Atari Falcon 030 Tower

I didn't mean for this to turn into a debate, my apologies if I caused it to stay off-topic. However, it seems that if I post on an Atari board about Amiga's abilities, people get angry and when I post on an Amiga board about ST abilities, people get defensive.

I'm not denying that the A500 is an overall better personal computer than anything else out on the market when it was released, because it was! It reminds me of my old Atari 800, and that 800 was my most favorite computer of all time.

Here is what I AM saying. When the A500 was first released, it had more advanced hardware for graphics, sound, etc than ANY cell phone, word processor or dedicated sequencer that came out that year. But back around then, I considered the cell phones to have more advanced hardware for making wireless phone calls. MIDI and the DMA laser printing interface was far more "advanced hardware" on the ST than the sound/RCA & parallel printer ports on the A500.

"Advanced hardware" doesn't just pertain to co-processors, it can also be interfaces & ports. Would your ever rip out your USB, SATA and IDE stuff and once again use only RS232 and parallel ports for all of your IO?!

And adding the ports/interfaces to an A500 doesn't help much. Consider the Sega Genesis CD/32X. Since these attachments didn't come with it from the factory, it didn't get as much support as the Saturn because the Saturn HAD the CD and 32X features built in out of the box. Also, the A500 was already expensive enough without having to buy add-ons.

The only exception I can think of atm is the Video Toaster. I think that's a well supported add-on simply because there wasn't any competition (that I know of). My only regret is that I didn't get one for my A2000 or A4000 back in the day.

To sum up, there is no debate at all! To me, everything is clear. Then again, I'm the type of person to take advantage of a situation instead of being "stuck". I chose to own both Amiga's AND Atari's, so I came out ahead of most people I knew. :cool:

PS: Then again, I didn't see the purpose of owning a Mac or PC, especially since both were so easy to emulate :p

We like a good debate here. And generally you will find Amiga owners to logically argue their case, whereas the Atari ST owners will get anger because they have to heavily defend their lessor system! ;) :lol:

I noticed you are from San Diego, and that really does explain your point of view between the Amiga and ST. In the US the Amiga was never marketed well and Commodore tried to sell it as a business machine. In contrast over here in the UK, and the rest of Europe, Commodore UK marketed the Amiga much better, showing how ahead of any other system the Amiga was for Multimedia, Video, Music, Animation and Gaming.

The UK and German were by far the largest markets for the Amiga and it far outsold the ST in these countries.

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Here is what I AM saying. When the A500 was first released, it had more advanced hardware for graphics, sound, etc than ANY cell phone, word processor or dedicated sequencer that came out that year.

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Try the next 10 years! ;) And this is true. The Amiga architecture and system capability wasn't reached in the PC market until the 90's, almost 10 years after the first Amiga was released. Quite amazing to thing the Amiga hardware design was that far ahead of anything else at the time.

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MIDI and the DMA laser printing interface was far more "advanced hardware" on the ST than the sound/RCA & parallel printer ports on the A500.

"Advanced hardware" doesn't just pertain to co-processors, it can also be interfaces & ports. Would your ever rip out your USB, SATA and IDE stuff and once again use only RS232 and parallel ports for all of your IO?!

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I disagree. Interfaces are not hardware in terms of the abilities a system has. They are just interfaces to communicate between different hardware. These days if a PC doesn't have a certain interface like SATA ports what do you do? You don't stop using a PC and find another system with SATA ports. You buy a card and add the ports by expanding it. Exactly what the Amiga users did and still do.

Here in Europe laser printers were very rare. Too expensive for home users to buy, so the ST's SMA laser printing interface was a completely unused port in Europe. And a MIDI port is only a serial connection to hook up and send data to MIDI compatible music hardware. Nothing special and nothing advanced. A MIDI box for the Amiga only cost £20 too so not expensive.

But if you want to compare interfaces, did the ST have a full interface slot that could be used to access CPU, memory etc...? Nope! Did it have a memory expansion slot for easy memory upgrades? Nope. I think these things are far more important to the wider overall market compared to MIDI and DMA printer ports, which you have to agree will only be useful and needed by a very small percentage of the overall userbase.

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Consider the Sega Genesis CD/32X. Since these attachments didn't come with it from the factory, it didn't get as much support as the Saturn because the Saturn HAD the CD and 32X features built in out of the box.

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That is a really bad example. Sega just dropped the ball after the Genesis (Megadrive in Europe) and all of the add-on CD-Drives, 32bit units etc were just stupid and a complete waste of marketing time, effort and expense. And the Saturn was a complete disaster. Well in Europe it was at least. Badly underpowered compared to the Sony PSX and it sold badly.

The Dreamcast though. That is another matter. Sega got it right with their final console and it remains one of my favourite consoles to this day. First with internet gaming built in, and the vivid graphics still look great.

Regarding the MegaCD again for a second. Another reason its a bad example is because any CD based format was not doing well when the media was first launched. Philips CDi, 3D0, Sega MegaCD, Amiga CD32, and even PC games struggled to find a market with the new Multimedia buzz word at the time. The world was just not quite ready for CD based games, and the developers were not actually quite sure what to do with all the extra space on the discs to begin with. With 16-bit systems they didn't need all that extra space to store game data. It was only when the 32-bit systems launched that CD storage sizes finally made sense.

1. "Amiga owners to logically argue their case, whereas the Atari ST owners will get anger because they have to heavily defend their lessor system!"

This is what I mean by defensive. :p You should really just trust me on this since I have both machines. One isn't better at EVERYTHING than the other. I CAN safely say that the A500/ST was better at EVERYTHING than Mac's and PC's though.

2. "I noticed you are from San Diego, and that really does explain your point of view between the Amiga and ST. In the US the Amiga was never marketed well and Commodore tried to sell it as a business machine."

You may know more about marketing in San Diego than I do, so I may be mistaken... But, from what *I* have seen in San Diego, the marketing went like this:

Amiga: Video/Graphics & games
ST: Music/DTP
PC: Business machine

3. "I disagree. Interfaces are not hardware in terms of the abilities a system has. They are just interfaces to communicate between different hardware."

Def (WordWeb)
Noun: interface
(computer science) computer circuit consisting of the hardware and associated circuitry that links one device with another (especially a computer and a hard disk drive or other peripherals)

Interfaces ARE hardware and very much so in terms of system abilities. Most people consider the more advanced hardware being the best when it comes to interfaces and communication.

Keep in mind, I live down the road from Qualcomm and not too far from the CES show where they show off new communications hardware technology. How does your portable device interface with your car, etc.

If interfaces, adaptors, and ports are not hardware, then what are they?!

4. "But if you want to compare interfaces, did the ST have a full interface slot that could be used to access CPU, memory etc...? Nope! Did it have a memory expansion slot for easy memory upgrades? Nope."

Are you trying to sell me things I don't need?! Which port is better for a student on a daily basis:
1. A port you can access CPU through + upgrade RAM? or,
2. A port through which you can have professional looking FAST printouts cheaply?

It doesn't matter which was more complicated and expensive to design, what mattered was which was more useful on a daily basis.

Again, to sum up:
Adding the extra ports/interfaces to the A500 was not an option. It would still not have the support or do the things I needed it to do.

I'm not a ST specific person. I'm only saying that the ST did things that other computers at that time simply could NOT do, especially for the same amount of money.

May I just add in my humble opinion.....Great arguements from both sides!
Really is no right or wrong, just views from BOTH SIDES OF THE POND and also good to see you guys keeping it civil unlike the same arguement on some "other" sites!!!
:thumbs:

For me there is no point in turning any argument into a flame war. I never understand that on most forums. If you are going to discuss something then use facts and your opinion to write something constructive and hopefully of interest. What is the point in posting something online otherwise? I just don't get the trolls and flamers we all encounter on many forums these days.

A forum is for discussing, to air your opinions and views about something and to read others views on the same subject. To share ideas, to have a discussion. Why use agression and arogance when a good discussion can be had? And why do so many people see the need to win arguments all of the time on forums? A topic of discussion that is about something like this topic doesn't need a true conclusion.

There are those of use who prefer the Amiga, and those who prefer the ST. The hardware capabilities are obviously evident to everyone. However the purpose that you use either system for personally has a great effect on how you view that system and how useful and good it was for your personal needs. Regardless of processing power, graphics or sound capabilities, or the type of ports it had. If a platform delivers what you needed it to do then it is the best platform for you.

And my view on the ST vs Amiga arguments is very much that all computer systems have their plus and minus points, and were/are useful in their own right. Both the ST and Amiga were very capable systems in the 80's and early 90's and allowed their users to access software that was at the leading edge of computing at the time.

Before the ST and Amiga arrived the only other platform offering anything near to the same level of usability with a WIMPs interface was the Mac, and that was way over priced and out of the reach of normal users. Regardless of the differences, both the ST and Amiga provided the first two systems capable of finally giving users truely usable OSs to do more than basic tasks and gaming.

Yes, the capabilities of the Amiga were better then the ST's as I've been stating, but a system is only ever as good as its software. Again the Amiga's Workbench was years ahead of GEM. However the Amiga didn't have Cubase and that was a cutting edge piece of software for any digital musician and for that type of computer use the ST was a better system purely because the software was there, and the Amiga didn't have anything as good to compete in that market.

In contrast the ST had nothing to match something like Deluxe Paint for 2D bitmap and animation.

It's never clear cut from a productivity software point of view.

However you could also argue that the Mac was better than the ST because it had better DTP software and a port of Cubase, for which users did need to add a MIDI expansion. However because of cost the ST remained the favourite for MIDI enabled studios and lower budget DTP.

And actually it isn't always clear cut for gaming either. While the Amiga's hardware meant that in general games developed on the Amiga were better than the same games on the ST, it also came down to the developers. There were a few ST versions of games that are better than the Amiga versions due to poor development rather than the hardware. A great example of this is Captain Blood. This game was developed on the ST originally and used it's audio capabilities to the max to create very nice sounding music and in-game sound effects. On the Amiga, the game looked and played all but identically. However the audio was somehow messed up. The music sounded muddy and muffled by comparision and the game was missing the whol of the audio for alien speach, so you never heard a single thing in those parts of the game. Players of either version would still enjoy the game but it was better on the ST.

But back to actual hardware capabilities, and again I'm talking about what the actual internal electronics can do, not what it can be connected to. The Amiga demo scene was on the main thing that really highlighted the superiority of the Amiga over the ST at the time. Demos showing what the hardware could do with graphics and sound overshadowned anything the ST could do.

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You may know more about marketing in San Diego than I do, so I may be mistaken... But, from what *I* have seen in San Diego, the marketing went like this:

Amiga: Video/Graphics & games
ST: Music/DTP
PC: Business machine

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The whole if the US, not just Dan Diago. The Amiga didn't get the same support as a gaming system compared to Europe. I know this based on everything I read during the Amiga years, including US magazines alongside UK ones. The Amiga in the UK marketplace was seen as the ultimate gaming system in the late 80's. And I know this isn't generally the case in the US where it had Nindendo and Sega to compete against more so than in the UK. From my observations the US gaming market was always more console orientated, whereas in the UK home computers were more popular at the time for gaming.

And later into the life of the Amiga, the US pretty much dropped gaming and centred on professional uses like video production, 3D, Animation and graphics. Whereas in the UK the gaming market just kept on expanding. And support for the platform didn't die until the mid 90's, when most of the rest of the world had already abandoned the Amiga as a viable gaming platform.

Also it is worth noting that in the UK the ST was never widely marketed for either Music or DTP. It was marketed as a gaming platform competing directly against the Amiga. And in this marketplace the ST's hardware was woefully underpowered next to the Amiga. So often I would walk into a computer store and see the same game or demo running on both platforms alongside each other and the ST versions instantly showed the inferior capabilities of the hardware. Lower quality graphics due to a much more limited grange of colours available on screen at once, no overscan so the games always had 8-bit style borders, no copper effects so the games didn't have the great multicolours gaduated backgrounds giving the effect of a lot more colours on screen, mono tinny sound compared to 8-bit stereo sampled audio... for gaming the list of reasons why in the UK the ST was easily highlighted as a lesser system than the Amiga could go on and on.

I accept that for anyone wishing to use a computer for MIDI or DTP the ST delivered exactly what they needed. For everything else the Amiga had the advantage most of the time, especially when graphics and the OS came into the equation.

And one final thing to say. The ST wasn't born with the love that the Amiga had. Jay and the rest of the development team created something special that touched every Amiga user and continues to live on with them. For me the ST just didn't do this. It was a cabably 16-bit platform and could be used for many of the same tasks as an Amiga, but it was missing something special that the Amiga had and still has to this day every time we use them. It is the reason the Amiga community is still so active and hardware and software projects continue to be worked on and enthusiasticall received by the community. I just don't see this in the ST community. And what there was of the ST demo scene was small even at its height. The Amiga demo scene in contrast was a phenominen of great proportion and continues thrive to this day.

I must say i really enjoy reading this topic. :)

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A great example of this is Captain Blood. This game was developed on the ST originally and used it's audio capabilities to the max to create very nice sounding music and in-game sound effects

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It was the first game i saw in the ST, the music was more then fantastic, 1988 i think.
One of the best games ever in the ST i think. Jean Michelle Jarre did an excellent work.

Here in Portugal, the Atari ST was very used for sound because of midi port. Many sound studios did used it for a long time. In 1989 i remeber a lot of musitians had the Atari connected to big keyboards.
Then i remember that a lot of people start to move from ST to Amiga with midi ports.
I think (may be wrong) the Atari had better software sound programs for some years, but the Amiga just did some really nice ones to, and by the 90's they were equal in music software but i think the amiga start to take a little advantage after 1990.
but in late 80's maybe they were simillar (in software)... :unsure:
But i allways remember the Atari ST as a great sound studio, a lot of musitians used it (same with amiga, a bit later).
anyway, i think they were both great !! but the Amiga.... better :D

Well it's quite easy to keep this civil since I've received such a warm welcome and inviting atmosphere! :D

I think I've had an advantage since I've owned both systems and can give a completely non-biased opinion. Also, I've had first hand exposure in professional environments with both.

For example, at game companies I've been to and worked at, A2000's were used to make video games for the Lynx & SNES.

TT030 to makes games on the Jaguar (I still have my Jaguar dev kit).

TT030 using DynaCad for mechanical engineering (at a company here in San Diego).

I've used multiple music studios which used ST's & Falcons (there was nothing like Cubase audio in the early 1990's).

I actually got my A4000 from work. It was used to make the glue screens and intros for Disney DVD's.

and the list goes on...

So you see, I don't come at this from merely from a user stand point, but from somebody who has seen first-hand what these computers actually have done professionally.


These questions are based on around 1992 or so...

Q: How can you replace an A500 with a ST when you need more on-screen colors?!
A: Buy a VERY expensive and perhaps even custom video card?!
- I don't think so....

Q: How can you replace a ST with an A500 when you HAVE to do repeatedly fast printing professionally?
A: Buy a VERY expensive laser printer with 4 megs of RAM OR a custom interface for the Amiga?!
- Same again, I don't think so...

Q: How can you replace an A2000 w/a video toaster with a ST when you're doing video production?
A: You can buy a genlock and fudge it? LOL!!!
- Please don't even try...

Q: How can you replace a Falcon running Cubase Audio to lay down audio tracks professionally with an Amiga?
A: You can buy a MIDI adaptor for the Amiga and resort to reel to reel recording, then pain-stakingly edit your tracks using the old 1960's method.
- Are you kidding?!?!?!

I rest my case!!! (unless someone keeps it going, PLEASE don't keep this going LOL)

Some very good points listed in your Q/A summary and I have to agree when you look at both systems being used in the professional market place. For professional graphics and video the Amiga couldn't be beaten, and for affordable printing and music studios the ST was the best option. And I wouldn't argue with that.

The only thing I would add is that the ST was quite a budget option for the printing and DTP markets. The Apple Mac was the system that ruled both of these areas at the time and you hardly ever saw an ST or Amiga in them. Only in lower budget studios would you have possibly utilsed an ST for DTP because the Mac was so expensive.

However if you leave the dedicated professional marketplace, where the computer would be utlised for one specific task, and look at the home marketplace then things are quite different. In the home maketplace, unless you were a musician wishing to use MIDI then the Amiga's much more advanced architecture meant it was the better option for games, graphics, sound sampling, and pretty much everything else.

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Originally Posted by Chewieshmoo

May I just add in my humble opinion.....Great arguements from both sides!
Really is no right or wrong, just views from BOTH SIDES OF THE POND and also good to see you guys keeping it civil unlike the same arguement on some "other" sites!!!
:thumbs:

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Now, shall I start up a Commodore 64 vs Spectrum vs Amstrad CPC argument!?!:lol:

Eventually the Mac ruled these areas, but not until about 1996 or so. Everyone I knew of used the Atari Falcon or dedicated embedded systems for laying down audio tracks.

Without Cubase Audio (or something like it), the Mac was worthless for laying down audio tracks. And this wasn't a software support issue, the Mac lacked the hardware to handle the job.

Back in the old days, the Mac was just an empty box (just like the PC). With co-processors for sound and a 2nd CPU (slave) especially made for digital signal processing (perfect for audio), I was able to do everything I needed on my Falcon. The Mac just simply wasn't up to the task.

As for DTP, by the mid 90's just about any computer could handle the job, handle it fast, and handle it right.

Thanks for the great conversation everyone. I'll be back from time to time especially when I resurrect my Amiga and try to get it onto the internet to grab some of those great games!