Amiga vs Atari
Alkis Polyrakis
you remember the old fight of the 80s between Amiga and Atari ST users?
Those were the days... Well I'm an Amiga user, and I had never seen an
Atari in my life. I'm thinking of making a Kick off 2 section in my
homepage, so I downloaded an Atari ST emulator (among others) in order
to get some screenshots (don't worry, I deleted it now) from the ST
version. I couldn't resist the temptation to download some games and see
what the machine was all about... I was surprised to find a bunch of
games inferior to the Amiga versions! Even the audio performance, of
which I had heard so much about, was slightly better than the one of a
Commodore 64!
So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of the Atari
ST?
Ok, let's start talking about the old argument again.. :) I'm not trying
to start a flame war, just a polite conversation.
--
'I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian'
Polyrakis Alkis
University of Patra, Greece
Electrical engineering department
ICQ #: 10123551
URL: http://i.am/alkis
(Click on the English flag if you're not Greek)
Henk Robbers
>> Ok, let's start talking about the old argument again.. :) I'm not trying
> to start a flame war, just a polite conversation.
>
Strange, I always thought that you could only play games on Amiga, but of course
I have never seen a Amiga in my life.
Please get youself a PC, they're uncomparable.
--
Groeten; Regards.
Henk Robbers.
http://people.A2000.nl/hrobbers/Homepage.html
Interactive disassembler: TT-Digger; Experimental text editor: AHCX
Chris Lennard
> I have never seen a Amiga in my life.
(spit) PC was still a glorified typing machine? (And still is)
> Please get youself a PC, they're uncomparable.
that is fundamentally flawed and filled with the over-priced and
poorly written dross thrown out by those crooks at Microsoft.
I'd even rather have a Mac than buy a PC knowing that Bill Gates and
Intel are laughing at me knowing that what Ive just bought is ALREADY
out of date and will crash on me every time you try to do anything.
>>
Anyway, back to the topic in hand, the whole Amiga/Atari thing
fascinated me at the time and in some ways still does. In fact Im
trying to buy an ST despite the fact Im an Amiga user but I did borrow
one once and Ive played on them extensively at friend's houses whereas
I always ran on Amigas in my house.
The point being is that both machines have their virtues. The ST in
its favour was smaller than the Amiga (all comparisons are made with
the A500 naturally although I welcome a Falcon/A1200 debate but I know
nothing about the Falcon about from its hardware configuration) it had
a attractive layout, it didn't have an exterior power pack-just a
normal kettle plug, it also didn't need an add-on to plug into a TV
unlike the 500. And of course it also had a built in GUI whereas for
the Amiga you have to insert Workbench.
However, the ST had its mouse/joysticks port in a ridiculous place
down below - meaning you had to lift up the thing each time you wanted
to play two player and the plugs were upside down! That and every game
took AGES to load in comparison to the Amiga. Plus the ST wouldn't
always read double density disks I think the STE did or something.
Yes in some respects the ST was closer to a C64 than the Amiga in
terms of performance. The Amiga was definitely the more
technologicaly advanced machine. As far as games are concerned though
it seems that the older the games the better as they are less
different. Most early nineties games are clearly better on the Amiga
than the ST whereas late eighties stuff is about the same. Games that
I know are better on the ST though are few, but R-Type for one was a
way better arcade conversion but that was down to Factor 5 being a bit
lame. (Although they got better later with Turrican)
By the way Alkis your ST emulator, I take its a ST emulator for the
(spit) PC if its for the Amiga any chance I could have a copy for
obvious reasons?
George Crissman
people who think "PC" means "clones of the IBM
personal computer", because when they ask if
our machine is "compatible" we can say "Oh no,
ours is a REAL computer."
These are the same people who think "Megahertz"
means "power", ignoring the concepts of "hardware
efficiency" and "software efficiency".
Besides ... the Amiga was originally developed
for Atari as the ultimate game system and only
wound up at Commodore during some last-minute
shenanigans. Honestly, you should put an Atari
logo on your Amiga.
George Crissman
str...@tmisnet.com
On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 02:04:26 +0200, Alkis Polyrakis
<alk...@mail.otenet.gr> wrote:
>I apologize for the crosspost, but this concerns both of the groups. Do
>you remember the old fight of the 80s between Amiga and Atari ST users?
>Those were the days... Well I'm an Amiga user, and I had never seen an
>Atari in my life. I'm thinking of making a Kick off 2 section in my
>homepage, so I downloaded an Atari ST emulator (among others) in order
>to get some screenshots (don't worry, I deleted it now) from the ST
>version. I couldn't resist the temptation to download some games and see
>what the machine was all about... I was surprised to find a bunch of
>games inferior to the Amiga versions! Even the audio performance, of
>which I had heard so much about, was slightly better than the one of a
>Commodore 64!
>So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of the Atari
>ST?
>Ok, let's start talking about the old argument again.. :) I'm not trying
>to start a flame war, just a polite conversation.
>
>
Stephan Neise
wrote:
>Alas, it's more fun to chat with narrow-minded
>people who think "PC" means "clones of the IBM
>personal computer", because when they ask if
>our machine is "compatible" we can say "Oh no,
>ours is a REAL computer."
>
>These are the same people who think "Megahertz"
>means "power", ignoring the concepts of "hardware
>efficiency" and "software efficiency".
>
>Besides ... the Amiga was originally developed
>for Atari as the ultimate game system and only
Jay Miner designed some 8 Bit computers at Atari and that's the only
thing Amiga and Atari have in common. Amiga Inc. was an independent
company. When they got into financial trouble Commodore bought them
for $4.25 a share while Atari's Tramiel offered them 98 cents....
>wound up at Commodore during some last-minute
>shenanigans. Honestly, you should put an Atari
>logo on your Amiga.
No, thanks.
r...@mailandnews.com
Neise) wrote:
>On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 17:40:57 GMT, str...@tmisnet.com (George Crissman)
>wrote:
>
>>Alas, it's more fun to chat with narrow-minded
>>people who think "PC" means "clones of the IBM
>>personal computer", because when they ask if
>>our machine is "compatible" we can say "Oh no,
>>ours is a REAL computer."
>>
>>These are the same people who think "Megahertz"
>>means "power", ignoring the concepts of "hardware
>>efficiency" and "software efficiency".
>>
>>Besides ... the Amiga was originally developed
>>for Atari as the ultimate game system and only
>
>Jay Miner designed some 8 Bit computers at Atari and that's the only
>thing Amiga and Atari have in common. Amiga Inc. was an independent
>company. When they got into financial trouble Commodore bought them
>for $4.25 a share while Atari's Tramiel offered them 98 cents....
If Atari, aka Tramiel hadn't been so arrogant Atari would have owned
Amiga. Basically Atari loaned Amiga some money at some point, when
the loan was nearly due Amiga talked to Atari about just buying them
out, but instead of trying to compromise and negotiate in good faith
on the price Tramiel offered a ridiculously low price. So Amiga wound
up talking to Commodore and the rest is history.
>>wound up at Commodore during some last-minute
>>shenanigans. Honestly, you should put an Atari
>>logo on your Amiga.
>
>No, thanks.
Yeah, I agree. From what I read somewhere, Atari only wanted the
Amiga for the chipset.
Troed
>Yeah, I agree. From what I read somewhere, Atari only wanted the
>Amiga for the chipset.
... lucky for us democoders they didn't get it :) The most fun I had
on the atari was to get around the limitations in the hardware. Many
of my Amiga friends turned to me when they needed weird 68k
optimizations, and they were stunned when they learned about how we
removed the borders and did syncscrolling (aka hardware scrolling) on
a machine that wasn't supposed to be able to do it.
Eventually two members of Sync became Amiga owners, and one even
joined an Amiga demo group. Two different machines for different
tastes, I would gladly have owned an Amiga myself too.
Red Fox / Sync
Nicholas Bales
Alkis Polyrakis <alk...@mail.otenet.gr> a écrit dans le message :
38D56B0...@mail.otenet.gr...
> I apologize for the crosspost, but this concerns both of the groups. Do
> you remember the old fight of the 80s between Amiga and Atari ST users?
> Those were the days... Well I'm an Amiga user, and I had never seen an
> Atari in my life. I'm thinking of making a Kick off 2 section in my
> homepage, so I downloaded an Atari ST emulator (among others) in order
> to get some screenshots (don't worry, I deleted it now) from the ST
> version. I couldn't resist the temptation to download some games and see
> what the machine was all about... I was surprised to find a bunch of
> games inferior to the Amiga versions! Even the audio performance, of
> which I had heard so much about, was slightly better than the one of a
> Commodore 64!
The Amiga had a slightly better graphics chip than the Atari, and the
Atari's sound chip was CRAP from the start. It was the same Yamaha chip as
the Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum, and yes, no better than the SID chip in the
C64.
This was improved with the STE a couple of years later, which had stereo DMA
sound and a slightly improved graphics chip. Nevertheless, this was too
little too late, and the majority of developers kept on writing games for
the 520STF because of the larger market.
So, in a sense, I beleive the Amiga was a slightly better machine for games,
but the Atari had a better offering of serious software, especially in DTP
and MIDI, mainly because of the fantastic monochrome display (no Amiga could
ever get close to the comfort of that screen) and the famous MIDI ports.
> So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of the Atari
> ST?
You've obviously never played Dungeon Master :-)
Seriously, speaking for myself, the Atari was 1000F (100UKP) cheaper than
the Amiga, which meant that it sold better and most games were pretty much
the same.
> Ok, let's start talking about the old argument again.. :) I'm not trying
> to start a flame war, just a polite conversation.
Nevermind, it'll end up as a flame war in a couple of seconds! ;-)
--
||| Nicholas Bales, Toulouse, France
===|||==============================================
/ | \ The Atari ST Quick FAQ bales@
-' ' `- http://bales.online.fr/atari online.fr
Iggy Drougge
: I apologize for the crosspost, but this concerns both of the groups. Do
: you remember the old fight of the 80s between Amiga and Atari ST users?
: Those were the days... Well I'm an Amiga user, and I had never seen an
: Atari in my life. I'm thinking of making a Kick off 2 section in my
: homepage, so I downloaded an Atari ST emulator (among others) in order
: to get some screenshots (don't worry, I deleted it now) from the ST
: version. I couldn't resist the temptation to download some games and see
: what the machine was all about... I was surprised to find a bunch of
: games inferior to the Amiga versions! Even the audio performance, of
: which I had heard so much about, was slightly better than the one of a
: Commodore 64!
Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the C64. Its
waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are four types in the SID
chip.
What ade the Atari renowned for audio uses was its MIDI hard and software,
not the poor Yamaha chip.
--
/Iggy, the irregular regular
Alkis Polyrakis
Chris Lennard wrote:
> Anyway, back to the topic in hand, the whole Amiga/Atari thing
> fascinated me at the time and in some ways still does.
(Interesting info snipped)
Very interesting summary, Chris.
> By the way Alkis your ST emulator, I take its a ST emulator for the
> (spit) PC if its for the Amiga any chance I could have a copy for
> obvious reasons?
I checked again, and the only ones available were for DOS, Windows, Unix
and Mac. Perhaps you should ask at the (real) amiga emulation newsgroup.
Alkis Polyrakis
Nicholas Bales wrote:
> The Amiga had a slightly better graphics chip than the Atari, and the
> Atari's sound chip was CRAP from the start. It was the same Yamaha chip as
> the Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum, and yes, no better than the SID chip in the
> C64.
>
> This was improved with the STE a couple of years later, which had stereo DMA
> sound and a slightly improved graphics chip. Nevertheless, this was too
> little too late, and the majority of developers kept on writing games for
> the 520STF because of the larger market.
I see.. So it was the STE I had heard about after all.
>
> So, in a sense, I beleive the Amiga was a slightly better machine for games,
> but the Atari had a better offering of serious software, especially in DTP
> and MIDI, mainly because of the fantastic monochrome display (no Amiga could
> ever get close to the comfort of that screen) and the famous MIDI ports.
All this changed of course when more powerful Amigas were produced.
>
> > So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of the Atari
> > ST?
>
> You've obviously never played Dungeon Master :-)
I'm not into RPGs..
>
> Seriously, speaking for myself, the Atari was 1000F (100UKP) cheaper than
> the Amiga, which meant that it sold better and most games were pretty much
> the same.
I still don't think they were the same, but anyway.. The price was a
plus indeed.
>
> > Ok, let's start talking about the old argument again.. :) I'm not trying
> > to start a flame war, just a polite conversation.
>
> Nevermind, it'll end up as a flame war in a couple of seconds! ;-)
Nahhh.. We are more mature than PC & Playstation users will ever be!
Pera Putnik
Alkis Polyrakis <alk...@mail.otenet.gr> wrote in message
news:38D56B0...@mail.otenet.gr...
> I apologize for the crosspost, but this concerns both of the groups. Do
> you remember the old fight of the 80s between Amiga and Atari ST users?
Ah, what beatiful bruises I get then... :-)
PP
Pera Putnik
Nicholas Bales <ba...@online.fr> wrote in message
news:HcxB4.809$EL3.3...@nnrp1.proxad.net...
>...
I agree with your technical opinions..
> You've obviously never played Dungeon Master :-)
Dungeon Master was converted to Amiga and PC too...
But 'Chaos strikes back' not, as I know.
PP
Nicholas Bales
>
>
> Nicholas Bales wrote:
>
> > The Amiga had a slightly better graphics chip than the Atari, and the
> > Atari's sound chip was CRAP from the start. It was the same Yamaha chip
as
> > the Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum, and yes, no better than the SID chip in
the
> > C64.
> >
> > This was improved with the STE a couple of years later, which had stereo
DMA
> > sound and a slightly improved graphics chip. Nevertheless, this was too
> > little too late, and the majority of developers kept on writing games
for
> > the 520STF because of the larger market.
>
> I see.. So it was the STE I had heard about after all.
>
> >
> > So, in a sense, I beleive the Amiga was a slightly better machine for
games,
> > but the Atari had a better offering of serious software, especially in
DTP
> > and MIDI, mainly because of the fantastic monochrome display (no Amiga
could
> > ever get close to the comfort of that screen) and the famous MIDI ports.
>
> All this changed of course when more powerful Amigas were produced.
At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already launched the
Falcon which is uncomparably better. The Falcon has on board SCSI and IDE,
030 at 16MHz, a DSP and a Videl chip with support for VGA, RGB and mono
monitors.
>
> >
> > > So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of the Atari
> > > ST?
> >
> > You've obviously never played Dungeon Master :-)
>
> I'm not into RPGs..
Your loss. Platformers and shoot'em ups were not my cup of tea. I agree, the
Amiga was better at those games. That doesn't make it a better computer.
> >
> > Seriously, speaking for myself, the Atari was 1000F (100UKP) cheaper
than
> > the Amiga, which meant that it sold better and most games were pretty
much
> > the same.
>
> I still don't think they were the same, but anyway.. The price was a
> plus indeed.
They were mostly the same. Sound was usually better on the Amiga, but most
of the games were designed on the ST and ported to the Amiga with no special
routines.
Petteri Valli
> > All this changed of course when more powerful Amigas were produced.
> At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already launched the
> Falcon which is uncomparably better. The Falcon has on board SCSI and IDE,
> 030 at 16MHz, a DSP and a Videl chip with support for VGA, RGB and mono
> monitors.
It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_ A1200, but
Atari's have always suffered from bad OS. AmigaOS runs circles around the
Atari's OS(es) and makes Amiga therefore better for serious use.
And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for VGA and RGB, SCSI
etc before Falcons ;)
Trizt
Alkis Polyrakis wrote:
> > By the way Alkis your ST emulator, I take its a ST emulator for the
> > (spit) PC if its for the Amiga any chance I could have a copy for
> > obvious reasons?
> I checked again, and the only ones available were for DOS, Windows, Unix
> and Mac. Perhaps you should ask at the (real) amiga emulation newsgroup.
Ain't there one in AmiNet?
Atleast I had once a ST emulator, but never had the rom, so I couldn't use it.
//Trizt
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: tr...@iname.com URL: http://home.bip.net/trizt/
IRC: lib.hel.fi:6667 Chan: #linux Nick: Trizt
ICQ: 13696780
System: Siamese System AmiOS/qDos+ (MC68040/25 PPC603e/160 AMD K6-3/400)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trizt
Nicholas Bales wrote:
> > > So, in a sense, I beleive the Amiga was a slightly better machine for
> > > games,
> > > but the Atari had a better offering of serious software, especially in
> > > DTP
> > > and MIDI, mainly because of the fantastic monochrome display (no Amiga
> > > could
> > > ever get close to the comfort of that screen) and the famous MIDI ports.
> > All this changed of course when more powerful Amigas were produced.
> At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already launched the
> Falcon which is uncomparably better. The Falcon has on board SCSI and IDE,
> 030 at 16MHz, a DSP and a Videl chip with support for VGA, RGB and mono
> monitors.
There was two problems with the Falcon, no where to buy it, no software for it.
There was alot more software for the A1200 when it came you got a bounche of
software which was adpated to it.
ehaines
Actually much better, too bad Amigans got stuck with so many 16-
color Atari ports which used jerky software scrolling and slow
software "sprites". Fortunately that died off after a few years.
>> So am I missing something here? Which games were the best of
the Atari
>> ST?
>
>You've obviously never played Dungeon Master :-)
Which the Amiga version beat the pants off of, thanks to the
extra (stereo) sounds. ;)
>Nevermind, it'll end up as a flame war in a couple of seconds!
;-)
Heh, I used to first have C64/Atari 8-bit arguments with a
cousin of mine, which later turned into Amiga/ST arguments.
--Eric
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Nicholas Bales
Petteri Valli <pva...@paju.oulu.fi> a écrit dans le message :
8b7ff3$oni$1...@ousrvr3.oulu.fi...
>
> > At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already launched the
> > Falcon which is uncomparably better. The Falcon has on board SCSI and
IDE,
> > 030 at 16MHz, a DSP and a Videl chip with support for VGA, RGB and mono
> > monitors.
>
> Atari's have always suffered from bad OS. AmigaOS runs circles around the
> Atari's OS(es) and makes Amiga therefore better for serious use.
I don't think the one is better than the other for serious use. The main
advantage of the Amiga was multitasking, which was a moot point in 1988 with
512K RAM (when I was on the market for a new computer).
It seems to me that in the Atari was quite widely used on it's own niche
markets (DTP and MIDI), just like the Amiga in Video.
Nowadays Atari has quite a large offering of OSs, with TOS, MiNT or MagiC
(or Linux of course), with features comparable to the Amiga OS.
> And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for VGA and RGB, SCSI
> etc before Falcons ;)
The TT had an 030 at 32MHz, SCSI, VME, LAN, MIDI, no VGA but support for
256Mb RAM, before the A3000 ;-)
At least the Atari clones are actually in production ;-)
Seriously, the systems were all pretty much comparable. Neither one is
better or worse than the other. Both have some great communities, which is
what sets them apart from today's PC or Mac world.
Methinks this thread, posted to both amiga and atari newsgroups was a bit of
a troll. It should actually be directed to the advocacy newsgroups.
Mike Clarke
> But 'Chaos strikes back' not, as I know.
Yes it was and was published by Psygnosis.
--
Mike Clarke Music (UK)
mi...@popstar.com
0151-639 7581
Mike Clarke
> The Amiga had a slightly better graphics chip than the Atari, and the
> Atari's sound chip was CRAP from the start. It was the same Yamaha chip as
> the Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum, and yes, no better than the SID chip in
the
> C64.
This chip was actually designed by Yamaha for use as a doorbell chime. Now
there's your seal of quality! And the Amiga's graphics was far in advance of
the STs. The ST was just a bitmap display with only 3 resolutions wasn't it?
No other hardware graphics support.
Angus Manwaring
>>The Amiga had a slightly better graphics chip than the Atari
>>Nevermind, it'll end up as a flame war in a couple of seconds!
>;-)
>Heh, I used to first have C64/Atari 8-bit arguments with a
>cousin of mine, which later turned into Amiga/ST arguments.
Specky, Specky, Specky!!!!!
:) Sorry,I don't know why I said that, I was a C64 user myself.
All the best,
Angus Manwaring. (for e-mail remove ANTISPEM)
I need your memories for the Amiga Games Database: A collection of Amiga
Game reviews by Amiga players http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/AGDB.html
Andy Blakely
> And it shows! Ever realised that the Amiga was multitasking whilst the
> (spit) PC was still a glorified typing machine? (And still is)
> > Please get youself a PC, they're uncomparable.
> Oh perlease you think anyone in their right mind would buy a platform
> that is fundamentally flawed and filled with the over-priced and
> poorly written dross thrown out by those crooks at Microsoft.
> I'd even rather have a Mac than buy a PC knowing that Bill Gates and
> Intel are laughing at me knowing that what Ive just bought is ALREADY
> out of date and will crash on me every time you try to do anything.
Yes, the PC was just a glorified typing machine. But it's not even
close to that now. It seems evident that you're speaking out of hatred
for PCs and/or people who choose them, and not out of knowledge. I'm
not promoting PCs, but had to point out your error. No computer has to
have Microsoft products running on it, nor Intel. There are many good
alternatives to MSDOS & MSWindows operating systems, including BeOS,
Linux, FreeDOS, and I know there's more but can't remember them right
now. Intel makes the Pentium and Celeron processors, but there are
several alternatives to those also. Like AMD, WinChip, and Cyrix. I
personally try to stay away from the mainstream overpriced stuff. I
have 2 Atari computers, but I'm interested in *ALL* systems. I don't
know why, but I do love my Ataris. Probably the same reason the Amiga
group loves their Amigas! I think it's cool that we've had diversity in
computers, which has led to competition and the growth of the computer
industry. I'll never understand why people let their love for a
particular machine create anger and hatred towards fellow mankind.
(note - I'm not directing this at you - just a general observation).
Just my 2 cents.
Happy computing to everyone!
Andy Blakely
Even Sandvik Underlid
>> etc before Falcons ;)
>The TT had an 030 at 32MHz, SCSI, VME, LAN, MIDI, no VGA but support for
>256Mb RAM, before the A3000 ;-)
>At least the Atari clones are actually in production ;-)
You know, one thing I've thought of is if the Milan could run AmigaOS with
some small modifications in the OS. After all, AmigaOS runs on the Draco,
an Amiga clone which lacks the custom chip set ... If so, it might give the
Boxer (Amiga clone due out "soon" for you Atari fans) some competetion.
Maybe the Boxer could be modified to be the ultimate Atari clone as well? :)
--
Even Sandvik Underlid
Martin-Éric Racine
> In comp.sys.amiga.games Nicholas Bales <ba...@online.fr> wrote:
>
> > At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already
> > launched the Falcon which is uncomparably better.
>
> It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_
> A1200, but Atari's have always suffered from bad OS.
How so? TOS has always been rock-solid and built-in on ROM.
> AmigaOS runs circles around the Atari's OS(es) and makes
> Amiga therefore better for serious use.
And MiNT matches or beats AmigaOS on most things (although, when
Atari was involved, it wasn't half as developped as it is now).
> And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for VGA
> and RGB, SCSI etc before Falcons ;)
...and came out after the TT, as I recall.
--
Martin-Éric Racine http://funkyware.atari.org/ Atari TT030 FAQ
Lappeenranta, Finland. Surfing on a Intel/Microsoft-free GEM OS
Martin-Éric Racine
> There was two problems with the Falcon, no where to buy it,
> no software for it.
Here, I have to agree. Except for Germany and UK, Falcons were
rather hard-to-find. When I still lived in Canada, many people
waited forever for one and never got it. Blame the Tramiels.
Martin-Éric Racine
> > And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for
> > VGA and RGB, SCSI etc before Falcons ;)
>
> The TT had an 030 at 32MHz, SCSI, VME, LAN, MIDI, no VGA but
> support for 256Mb RAM, before the A3000 ;-)
I'm gonna have to stick a sock in your mouth on this one! ;-) The
TT does VGA just fine, without any extra graphic card. Beleive me
I know: I am using one right now as I'm writing this e-mail.
And yes, it _did_ come out before the A3000.
Alkis Polyrakis
Nicholas Bales wrote:
> > I'm not into RPGs..
>
> Your loss. Platformers and shoot'em ups were not my cup of tea.
I don't mind a good platformer or shoot'em up once in a while, but I
prefer adventure games.
Chris Cracknell
>Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the C64. Its
>waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are four types in the SID
>chip.
>What ade the Atari renowned for audio uses was its MIDI hard and software,
>not the poor Yamaha chip.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
Yepper, I can concure with this. One of the main reasons I wanted the C-64
was because of the SID chip. At the time I got my C-64 MIDI meant lunch
in a french restraunt but the SID chip was all the rave. I can remember
music magazines proclaiming it was better than most synths of that day.
I moved from the C-64 to the ST because of the built in MIDI ports and
the increadably MIDI software for the machine plus the rock solid operating
system on ROM.
At the time I worked in a computer retail store and we sold Amigas and Atari
STs. While the Amiga was quite superior in terms of graphics the ST had the
edge in MIDI software, and I absolutely hated the Amiga's operating system
because it was constantly dishing out the "Guru Meditation Errors" like
a pez dispenser. The Amiga had a pretty good sound chip (the sound system
in the beastie was basically an Ensoniq Mirage) and the only other
thing apart from the sound and the graphics that I liked about the Amiga
(and there was only one model of Amiga at this time too. No Amiga 500 or 2000,
just the 1000) was the look of the machine itself. I really wish that Atari
had gone with a detachable keyboard for the ST like they did later with the
MEGA STs. (although without the stupid joystick ports on the keyboard.
That was just idiocy) and I wish the STs had a better keyboard period.
The thing was like typing on foam rubber. The three best keyboards I've
ever felt were the original Mac Plus keyboard, the TI-99/4a keyboard
and the C-64 keyboard. I liked them better than even the PC keyboard.
The Atari ST had a pitiful keyboard on it.
It was funny because I remember seeing a lot of switch over between
Commodore and Atari when they both released their 16/32 bit machines.
A lot of people who bought 8-bit Ataris because of the superior
graphics bought Amigas for the same reason, and a lot of the people
who bought C-64s because of the superior music applications bought
Atari STs for the same reason.
CRACKERS
(Still using an ST for all my MIDI work from hell!!)
--
Collector of Atari 2600 carts - Accordionist - Bira Bira Devotee - Anime fan
* http://www.hwcn.org/~ad329/crab.html | Crackers' Arts Base *
* http://www.angelfire.com/ma/hozervideo/index.html | Hozer Video Games *
Nihongo ga dekimasu - 2600 programmer - Father of 2 great kids - Canadian eh
Joona I Palaste
on comp.sys.amiga.games:
: Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the C64. Its
: waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are four types in the SID
: chip.
: What ade the Atari renowned for audio uses was its MIDI hard and software,
: not the poor Yamaha chip.
Iggy, where have you been? Why aren't you on ATT any more?
I have never used the Atari myself, but seeing how good the C64's audio
was, I wouldn't be surprised if it was superior to the Atari's.
--
/-- Joona Palaste (pal...@cc.helsinki.fi) ---------------------------\
| Kingpriest of "The Flying Lemon Tree" G++ FR FW+ M- #80 D+ ADA N+++ |
| http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste W++ B OP+ |
\----------------------------------------- Finland rules! ------------/
"Outside a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark
to read anyway."
- Groucho Marx
Martin-Éric Racine
> Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the
> C64. Its waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are
> four types in the SID chip.
You have no experience whatsoever of FM sythesizer programming,
do you? That chip inside an Atari is essentialy a Yamaha DX9
synthesizer on a chip. Anyone familiar with FM programming will
know that even a basic 4-operator chipset can produce a rather
good variety of sounds.
Chris Lennard
troll - were all much older and wiser now than we were back then when
the debate was relevant. Besides you should try the CPC/C64 debate
thats just as good.
However all this begs the question: Who were the bigger idiots
Commodore or Atari? Both died miserably thanks to some pathetic
mistakes leaving us with the awful (spit)PC/Mac homogeny that we have
today. Both the Falcon and the A1200 failed to have the same success
as the ST and A500 before them, the STE and the A600 were not enough
of a departure from them either, the CDTV and the Lynx failed and
both the CD32 and the Jaguar64 were the last nails in both companies.
Opinions please! I personally think they were about as hopeless as
each other with maybe Commodore just nudging out as the worst. All the
more shame as four platforms would be so much better than 2.
(One if you're honest)
Chris Lennard
off completely any element of diversity. The diversity of the eighties
and the early nineties was for me so much more interesting, it was
like each platform was like a football team you support, something
you'd defend. Im not advocating hatred, but Ill admit I was furious
when everybody abandoned their 16bits for the PC. It was sad really,
watching everything that had been there before disappear. Yeah if I
got a PC myself (Although I suspect Id plumb for a Mac) I would
probably get an AMD K7 with a Linux OS just to stick two fingers at
that monster Bill Gates who should be tried for crimes against
humanity. Can you imagine just how much this man has held computers
back with his inferior products?
I myself do appreciate all platforms for their respective virtues
Atari,Commodore,Amstrad and Spectrum, in fact I personally wouldn't
mind knowing more about Atari's products: When was the ST released?
And whats the TT? And the Mega ST? And the differences between the
STE? And the 1024ST? Did Atari make any other consoles apart from the
Lynx (Which I liked) and the Jaguar64 (which apparently wasn't truly
64 bit). And I take it there was an Atari 8bit computer to rival the
C64 and CPC?Is this an Atari XL?
Answers please!
And yes happy computing to everyone.
Richard Rives
I got my Atari (Stacy & Falcon) to do midi work and the only top midi
program for the Amiga that I knew was Barrs & Pipes which was gobbled by
Microsoft.
Rich
> Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the C64. Its
> waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are four types in the SID
> chip.
> What ade the Atari renowned for audio uses was its MIDI hard and software,
> not the poor Yamaha chip.
>
Chris Cracknell
>On 2000-3-21, Petteri Valli <pva...@paju.oulu.fi> wrote:
>> It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_
>> A1200, but Atari's have always suffered from bad OS.
>
>How so? TOS has always been rock-solid and built-in on ROM.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
I'd like to hear the explanation for that one too. I felt that GEM was
much better than Work Bench, and TOS was certainly more stable than the
Amiga's operating system. The only time I've ever had something crash on
me was if the disk itself became physically corrupted.
Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
crashed a lot.
CRACKERS
(Still love my ST operating system from hell!!)
Joachim Froholt
Chris Cracknell wrote:
> In article <Pine.MNT.4.10.10003220014140.73-100000@rakas>, you wrote:
> >On 2000-3-21, Petteri Valli <pva...@paju.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
> >> It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_
> >> A1200, but Atari's have always suffered from bad OS.
> >
> >How so? TOS has always been rock-solid and built-in on ROM.
> ~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
>
> I'd like to hear the explanation for that one too. I felt that GEM was
> much better than Work Bench, and TOS was certainly more stable than the
> Amiga's operating system. The only time I've ever had something crash on
> me was if the disk itself became physically corrupted.
>
> Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
> of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways.
I don't know about the Amiga 1000, but in my experience (A600, A1200 - later with
030/50), Amiga's have multitasked very well. The only problem is if you forget to
pause a game as you change screens.... I also liked impressing people with screen
dragging.
> It was slow and crashed a lot.
The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga and it's OS have
come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5 was released last year, btw).
--
Joachim Froholt
ICQ: 52425516
Martin-Éric Racine
> > It was slow and crashed a lot.
>
> The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga
> and it's OS have come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5
> was released last year, btw).
Funny that Amiga users always take the original TOS 1.00 ST as a
reference when trying to justify why Amiga might be better, but
do not accept that Atari users compare a Milan to an A1000.
John Selck
> > Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the
> > C64. Its waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are
> > four types in the SID chip.
>
> do you? That chip inside an Atari is essentialy a Yamaha DX9
> synthesizer on a chip. Anyone familiar with FM programming will
> know that even a basic 4-operator chipset can produce a rather
> good variety of sounds.
still, the SID's sound is a lot better, not only due to the
different waveforms, it also features ringmodulation and a
configureable analogue filter which can operate at different
frequencies and as low/band/high-pass filter.
did you know that kb/elitegroup did some 303-like synth stuff
on sid? very nice...
Graham.
John Selck
> > The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga
> > and it's OS have come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5
> > was released last year, btw).
>
> Funny that Amiga users always take the original TOS 1.00 ST as a
> reference when trying to justify why Amiga might be better, but
> do not accept that Atari users compare a Milan to an A1000.
so what do you prefer to compare?
i would assume this as being fair:
Amiga 1200 - Falcon 030
the gfx hardware:
both machines have bitplane modes up to 8 planes, the amiga
is much more flexible here, allowing anything from 1 to 8
planes, while the falcon only allows 1, 2, 4 and 8. the falcon
still has no scroll registers and has a hard deal moving all
8 bitplanes.
also annoying is that the falcon only allows 6 bits per color
gun in the palette while the a1200 allows all 8 bits, so the
total amount of displayable colors on the falcon is max 262144
and on the a1200 it's 16777216.
both machines offer a special graphic mode which is different
to that bitplane stuff. the amiga offers the HAM mode which
has a lot of color restrictions and is only useful to display
pictures. the falcon has the 65536 color mode which is very
nice but also has a heavy dma load.
at the time i was very annoyed that the amiga 1200 didn't offer
a hicolor mode as the falcon, but you can "fake" a similar
mode with ham so you get a 262144 color mode.
for the special hardware features the amiga offers some things.
first there are the sprites. sometimes they are nice but mostly
you can forget about them.
what the falcon (and also todays PCs) really lacks is the copper.
with this small processor you can configure your display freely
without using interrupts and similar hacked stuff which mostly
kills different machines.
the blitter:
the blitter of the falcon is still a joke, nothing compared to
the very flexible blitter of the amiga. the only things it
can do is to copy memory and fill memory...
the amiga's blitter is much more useful, it has 3 sources
and 1 destination, a lot of masking registers, a not-so-very
useful fillmode and is able to draw lines to bitplanes very
fast.
well, the blitter is not of use that much since both computers
have fast enough processors.
while we are at it: the processors.
the falcon has a 68030 running at 16 MHz, the 1200 has a
68020 at 14.xx MHz. the difference between 020 to 030 is
very small, all opcodes execute as fast on 020 as they do
on 030, the data cache of the 030 is only of use with
very fast ram which neither the 1200 nor the falcon has,
so here it's almost equal... almost, if the 1200 didn't
have support for 32 bit ram. okay, in most cases you had
to buy a small memory card but it was worth it. the 1200
nearly got 4 times as fast as without fastram, without
processor upgrade. i have heard of fastram cards for
falcon, but at the time i owned a falcon no programmer
had taken notice.
the OS:
atari has put two os's to the falcon package: TOS and MultiTOS.
the amiga comes with AmigaOS 3.0.
i'm sorry to say this but here the amiga definitely kicks the
falcons butt. TOS is a weak attemp of doing a graphical os and
lacks multitasking, multitos doesn't lack multitasking but is
still a very weak attemp.
amigaos 3.0 has a lot of features even linux or windows still
dream of like true datatypes, localization support etc.
what i didn't talk about yet was the falcon's dsp. a (for that
time) very fast processor without a proper memory interface.
it carries 56K of memory, but is a bit difficult to reach from
the 030's side of view. you can do some demos with it, but in
every days life you can just forget it.
i'm sorry, all in all my choice remains the same: from those two
machines i definitely choose the amiga as the favourite system.
and before anyone cries: yes, i owned a falcon (it got destroyed
when the flat of some friends burned down) and i also programmed
stuff on it. still, the hardware AND the os of the amiga is better
designed.
Graham.
Martin-Éric Racine
> Amiga 1200 - Falcon 030
> almost, if the 1200 didn't have support for 32 bit ram. okay,
> in most cases you had to buy a small memory card but it was
> worth it. I have heard of fastram cards for falcon, but at
> the time i owned a falcon no programmer had taken notice.
How many decades ago was that? All Falcon ram upgrades are
TT-RAM based (except Atari's own).
[TOS, MultiTOS vs AmigaOS]
> amigaos 3.0 has a lot of features even linux or windows still
> dream of like true datatypes, localization support etc.
Amiga OS 3.0 was available in 1993, when MultiTOS was released?
Overall comments
----------------
Most of the points about the sound and graphic hardware of the
Amiga that you mentioned are well taken and were noticed before.
Amiga still is a good game coding machine. However, Atari is
better at serious applications such as MIDI and DTP.
IMHO, as an Atari user, the Falcon was a real joke and is just
not a good reference point at all. It did not deliver the goods
it promised and the hardware combination is a complete joke, as
it mostly was a horrible demo for clever Jaguar technology ideas.
However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
John Selck
> > almost, if the 1200 didn't have support for 32 bit ram. okay,
> > in most cases you had to buy a small memory card but it was
> > worth it. I have heard of fastram cards for falcon, but at
> > the time i owned a falcon no programmer had taken notice.
>
> How many decades ago was that? All Falcon ram upgrades are
> TT-RAM based (except Atari's own).
how many decades it was ago that people used a plain 1200?
i just took these two machines since they are a good comparision
to each other, similar to 1040ST <> A500.
> > amigaos 3.0 has a lot of features even linux or windows still
> > dream of like true datatypes, localization support etc.
>
> Amiga OS 3.0 was available in 1993, when MultiTOS was released?
no, but amigaos 2.0 was available which was a big step ahead
since 1.x, far bigger than the step from 2.x to 3.x
> Overall comments
> ----------------
>
> Most of the points about the sound and graphic hardware of the
> Amiga that you mentioned are well taken and were noticed before.
> Amiga still is a good game coding machine. However, Atari is
> better at serious applications such as MIDI and DTP.
i agree with midi, but i disagree with dtp. the main reason why
ataris were used as dtp machines was the not interlaced high
resolutions. but since a1200/4000 the amigas have freely
configureable sync registers which allow almost any video
output (yes, you CAN destroy monitors with it :) so the point
of the interlace-flickering is no more.
> However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
> N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
against what amiga? nobody uses a plain 1200/4000 anymore, the
least thing you can expect is a 68060, people who seriously
use their amigas have ppc inside.
Graham.
Nicholas Bales
>
> The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga and it's OS
have
> come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5 was released last year, btw).
So has the Atari!
Stephen Burkart
: The Amiga had a pretty good sound chip (the sound system
: in the beastie was basically an Ensoniq Mirage) and the only other
Um, I believe you meant the Apple II GS had that chip...
Daniel L. Dreibelbis
Racine <q-f...@funkyware.atari.org> wrote:
> On 2000-3-22, Joachim Froholt <jfro...@c2i.net> wrote:
>
> > > It was slow and crashed a lot.
> >
> > The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga
> > and it's OS have come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5
> > was released last year, btw).
>
> Funny that Amiga users always take the original TOS 1.00 ST as a
> reference when trying to justify why Amiga might be better, but
> do not accept that Atari users compare a Milan to an A1000.
not so funny when you consider a certain Mac Advocate with no life
constantly attempts to make brownie points when he compares TOS 1.00 to
Mac OS 9 :)
kK
> Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
> of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
> crashed a lot.
it was slow at what?? 3d rendering?? as far as the actual multitasking was
concerned there was never any lag switching between programs on a 1meg 68000
machine - maybe that was because of the preemptive multithreading - not to bad
for an OS that came on 1 floppy.. and sure, it didnt have protected memory or
anything like to keep a program from crashing the system, but it was badly
written programs and not the OS that were unstable..
y'r pal -kK
Hans Guijt
>On 2000-3-20, Iggy Drougge <opt...@uno.canit.se> wrote:
>> Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the
>> C64. Its waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are
>> four types in the SID chip.
>You have no experience whatsoever of FM sythesizer programming,
>do you? That chip inside an Atari is essentialy a Yamaha DX9
>synthesizer on a chip. Anyone familiar with FM programming will
>know that even a basic 4-operator chipset can produce a rather
>good variety of sounds.
The chip inside the ST (which I think we were talking about) is an AY-3-8910
or compatible. It has three tone channels which can only have a block waveform
and cannot be recombined with each other. In addition it has a noise channel
(or three, depending on how you look at it). About the only thing that's
'dynamic' about it is the envelope system which can change the volume in
certain pre-set sequences.
The same chip is used in the Amstrad CPC, the Spectrum 128K+2 (why not just
130K - never got that...), the MSXes, and a wide range of other machines.
Later Atari models had a different chip (starting from the STe I think), of
which I know absolutely nothing. However, I do know that the typical Atari
sound most people will know (either from earlier experience or from Atari-ST
game music that is available on the net) was produced by the AY-3-8910.
Hans Guijt
Nathan Wain
On 22 Mar 2000, Joona I Palaste wrote:
> I have never used the Atari myself, but seeing how good the C64's audio
> was, I wouldn't be surprised if it was superior to the Atari's.
The c64's audio was way better than the Atari's. (But the Atari's
68000 horsepower allowed for some interesting tricks.)
...I think the whole idea of the Atari's sound was that it was basic
in the stock model, but *expandable*. ...That's why it did/does so
well in the music/audio scene - it had all this beautiful MIDI capability
hiding under the hood.
Of course, many games would only support the stock configuration, and
thus lost out on those advantages. But for the pro user, sound was a
beautifully expandable thing.
...I only ever had an Amiga myself, and love the built in sound chipset.
(Though it is a bit limited by todays standards.) ...But I don't see
the point in arguing about which stock configuration was better, since
the Atari's were designed in that respect with expandability in mind.
But I still just had my c64 when everyone else was upgrading to their
Atari's and Amiga's... So I was just in awe at them both. :)
Nathan.
--
nat...@caverock.net homepages.caverock.net.nz/~nathan
A4000 030/25MHz 1.2Gig HDD, 24xCD, Viewsonic17", and a *big* stereo.
A1200, A500, SX64, C128 and Speccy+ too, for serious retrogaming. :)
Mike Clarke
Who started this stupid thread anyway? And who started cross-posting?
> >How so? TOS has always been rock-solid and built-in on ROM.
> >
> I'd like to hear the explanation for that one too. I felt that GEM was
> much better than Work Bench, and TOS was certainly more stable than the
> Amiga's operating system. The only time I've ever had something crash on
> me was if the disk itself became physically corrupted.
I just have to interject here. (even though I hate these sorts of dead
arguments -probably because I can't stop myself from replying!) The
stability of the OS is not in question. The OS itself was and is very stable
indeed. Problems arise with badly written programs. If you're multi-tasking
10 things at the same time then obviously there's at least 10 times more
chance of a crash than if you're only running one single task. Quite
frankly, I prefer the option of being able to run 10 things at once if I
wanted to than to be stuck with one thing at a time. And as far as features
go, there simply no question of the superiority of the Workbench over GEM.
What mutant chose primary green for the initial background colour? :)
> Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1
meg
> of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow
and
> crashed a lot.
Sounds to me just like "yeah well, I never wanted to play your stinking game
anyway". ;)
Don't compare the AmigaOS with current OSes. Workbench was and is very fast,
even with an 8MHz 68000. Just because current multi-tasking OSes are slow
and bloated and need massively powerful (in comparison) hardware, does not
mean the AmigaOS was slow on a relatively slow processor. It certainly was
not, and only crashed if it was pulled down by some evil program. It
certainly wouldn't crash for something trivial like disk corruption. It
would tell you that the disk was faulty.
There. Said it. And I'm annoyed at myself now for getting sucked into
something that should really be on the advocacy groups.
--
Mike Clarke Music (UK)
mi...@popstar.com
0151-639 7581
Alkis Polyrakis
Chris Lennard wrote:
> However all this begs the question: Who were the bigger idiots
> Commodore or Atari? Both died miserably thanks to some pathetic
> mistakes leaving us with the awful (spit)PC/Mac homogeny that we have
> today. Both the Falcon and the A1200 failed to have the same success
> as the ST and A500 before them, the STE and the A600 were not enough
> of a departure from them either, the CDTV and the Lynx failed and
> both the CD32 and the Jaguar64 were the last nails in both companies.
> Opinions please! I personally think they were about as hopeless as
> each other with maybe Commodore just nudging out as the worst. All the
> more shame as four platforms would be so much better than 2.
> (One if you're honest)
Excellent point, Chris. I sometimes wake up in the morning saying to
myself "What the hell were they thinking? Hadn't anybody in Commodore
taken any marketing lessons? How could they fail so miserably at taking
over the world of computer industry when they were obviously so superior
to the PCs?"
So to answer your question, they were both idiots, and maybe we should
blame them, not Gates.
Alkis Polyrakis
Chris Cracknell wrote:
> The three best keyboards I've
> ever felt were the original Mac Plus keyboard, the TI-99/4a keyboard
> and the C-64 keyboard. I liked them better than even the PC keyboard.
> The Atari ST had a pitiful keyboard on it.
Nothing beats the rubber keyboard of a Spectrum 48K! :)
Mike Clarke
> > Actually, the Atari's audio is vastly inferior to that of the
> > C64. Its waveform variation is nonexistent, whereas there are
> > four types in the SID chip.
>
> You have no experience whatsoever of FM sythesizer programming,
> do you? That chip inside an Atari is essentialy a Yamaha DX9
> synthesizer on a chip. Anyone familiar with FM programming will
> know that even a basic 4-operator chipset can produce a rather
> good variety of sounds.
You have no experience of C64 sound do you? :) Or of Atari ST sound
apparently.
The SID chip has Saw, Sine, Noise and variable pulse width waveforms. You
can also combine waveforms so you can logically AND a noise and a saw
together for example. It has low pass, band pass and high pass resonant
filters (and also allows a notch filter by combing the low pass and high
pass), along with ring modulation and hard sync. It was designed by Bob
Yannes who went on to co-found Ensoniq.
And where on Earth did you get the idea that the ST chip had FM on
it!?!?!!!?!
It's certainly not a 4-operator FM chip.
Here's an extract from the Yamaha manual for the YM2149 chip which is pin
compatible with AY-3-8910 manufactured by GI. (SSG stands for
Software-Controlled Sound Generator):
All functions of the SSG are controlled by the 16 internal registers. The
CPU need only write data to the internal registers of the SSG. The SSG
itself generates the sound.
Sound is generated by the following blocks:
* Music generator: Square waves having a different frequency are generated
for each channel (A, B, and C).
* Noise generator: Pseudo-random waveforms are generated (variable
frequency).
* Mixer: Music and noise output are mixed for the three channels (A, B, and
C).
* Level control: Constant level or variable level is given for each of the
three channels (A, B, and C). Constant levels are controlled by the CPU, and
variable levels by the envelope generator.
* Envelope generator: Generates various types of attenuation (single burts
attenuated and repeated attentuation).
* D-A convertor: Sound is output on each of the three channels (A, B, and
C) at the level determined by the level control.
The CPU can read the contents of the internal registers with no effect on
sound.
No mention of FM anywhere. Merely 3 Square wave channels and a noise
channel, all with envelope generators. With a bit of clever programming you
can get samples out of it, but that's it.
Mike Clarke
> better at serious applications such as MIDI and DTP.
widespread (you didn't have to pay the extra for a MIDI interface), but
certainly not better. Cubase, for example, is a pile of cack. Always was and
by the looks of the way PC and Mac development is going, always will be. VST
is just the same old featureless rubbish with software FX bolted on. The
MIDI support itself is very basic indeed. Amiga MIDI software (well
basically I mean Bars&Pipes) is still very advanced for MIDI sequencing so
you could hardly say the ST was better. But this is a pointless argument
anyway. If what you have got does the job you need then why change it? As to
DTP, the Amiga had/has some pretty vast DTP packages, so again the more
widespread argument again applies.
> However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
> N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
Is that really an Atari though?
Let's change this discussion. I would say that my Amiga, while being far
beyond the power of the old Amigas, is still very much an Amiga in every
way. However, the above combinations that you describe, don't sound very
much like an ST at all.
Now I know this has been covered by the Amiga community before with very
varying results, but let's try it on the ST...
What makes an ST an ST? I say that because MiNT, as it says in the title "is
Not TOS". So if you class MiNT as still essentially an ST then obviously TOS
is not the core. And beyond the OS there's really not much else. It's
basically just a processor. So what defines it to be the computer it is?
Thoughts if you will....
And may I suggest that any further posts are taken out of
comp.sys.amiga.games.
Chris Cracknell
From what I read in an issue of Keyboard magazine the Amiga's sound system
was designed by Ensoniq employees and was basically built around the Ensoniq
Mirage's design.
The IIGS used the actual Mirage chip.
CRACKERS
(IIRC from hell!!!!!!!)
Martin-Éric Racine
> You have no experience of C64 sound do you? :)
I do. Playing Dig Dug on C64 was almost better than the arcade
version.
> And where on Earth did you get the idea that the ST chip had
> FM on it!?!?!!!?! It's certainly not a 4-operator FM chip.
It sure is and this was abundantly discussed in several places.
Martin-Éric Racine
> And as far as features go, there simply no question of the
> superiority of the Workbench over GEM. What mutant chose
> primary green for the initial background colour? :)
PC GEM used dithered blue as a default. Either way, desktop
defaults are a pointless comparision argument.
> Don't compare the AmigaOS with current OSes. Workbench was
> and is very fast, even with an 8MHz 68000.
By the same token, don't compare Workbench with the GEM found
on TOS 1.0, otherwise the argument is mute.
If people are gonna mention AmigaOS 3.5, they might as well
compare it to MiNT 1.15.5 with N.AES 2.0 and Thing 1.27, current
version against current version.
Martin-Éric Racine
> > However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
> > N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
> Is that really an Atari though?
MiNT (despite the "MiNT is not TOS" slogan) is actually a GEMDOS
replacement. Below that, you still have BIOS/XBIOS and above
that the standard AES.
> However, the above combinations that you describe, don't
> sound very much like an ST at all.
MiNT just adds multitasking and abstract interfaces a la UNIX to
GEMDOS, while N.AES is a much better version of MultiTOS. Thing
is also a desktop that is ages ahead of anything Atari ever made.
> So if you class MiNT as still essentially an ST then
> obviously TOS is not the core.
It is. See above.
Nathan Wain
On 22 Mar 2000, Chris Lennard wrote:
> The ST/Amiga debate is a good one, I don't think it was that much of a
> troll - were all much older and wiser now than we were back then when
> the debate was relevant.
Yeah. :) The wars were fun. But we're all now the 'underdogs' I think
that gives us more of a sense of commonality. ...Or maybe it's just a
common hatred of Bill. :)
> Besides you should try the CPC/C64 debate thats just as good.
I bet it would be. ...Always had a c64 meself. The cpc was a powerful
beast... Just too late in the 8bit era.
> However all this begs the question: Who were the bigger idiots
> Commodore or Atari? Both died miserably thanks to some pathetic
> mistakes leaving us with the awful (spit)PC/Mac homogeny that we have
> today.
I think Commodore has to take the cake for most braindead company
trying to market some brilliant hardware.
When Atari were happily selling their ST to the home users for the
games market (as well as the professionals), commodore would still
swear blind that theirs was a *business* machine.
Actively discouraging developers who were part of 'games' companies
was just stupid, considering how well it was selling for precisely
that purpose. ...It's no wonder they managed to screw up so royally.
Even as a devout commodore fan all my life (vic20 -> c64 -> a500 ->
a1200 -> a4000) ...I still feel it was a shame the Atari Lynx never
became the huge success it should have. ...That's got to be the
best wee hand-held console of that era.
Any Atari users care to share their perspective on why Atari
failed so well? I didn't get to hear much about what happened to
them on this side of the world.
KPW
100...@shell.caverock.net.nz>, nat...@caverock.net.nz says...
I bought my Atari in 1985 when the choices were: an 8 bit machine (the
writing was well and truly on the wall) An Amiga 1000 (too expensive) a
Macintosh (way way too expensive) an XT with hercules monochrome graphics
and one single sided floppy or an ST with colour screen and one free
standing fdd with gigantic 500kb storage capacity. Of course I bought the
ST and got the best technology for my budget. The ST was a fun machine
and useful. I wrote a 300 page thesis on 1ST Word + and a dot matrix
printer.I had it for six years but development never lived up to the
Atari hype. Every year there was always something new that was announced
long before other marques had it but it somehow never materialised. Some
of the serious business software was not very good, although it was
comparitively cheap. Support from the dealers or from Atari Corp was
pretty much non existent. You had to depend on the local users' group,
which wasn't such a bad thing, I suppose. But you had to be loyal to
survive, and that's what fuelled the great Atari/Amiga rivalry.
Eventually the frustration level was too great and I succumbed to the
lure of dull but dependable Windows computing. Until last year when I
found an old STE in a garage sale....
Martin-Éric Racine
> Any Atari users care to share their perspective on why Atari
> failed so well? I didn't get to hear much about what
> happened to them on this side of the world.
Here's my perspective on Atari Corp.'s failure:
1) complete lack of marketing.
When Tramiel was working for Commodore, they released the PET
and were flooded with interview requests because this was one
of the first "powerfull" personal computers.
Their mistake was to assume that because you manage to innovate
once, people in the industry and press will automatically want
whatever you come up with next.
The MEGA/STE, TT and Falcon are all fairly capable machines,
but neither of them got developped to their full capability
on the market, because Tramiels never understood what
marketing meant. In fact, they downright never knew at all.
A good example of this:
The TT's release was abortted 3 times; once because of FCC
approval problems, others because of lack of planning. By
the time it came out, the motherboard had changed layout 3
times and, oh surprise:
- what is this TT-like box with an SM147 display on it?
- Ah yes, that's our baby the MEGA/STE. The Tramiels just sent
us one for show before today's demo. No idea on the specs;
just turn it on and tell us how many you wanna order.
2) lack of focus: sometimes a game console company, sometimes
a personal computer company.
Because of this, neither the Falcon nor the Jaguar never were
half of what they were meant to be on paper; both ended up
partially brain-dead designs.
The same mistake got the TT not even half the credit it
truely deserved. They promised a really good networking
machine, but cancelled the UNIX port before it matured. Then,
they were supposed to produce all sorts of interresting
VME devices, but canceled Atari Germany's own attempt (the
Riebl Ethernet card) at the VME game and layed off the
division's president for trying to emphasize the computer
products when the Tramiels had just decided to focus on
the Jaguar exclusively.
They should have split the company in three: computers, game
consoles and a common R&D that creates the custom chipsets.
3) personal dumbness.
The Tramiels were never geniuses, but refused to admit it.
a) They kept on closing, then opening, then closing again
several national divisions, based on their mood of the
moment.
In Canada's case, they once considered that it warranted
its own division, then perhaps it should that Canada and
USA should be merged into North American division, then
again not and it might be a good idea to create a distinct
Atari Quebec to cather the francophone market. Oh, fuck
that, Canada is not profitable enough, let's close it all.
b) reverse merger with Tandon (JTS).
That whole idea came out of misplaced jewish family
spirit, because Tandon was toghether with Tramiel in the
jewish getto during World War 2, so when JTS got into
financial trouble, Tramiel merged (a then profitable)
Atari with JTS to help balance JTS' debt, as a personal
favor to his old friend.
In a nutshell, Atari had the right development team, but really
crappy management. That's why Atari computers failed, except in
the music industry where anything with MIDI ports was an instant
universal best-seller, back in the 80's.
Daithi O'Cuinn
inferior technically when compared with the Amiga. What it did have going
for it however was it's far more reasonable pricing, meaning that a lot of
people moved to it instead of the Amiga in the early 16-bit days. This
ensured that it got most of the new original 16-bit games, and the Amiga
had to make do with shoddy porting jobs that did not take full advantage of
its custom chips.
However, when games like Kick Off (with its full overscan) and Shadow Of
the Beast (with multi-layer parallax and copper list gradients) came out,
people began to sit up and take notice, and the Amiga became more of a
'must have' type of machine. It also started to excel in applications
software.
And the rest... is history! It overtook the ST (thanks in part to dodgy
Atari business practive) and reigned for a while before it in turned was
stomped by the PC (thanks ENTIRELY to dodgy C= business practices).
This is also from a UK/Europe perspective, I'm sure in the US it was
different.
ehaines
"Angus Manwaring" <angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Heh, I used to first have C64/Atari 8-bit arguments with a
>>cousin of mine, which later turned into Amiga/ST arguments.
>
>Specky, Specky, Specky!!!!!
>
>
>:) Sorry,I don't know why I said that, I was a C64 user myself.
>
> All the best,
> Angus Manwaring. (for e-mail
remove ANTISPEM)
Well, no, actually the Spectrum was essentially non-existant in
the U.S. so I missed out on that bit of rivalry entirely. :)
--Eric
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Nicholas Bales
Mike Clarke <mi...@popstar.comdeletetheobvious> a écrit dans le message :
38d9...@news.screaming.net...
.
>
> > However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
> > N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
> Is that really an Atari though?
It is a TOS clone. By that reasoning, is a PPC equipped Amiga really an
Amiga?
> Let's change this discussion. I would say that my Amiga, while being far
> beyond the power of the old Amigas, is still very much an Amiga in every
> way. However, the above combinations that you describe, don't sound very
> much like an ST at all.
Have you ever seen or used one?
> Now I know this has been covered by the Amiga community before with very
> varying results, but let's try it on the ST...
>
> What makes an ST an ST? I say that because MiNT, as it says in the title
"is
> Not TOS". So if you class MiNT as still essentially an ST then obviously
TOS
> is not the core. And beyond the OS there's really not much else. It's
> basically just a processor. So what defines it to be the computer it is?
The programs that run on it, the community, the look and feel...
A PC is no longer a PC and a Mac is no longer a Mac.
> Thoughts if you will....
>
> And may I suggest that any further posts are taken out of
> comp.sys.amiga.games.
--
Joachim Froholt
Nicholas Bales wrote:
> >
> > The A1000 perhaps. But that was in, what, '85? '86? The Amiga and it's OS
> have
> > come a long way from there, you know (OS3.5 was released last year, btw).
>
> So has the Atari!
Ofcourse (although I know very little about the Atari myself).
I was mainly replying to Mr. Cracknell, who said that:
"Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
crashed a lot."
This doesn't make much sense when you look at todays Amigas (or almost any
older Amiga as well).
--
Joachim Froholt
ICQ: 52425516
Mike Clarke
> > superiority of the Workbench over GEM. What mutant chose
> > primary green for the initial background colour? :)
> PC GEM used dithered blue as a default. Either way, desktop
> defaults are a pointless comparision argument.
deadpan are you? :)
> > Don't compare the AmigaOS with current OSes. Workbench was
> > and is very fast, even with an 8MHz 68000.
> By the same token, don't compare Workbench with the GEM found
> on TOS 1.0, otherwise the argument is mute.
> If people are gonna mention AmigaOS 3.5, they might as well
> compare it to MiNT 1.15.5 with N.AES 2.0 and Thing 1.27, current
> version against current version.
Which I wasn't doing.I never said anything about OS3.5. I said "Workbench
was and is", indicating that I was talking about *any* version of the
AmigaOS including 1.2/1.3. And I wasn't comparing it against TOS anyway. The
previous post indicated that because pretty much any other multi-tasking OS
would run awfully on an 8MHz 68000 then Workbench was the same which is
simply not true.
Are all ST owners so deadly serious. ;)
Mike Clarke
> > And where on Earth did you get the idea that the ST chip had
> > FM on it!?!?!!!?! It's certainly not a 4-operator FM chip.
> It sure is and this was abundantly discussed in several places.
"It sure is" is hardly a conclusive argument now, is it? It's simply not an
FM chip. Discussion does not indicate truth. If it was FM, it would have
sounded more like Megadrive music, and consequently I'd have a bit more
respect for it.
I posted an extract from the actual Yamaha chip manual. If you can point me
to alternative information then my mind will be changed. Every piece of ST
music I've heard is either samples or that awful square wave cacophony.
atari
faster somewhat, but compared to MiNT, amiga OS3.1 sucks! MiNT is a far more
superior operating system. There is NO DOUBT in my mind. I think Linus T. would
agree :)
JoNk
Petteri Valli wrote:
> In comp.sys.amiga.games Nicholas Bales <ba...@online.fr> wrote:
> > > All this changed of course when more powerful Amigas were produced.
>
> > At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already launched the
> > Falcon which is uncomparably better. The Falcon has on board SCSI and IDE,
> > 030 at 16MHz, a DSP and a Videl chip with support for VGA, RGB and mono
> > monitors.
>
> It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_ A1200, but
> Atari's have always suffered from bad OS. AmigaOS runs circles around the
> Atari's OS(es) and makes Amiga therefore better for serious use.
> And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for VGA and RGB, SCSI
> etc before Falcons ;)
Nicholas Bales
Nathan Wain <nat...@caverock.net.nz> a écrit dans le message :
Pine.LNX.4.10.100032...@shell.caverock.net.nz...
>
>
> On 22 Mar 2000, Chris Lennard wrote:
>
> Any Atari users care to share their perspective on why Atari
> failed so well? I didn't get to hear much about what happened to
> them on this side of the world.
Lack of development, too little and too late. The Falcon was what the STE
should have been. Then all of a sudden, just as it was being launched, the
Tramiels decided to stop developing the Falcon040 to concentrate on the
Jaguar.
Lack of vision, the Tramiels failed to see the professional market of the
machines. Germany (where the Ataris were most recognized as pro DTP
workstations, and sold like hotcakes) is a long way from Sunnyvale. They
kept on aiming the "home computer" market, when everyone was buying PCs to
have the same computer at home as they had at work. The Jag was aimed at
market they had been absent from for a decade and was already completely
saturated with offerings from the Japanese console makers. Of course, with
no marketing it was a flop.
Lack of marketing. The ST range was a huge success but I can't recall ever
seeing any advertising for the Falcon. They were actually selling them to
developers and magazines, so there were no reviews. This was all even more
inexcusable as they had committed exaclty the same errors with the Lynx.
Nicholas Bales
ehaines <ehaines...@courierpub.com.invalid> a écrit dans le message :
084d09a8...@usw-ex0106-045.remarq.com...
> In article <646.115T1640T11375111@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk>,
> "Angus Manwaring" <angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >>Heh, I used to first have C64/Atari 8-bit arguments with a
> >>cousin of mine, which later turned into Amiga/ST arguments.
> >
> >Specky, Specky, Specky!!!!!
> >
> >
> >:) Sorry,I don't know why I said that, I was a C64 user myself.
> >
> > All the best,
> > Angus Manwaring. (for e-mail
> remove ANTISPEM)
>
> Well, no, actually the Spectrum was essentially non-existant in
> the U.S. so I missed out on that bit of rivalry entirely. :)
Yeah, but didn't you have the Speccy's predecessor, the ZX81 re-badged as
Timex something?
kK
> And the rest... is history! It overtook the ST (thanks in part to dodgy
> Atari business practive) and reigned for a while before it in turned was
> stomped by the PC (thanks ENTIRELY to dodgy C= business practices).
>
> This is also from a UK/Europe perspective, I'm sure in the US it was
> different.
yeah, in the US it never actually reigned..
y'r pal -kK
Nicholas Bales
Joachim Froholt <jfro...@c2i.net> a écrit dans le message :
38DA4E0B...@c2i.net...
Yes, but Ataris multitask too.
Steve Sweet
> not so funny when you consider a certain Mac Advocate with no life
>constantly attempts to make brownie points when he compares TOS 1.00 to
>Mac OS 9 :)
Hm!, is this guy a total tosser, i think i know of him, does he spout total
shitte everytime his mouth opens, and does he have an inferiority complex
the size of an elephants asre and looks to match??.
--
Regards from STEve & his nice warm cosey PAK'd MegaSTE.
* MegaSTE 40Mhz 68030, 68882 FPU, 4+16 Meg RAM, SCSI II, MV-300 *
Hans Guijt
>I have owned a Falcon and also have owned an A3000@50mhz. Ok the Amiga was
>faster somewhat, but compared to MiNT, amiga OS3.1 sucks! MiNT is a far more
Is that a cutdown version of Windows NT or something?
Hans Guijt
John Selck
> > > However, if you take a well-equipped TT, Hades or Milan running
> > > N.AES over MiNT, it measures up rather well against any Amiga.
> > Is that really an Atari though?
>
> It is a TOS clone. By that reasoning, is a PPC equipped Amiga really an
> Amiga?
yes it is, as it still runs amigaos and it still runs all the programs
written for amigaos.
Graham.
Chris Cracknell
>The chip inside the ST (which I think we were talking about) is an AY-3-8910
>or compatible. It has three tone channels which can only have a block waveform
>and cannot be recombined with each other. In addition it has a noise channel
>(or three, depending on how you look at it). About the only thing that's
>'dynamic' about it is the envelope system which can change the volume in
>certain pre-set sequences.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
Whew! Then I wasn't wrong for thinking 4-op FM my ass! ^_^
I had thought the ST used the same Square Wave chip that the Sega Master
System used and I'm certain it was the AY-3-8910 too.
Besides I'll take the SID over a 4-op FM chip anyday. You need at least
6-op (like the DX-7) to make FM sound good, otherwise you just get that
anemic, original soundblaster/NES sound.
The SID has a much more interesting sound. I used to have a program for
the C-64 called Microsynth 2001 (my working copy became corrupted and
I had put my original in a "safe place" but damned if I can remember
where that safe place is. Although I did find the "safe place" I had
put my original Art&Film Director disks the other day, but appearently
it wasn't the same safe place my C-64 disks were put (I thought for sure
it was under the table my stereo is on, but it's not. Damn). Microsynth
was one of the coolest music programs ever. It combined the three
oscilators to give you a mono synth with a really big, beefy sound.
Apart from all the processor noise the C-64 throws into the signal
(I hear there's a mod to give you pro-quality audio output on the C-64)
this programme sounded bigger and beefier than my Moog MG-1.
I got the coolest analogue synth sounds out of that old C-64.
The program used the standard
2 3 4 5 6 9 0
Q W E R T Y I O P [
Type of setup to approximate a music keyboard. I was going to actually
hack a real synth keyboard into the C-64's keyboard and build a real
synth out of it but lost the damn synth programme before I could.
Although, you know, I could always write a NEW synth program for the
C-64. One that uses 2 sets of paddles to give you real-time analogue
control over the filters and such.
Hmmmm... now there's an idea. And I could make it a midi controlled
synth too using my Pitchrider interface. Woohoo!
CRACKER
(Damn fine program from hell!!!)
Chris Cracknell
>Ofcourse (although I know very little about the Atari myself).
>I was mainly replying to Mr. Cracknell, who said that:
>
>"Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
>of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
>crashed a lot."
>
>This doesn't make much sense when you look at todays Amigas (or almost any
>older Amiga as well).
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
I thought this argument was about what was better, the original 1040ST or
the original Amiga A1000.
And I still stick by my guns and say that the original ST had a much
more stable OS than the original A1000 with it's damn Guru Meditation
errors everytime you just looked at the thing funny.
Falcon, TT, Milan, Hades. I don't care what you say as far as I'm concerned
only the ST is an ST. The others are different machines that just happen
to retain a certain degree of ST compatability.
CRACKERS
(Still using my old STs from hell!!)
Martin-Éric Racine
> Falcon, TT, Milan, Hades. I don't care what you say as far as
> I'm concerned only the ST is an ST. The others are different
> machines that just happen to retain a certain degree of ST
> compatability.
You forget to mention that only an Amiga 1000 is a real Amiga.
Anything with a 020 or PPC (or anything else than a 68000) is
not; it just happens to have retained the same trademark.
ROTFL!
Chris Lennard
> should have been. Then all of a sudden, just as it was being launched, the
> Tramiels decided to stop developing the Falcon040 to concentrate on the
> Jaguar.
development, too little too late.The A1200 was what the A600 should
have been. (The A600? biggest pile of crap Ive ever seen) And in a
small way, Commodore did the same thing in the end as it dropped the
A1200 to concentrate on the CD32 (Another pile of crap). And what was
worse was whilst Atari had once had experience of success in the
console market those idiots at C knew diddly squat! It makes my blood
boil! I remember thinking the CD32 was ridiculous at the time- an
Amiga console? I thought the whole point of the Amiga was that it was
a computer that was cheaper than a PC but being one could do more than
a console. Then again it would seem that it was just history repeating
itself. From what I've read about Commodores earlier exploits they
were always bloody hopeless. Like the Amiga they overpriced the C64
upon its release and it only became a success when they lowered the
price - remember that C had whopping great losses in 1989. When they
did lower the price sales rocketed along with the profits for 90/91
and the Amiga then finally beated the Atari beacause the price was now
comparable and everybody knew the Amiga (thanks to games like Beast)
could do more in graphics. And the CD32 wasn't the first failed
Commodore console, C released a console version of the C64 (just as
the CD32 is a A1200 with a CD drive) and it also failed miserably.
Those idiots just never learnt from their mistakes! (CDTV anyone?)
Arrrrrrrrgh!
> Lack of vision, the Tramiels failed to see the professional market
>of the machines. Germany (where the Ataris were most recognized as pro DTP
> workstations, and sold like hotcakes) is a long way from Sunnyvale.They
> kept on aiming the "home computer" market, when everyone was buying
>PCs to have the same computer at home as they had at work. The Jag was
>aimed at> market they had been absent from for a decade and was already
>completely saturated with offerings from the Japanese console makers. Of
>course, with no marketing it was a flop.
any killer titles to save it. That and there wasn't that many anyway.
At least the Saturn died with them (as the Dreamcast will too as the
PS2 will most likely kick its arse into submission)
> Lack of marketing. The ST range was a huge success but I can'trecall
>ever seeing any advertising for the Falcon. They were actually selling
>them to developers and magazines, so there were no reviews.
A1000/500 properly stating that people would come to them without
major advertising (somehow) - the idiots. As such no-one was aware of
the platforms potential they just dismissed as another gaming platform
and stuck with their two colour (spit) PCs despite the fact it was WAY
inferior.
>This was all even more inexcusable as they had committed exaclty the
>same errors with the Lynx.
to say it was so much better than the Game Gear and the Game Boy.
So what were the differences between the ST and the STE? (seeing the
Falcon/A1200 have already been discussed) If any Atarians (Is that the
equivalent of Amigans?) are bothereed the A600 was an A500 with the
slightly faster 68010 CPU (about 1.5mhz more? laughable!) a smaller
motherboard and thus size, 1mb RAM as opposed to 512kb and was way
more expandable allowing a higher ram expansion and an internal hard
drive. If anything the A600 was what the A500 should have been in the
first place! Anyway, what set the STE apart from the ST?
Mika Yrjola
> On 2000-3-23, Mike Clarke <mi...@popstar.comdeletetheobvious> wrote:
>
> > You have no experience of C64 sound do you? :)
>
> I do. Playing Dig Dug on C64 was almost better than the arcade
> version.
Try listening the Parallax, Monty on the Run, Knucklebusters, Ark
Pandora, Miami Vice or some other more recent c64 audio stuff, it'll
kick Dig Dug in the ass seriously. ;)
>
> > And where on Earth did you get the idea that the ST chip had
> > FM on it!?!?!!!?! It's certainly not a 4-operator FM chip.
>
> It sure is and this was abundantly discussed in several places.
How about giving some references to those discussions then?
--
/-------------------------------------------------------------------------\
I Fantasy, Sci-fi, Linux, Amiga, Telecommunications, Oldfield, Vangelis I
I Seti@Home, Steady relationship, more at http://www.lut.fi/%7emyrjola/ I
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------/
Mika Yrjola
> Besides I'll take the SID over a 4-op FM chip anyday. You need at least
> 6-op (like the DX-7) to make FM sound good, otherwise you just get that
> anemic, original soundblaster/NES sound.
This is a bit off-topic, but:
There are quite a few different varieties of 4-op FM. The one in my
synthetizer has 8 different waveforms, and each operator can use any
of them. This gives far more possibilities than the sine only -
approach, because you don't for example have to use several operators
just to get a square - like wave to use with other operators. Although
whether it's better or worse than 6 operators still depends on the
sound you're trying to get out of the machine... (well, FM
synthetizers usually have more features than the (old) soundblaster
ones anyway, like DSP for reverb, echoes and such stuff, pitch
envelope generator, LFO, filters etc.)
But I'd take SY99 or something like that gladly, it combines the
greater number of operators, ability to use samples in operators and
several other nice things. ;)
Daithi O'Cuinn
When I say reigned, I mean in the "Amiga in every home" sense, not in any
business sense - the crappy old PC had that sown up from day one.
Commodore had no cohesive global strategy. In the UK, they sold loads of
Amigas as games machines, in the US they were targeted at niche markets,
like video production.
Daithi O'Cuinn
<Pine.MNT.4.10.10003240956440.161-100000@rakas>:
>You forget to mention that only an Amiga 1000 is a real Amiga.
>Anything with a 020 or PPC (or anything else than a 68000) is
>not; it just happens to have retained the same trademark.
Believe me, the arguments have absolutely RAGED in the Amiga groups over
the years as to what makes an Amiga. It's generally deemed to be the OS,
but there's still a few custom chip advocates.
And it has mutated now into "Will the new Amiga really be an Amiga?"
I just philosophically avoid the question and say "It's a state of mind" ;)
Martin-Éric Racine
> This is a bit off-topic, but:
>
> There are quite a few different varieties of 4-op FM. The one
> in my synthetizer has 8 different waveforms, and each
> operator can use any of them.
Sounds like a TZ81Z or DX11.
Guillaume Déflache
> is much more flexible here, allowing anything from 1 to 8
It thought it "only" allowed 1,2,4,5,6,8 (6 being a "trick-in-some-way"
5-bitplane mode)... Anyway IIRC it also had two layouts of
plane-interlacement...
> planes, while the falcon only allows 1, 2, 4 and 8. the falcon
> still has no scroll registers and has a hard deal moving all
What do you mean by scroll registers? Since the STe hardware scrolling is
possible!
> 8 bitplanes.
Apart from the 16-bit data bus access, I cannot see any reason why it
should be faster on a bare 1200. And one does not always do linear
memory-accesses...
> pictures. the falcon has the 65536 color mode which is very
> nice but also has a heavy dma load.
Better than doing C2P conversion IMHO! :)
> very small, all opcodes execute as fast on 020 as they do
Some are faster (muls IIRC). And you have got a nice PMMU within! :)
Martin-Éric Racine
> The Falcon was what the STE should have been.
Interrestignly enough, I gave another try at the Falcon yesterday
and I could not agree more. For what it's worth, I would prefer
an STE with Mario Becroft's IDE interface to a Falcon.
At least, this TT is a real computer. No wonder the NASA bought
several of them, back then. ;-)
Martin-Éric Racine
> Commodore had no cohesive global strategy. In the UK, they
> sold loads of Amigas as games machines, in the US they were
> targeted at niche markets, like video production.
The same for Atari.
The ST was sold as a generic computer. Of course, the main
customer response came from DTP and MIDI markets, but overall,
Atari did far better in Europe than in North America.
In America, the only market they "tried" approaching was the MIDI
market, through full-page adds in Electronic Musician.
Martin-Éric Racine
> >You forget to mention that only an Amiga 1000 is a real Amiga.
> >Anything with a 020 or PPC (or anything else than a 68000) is
> >not; it just happens to have retained the same trademark.
>
> Believe me, the arguments have absolutely RAGED in the Amiga
> groups over the years as to what makes an Amiga.
I don't doubt it. ;-)
That was just my sarcastic reply to another poster's "an ST is an
ST only if it is the original ST (not an STE, MEGA or clone) and
that has always been worth shit" dumbass attitude.
Petteri Valli
> At least, this TT is a real computer. No wonder the NASA bought
> several of them, back then. ;-)
As "bigbox" amigas are too. No wonder the NASA still uses them ;)
Mika Yrjola
> On 2000-3-24, Mika Yrjola <myr...@renttu.lnet.lut.fi> wrote:
>
> > This is a bit off-topic, but:
> >
> > There are quite a few different varieties of 4-op FM. The one
> > in my synthetizer has 8 different waveforms, and each
> > operator can use any of them.
>
> Sounds like a TZ81Z or DX11.
V50 actually ;) But it's a rather close cousin of TZ81Z with a few
added features in synth side, built-in drum machine and sequencer
etc. One of first workstation - like synths.
Ken Macdonald
therefore a Hades, Milan,... running MiNT is an atari.
as these hardware platforms run all the atari software.
ken
x...@x.com
>
Alex Holland
"Mike Clarke" <mi...@popstar.comdeletetheobvious> wrote:
> > Dungeon Master was converted to Amiga and PC too...
> > But 'Chaos strikes back' not, as I know.
>
> Yes it was and was published by Psygnosis.
The Amiga version of CSB was first published by FTL and then re-
published by Psygnosis. The PC version of Dungeon Master was published
by Psygnosis (dunno if FTL ever published it), and I am unsure if a PC
version of CSB was ever done, well I havnt got it :^(
--
Cheers
Alex Holland
Webmaster of the Thalion Webshrine
http://thalion.amiga.tm
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Alex Holland
> Even the audio performance, of which I had heard so much about, was
>slightly better than the one of a Commodore 64!
The STFM chip was inferior to the Paula, but dont forget that ALL the
current ST emulators have pretty bad sound emulation when it comes to
samples. If you want to listen to some excellent ST music on the ST,
listen to the Intro to Wings of Death and Lethal Excess by
Thalion/Eclipse written by Jochen Hippel
r...@mailandnews.com
=?iso-8859-1?Q?D=E9flache?= <guill...@europe.com> wrote:
>> both machines have bitplane modes up to 8 planes, the amiga
>> is much more flexible here, allowing anything from 1 to 8
> It thought it "only" allowed 1,2,4,5,6,8 (6 being a "trick-in-some-way"
>5-bitplane mode)... Anyway IIRC it also had two layouts of
>plane-interlacement...
Amiga allows any 1-8 for AGA and any 1-6 for ECS as the previous
poster said, whoever he is. You might be thinking of ECS halfbrite
mode where the 6th plane was a flag, changing the brightness of that
pixel, from normal to half as bright. So you couldn't quite use 6
planes for just any colors, but could use it for any 32 colors, plus
the half-brite versions of those 32 colors. Since AGA allows *any*
selection of 1-8 planes for color lookup, half-brite mode doesn't make
any sense on AGA.
Then there was HAM, 2 bitplanes are reserved for determing which 1 of
the RGB values from the previous pixel to modify for the current pixel
while holding the other 2 RGB values the same as the previous pixel.
Hence Hold-And-Modify, HAM. Hope the HAM description was correct. In
AGA HAM you can have any 64 base colors, 6 planes, the other 2 planes
are reserved for the HAM flags. On ECS HAM you would have 16 base
colors.
Joachim Froholt
Nicholas Bales wrote:
>
> > "Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1
> meg
> > of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow
> and
> > crashed a lot."
> >
> > This doesn't make much sense when you look at todays Amigas (or almost any
> > older Amiga as well).
>
> Yes, but Ataris multitask too.
>
I should hope so! :)
--
Joachim Froholt
ICQ: 52425516
Joachim Froholt
Chris Cracknell wrote:
> In article <38DA4E0B...@c2i.net>, Joachim Froholt <jfro...@c2i.net> wrote:
>
> >Ofcourse (although I know very little about the Atari myself).
> >I was mainly replying to Mr. Cracknell, who said that:
> >
> >"Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
> >of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
> >crashed a lot."
> >
> >This doesn't make much sense when you look at todays Amigas (or almost any
> >older Amiga as well).
> ~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
>
> I thought this argument was about what was better, the original 1040ST or
> the original Amiga A1000.
In that case, we've misunderstood eachother. The post you originally replied to
mentioned Falcons and A1200's, so I assumed that you were having them in mind when
you said that the Amiga could multitask, but not very well (which they can, btw.
_Very_ well :))
>
> And I still stick by my guns and say that the original ST had a much
> more stable OS than the original A1000 with it's damn Guru Meditation
> errors everytime you just looked at the thing funny.
Well, I can't argue here. Not because I agree, but because I don't know. I've never
used an A1000, or an original ST. When was the 1040ST released?
Nicholas Bales
Chris Lennard <c.le...@ukonline.co.uk> a écrit dans le message :
38DB35AE.MD-1...@ukonline.co.uk...
<snip>
> And the CD32 wasn't the first failed
> Commodore console, C released a console version of the C64 (just as
> the CD32 is a A1200 with a CD drive) and it also failed miserably.
Atari actually did the same and launched a console based on the Atari 8bit,
this was launched at the same time as the 130XL and 520ST. Flop again.
> Those idiots just never learnt from their mistakes! (CDTV anyone?)
> Arrrrrrrrgh!
<snip>
> >This was all even more inexcusable as they had committed exaclty the
> >same errors with the Lynx.
> Great shame, I knew two people who owned a Lynx (a miracle) and I have
> to say it was so much better than the Game Gear and the Game Boy.
> So what were the differences between the ST and the STE? (seeing the
> Falcon/A1200 have already been discussed) If any Atarians (Is that the
> equivalent of Amigans?) are bothereed the A600 was an A500 with the
> slightly faster 68010 CPU (about 1.5mhz more? laughable!) a smaller
> motherboard and thus size, 1mb RAM as opposed to 512kb and was way
> more expandable allowing a higher ram expansion and an internal hard
> drive. If anything the A600 was what the A500 should have been in the
> first place! Anyway, what set the STE apart from the ST?
The STE was an Enhanced ST. The CPU was the same, and externally there
wasn't much to differentiate from the STF. However, inside it had a separate
blitter chip, An DMA chip for stereo sampling, stereo RCA outs, a new video
chip with hardware scrolling and a 4096 colour palette (but still only 16
colours on screen), extra analog joystick ports and standard SIMM memory (up
to 4Mb). The problem was that there was already a huge installed base of STF
machines, and there were not enough enhancements for the developers to make
STE-only versions of their programs. A few STE-only games came out, but not
a lot.
Nicholas Bales
Daithi O'Cuinn <doc...@cluke.demon.co.uk> a écrit dans le message :
8F0173A31docuinnclukedemoncou@news...
> ke...@ulster.net (kK) wrote in <38DAA02...@ulster.net>:
>
> >Daithi O'Cuinn wrote:
> >
> >> And the rest... is history! It overtook the ST (thanks in part to dodgy
> >> Atari business practive) and reigned for a while before it in turned
was
> >> stomped by the PC (thanks ENTIRELY to dodgy C= business practices).
> >>
> >> This is also from a UK/Europe perspective, I'm sure in the US it was
> >> different.
> >
> >yeah, in the US it never actually reigned..
>
> When I say reigned, I mean in the "Amiga in every home" sense, not in any
> business sense - the crappy old PC had that sown up from day one.
Here in France the proportion was 50/50 between Amiga and Atari before the
PCs took over. In Germany I understand the Atari was more successful.
> Commodore had no cohesive global strategy. In the UK, they sold loads of
> Amigas as games machines, in the US they were targeted at niche markets,
> like video production.
Same for the Atari.
--
||| Nicholas Bales, Toulouse, France
===|||==============================================
/ | \ The Atari ST Quick FAQ bales@
-' ' `- http://bales.online.fr/atari online.fr
Sven Wenzel
>
> Ofcourse (although I know very little about the Atari myself).
> I was mainly replying to Mr. Cracknell, who said that:
>
> "Sure the Amiga could multi-task, but let's face it, an 8MHz 68000 with 1 meg
> of memory isn't really going to multi task that well anyways. It was slow and
> crashed a lot."
>
> This doesn't make much sense when you look at todays Amigas (or almost any
> older Amiga as well).
>
And the multitasking on Amiga in early days didn't just meen to run
more programs at the same time. This multitasking was and is still a
part of the Amiga 'look and feel'. It was not only formating a disk in
the background. And with 1MB you really had to knew what you did when
e.g. running K-Seka and D-Paint at the same time.
It's hard to explain to someone who never really used an Amiga. But I
remember back in my study time I typed some text for LaTeX on Amiga
with some friends. They normally used Win3.11-crap. We heard some mods
in the background from an AminetCD. To hear a new mod I did the
following: 1) click on the gadget 2) go back to the editor. My friends
did it the following way: 1) click on the gadget 2) wait till
-decrunching- window disappears and music plays 3) go back to the
editor.
So for my friends there was not much difference in using real
multitasking and Win3.11 what-ever-it-was-called. But for me it was
and is still a pain not to have that smoothness on other OS.
Sven
kK
> ke...@ulster.net (kK) wrote in <38DAA02...@ulster.net>:
>
> >Daithi O'Cuinn wrote:
> >
> >> And the rest... is history! It overtook the ST (thanks in part to dodgy
> >> Atari business practive) and reigned for a while before it in turned was
> >> stomped by the PC (thanks ENTIRELY to dodgy C= business practices).
> >>
> >> This is also from a UK/Europe perspective, I'm sure in the US it was
> >> different.
> >
> >yeah, in the US it never actually reigned..
>
> When I say reigned, I mean in the "Amiga in every home" sense, not in any
> business sense - the crappy old PC had that sown up from day one.
actually the Amiga did pretty well here in the DV and CGI business - something
that has since been taken over by Macs - thanks mostly to the Toaster.. as for
entertainment i STILL think it played second-hat here in the US to PCs and
consoles - even though it was so much better.. you have to remember that in
America at that time most people that owned computers (that werent C64s) were
also employess of IBM.. and IBM was also that greatest contributer of
computers to education - so right from school kids were brought up using PCs..
as an Amiga user i always stood alone defending my platform - 9 /10 friends
all had PCs.. they loved those grainy looking and sounding 16 color Sierra
games.. they thought their PCs cranked when they played Commander Keen or Duke
Nuke 'em (the original) - that was arcade entertanment to them.. of course i
cant really say who had the last laugh..
y'r pal -kK
Iggy Drougge
: On 2000-3-21, Petteri Valli <pva...@paju.oulu.fi> wrote:
:> In comp.sys.amiga.games Nicholas Bales <ba...@online.fr> wrote:
:>
:> > At the time the 020 based 1200 came out, Atari had already
:> > launched the Falcon which is uncomparably better.
:>
:> It's true, that Falcon has better hw-specs than _unexpanded_
:> A1200, but Atari's have always suffered from bad OS.
: How so? TOS has always been rock-solid and built-in on ROM.
Yes, but then again, TOS just grew more and more antiquated as the years
passed, whereas AmigaOS has been constantly maturing.
As you stated in another thread, the differences between version 2 and
version 4 are merely cosmetic, and trust me, version 2 is by no means a
nice little OS, albeit stable.
Besides, the AmigaOS has also been built into the ROM. Only the desktop
(Workbench) and luxury programs are loaded from disk, but insert any
random non-bootable disk into my A4000 or A1200, and you are presented
with a GUI screen with a shell, all essential libraries and the most
essential commands.
It wasn't by pure chance that MultiTOS was bundled on disk alingside the
firmware TOS 4 with the Falcons.
:> AmigaOS runs circles around the Atari's OS(es) and makes
:> Amiga therefore better for serious use.
: And MiNT matches or beats AmigaOS on most things (although, when
: Atari was involved, it wasn't half as developped as it is now).
MiNT seems jolly, I have it on a coverdisk around here, but I'm uncertain
as to whether it will run smoothly on my 1040STFM.
However, it is a tad UNIX-like, somewhat cryptic, isn't it?
:> And don't forget A3000 which had 030/25MHz, support for VGA
:> and RGB, SCSI etc before Falcons ;)
: ...and came out after the TT, as I recall.
Those two could have been twins. Never have I seen two computers from
disparate brands being so similar.
The same goes for the Falcon and the A1200, although the Falcon was more
luxurious, but also more expensive, whereas the A1200 has proven more
future-compatible.
--
/Iggy, the irregular regular