Amiga vs Atari - was there any real competition?

[AmiVeteran]

Was there any real threat to Amiga from Atari?

What about the Falcon - as far as I could see it was pretty good.

And who prefers the Amiga over Atari for music?

Does anyone know how good the Amiga would've been with a dsp? How would it have beaten the Falcon?

As far as I can see the Amiga still had more flexible screenmode system, and scalable fonts usable by the OS, whereas Atari had the horrible Gem font all the time.

[Colin_Camper]

Are you nuts!  :-D

The Amiga A500 / Atari ST war was HOT. It was like betamax and vhs and could be the cause of punch-ups in the high street.
Are you too young to remember, dude? :-P

btw - Amiga won the battle, eventually - except in the music industry. Only to be tossed away by Commodore in their lust for making pathetic 386sx PeeCees (Ranc!)

[AmiVeteran]

Lol no I remember the Amiga winning (I'm 27) at the time but it's good to get the outside view on this. Just trying to get the Atari owners out in the open. Before a blast of Operation Thunderbolt hehheh no only jkin

I brought mine into school at the time to show off multitasking Octamed with Deluxe Paint on an A500 in front of everyone, all from floppies.

Eventually i got a kickstart 2.04 ROM and switcher then Super Denise and modded for 1Mb chip RAM. Also had a 1084SD1 monitor and a friend was always teasing me as his cm8833 didn't have burn-in unlike mine which had it on the top right corner (went light green in green screen mode)

Finally I got an A1200 with 80Mb hard disk, midi interface, sampler, blizzard 1230 030 with mmu 50MHz and 8Mb RAM. Alas I remember selling it at the time to get a PC - sold it for £115 I believe. Sold all my music composition floppies with it (grr) as I didn't think the PC would ever read the disks. However only now am I wishing I kept the floppies.

Alas I'm trying to obtain one again though the one I bought on ebay never arrived, so I just have a CM8833 monitor on it's own waiting to be used.

So I remember it well.

However it's easy to think you won when you love the Amiga. Bring back some of the Atari owners.

Also remember on the A1200 using VistaPro creating flypasts of landscapes - using the MMU in the 030 meant it was possible to produce an endless animation as big as the hard disk and rendering time would permit, with overscan. This was done by joining up all the frames into an iff anim file, then playing it back from the workbench screen. This was just neat, and so far I couldn't actually do the same on the PC because the tv-out produces a black border.

I mean I just laughed once when I played a med module at home, went over an Atari ST owners place and he fired up a tracker. Every time he clicked on something the tracker paused slightly, and my hunch was that it was indeed as naff for multitasking as people made out.

However I never saw an STE or Falcon in action so I can't comment on those. So it would be interesting to see if these were any better.

[Calen]

Amiga vs Atari - was there any real competition?

No! :-)

I had and STE for a very short time, it just never grabbed me, personal preference i guess.
Once the Amiga started to get less game ports from the ST,  the Amiga really started to shine.

As for the music side, an extremely cheap midi connector and various great music apps, it was well catered for.

All in all, yeah it was fun times :-)

[Calen]

I mean I just laughed once when I played a med module at home, went over an Atari ST owners place and he fired up a tracker. Every time he clicked on something the tracker paused slightly, and my hunch was that it was indeed as naff for multitasking as people made out.

There may have been a very slight mhz difference on the A500 vs the ST and it may have showed ever so slightly on 1 r 2 games but that would have been all lost once the ST used sampled sounds as it seemed to eat at the CPU cycles.
Paula and the rest of the chipset was indeed unmatched.
IIRC also, hardware scrolling was not available on the ST, unlike the Amiga and C64!

[Hyperspeed]

[HopperJF]

Calen wrote:

I mean I just laughed once when I played a med module at home, went over an Atari ST owners place and he fired up a tracker. Every time he clicked on something the tracker paused slightly, and my hunch was that it was indeed as naff for multitasking as people made out.

There may have been a very slight mhz difference on the A500 vs the ST and it may have showed ever so slightly on 1 r 2 games but that would have been all lost once the ST used sampled sounds as it seemed to eat at the CPU cycles.

Indeed, there was a slight difference with the clock speeds.
The Amiga 500 was actually clocked SLOWER than the ST, as the 68000 Amigas are all clocked at 7.14MHz, and the 68000 Atari machines were at 8MHz.

[HopperJF]

Amiga is a better `open source' community than Linux ever will be.

A very courageous, bold and debatable point there.
Nice one.

[carls]

As far as for the first ST models compared to A500, no, there was no competition. The ST didn't have a blitter and only 16 colours on screen simultaneously. At that time TOS wasn't multitasking and playing modules when using other programs (it could be done using something called "accessories", I think it's kind of like commodities) slowed down the machine.

Later on, Atari modified their ST models to include a blitter and they also released the MEGA STe with a 16MHz 68000. This machine was of course faster than Amiga on vector games and such. I don't think it sold very well though, since it was a "pizza-box" machine, kind of semi-professional, and thus quite expensive.

The ST/TT models didn't have HAM modes, but they could produce something similar using clever programming tricks. There was even a paint program using this graphics mode.

Before getting my A1200, I was kind of interested in getting a Falcon. I never did, because I didn't know anyone who owned an Atari and I didn't know anything about the OS, so I got a second-hand A1200 instead.

However, the Falcon had some impressive specs. Just like the  A1200 it had a built-in hard drive interface. AFAIK it also featured a SCSI connector, the famous MIDI port, the DSP, and newer graphics circuits. I don't beleive The 16MHz 68030  was that much faster than the 14MHz 020 in the A1200, but the Falcon came fitted with 32-bit memory as a standard (C= should have done this with the A1200... grr...)

The graphic modes on the Falcon were much like AGA AFAIK. The truecolor mode couldn't be used in all resolutions like HAM8 on AGA, but in return it was a REAL truecolour mode with no fringing.

I've never owned an Atari, so this is just written from memory of what I've read in magazines, brochures and on the net.

Atari conquered the music market thanks to the MIDI interface, I don't think the DSP made that much of a difference (perhaps it can be used for C2P, but then again  I don't know if the Falcon needs C2P). Amiga conquered the video market so I think the impact on the differnet professional sectors was about equal.

There is a living Atari community: Lately, a 68060 turbo was released, there are several replacement desktops/OSes and new software is being developed. I get the feeling that the remaining Atari community is not as big as the Amiga community, but that might just be because I'm an Amigan :-)

I hope to get hold of a used Falcon one day just to see what it was all about, but currently they seem to be very rare, at least in Sweden.

I noticed a post from an Atari-guy a few days ago, perhaps he could step in and sort things out? I'm sure there are errors in my Atari ramblings :-)

[BoingBoss]

The Atari ST was cooler looking then the Amiga.  Some software was only available for the Atari ST.  The Atari ST had better MIDI software.  The Amiga in general was more powerful then the Atari ST.  I have always had both an Amiga and an Atari ST.  They are great machines.   :-)

[Holley]

The Atari ST was cooler looking then the Amiga

Debateable, the Ataris always looked/felt more serious/sturdy case wise.

The number of programs/games only available for Amiga greatly outnumber those only available for Atari.

I had a 520ST, and wouldn't want one again ... not that it was bad or anything, just felt restrictive.

[that_punk_guy]

OT...

Hyperspeed wrote:
I think it's important for every computer user to learn on a basic
system before going into luxurious machine with unlimited power. I
think it makes you more disciplined and gives a better understanding.

Absolutely.

Although on the other hand some Amiga users seem to use Microsoft's incompetence as an excuse to remain completely ignorant of how Windows works, never to bother learning how to set it up properly, install bad software badly, and blame Bill Gates when it f**ks up.

[seer]

Although on the other hand some Amiga users seem to use Microsoft's incompetence as an excuse to remain completely ignorant of how Windows works

That's not just Amiga users, but computer user in general..

[Roj]

I don't much care for the notion that everyone who touches a computer, no matter the type, is expected to embrace Windows, or worse, actually like using it. Microsoft's incompetence isn't so much an excuse as it is a factor which makes me just not give a damn. I've learned what I know about Windows because I've had to. It doesn't have enough under-the-hood charm and I don't have enough free time to ever want to. I've embraced it as far as I'm willing.

[TjLaZer]

I also own both Atari and Amigas.  I own a Falcon030 and TT030 as well as 520ST, 1040 and Mega STs.  They are not bad machines, but the Amiga is flat out better.  Smoother graphics, better sound, and better quality software when it was not ported over.  But since I owned both platforms I love them both. lol