Amiga 2000HD - VS - Atari Mega4 ST

[Zadoc]

Back in the 8-bit days (C=64 vs Atari 8 bit like the 800XL) I was an avid Atari fan with Commodore being the 'arch-rival'.  Back in those days the comparisons/competitions were close between the two machines.

When the 16-bit giants entered I balked at the Atari's offering...the Amiga wiped the floor with it.  Undeniable to even a devout Atari fan (and C= basher, back then) like myself.

The OSes, as mentioned, were worlds apart in fluidity with TOS being a kludgey, non-multitasking nightmare compared to Workbench.

The Amiga's OCS/ECS chipsets delivered rich 4,096 color HAM graphics as opposed to the ST's feeble 16.

The only advantage the ST had in my opinion was the inexpensive 1040 and 520 ST models which were (at least before the release of the Amiga 500) far cheaper than the A1000.

Arguably, this made those little machines ideal for the music field, being inexpensive and coming with MIDI as standard ports.

The MegaST was Atari's attempt at big boxing these machines, and in my opinion, was not anywhere near as usefull as the A2000 was at it's time (which in a sense, was a big box version of the A500).

The higher clockrate (8MHz vs the A500/A2000's 7.14MHz) 68000 did little to improve software performance.

Finally, the A2000 is a far more expandable machine as well.  If you really juiced it out, you could have an 060, SCSI, graphics card, ethernet, and even USB onboard.  I'd like to see an Atari MegaST come anywhere close to those specs...even the Atari Falcon only made it to the 030 cpu, and I think only the ST clone Hades is the only 060 based Atari compatible out there.  Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know a heck of alot about the ST line of Atari computers.

[Zadoc]

Is it possible to emulate an Atari ST on Amiga?

Yes...but I've had no luck so far with any of the emulators I've tried due to the fact that aside from the Falcon series (and Hades 060 clones) the Atari ST line never made it past the 68000 cpu - where as an accelerated Amiga chokes either the emulators or the TOS (I can't recall which is the case).

Even trying to get the ST Emulators to run under UAE as a plain A500 I've had no luck.

There were also a few hardware based ST emulators if I remember correctly too, but these probably would be really difficult to find secondhand.

[Zadoc]

The games between the ST and Amiga were comparable and similar.

This is partly because when the ST and the Amiga first hit the market, games were usually written on the ST and then ported to the Amiga.

The Amiga's graphics capabilities were far better than what the ST could produce.  Had the games been coded specifically for each machine, we'd have seen a greater difference.

Back to expandability again, another Atari ST shortcoming was a barrier of 4Mb of RAM on the 520/1040ST as opposed to the 8Mb possible on the A500...Not that many games ever tackled that much RAM, but another superiority in the Amiga's corner.

[Zadoc]

With a bit of hacking you could get 2MB chip 8 fast and ~1.8 slow, summing
up to nearly 12MB (with the standard 68000).

Well, I did mean with a memory expansion.  My GVP SCSI sidecar has some SIMM slots in it that accomodates up to 8Mb.

I haven't heard of a possible way to expand a 520/1040 ST (comparible to the A500's case) past 4Mb.