TheMagicM wrote:
hmm..now to find a game to put on there..hopefully I can compare a Amiga game and a Atari game to see which is better.. A500 vs. Atari 1040STf
Try Dungeon Master or Chaos Strikes Back, I'm playing CSB on the 1040ST right now. I got my versions from the Dungeon Master/Chaos Strikes Back Encyclopedia site (
http://dmweb.free.fr/). There are zip and msa (an atari ST archive format) versions for download, iirc. You definitely could use a second floppy drive (SF357 is the double-sided double-density version/SF354 does only single-sided dd disks i.e. 360K). Your built in floppy should be a 720K drive. One thing I've found is that the ST floppy drives don't seem to like 720K disks formatted on the Amiga with Crossdos, format your floppies with the ST or on a PC first. DM and CSB seem to be a little less impressive on the ST, though not by much (e.g. there's no map feature for CSB as in the Amiga version).
Overall, hardware-wise the ST seems to be a poor man's 1MB OCS Amiga, using the 68000 cpu and four "custom" chips (glue, mmu, video shifter and dma). It also uses an off the shelf Yamaha sound chip for 3 voice sound and MIDI support (Paula has 4 voice support). A base ST can display up to 512 colors compared to the original Amiga's 4096 in HAM mode (more with the STe, but not even up to snuff with ECS). The gui is the mac-like GEM by Digital Research. I recommend at least TOS version 1.02 ROMs for better gui, floppy access, etc.
The only area I can see the ST was better really is the built in dma port and it's midi ports. The dma port is where you can plug in either an Atari dma SH204 ahdi 'pseudo-scsi' mfm drive or a 3rd party scsi controller and drive. The Amiga needed extra hardware to supply a dma peripheral port and midi.
You can really see the influence of the C64/128 C= hardware in the ST design that Jack Tramiel must have favored from his C= days. The floppy and video monitor ports have round DIN ports, and of course the 'computer in keyboard' look that the A500/600/1200 later used.
I'm starting to like the Amiga and the Atari ST just about the same, they grow on you and seem like long-lost cousins once you get to know them.