Atari ST games that outshone the Amiga

[Bloodwych]

We all know that the Amiga was the better machine and, in general, had better versions of the same games.

As Amiga owners, we were smug; taking the piss out of the Atari ST and its inferior nature in the famous 16bit wars of the golden days.

But let us not be so pretentious in victory fellow Classic Amiga veterans. Let's show our respect for a machine that some of us may have owned, even enjoyed, in those days of old. Let's help the Atari ST for once in our lives and put forward the names of games that shone on the nemesis format.

Admittedly, this could be a very short thread and many examples may come from the early years when the Amiga got crap ports, but so what? Let the inferior machine have its moment of glory.

Games unreleased on the Amiga are also permitted, just to help posters with their choices.

I'll start then:

Falcon

The famous flight simulator. I ordered the original of this on the Atari and it was a great flight sim of the time. Due to the Atari's faster CPU (higher clocked 68000), the Amiga version was actually slower.

Apparently I heard the Amiga's blitter could have been used to make Falcon run smoother on the Amiga had it not been a direct port, but the fact remains - Falcon was better on the Atari ST. There I admitted it. Shoot me.

[Harrison]

The last point you made was a big factor in Atari ST games badly ported to the Amiga. The ST didn't have custom chips like the Amiga so had to process most data using the main CPU. So porting a game to the Amiga without recoding it to take direct advantage of the Amiga custom chipset would leave a game running slower than the ST original due to the 68000 CPU in the ST being clocked slightly faster than that in the Amiga. Not good.

I never played Falcon on the Amiga, but did own the game on the Atari ST and it was great at the time.

We also mentioned in another thread about Captain Blood and how the ST version was better than the Amiga version, the graphics and gameplay were identical. It was the music and audio that were superior on the ST, which is completely mad when you consider the Amiga had far superior 4 channel stereo sound compared to the 3 channel mono of the ST. The samples used for the music in the Amiga version were muffled compared to the ST version, and the speech heard when talking to aliens in the ST version was completely missing from the Amiga version. Why? Who knows.

[FOL]

Errmmm, I only ever own, Falcon, StarTrek, Dungeon Master and Lombard RAC Rally. I have to agree, Falcon captured my imagination for Flight Sims. It was the first flight I had ever seen, .

I thought Midwinder seemed better on Atari ST (played it on my uncle's).

[Bloodwych]

Some good examples there. Dungeon Master was better on the ST and Star Trek - I'd forgot all about that! My goodness, that was an early release title!

I have loads of examples, but I don't want to blurt them all out at once.

Xenon was better on the ST, but the Amiga got revenge with Xenon II.

It wasn't all bad owning one. The ST also had quite a good demo scene and chip music disks. Anyone remember "The Big Demo":

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVwRwqM9hU



I quite enjoyed my Atari ST years (before I snatched an Amiga Batman Pack)

[Harrison]

I enjoyed owning an Atari ST too until I eventually got hold or an Amiga, but I did always hate the GEM desktop environment. It was so clunky and crap. Made Workbench look very revolutionary by comparison.

Why do you think Xenon was better on the ST? I owned both versions and thought they were identical, except the audio was in stereo on the Amiga!

Dungeon Master was originally an exclusive on the ST and didn't appear on the Amiga until quite a bit later. That was one game I was glad of owning an ST for at the time. Great game and very revolutionary for the RPG genre at the time. Was the game any different on the Amiga? I played it quite recently on the Amiga and thought it seemed exactly the same.

Was the Star Trek game, Star Trek: The Rebel Universe, by Firebird? The one with the digitised graphics from the series? That was cool at the time. Was also on the C64 and DOS. The only Star Trek game at the time on the Amiga was a PD game AFAIK. Good but not as good as the ST game.

[Bloodwych]

You know what – you’re right!

I guess what makes those games seem better in my mind (Xenon, Dungeon Master) was simply the fact they weren't improved for the Amiga, so didn't outshine my original Atari ST memories. If I’d played Xenon on the Amiga first, it’d probably be the other way around!

I also thought the ST chip music suited Xenon and actually sounded better, regardless of the stereo and lack of channels. That tune was chip music at heart. On the Amiga it sounds, well, muffled and has strange guitar samples and stuff thrown in.

I might be wrong as it's been a long time, but wasn’t Dungeon Master more sluggish and less responsive than the ST version? Again down to the 1Mhz CPU speed difference and direct porting?

Captive, Nitro, Operation Stealth, Super Wonderboy and Tiger Road were better on the ST. Or were they? Perhaps my memory isn’t very reliable, since I’m trying to think back so many years without recent evidence. Time to fire up the emulators I guess…

We've also still got the Atari ST exclusives to mention as well. Star Trek is one of them - yes, it was the one with digitized graphics!