Atari ST vs Amiga

Aww memories are flooding back with this thread. Used to have a 1040Ste, and a neighbour-mate the A500...great machines at the time looking back at it now.

Cant think of all (and jesus, I admit I used to pirate 100's back then)....but games that spring to mind are:

Microprose F1 Grand Prix - Sent FAR too much time on this.
Kick off 2 / Sensible Soccer - Which did you prefer (sensi here...just)
GODS - Great platformer
F-19 Stealth Fighter
Speedball 2 - Awesome, still wish something similar existed.
EPIC - The Intro (for the time) was wow :)
Populous
Midwinter / Captive / lemmings / Stunt car racer...
 
Armorgeddon and Bloodwych spring to mind, as they were the first co-op games I ever played. Bloodwych in particular was fantastic, two player dungeon master basically :D
 
knowledge123 said:
Quite true MP! :cool: Many of the great adventure /point and clicks spanned more then 10 disks (Kings and Space Quest, Beneath a Steel Sky, Zak McCracken, DotT, Simon the Sorcer, Loom etc etc ). I think that Elite may have had the most ever ? I really can't remember now :( :p
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Zak McKracken was only 2 disks as was Loom. However Beneath a Steel Sky was 15!!! It was worth it though.



M/.
 
Sleepery said:
Armorgeddon and Bloodwych spring to mind, as they were the first co-op games I ever played. Bloodwych in particular was fantastic, two player dungeon master basically :D
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Agreed we used to play it. The only downside was that for the two player it required joysticks instead of mice which made it a little harder.

Absolutely great game though!


M.
 
jellybeard999 said:
The ST had better sound didn't it ? I know the music for example on the ST was miles better. For example the R-Type intro music on the ST compared to the other systems (while also being an awesome game) !

I had an ST for ages when I was little. Went straight from that to a Playstation :p

Mates had Mastersystems / Megadrives, so used theirs.
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the Amiga had better in game sound, the ST was only better in midi music

i still have my Amiga a1200 with a 34mhz cpu upgrade board with extra 4mb
i got it just for indy 500 great game
i also had a ST520 with a ram upgrade board
 
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Johnnytoxic said:
How about Weird Dreams? That game seriously freaked me out.
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Oh man I remember that game! That was really freaky...you start off the game at the bottom of a candy floss machine and it just got stranger after that! They just don't make em like that anymore!

Ah, memories..... I used to have an A500 and it was far superior to the ST for games & much better sound. Future Wars, Another World, Speedball 2 (I still play that now and then using winUAE) and many others. Any of the Bitmap Brothers games were really good on the Amiga but my favourite was definately Speedball 2. Wore out many a joystick playing that game!

ST was better for MIDI recording though and I used it to record many tunes. Amiga was the head of the class for games though. I recommend giving winUAE a go. Pretty easy to setup but obviously watch out for copyright issues on games.

Woah...I forgot Midwinter- that was an absolute classic & really deserves a remake.
 
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Chaos engine was good. Lotus Espri challenge was good also had a isometric racer which was fun.

A500+ I had with upgraded from to 1Mb and a freeze game thing where you could load the game from that point (it happened to work for games which wouldn't copy normally.

Like First Samuri. Also reminds me of Last Ninja, but I didn't like that so much.

Played populous but it took 1 hour to see if you were winning or not so I didn't like it that much. Same with a flight simulator, took too long.

Hard Drivin' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin'
 
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mame said:
Well in stoke there was actually a 'club' that met up in a working man's club every monday night attended by kids and adults. a lot of people went and there was even someone who set up a stall selling blank disks etc (Rich, who only recently got locked-up for music piracy)..
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Reminds me of the computer "club" in Buddle Arts Centre in Wallsend, which John Twiddy used to come along to regularly.... nice of him to dish out copies of Sanxion & Delta to everyone, not to mention the less restricted versions of the Expert Cartridge software that he used to hack around with. Guess those little memories won't be included in his biog eh?!

OP: Amiga easily. Loved mine and never was there a decent version of Sensible Soccer ever again.
 
I ordered an A500 after saving up my grant money from Uni. It was waiting for me at home when I came back on hols. I can still remember the excitement putting it together, then my Stepdad played X-Out for about an hour while I itched to have a go, hehe!

After that I had an A1200 with, if I recall, a 60Mb hard drive. It was an excellent machine, I did loads on it. Also workbench 3.1 was a vast improvement, and a really powerful OS, lots of features that I wish we had in modern OS's. Games-wise I spent hours lapping Monaco in F1GP, it became a zen trance thing after a while.

I sold it to a bloke years later for £60, and regretted it. Since then I picked up an A1200 a few years ago with a '030 board, quite a lot of RAM (for an Amiga!), some graphics card, lots of bits and bobs, all mounted in a PC case with a remote keyboard. I had a quick play but then I've not really touched it to be honest. It's still in my loft in a bin bag.... I should really dig it out and have a tinker.
 
Monkey Puzzle said:
The falcon cost twice as much, it's not really that fair a comparison. Besides which, didn't Atari stop making it shortly after it came out? Kind of like saying the 3DO was a great games machine - who cares? it was dead on arrival, overpriced and flopped.
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It was £100 quid more.

Its a fair comparison because they went head to head as Atari and Amigas new mainstream 32bit home computers...
 
undergroove said:
Reminds me of the computer "club" in Buddle Arts Centre in Wallsend, which John Twiddy used to come along to regularly.... nice of him to dish out copies of Sanxion & Delta to everyone, not to mention the less restricted versions of the Expert Cartridge software that he used to hack around with. Guess those little memories won't be included in his biog eh?!

OP: Amiga easily. Loved mine and never was there a decent version of Sensible Soccer ever again.
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Hehe, me and a mate we used to go to a "Club" too in Acton every Wednesday, Amiga's and monitors bundled in the back of his VW Jetta. Half of us used to sit there showing off Amiga Demos while the other half used to sit there with 4 external drives hanging off their Amigas running XCopy Pro and handing bundles of games to each other. It's no wonder the Amiga Games scene died such a death.

Eventually I saved up a fortune and built a 486 DX2/66 PC, bought a copy of Flight Simulator 5 and took it to the club. It wiped the smiles off a few faces I can tell you :)
 
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Dr Who said:
Falcon 030 is often raised by Atari Fanboys, the reality was it a fast cpu, with little else. The AGA Amigas had once again a way superior architecture, but the death knoll had already been sounded for non PC compatibles at that time.
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What you talking about? :confused:

A Fast CPU with little else????

What about the 16-bit 8 channel 50khz sound engine that had a 32 MHz DSP?
Or the 16-bit True Colour Video hardware?
Seperated blitter, hardware scrolling, extended controller ports, built in SCSI, Unix based OS...

Keep in mind that we are talking about Vs the A1200 not the A4000...Atari never bothered releasing the Falcon040 even though it was ready for production.

AGA was an excuse to put the words 16.7 million on the marketing bumph...was a load of crap, all this 262k colours on screen at once, big deal it was for static images only.

Didn't care if the A1200 sold more, it was never about that with Falcon owners, we knew it was a fairly dead platform, rumours of the Jaguar were rife. It was about having something bespoke and underdog, its what drove the creativity on the Atari scene...Amiga guys would do something in a demo, then the Atari guys would go off and do it and better it...vice verser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoK8KaJV4CA

Awesome STe demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kGRwokph0U

Award winning Falcon demo...on standard hardware.
 
Blimey, someone has kept their fanboy angst active for decades then!

Amiga- lived bright and died, potential realised. Result? Fail.

Falcon- came way too late, barely lived, then died, potential unrealised. Result? Fail.

Oh and AGA was about a lot more than 16.7million colour images. It was a decent evolutionary step over the ECS. But by then CPU power was becoming cheap and custom chipsets were becoming unnecesssary for the masses. It killed Commodore (with a lot of help from Commodore), and Atari were wayyyyy too late to the party.

Amiga vs ST..... Like Vietnam, you do know the war's over.... don't you?
 
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still has a A500 A600 and A1200 hanging around plus an STe - but if you want to really to go back I have a BBC B in the boot of my car atm for renovation
 
This is a very good comparison of Amiga custom chips Vs the St lack of hardware.

Shadow of the Beast:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5ic3Fy-tVY


The sound chip in the St was terrible. It was really a sound chip for 8 bit machines. People go on about the midi port way to much. All it did was allow it to communictae with extrenal musical instruments. How many users even used it ?! You could buy a midi port for the Amiga for about £20 anyway.

Amiga sound Vs St with Lotus 2. They are light years apart.

St - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs1gDpYJzew
Amiga - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kes7RQFnzk4
 
EvilFranky said:
What you talking about? :confused:

A Fast CPU with little else????

What about the 16-bit 8 channel 50khz sound engine that had a 32 MHz DSP?
Or the 16-bit True Colour Video hardware?
Seperated blitter, hardware scrolling, extended controller ports, built in SCSI, Unix based OS...

Keep in mind that we are talking about Vs the A1200 not the A4000...Atari never bothered releasing the Falcon040 even though it was ready for production.

AGA was an excuse to put the words 16.7 million on the marketing bumph...was a load of crap, all this 262k colours on screen at once, big deal it was for static images only.

Didn't care if the A1200 sold more, it was never about that with Falcon owners, we knew it was a fairly dead platform, rumours of the Jaguar were rife. It was about having something bespoke and underdog, its what drove the creativity on the Atari scene...Amiga guys would do something in a demo, then the Atari guys would go off and do it and better it...vice verser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoK8KaJV4CA

Awesome STe demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kGRwokph0U

Award winning Falcon demo...on standard hardware.
Click to expand...

A1200 68020 loadsa software, enhanced versions for AGA AT interface for cheap 2.5 inch Laptop drives

Falcon 68030 little software, same as it was on the ST Scsi to support HDDs costing 2x as much as the PC

Commodore got the software support thru all the varities of machine they had, thats what kept the Amiga alive as long as it did, but both machines were already dying thanks to the dominance of the PC and the release of Doom, which started pulling in the hardcore gamers.

I bought my first A500 in 1987, switched it for an A2000 in 1988, they wre great machines, but I also had a 520ST in 1985 when the A1000 was just too much money. The ST got demoted when the 500 came along, I wasn't precious about my hardware, I wanted what gave the best performance.

The A500 vs 520ST was a continuation of the Spectrum vs C64 battles and all of it perpetuated by Jack Trammiel and his obsession with doing better than the competition.

Sadly he failed, and ultimately Commodores management were a little too ahead of the time.

CDTV is the forerunner of todays HTPC

CD32 was the first Games console with upgradeable hardware

Sadly all Atari (Jack Trammel) ever succeeded in was giving the world a cheap alternative to an Amiga, and that was his speciality at Commodore, price wars.

Yeah the hardware on the Falcon was good on paper, but other than a few demos and some professional midi software, it was to all intents and purposes an expensive doorstop, something which the Amiga was ultimately destined to become shortly after.
 
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