely to fail horribly, however.

Technically, I don't think there is anything that prevents the ST from "emulating" AmigaOS, but the patching (more like porting in this case) would need a considerable effort, and again, any application which touch the hardware directly will fail.

-- Peter

[stopthegop]

@Shoggorth
 
You're right, 1988 was a mistake, I meant 1989.  But we're both off by a year because it was in fact released in 1989. This I know for a fact because 1989 was the year I graduated High School and I used my Dad's new TT030 for both semesters of my first year of college, starting around Aug, 1989.   The memory expansion I mentioned was available around that time as well, no more than a year after the TT was released.  It was a 128M expansion and I remember it being hugely expensive.  Believe it or not, there was actually one on ebay just a few weeks ago..  I mean the 128M RAM cage.  Sold for around $200.  As for the ROM port, that was a mistake on my part mentioning the same thing twice.  For sure though, the TT030 was released in the 1980s, and it was most definately a better machine than any crapintosh of the day (sorry, I'm just really allergic to mac/os in general -- the software, that is), light years ahead of anything from microsoft, and in my estimation, about equal with Amiga at that moment in time.  But again, the TT cost around 3 grand when it came out, 4 grand if you wanted memory.  So I guess it all came down to price?  I suppose thats why the PC "won": price.  God knows it wasn't the product.      

[itix]

I have such a 520ST from 1984 (serial number 5000-odd I think) at home - except it's been upgraded to 1MB of RAM. How was the upgrade done? The only way was to solder new RAM chips on top of the old ones, taking the high address line via a wire connected somewhere else on the motherboard. No slot expansions here!

But for comparison, what kind of upgrades were made available to A1000 at that time? There was no Amiga 500 until 1987. At that time Atari had upgraded their machines to better specs (1040, STM and STFM). Gfx and sound options were not great but ST had higher resolution without flickery (with B/W monitor only).

Cant think of any other good points for ST :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Ok. The gui of the ST is nicely built-in; but also hard to expand/modify. That's why Commodore has chosen otherwise (they could have put it all in ROM)
Also, hardware multitasking is STILL not a feature of todays hardware (unless you got a hyperthreading proc, though I haven't yet take a look at that).
Maybe the ST is clocked faster, productivity-wise the Amiga is way way faster because one can multitask in every way; formatting (multiple) floppies, printing documents and writing at the same time is of little concern.
The Amiga is designed from the beginning to multitask. And thus it can multitask like no other computer/os. Every programmer knows when he/she just 'glues' functionality to it's original software, it's not going to function very well.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

itix wrote:
But for comparison, what kind of upgrades were made available to A1000 at that time? There was no Amiga 500 until 1987. At that time Atari had upgraded their machines to better specs (1040, STM and STFM). Gfx and sound options were not great but ST had higher resolution without flickery (with B/W monitor only).

Cant think of any other good points for ST :-)

Yes but it also didn't have HAM, and that's a functionality less, because it can't view photo's in
reasonable quality.

[shoggoth]

Also, hardware multitasking is STILL not a feature of todays hardware (unless you got a hyperthreading proc, though I haven't yet take a look at that).

What do you mean by "hardware multitasking"?

-- Peter

[Speelgoedmannetje]

shoggoth wrote:

Also, hardware multitasking is STILL not a feature of todays hardware (unless you got a hyperthreading proc, though I haven't yet take a look at that).

What do you mean by "hardware multitasking"?

-- Peter

The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting.

[itix]

The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting.

Using copper is not multitasking. Modern GPUs are more complex than copper while using GPU still is not considered as multitasking.

[spirantho]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting.

Erm... that's not quite accurate. The Copper is another processor, it doesn't affect the OS in any way to do with multitasking whatsoever.

Otherwise you could say that any PC with a WinTV card supports hardware multitasking because it's got a seperate RISC processor on-board which can wait for stuff without tying up the CPU.

Incidentally, the original 520ST may have been bundled with a disk drive but it didn't come out of the box with a disk drive. I know because my disk drive wouldn't fit in my 520ST's box.

[shoggoth]

[/quote]The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting. [/quote]

You'll have to explain that further. I'm fairly familiar with the Copper, but I can't see how this relates to multitasking. It's a coprocessor. It's not like it makes context-switching in the CPU any faster.

-- Peter

[Speelgoedmannetje]

itix wrote:

The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting.

Using copper is not multitasking. Modern GPUs are more complex than copper while using GPU still is not considered as multitasking.

The copper isn't just a gpu.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

shoggoth wrote:

The copper co-processor makes it possible to use multithreading natively. No extra software needed. No cpu cycles spilled waiting. [/quote]

You'll have to explain that further. I'm fairly familiar with the Copper, but I can't see how this relates to multitasking. It's a coprocessor. It's not like it makes context-switching in the CPU any faster.

-- Peter[/quote]It has the 'wait' instruction.