Be Excellent To Each Other

There was nothing wrong with the ST. It was cheaper, had a high-res output and ran a little quicker, and it was out first, I believe. The Amiga had the custom chipset for gaming though.

I was going to say, even my mate who had an ST when I had an A500 thought my A500 was better than his ST.

I think the only thing that it could even begin to be considered to be better on was music creation software.

Malc

Well the Amiga was best, obviously, as it was the one I had. Same as the Speccy's better than a C64, Ds than a a PSP, 360 than a PS3, Gamecube than a PS2, and PS2 than a Gamecube.




Hangon...

For me, the slight edge in polygon heavy titles was the ST clincher. F-19 was a mite smoother and that made a massive difference to me in those days. The original Championhsip Manager also seemed to tick along less slowly.

The ST was shit computer, bodged together by Atari when they lost the Amiga project.

It was rushed out and was in the UK first. It was also cheaper and often had huge bundles of games given away with it. Atari also got into the high streets earlier with shops such as Tandy not stocking the Amiga for quite a few years.

Yes it had a MIDI ports but so did the the 128k Spectrum's. The difference is that it had good software that could use the MIDI ports. You could bolt a MIDI port onto a CPC and make music if you wished (Amstrad Action did, see the most terrifying computer magazine cover ever, below). The only difference was that the ST had more memory for larger sequences and more power for a better GUI.

In short the ST was cheap and entered the UK market earlier. Ironically by 1992 its share of the games market was about the same as the CPC believe it or not (Amstrad Action published the figures) and ST format only outlived Amstrad Action by a mere year. By the early 1990's there was only one computer that could win and I knew 2 ST owners and not much on their platform could entice me.

Well I had an amiga rather than an Atari ST (after growing up with the 8-bit atari's).

The only things i envied them for was the Pompy pirates , and the fact the floppy disks were MS dos compatible so people with ST's at uni could do work on the ST and bring it in and i couldnt unless i did unfathomable things with crossdos

I had PC0 and PC1 drives setup on my Amiga, I would often download stuff off Aminet on to 720s at uni, and then bring them home, and copy them on to the HD of my A1200.

From memory it wasn't that hard to setup...

Malc

It was easy with Workbench 3.0 and above. I believe for our friends with older machines it was more of a problem.

I also used to use a serial link between my PC and Amiga.

At the time i had a 500 , 2nd disk drive plus a HD that looked like a dustbuster on the side , however to get things on a PC compatible disk required crossdos to be run and files to be converted back and forward. And yes i'd be usking Kickstart 1.3 and workbench 1.3

This would have been in .... 89 or 90 probably

See, just how shit is the ST? You can't even have an ST thread without the Amiga taking it over!

I guess the advantage of the ST would've been less from a gamers' perspective in the earlier days of the two formats, when there wasn't much difference between the ST and Amiga versions of games (well, admittedly as they were developed for the ST first, being the dominant format of the two).

Certainly in the early days there were lots of shonky ST ports on the Amiga. But part of the problem was that the ST had been around for longer. Once the Amiga had a larger market share, developers started to move over to it.

Didn't the ST have one megabyte built in as standard? The Amiga 500 only had 512k (you had to buy the memory expansion pack separately). If I'm right, then there's your solid argument right there -- many of the best games at the time required a meg to play.

Afraid not -- there was an ST with 1MB as standard but I'm pretty sure the one with 512KB was more common (not sure if it could be upgraded to a full megabyte or not).

My favourite fun fact about the ST is that you could argue that the STFM models had marginally worse sound than the Spectrum 128K -- they both had the same AY-3-8910 sound chip, but the Spectrum also had the beeper.

Anyway, wasn't the ST the Amstrad CPC of the 16-bit era? Mainly rubbish but inexplicably popular in France?[/chinnybaiting]

I had an ST-owning friend who flat-out refused to acknowledge the graphical and aural superiority of my Amiga. Titles like Turican 2, SWIV, Xenon II, Chaos Engine -- the difference was huge, especially when it came to sound. His level of self-denial was astonishing.

When, as Chinny mentions, the games developers were more Amiga-focused, the differences in the technical ability of the machines was pretty noticeable, definitely. Particularly anything that needed to scroll the screen horizontally.

Yep, the 512kb was most common (but it could be upgraded to 1meg).

No. And in fact early models only had single density (or sided) drives.

However, the ST was awesome when it came to music production. Built in Midi and a nice sounding AY chip. The Amiga ever did any decent chip tunes but the ST sounded like a super speccy. I wonder if there's a soundtracker like prog for the ST that I can emulate. I know the sam coupe had a tracker as well.. I want an AY chip tracker that I can use with mouse!

I've never touched an ST. I've had 4 Amigas though.

There was an A500 in the geography lab at school. One day, the teacher was really late for the lesson and I happened to have a copy of leisure suit larry in my bag. Do you know the sound of a 25 14-15 year olds laughing at a knob joke? I do.

My A500 had 1Mb in it, I don't remember putting it in there myself, so I assume it came with it.

Malc

I used to argue with my friend until I was blue in the face that my Spectrum +2A was better than his Amiga 500.

I think I was about 6.

The +2A was worse than pretty much all the other spectrums put together. Now, if you'd had a +2...

The difference with the CPC being that it had more colours and arguably better graphics than the Spectrum or C64, not to mention the wealth of powerful serious software that Speccy and C64 owners could only dream of. I prefer to think of it as the PC of it's era as it was far more all round capable and expandable than either of its cheaper 8 bit rivals.

Wasn't hard at all. I later got an Iomega Zip drive with dual parallel / SCSI interface on it, to leech stuff from the internettransfer my project files at uni.

They I got a modem and discovered the local call aberdeen uni dial-in which inexplicably allowed a PPP connection straight to the internet. Wahay!

I was going to make a Jam "YES I KNOW WHAT A MIDI PORTS ARE!" joke but then you posted a mag that apparently even actually has Chris Morris on the cover, looking and acting a tit.

Here's an Atari St artist (Atarist?) making some good music:



And here's Renoise doing some nice stuff with the Atari ST chip plugin ymvst:

The SAM coupe had better sound than the ST and the Amiga. that was one area where it really shined.

not much different from PS3 fanboys

It's not really fair to compare them, mind - the Sam was an 8-bit machine.

I kpet being told the Amiga was the better machine. By all the Amiga owners. They all usually had Batman, New Zealand Story , F-18 and whatever game they'd got for the next two birthdays, and a couple of pirates. I'd go round and ask what else it could do. They couldn't show me anything, just the paint program, where the knobs looked like every other knob on every othr art package.

So I got an ST, where the fewer owners I knew about were doing all kinds of stuff - sims, midi, DPT (the hi-res monochrome mode meant I had a precise machine like the mac in school) and eventually I had one myself, with the Power Pack - I don't think I needed another game for a year.

The Amiga did have better graphics when it was being developed for first (like the ST did beforehand) but the point was one I was arguing wiht chavs who didn't really care about computers when you reckon it up. So I didn't care about the argument. I wish I still had my ST, I'd be using it today.

We need some CPC action here to remind us that the ST only had the same sound chip as the CPC and Spectrum.

The Amiga wasn't worth having until the A1200. The ST was *never* worth having. As an 8 bit owner neither formats could entice me until the A1200 offered a quantum leap* in power.




* See what I did there?

...that struggled to play mod files (didn't it?) let alone surpass the Amiga at doing so. Craster, you've got to be talking specifically about chip music, right?

EDIT: Are these not representative of the SAM Coupe's audio prowess? 1, 2.

Are you mad? The Amiga 500 was light years ahead of its time. It came out in 1987 for Christ's sake. When it came to gaming, it left every other console and computer in the dust, and continued to do so up into the early 90s. (Multi-thousand dollar PCs don't count, natch).

I had an ST for a year. 520STFM.

Sold it a year later for an A500.

I wasn't talking about any kind of music, just stating that the SAM's peers were the C128/Archimedes not the Amiga/Atari ST.

There was nothing worth having. As a CPC owner I could saunter up to WH Smiths and pick up a decent game for 3 or 4 quid, with the Amiga it was 25 quid a pop (16 bit budget games never really took off) for games that were often style over substance. Yeah there were some good games, but that price for games from developers who mostly still struggling to make the leap from the 8 bits? It really wasn't until 1992 that the Amiga properly got going with proper 16 bit games in much the same way that we didn't see the best stuff on the 8 bits until 1988. I always remember an Amiga owner writing in to New Computer Express saying he had just played Chase HQ on the Spectrum and was blown away. He pointed out that perhaps people were now only just getting the best out of the Speccy and wondered what the future held for the Amiga. He was *exactly* right. In 1989 the Amiga still had a few years to go before we saw the best from it.

Also Amiga owners were some of the most hateful individuals you could imagine. The world became a better place when they all fucked off to the SNES and left the rest of us to enjoy the platform.

I never wanted just a games machine, I wanted something that could do everything my CPC could do and more. It was only during 1992 that I saw that the Amiga could fill that gap and that some decent affordable peripherals were starting to come on the market.

agreed. I always thought the A1200 came too late and it was too little. It was a desperate move from Commodore

Really?

Bloody Hell, I thought I got one as it came out, but there's no way I got it when I was 12.

I got my CPC 464 either for Christmas 1984 or for my birthday in March 1985, and I still had that when I was handing in English assignments for my GCSEs (which would have been 1988 - 1990).

I know I got the A1200 at launch (1992), and I know I had the A500 for several years before that.

I must have got the A500 in about 1989 I guess. so 2 years after launch. That doesn't sit right at all. But I guess it must be so.

Malc

Sorry, I had the quotes backwards in my rubbish head Craster, I agree with you (comparing the SAM to the Miggy is just cruel) and meant to target that question at ltia. Me =

The Archie was a 32 bit powerhouse. You can't even begin to compare it to the Sam. Well you can, both computers sold precisely fuck all and were never properly exploited by programmers.

The most frustrating experience in the world was using an Archie, knowing how powerful it was and finding out all the software was at the same level as Amiga PD, written in a backroom by nerds who's only previous programming experience was on a BBC B.

Oh yeah - not sure how I sneaked the Archimedes in there.

You didn't really see them around until 1989. That's when people started to buy them in any kind of serious numbers, and even then they were exotic. I think 1990 was regarded as the last "8 bit" Christmas where 8 bit software and hardware outsold the "next-gen".

I also got the Amiga in 89, and i was the first guy from my hometown having it, so its kind weird to know he was already around 2 years before (well, my cousin had it in 88, but i thought he was the 1st person in the world to own one)

Did you not feel a little bit like a geek buying a computer that was basically called the Commodore 'Girlfriend'?

Do I need to correct you, or are you playing the "ignore posts by Malc" card?

Malc