I had the ST coming from C64 and then upgraded to an Amiga500. Absolutely adored the ST but my friend had the Amiga and kept constantly wowing me to the point I eventually got one. I say I got one but it was a particularly nice gift from my dad. My time with the ST though was very special and many years later I even owned 6 of them. Amazing days on all these machines and I still very much play them all. When my favourite game Oids from the ST was being ported to Amiga I was the one that did the new maps for it. Wow what a claim to fame. Anyway cool video and it's easy to see why you love the ST so much
Similarly upgraded from c64 to ST because that's what I saw first (the really original ST) I only got an Amiga after 2 STs were sent back with faults. I did actually like it and got another one later on.
@@Ray.Norrish yeah I think mostly any machine we owned became it's own special thing back then. They were all so distinct in how the experience felt because of their various strengths. Unique in a way you don't tend to feel with modern machines. Great times
The ST is the 16 bit version of a Commodore 64 . Power Without the Price seems to be originally from the 64 . And the AMIGA is the 16 bit version of the 8bit ATARI line .
@@akfreed6949 Very true! Probably why I like the Amiga as I loved Star Raiders and 80s Atari coin-ups like Gauntlet but never really gravitated to the C64!
Great review.. I was an Amiga guy growing up, but always thought highly of the ST also. Couldn't see why people were buying PCs and Macs with the Amigas and STs out there. ;-) I thought it was interesting when I learned the history of the designers later, and realized how connected the Commodore / Atari lines were. You could pretty easily argue that the proper paths would be Atari 8-bit to Amiga and C-64 to ST. ;-) Both great machines...
PC compatibles dominated the market because they were fully backwards compatible with a massive software library (including custom built applications that most large corporations operated) while consistently getting cheaper and more powerful every year thanks to the economy-of-scale of having thousands of manufacturers produce parts, peripherals and complete systems. In 1987 a budget turbo XT 8088-8 with 640k ram was around US $500 compared to $599 for the ST and $699 for the Amiga 500. That XT had access to better keyboards, monitors, and much cheaper storage options (US$700 for a 20mb amiga HDD compared to $200-300 for the XT) while also being far easier and cheaper to maintain, repair and upgrade. So overall the XT was a much better option for businesses while the Amiga and ST found their niches in gaming, graphics and music. However by 1989 you could get a 286-16 with EGA for $750 and in 1991 a 386SX-25 with VGA for the same price and suddenly the gaming advantage the amiga and ST had was gone. They were both great machines but they couldn't compete with PCs rapid improvements at mid and high end gaming while consoles took away the budget market.
I really think the big mistake was the companies switching their products; Atari should have released the amiga and the ST was better suited as a low cost successor to the C64. Atari's only chance was to directly compete with the Macintosh and get in on the multi-media and desktop publishing markets with games being a secondary focus rather than directly compete with PCs and Commodore. For Commodore they needed to take advantage of the C64's massive library and popularity by making a successor that was a both fully backwards compatible and an upgrade to the C64 but that was still cheap enough to be an alternative to consoles. If they used the ST's basic design with an upgraded 6502 processor and 128 or 256k memory in the first version (similar to the planned ST130 and 260) then they likely could have achieved that for under US$400.
@@dgmt1 Yeah, I don't think anyone could have stopped PC compatibles... I really think (hindsight) the only sustainable alternate market was education. That's how Apple survived, and it was very intentional on their part. Getting into schools was the smartest thing Apple did. If Atari or Commodore were to compete long term, they would have had to become THE player in the schools. Commodore had a shot at that, but they were too cheap to go all in like Apple did. Music (ST) and Video (Amiga) were nice niche markets, and gaming is great, but there weren't going to last that way.
We shared the same attitude. Every new game was a good excuse to spent time on a different machine....and we always ended up playing some Kick off matches on a 1040STE.
Im with you... Atari forever ! my journey was 2600 to 800XL to 520STFM so the nostalgia is very strong. Even though i still own an amiga , for me Atari will always bring me back to being 14 years old in my bedroom in 1987 playing Goldrunner and discovery pack games.
@John Thomas I owned both an Amiga and a Atari ST its not about which is better. I enjoyed both computers, its which one put a smile on my face ages 14. I never owned a C64 so no memories, but now playing 800xl ported games on a C64, sorry the 800XL is much better IMHO.
As an Atari fanboy myself I'm jealous of the amout of speech/music samples the Amiga uses. Why was that so much more prevalent in the Amiga? The Atari can do them as well after all.
The ST uses a synthesizer type sound chip that to play a sound requires a simple waveform setup and attributes. This is great in that it does not require a lot of memory, CPU overhead or system bandwidth once sent to the sound chip. But to play a sample it requires the CPU to constantly change the sound using interrupts, and due to the nature of using waveforms it requires multiple channels to improve the sound quality so requires even more CPU overhead and memory bandwidth for each channel. I can't give any definitive CPU percent usages due to the variances in sample quality, but enough to say beyond playing a reasonable quality sample there wasn't much left to do any other high bandwidth tasks like graphical updates. The Amiga was designed with samples in mind (it can also do synth type but that's not it's focus) The CPU doesn't actually get involved with the sound playback and instead relies on the custom sound chip (Paula) which is a coprocessor that has it's own direct memory access. Memory access is on opposite ticks to the CPU so doesn't interrupt the CPU memory access. The only real disadvantage of using samples on the Amiga was memory usage (while not slowing it down, it did use more memory) The STE mostly resolved this by adding another sound chip to add this as a option on an additional channel to the originals but it was rather rigid with sample quality settings where the Amiga was more flexible and the Amiga had lower memory bandwidth usage.
The ST used a simple sound chip from the '70s. It wasn't as good as Pokey, and it wasn't as good as SID. Atari had been trying to negotiate a deal to get Yamaha FM chips (think AdLib/SoundBlaster) but that fell through. So, if you want digital sound on the ST, you have to cram volume values into the soundchip at the desired sampling rate which eats a lot of CPU time and sounds rather fuzzy due to the lack of a real DAC. I was an ST user/programmer, but the Amiga was a far more capable machine in most respects.
I was an Atari ST guy all the way, but looking back I really wish the Atari STE would have been what Atari launched the platform with in '85. The 8-bit digital stereo sound, blitter chip and expanded color palette would have made the ST much better competition for the Amiga on the gaming front. I always appreciated just how much smoother games played on the Amiga and loved all the digital samples.
Totally agreed, it's a real shame we had to wait until '89 for the STE, and by that point the ST install base was so big that most developers didn't bother taking advantage of the STE's enhanced features so there wasn't much point in having one.
I had the Amiga but also wished Atari had come directly with the STe instead of ST. It would have been better for everyone. The Amiga had so many ST ports that didn't use the Amiga hardware at all.
Thank you for this video and a reminder of one of the most exciting days of my young child life; when I got my first amiga (amiga 1000). This amazing machine was a godsend and something I can’t help but get nostalgic over when I watch videos like this. 👍🏼
I was lucky to get to enjoy both machines. Had an ST myself and I had an Amiga 3000 at work. Which I used to create broadcast graphics and animations ... and of course; to play games on as much as possible! 😁 Was really cool to get to play all kinds of 3D games on a faster machine! But after a few years we got a Sillicon Graphics machines instead and gaming focus changed to a bunch of PCs that we had in a network. Combining work and pleasure, good times! 😁😁
Oh yes, the rivalry, we had a bit of that at school between the Amiga and Atari folks versus the pc. :) So at least the Amiga and Atari were just happy together. As you say, luckily we just enjoyed each others machines. Which isn't a normal thing I'm noticing these days, it's all so polarized. Good on you!
Really enjoyed this Rees. Love how you avoided the playground debate. The little A600 is a great choice of machine with plenty of options for WHDLoad, only lacking the AGA and 32 Bit bus of the now over priced A1200 (well...and they keypad of course). You're spot on about Nostalgia too. Why else would we even do this? Can it play FS2020? Well......no! lol
Upvoted for not being a fanboy. A lot of us were fanboys to one specific system in our youth... usually the one our parents bought for us. But, now that we are older, wiser, and can afford to have more than one brand... they're all pretty great examples of technological progress. I grew up in the opposite camp back in the 80's and am now enthused to see more Atari and Apple stuff in my later years.
I've just discovered your channel via RMC, finally an Atari person. I don't know how you managed to avoid the rivalry, it was rife in the school playground, every other day it'd be a game of top trumps between the Atari and Amiga. I started out on the rubber key ZX Spectrum in the late 80's, but it was the Atari 520STFM that arrived next which really got me into computers. These days I have quite a retro computer collection with various Amigas too, but I'm still hankering an Atari Falcon, the one that got away! Enjoying the channel, great content.
More room here to comment from my Tweeter comment :) as a kid in the 80s we only had the zx81 as we couldn't afford anything else. Parents also thought I'd get bored of stuff quickly, only thing I did was draw cartoons and read my comics. Eventually in high school the CDT teacher had an Atari ST in his office. When out he'd let us go in and use his Atari ST all lunch to play golf. Was quite good from what I remember. Never really got into computers back then as we never had one, didn't see the point. Years later in college I started my computer course and finally got my DOS computer a 386sx and loved it. Met Michael Harris (don't know where he is now as I no longer live in London) on our course and he still loved his Amiga 500 that he had setup at home with all the kit. We were supposed to be doing the computer course for DOS and Windows but he just carried on, at home, using his Amiga as he still really loved it. I remember in 1999 our courses were coming to an end, Michael still loved his Amiga, the PlayStation had come out & he loved that as well so we'd go play his. I remember ribbing him about the Amiga, why did he still like it? Its a dead system & the PC is taking over now, why did he still have loads of stuff for it? I never had one so never saw the appeal. He used to say "But all the graphics on Babylon 5 are created with Amigas" would still rip him. Now, decades later I see what he meant. I don't have nostalgic feelings for the Amiga and when I used Workbench on emulation still had no nostalgic feelings for it. But I now have nostalgic feelings for all the old Amiga documentries I see, just because it reminds me of the 80s and 90s. Although we all ribbed him, me probably more than others, I finally understand why he loved the Amiga so much. Considering he had and could run a lot more games on his Amiga 500 than I could of my slow 386sx.
Well, I'm an Amiga guy, and a C64 guy..and a ZX Spectrum guy XD ... and understand perfectly what you say, I recently beaten Flying Shark for the first time on the ZX Spectrum and I enjoyed sooooo much :D ... it's not all only about the scroll or a few more colors
Back in the day I did consider a ST but the Amiga's sound capabilities that where breathtaking at the time made me buy an A500. Still use my Amiga's and have some heavily expanded ones (A1200 and A4000 with PPC+gfx cards, A600 vampire 2, A500+PiStorm)
The battle is always AMIGA VS ATARI. My first computer is the C64 1984 and 1988 the AMIGA 500 and 1993 the AMIGA 1200. Now I still busy with the C64, AMIGA 500 and the AMIGA 1200.
I have used both and I always went back to my Atari ST. I was an Atari kid, I had an Atari 800, 130XE, and a 520ST. The Atari ST monochrome monitor was fantastic, in fact when I got a color monitor (an NEC 16 color dedicated monitor) I often times switched between the two depending on if I wanted higher graphic quality vs color.
I had both growing up, first ST then Amiga. After I moved to Amiga I did see some music setups with the Atari plugged into hi Def monitors running cubase. That little monitor output blew my mind and I saw an aspect the Amiga could not touch.
Similar experience here. I had an STe (and later Falcon) as a musician in a demo crew, most friends had an Amiga. It was God-give that they had somewhat better games and I had Cubase. Either of us got what they wanted and was happy for the other.
I had both machines and loved them both for different reasons (the AtariST's pirate scene menu disks but the Amiga's more advanced sound and graphics). My path was the Commodore VIC20, Commodore 64, Atari 520 STFM, Commodore Amiga 500 plus and finally the PC master race. Out of all machines the C64 is the machine that defined my childhood (that xmas morning in 1985 as a 10 year old) and the one I love and miss the most. Even though we have emulators to run everything now I still miss those days of loading ahem 'backup' cassettes on the old c64.
The Rivalry was in the mid 80s between the Amiga 1000 & the Atari 520 ST. The rivalry was created by new Atari owner (former Commodore founder) Jack Tramiel who put out a series of Ads "Power without the price" to deceive people into thinking the Atari ST was just as good as the Amiga, but only had cost half the price. I bought an Amiga 1000 when they came out for twice the price and was not stupid enough to believe the ads Jack put out. The things I wanted the Amiga for were simply not possible on the Atari ST. Maybe the most significant thing was the incredible Amiga sound chip which introduced the world to software synthesizers (today they are best known as VST's on modern computers) and no other computer in the mid 80s could do anything like that. Using the Amiga's built in MIDI (that's right, built in. Just needed din ports) I saved myself a fortune on the new sampling keyboards and other kinds of synthesizers. Being an early owner of a video camera, I also had an interest in the Amiga's desktop video abilities and I worked in broadcast television in the late 80s before becoming a computer consultant in the early 90s. Video games were a strong interest of mine since getting my Atari Sears Pong in 1975 which I still have. The Amiga was designed by important former Atari engineers and due to the classic Atari company's lack of interest in the Amiga technology, they split and founded Amiga. As you know "Have you you played Atari today" has a lot more in common with the Amiga than the Atari ST which was designed by former C-64 engineers and Atari was now owned an managed by the former Commodore founder. The Amiga was truly superior in almost every way, and easily worth twice the price. But in 1987 the cheaper Amiga 500 came out, and people here in America where computers had cost half the price than they did in England and other parts of Europe had little reason to choose the Atari ST. The Amiga quickly out sold the Atari ST by a margin of 10 to 1. People weren't dumb. I know things were a big different in Europe than here. Pricing was very different. Also, by 1992 as you mentioned the Rivalry you mentioned was over. The winner.....neither. The PC won out. By 1992 most Americans were ditching the Amiga's in favor of PC's. The Amiga for a short time became sort of a budget home computer for those that couldn't afford a PC, or just wanted to use it as a game console, or special purpose like video production. The Amiga 600 wasn't even sold here. The Amiga 1200 clearly was headed no where. I bought one reluctantly anyway just in case, but knew it was a dead end. The Atari Falcon design made no sense at all. It was simply made for bragging rights created by the rivalry as a way of saying....."You were far superior for 7 years....Take that". But it's release made no sense at the time, it sold almost no units, barely any software made for it and it wasn't in production for more than a year if that. The PC's clearly already won the war. As a huge Amiga fan (I owned 4 Amiga's and was President of a group), I adapted to the PC when it was time and Windows was taking over the world. I've never heard of most of the software titles you mentioned, because.....the days of the Amiga being a viable platform (and the Atari ST) were generally over by 1992 or well on their way out. 1985 is when they were impressive. A 7 year run wasn't too bad.
Great video as always. With an ST upbringing, Workbench is also a mystery for me. Very keen to learn more, get to grips with WHDLoad and do a “pimp my workbench” video 😎
Commodore's original was the A1000. The A500 was a cut down version "wedge" of the biggish box A1000. The A2000 was a proper big box version - all had basically the same guts.
I find it quite amusing that at the same time you - a lifelong Atari fan - are just dipping your toe into the world of Amiga, I - a lifelong Amiga fan - have just got my first STe. Well done on the re-cap though. My A600 wasn't so successful (it had leaked a fair bit).
Oh awesome! I think it's finally time to put aside those differences and finally let those old wounds heal 😅 I think I got really lucky with the re-cap - I was under such time pressure that I didn't even practise, I literally took the hot air gun out of the box for the very first time and went at it. I've seen some real horror stories with these but apart from the smell and one pad that had come half unstuck there wasn't any evidence of leakage at all.
@@ctrlaltrees tbh, I just like the older machines. They're great fun to play with no matter what. I remember seeing the ST in the Argos catalogue and wanting to play with one. Any computer is a good one to me! SMT recaps can be troublesome, but the caps seem to cause more problems than soldering. I need to get back to my 600; leaky caps killed the blue video output, the audio is still screwed, and it won't boot from floppy. It's a step up from the fact it wouldn't even power on, mind!
You hardly scratched the surface of what Amiga is. The A600 is not the best example,but useable. Not to mention its so easy to add a CF card as a HD,network it via cheap pcmcia card and and host of other handy items. Workbench looked like it did default because it was designed to work on the lowest common denominator Amiga(512K) but could be expanded quite a bit with even the included stuff that was not activated. Add a host of addons like Genlocks,DCTV,accelerators and/or ram expansions etc. and the sky is the limit-or so it seemed back then.
Yes, sadly a product of the time constraints I had to work under in putting this together for the charity livestream. I'd certainly like to revisit the Amiga in future and get it fully kitted out with upgrades. It's impressive what's possible with some of the modern add-ons.
Very cool video! My childhood was 2600 --> 800 --> 520ST (no F), and finally 1040STfm. The only exposure I had to the Amiga back in the day was playing the game Rogue on the Amiga 1000. Unfortunately this game didn't use any of the capabilities of the Amiga so I assumed it was just an overhyped machine. Years later, I have an A1200 sitting next to a Mega STe and enjoy both :). When I left the ST for the PC, it was for running a large BBS and running a lot of DOS applications; I left in 1990 so I missed out a bit on the ST and even more on the Amiga, so it's great getting hit with both the nostalgia of "I played that" and "oh, I didn't know the ST/Amiga could do that.."
It actually didn't! I really should have mentioned this in the video but it got overlooked... Apparently there's a transistor in the video output circuit to the right of the IDE connector that can fail, causing this issue. I was going to try replacing that as well but didn't have the part in stock and ran out of time. Hopefully a subject for a future video.
The ST was a great machine, but after upgrading to my first miggy (A500 Batman pack), it was VERY quickly forgotten. The Amiga was simply the best machine in the late 80's/early 90's.
@@ctrlaltrees I had an Atari STe first it was the powerpack version with the big pack of software plus I managed to get the summer pack collection separately for £30 so I had a huge amount of games for my ST. It didn't seem that long before I got an Amiga 500 plus maybe 6 months. I actually preferred the Atari ST. I always thought the ST was a bit like a cheap Macintosh with also decent games sort of package but the Amiga was really just a games machine, workbench was awful, the computer wasn't very stable with quite frequent guru meditations and mine had occasional problems reading discs. I loved the fact the OS on the ST was built in. You could put in any disc even blank and formatted and you got to the desktop straight away. I had a Phillips CM8833 monitor so would set the ST up so it had no border using the pots at the back to remove the border but the Amiga kept switching between borders and borderless so I had to leave it with a border when using the same monitor. So for me the Amiga had borders perversely. I think in the end the ST was used exclusively for the serious stuff and with the Phillips monitor and the Amiga was pretty much under the TV as a games machine only and that worked for me. I didn't really do any serious stuff on the Amiga at all, it was just games and demos on the main tv. Later I got an Archimedes A3000 secondhand and both Atari ST and Amiga seemed primitive and a bit crap to be honest. I enjoyed the 3D games of the Archimedes like Starfighter and Stuntracer 2000 a lot more than 2D games too. Risc OS is still my favourite operating system and GUI environment. So I'm a rare person who had both Atari ST and Amiga at the same time but actually preferred the Atari St as an overall package but totally accept Amiga versions of games were typically a little better. I must admit though at the time I would buy the versions of games I could find cheaper and as I was more into 3D games I would favour the ST slightly more as they typically ran a smidgen faster. My Atari ST got a lot more use than my Amiga perhaps 10x as much because it was my main wordprocessor and other tasks (bulletin boards, midi etc). It was just such a reliable stable machine.
Nice. If the STE had been released as the first ST, then I think we would have seen some truly amazing games on it rivaling the Amiga. As for the Formula one game, that looks like A1200 or A3000 video as it is way smoother than an A500 or A600.
Indeed, seems Atari thought they'd have the upper hand by being first to market but it really hurt them in the long run. The big install base of ST/F/M users and the STE's backward compatibility meant that developers would only ever target the lowest common denominator.
@@ctrlaltrees From what I understand (I know someone high up at Atari,) an STE like machine with sprite hardware was meant to be release from Day 1, but apparently Atari had wanted to include the Blitter on the MMU IC, and the rest on the Shifter, but had issues getting them to work, and using separate chips was a whole lot more expensive.
there is 1 Amiga guy here.. he votes thumps down LOL. you are right: nostalgic experience makes each system unique unless you had multiple systems at that time.
An interesting take on the Amiga. I think you should have compared your "nostalgia" for the GEM Desktop/TOS with your new experience with Workbench/AmigaOS. The Amiga/ST had such similar games catalogues in the 80s that I see the OCS/ECS Amigas and 520/1040STs as fairly interchangeable on the gaming front. The difference for me was Deluxe Paint vs Canvas, PageStream vs Papyrus and Cyber Studio CAD-3D 2 vs Lightwave. Yes, the ST monochrome modes were great but what kid in the 80s was utilising there ST as a Jackintosh DTP machine at home with a fancy monochrome hi-res monitor? As an ST owner with Amiga owning friends, I have to say that my nostalgia is more for the Amiga now which had Turrican and Rainbow Islands but gave a better more compatible (but still not ideal) upgrade path to AGA machines and basically pushed the extra hardware it had (blitter and copper) to create much more unique experiences than the standard STs could muster (thanks Team17 and EA especially). I know you had an STE but it didn't lead to Alien Breed being ported k or a passible version of Lemmings 2 sadly. Just my view! I still have a soft spot for the 'busy bee' loading pointer and Blue War III (please check that game out). Thanks.
There's a few games that offers cross-compatible "multiplayer" via Serial-Null-Modem. Lotus III and Battle Chess. Maybe there's others.. But basically what it means, is that you can hook up and AtariST with an Amiga and play against each other.
Love that there is no stupid fanboy stuff going on (all systems have their merits and faults) in this video so for that I shall sub. I also loved that you cheeked out the operating system Workbench before gameplay as on these 16 bit computers it's often overlooked that these were meant as work machines first and gaming systems second.
Both machines Atari and Amigas are both MC68000 Cpus but Atari has a slightly faster Mhz than Amiga. Then the diffrence is Amiga has Workbench on a Disk, and Tos/ Gem on roms chips that is slightly quicker. eather way they are both grate and still a master peace of history today.
A twinge of jealousy here with the music.... :) That's usually the thing that sticks out to me most between the platforms (although I haven't really played much on the Amiga, TBH)
Yeah, i totally get your last summary words - its the best for you becouse of your nostalgia. And today there is no sense arguing which one of the old 8 or 16 bit computers are the best. Its the matter of our memories, past experience from our childhood. To be honest i will always "love" small Ataris like 65XE or 800XL becouse it was my first computer and i know C64 were better "programmed" with time and their graphics/music were objectively better. For me, 65XE is the best microcomputer, period. thanks for your vids!
For me the whole UV curiosity with plastic is that direct sunlight is fine but the light passing through windows was the main culprit for yellowing. Nice looking box of gear there. ;) When you were on the ST I was mostly into GEN/MD but also C64 since I got a used one around that time, kind of old news by then but it did have some fun games included and it's monitor gave me my first taste of Composite on GEN/MD. I used to look at Amiga magazines at this big book store so I knew a little about it bitd, but not actually trying an A500 until around 2010. ^_^ Then online I've learned about various Atari I didn't know about and became a fan of the Amstrad CPC despite no model of it ever reaching NA lol.
12:20 there was a similar program on the ST which was indeed a lot of fun to play with. It was especially fun to try to make it speak French or German with ot a too heavy english accent.
I hope to one day do something very similar to this... Don't have the hardware (yet), but will probably go with emulation. I'm just as clueless though as to how everything worked. Loved the palette shift! :)
OK, but I think a face-to-face comparison of features would work better than a personally reflexive first look. Obviously you can't really get the feel of a platform until you have had enough time to explore its depths.
I also had an Amiga (500) for about four years or so. And I call me an Atari guy, too. Hey, who cares, it was a great gaming machine! I think I loaded Workbench about two or three times in theses years! 😂 Yeah, the Amiga has multitasking, but overall usability is way better on the ST imho! Let the war begin... 😛
why does the ST Amiga Format coverdisc read into steem emulator?? it works in winuae but not steem or winston or stew?? thanks......... I have an ST Amiga format coverdisc and it wont read in steem but reads fine in winuae thanks......
Let's not fool ourselves here ..amiga is better in almost every single area ...I had an atari st 520 then the ste 1040 ..all my memories are from st and I loved it .Back in the 80s 90s at school I would defend st against amiga all day long and I truly believed st was as good if not better ,but who was I kidding lol ..I've now got an amiga 1200 and it gives me all the same nostalgia but with that extra bit of graphics ,speech ,scrolling, etc ..the only 2 things I miss about st is the sound was more cheesy retro not better but I miss the sound ..and the look of the keyboard ...everything else amiga excells in ..its better in sound to ,just I miss hearing the st but no doubt the reality is it would sound crap side by side ...I'll always love my memories of st but I can now finally admit amiga is a bit better in everything where it counts
OK, but I'm not really sure what so many people think they have to gain by repeatedly making this point on Atari content all over the internet. Perhaps just let people enjoy things?
bUt aN A600 iS nO rEaL aMiGa 😉 Sorry, could not resist 😉 I never had love for the 600. The Numpad was THE thing after the C64 and I still use it so very much today. No need to say that I don't use bare notebook keyboards either 🤣 The Amiga keyboard was nearly a standard keyboard back in the days and I got used to it since then.
Yeah, so I hear! A lot of flight sim fans complain about them too due to the lack of numpad. Also that weird blank key that doesn't do anything, what was that all about!? 😆
@@ctrlaltrees Blank key is so that it can be configured for multiple languages by just changing key caps without having to have a completely different keyboard. It was oddly forward thinking for Commodore :-\ Also that missing numpad was a pain not just flight sims but for many applications.
The thing that annoyed me the most with workbench when I had my Amiga500 was that the windows didn't display the content of the disk as such, just the icons someone deigned put in there. If you wanted to do file operation you either had to load a filer program or use the command line, which opened another can of worms when you only had the internal floppy. On GEM you could format, copy, move files without needing extra tools.
I didn't have an Amiga myself, but my brother had. And he would always say the Amiga is the best computer, and he would especially hate on the pc :P And nintendo copied great giana sisters and made super mario. I couldn't be the other way around of course :P Today when I asked about it, he said he was brainwashed. Oh, and great job recapping :)
Haha sounds familiar specially about the PC hating, oh well PC's where awful clunky machines back then and we as Amiga users always made fun of PC's users. In the end the PeeCee users got the last laugh i guess 😂
Your beloved machine had no rival. That what suggest that the ATARI was a machine that could rival the AMIGA in the first place. And that my dear mate is nonsense ;-)
I have used both machines for 25+ years. In my experience the Atari ST is more reliable with floppy disks than the Amiga and booting to the OS without needing a floppy is nice if you have no hard drive. I have had probably 1 Atari disk go bad per 40+ Amiga disks go bad. I am not joking!!
Amiga used a more compact track layout which allowed for more storage, but unless you have good quality DD floppies it doesn't have as much leeway for data loss. Also as a side note using HD floppies is worse (even for DD drive on PC I can't say for ST as I don't know the FDD system as well) than using DD as the magnetic media was changed. Many floppies sold as DD were in fact HD when they changed the manufacturing over for convenience, as it mostly worked. 3M did this and then had to reopen a DD line again, as the HD floppies failed QC on DD drives.
I like to rub it into the commodore nuts that poopoo the ST and brag about the AMIGA . I ALWAYS point out the AMIGA is really an ATARI since it was made by the creator of the 400/800 computers and we all know it's more powerful than the C64 😈
I had the ST coming from C64 and then upgraded to an Amiga500. Absolutely adored the ST but my friend had the Amiga and kept constantly wowing me to the point I eventually got one. I say I got one but it was a particularly nice gift from my dad. My time with the ST though was very special and many years later I even owned 6 of them. Amazing days on all these machines and I still very much play them all. When my favourite game Oids from the ST was being ported to Amiga I was the one that did the new maps for it. Wow what a claim to fame. Anyway cool video and it's easy to see why you love the ST so much
Similarly upgraded from c64 to ST because that's what I saw first (the really original ST) I only got an Amiga after 2 STs were sent back with faults. I did actually like it and got another one later on.
@@Ray.Norrish yeah I think mostly any machine we owned became it's own special thing back then. They were all so distinct in how the experience felt because of their various strengths. Unique in a way you don't tend to feel with modern machines. Great times
The ST is the 16 bit version of a Commodore 64 . Power Without the Price seems to be originally from the 64 . And the AMIGA is the 16 bit version of the 8bit ATARI line .
@@akfreed6949 Exactly
@@akfreed6949 Very true! Probably why I like the Amiga as I loved Star Raiders and 80s Atari coin-ups like Gauntlet but never really gravitated to the C64!
Great review.. I was an Amiga guy growing up, but always thought highly of the ST also. Couldn't see why people were buying PCs and Macs with the Amigas and STs out there. ;-)
I thought it was interesting when I learned the history of the designers later, and realized how connected the Commodore / Atari lines were.
You could pretty easily argue that the proper paths would be Atari 8-bit to Amiga and C-64 to ST. ;-)
Both great machines...
Trade magazines would trash the Amigas and STs.
Notable missing route would be going from C64 to Apple IIGS (due to soundchip designer).
PC compatibles dominated the market because they were fully backwards compatible with a massive software library (including custom built applications that most large corporations operated) while consistently getting cheaper and more powerful every year thanks to the economy-of-scale of having thousands of manufacturers produce parts, peripherals and complete systems. In 1987 a budget turbo XT 8088-8 with 640k ram was around US $500 compared to $599 for the ST and $699 for the Amiga 500. That XT had access to better keyboards, monitors, and much cheaper storage options (US$700 for a 20mb amiga HDD compared to $200-300 for the XT) while also being far easier and cheaper to maintain, repair and upgrade. So overall the XT was a much better option for businesses while the Amiga and ST found their niches in gaming, graphics and music. However by 1989 you could get a 286-16 with EGA for $750 and in 1991 a 386SX-25 with VGA for the same price and suddenly the gaming advantage the amiga and ST had was gone. They were both great machines but they couldn't compete with PCs rapid improvements at mid and high end gaming while consoles took away the budget market.
I really think the big mistake was the companies switching their products; Atari should have released the amiga and the ST was better suited as a low cost successor to the C64. Atari's only chance was to directly compete with the Macintosh and get in on the multi-media and desktop publishing markets with games being a secondary focus rather than directly compete with PCs and Commodore. For Commodore they needed to take advantage of the C64's massive library and popularity by making a successor that was a both fully backwards compatible and an upgrade to the C64 but that was still cheap enough to be an alternative to consoles. If they used the ST's basic design with an upgraded 6502 processor and 128 or 256k memory in the first version (similar to the planned ST130 and 260) then they likely could have achieved that for under US$400.
@@dgmt1 Yeah, I don't think anyone could have stopped PC compatibles...
I really think (hindsight) the only sustainable alternate market was education. That's how Apple survived, and it was very intentional on their part. Getting into schools was the smartest thing Apple did. If Atari or Commodore were to compete long term, they would have had to become THE player in the schools. Commodore had a shot at that, but they were too cheap to go all in like Apple did. Music (ST) and Video (Amiga) were nice niche markets, and gaming is great, but there weren't going to last that way.
Nice to see you finally running an Amiga. There's hope yet for your soul.
lol
Your first SMD recap was this A600? Absolute madlad.
Yup... That's just how I roll 😅
I know the old adage "go big or go home", but you really went all out.
Haha thanks! I did have a lot of guidance from my good friend Chris at Pure Amiga so I can't take all the credit. 😁
I probably should do the same to my 1040ST, but I'll admit, I'm a little intimidated :)
@@MissionEdPossible understandable. You could damage it.
We shared the same attitude. Every new game was a good excuse to spent time on a different machine....and we always ended up playing some Kick off matches on a 1040STE.
Im with you... Atari forever ! my journey was 2600 to 800XL to 520STFM so the nostalgia is very strong. Even though i still own an amiga , for me Atari will always bring me back to being 14 years old in my bedroom in 1987 playing Goldrunner and discovery pack games.
@John Thomas I owned both an Amiga and a Atari ST its not about which is better. I enjoyed both computers, its which one put a smile on my face ages 14. I never owned a C64 so no memories, but now playing 800xl ported games on a C64, sorry the 800XL is much better IMHO.
As an Atari fanboy myself I'm jealous of the amout of speech/music samples the Amiga uses. Why was that so much more prevalent in the Amiga? The Atari can do them as well after all.
The ST uses a synthesizer type sound chip that to play a sound requires a simple waveform setup and attributes. This is great in that it does not require a lot of memory, CPU overhead or system bandwidth once sent to the sound chip. But to play a sample it requires the CPU to constantly change the sound using interrupts, and due to the nature of using waveforms it requires multiple channels to improve the sound quality so requires even more CPU overhead and memory bandwidth for each channel. I can't give any definitive CPU percent usages due to the variances in sample quality, but enough to say beyond playing a reasonable quality sample there wasn't much left to do any other high bandwidth tasks like graphical updates. The Amiga was designed with samples in mind (it can also do synth type but that's not it's focus) The CPU doesn't actually get involved with the sound playback and instead relies on the custom sound chip (Paula) which is a coprocessor that has it's own direct memory access. Memory access is on opposite ticks to the CPU so doesn't interrupt the CPU memory access. The only real disadvantage of using samples on the Amiga was memory usage (while not slowing it down, it did use more memory) The STE mostly resolved this by adding another sound chip to add this as a option on an additional channel to the originals but it was rather rigid with sample quality settings where the Amiga was more flexible and the Amiga had lower memory bandwidth usage.
The ST used a simple sound chip from the '70s. It wasn't as good as Pokey, and it wasn't as good as SID. Atari had been trying to negotiate a deal to get Yamaha FM chips (think AdLib/SoundBlaster) but that fell through. So, if you want digital sound on the ST, you have to cram volume values into the soundchip at the desired sampling rate which eats a lot of CPU time and sounds rather fuzzy due to the lack of a real DAC. I was an ST user/programmer, but the Amiga was a far more capable machine in most respects.
the atari st had a rubbish audio chip similar to a 128k spectrum lol
I was an Atari ST guy all the way, but looking back I really wish the Atari STE would have been what Atari launched the platform with in '85. The 8-bit digital stereo sound, blitter chip and expanded color palette would have made the ST much better competition for the Amiga on the gaming front. I always appreciated just how much smoother games played on the Amiga and loved all the digital samples.
Totally agreed, it's a real shame we had to wait until '89 for the STE, and by that point the ST install base was so big that most developers didn't bother taking advantage of the STE's enhanced features so there wasn't much point in having one.
I had the Amiga but also wished Atari had come directly with the STe instead of ST. It would have been better for everyone. The Amiga had so many ST ports that didn't use the Amiga hardware at all.
Thank you for this video and a reminder of one of the most exciting days of my young child life; when I got my first amiga (amiga 1000). This amazing machine was a godsend and something I can’t help but get nostalgic over when I watch videos like this. 👍🏼
I was lucky to get to enjoy both machines. Had an ST myself and I had an Amiga 3000 at work. Which I used to create broadcast graphics and animations ... and of course; to play games on as much as possible! 😁 Was really cool to get to play all kinds of 3D games on a faster machine! But after a few years we got a Sillicon Graphics machines instead and gaming focus changed to a bunch of PCs that we had in a network. Combining work and pleasure, good times! 😁😁
Another fantastic episode.
Well done on the first SMD recap, great job. You made it look easy.
And the sunbrighting really worked well.
Thanks Rich, glad you enjoyed it! I think the recap was more luck than judgement (and excellent guidance from our very own Pillock of course)
Oh yes, the rivalry, we had a bit of that at school between the Amiga and Atari folks versus the pc. :) So at least the Amiga and Atari were just happy together. As you say, luckily we just enjoyed each others machines. Which isn't a normal thing I'm noticing these days, it's all so polarized. Good on you!
Really enjoyed this Rees. Love how you avoided the playground debate. The little A600 is a great choice of machine with plenty of options for WHDLoad, only lacking the AGA and 32 Bit bus of the now over priced A1200 (well...and they keypad of course). You're spot on about Nostalgia too. Why else would we even do this? Can it play FS2020? Well......no! lol
Upvoted for not being a fanboy. A lot of us were fanboys to one specific system in our youth... usually the one our parents bought for us. But, now that we are older, wiser, and can afford to have more than one brand... they're all pretty great examples of technological progress. I grew up in the opposite camp back in the 80's and am now enthused to see more Atari and Apple stuff in my later years.
I've just discovered your channel via RMC, finally an Atari person. I don't know how you managed to avoid the rivalry, it was rife in the school playground, every other day it'd be a game of top trumps between the Atari and Amiga. I started out on the rubber key ZX Spectrum in the late 80's, but it was the Atari 520STFM that arrived next which really got me into computers. These days I have quite a retro computer collection with various Amigas too, but I'm still hankering an Atari Falcon, the one that got away! Enjoying the channel, great content.
More room here to comment from my Tweeter comment :) as a kid in the 80s we only had the zx81 as we couldn't afford anything else. Parents also thought I'd get bored of stuff quickly, only thing I did was draw cartoons and read my comics. Eventually in high school the CDT teacher had an Atari ST in his office. When out he'd let us go in and use his Atari ST all lunch to play golf. Was quite good from what I remember. Never really got into computers back then as we never had one, didn't see the point. Years later in college I started my computer course and finally got my DOS computer a 386sx and loved it. Met Michael Harris (don't know where he is now as I no longer live in London) on our course and he still loved his Amiga 500 that he had setup at home with all the kit. We were supposed to be doing the computer course for DOS and Windows but he just carried on, at home, using his Amiga as he still really loved it. I remember in 1999 our courses were coming to an end, Michael still loved his Amiga, the PlayStation had come out & he loved that as well so we'd go play his. I remember ribbing him about the Amiga, why did he still like it? Its a dead system & the PC is taking over now, why did he still have loads of stuff for it? I never had one so never saw the appeal. He used to say "But all the graphics on Babylon 5 are created with Amigas" would still rip him.
Now, decades later I see what he meant. I don't have nostalgic feelings for the Amiga and when I used Workbench on emulation still had no nostalgic feelings for it. But I now have nostalgic feelings for all the old Amiga documentries I see, just because it reminds me of the 80s and 90s. Although we all ribbed him, me probably more than others, I finally understand why he loved the Amiga so much. Considering he had and could run a lot more games on his Amiga 500 than I could of my slow 386sx.
"...to play football." you gave me a near heart attack with the video clip dude!
Formula One Grand Prix... My favourite game back in the day :)
Well, I'm an Amiga guy, and a C64 guy..and a ZX Spectrum guy XD ... and understand perfectly what you say, I recently beaten Flying Shark for the first time on the ZX Spectrum and I enjoyed sooooo much :D ... it's not all only about the scroll or a few more colors
In the 80s both the atari st and amiga were very much appreciated.
No Rees, NOI! Just kidding, the Amiga is an Amazing machine.
Step away from the Amiga! 😂
Back in the day I did consider a ST but the Amiga's sound capabilities that where breathtaking at the time made me buy an A500.
Still use my Amiga's and have some heavily expanded ones (A1200 and A4000 with PPC+gfx cards, A600 vampire 2, A500+PiStorm)
Good episode as per usual, and great attitude
The battle is always AMIGA VS ATARI. My first computer is the C64 1984 and 1988 the AMIGA 500 and 1993 the AMIGA 1200. Now I still busy with the C64, AMIGA 500 and the AMIGA 1200.
Just curious - what do you do on the 500 that you cant do on the 1200? Why still use the 500?
I have used both and I always went back to my Atari ST. I was an Atari kid, I had an Atari 800, 130XE, and a 520ST. The Atari ST monochrome monitor was fantastic, in fact when I got a color monitor (an NEC 16 color dedicated monitor) I often times switched between the two depending on if I wanted higher graphic quality vs color.
I had both growing up, first ST then Amiga.
After I moved to Amiga I did see some music setups with the Atari plugged into hi Def monitors running cubase. That little monitor output blew my mind and I saw an aspect the Amiga could not touch.
Similar experience here. I had an STe (and later Falcon) as a musician in a demo crew, most friends had an Amiga. It was God-give that they had somewhat better games and I had Cubase. Either of us got what they wanted and was happy for the other.
I had both machines and loved them both for different reasons (the AtariST's pirate scene menu disks but the Amiga's more advanced sound and graphics). My path was the Commodore VIC20, Commodore 64, Atari 520 STFM, Commodore Amiga 500 plus and finally the PC master race. Out of all machines the C64 is the machine that defined my childhood (that xmas morning in 1985 as a 10 year old) and the one I love and miss the most. Even though we have emulators to run everything now I still miss those days of loading ahem 'backup' cassettes on the old c64.
The Rivalry was in the mid 80s between the Amiga 1000 & the Atari 520 ST. The rivalry was created by new Atari owner (former Commodore founder) Jack Tramiel who put out a series of Ads "Power without the price" to deceive people into thinking the Atari ST was just as good as the Amiga, but only had cost half the price.
I bought an Amiga 1000 when they came out for twice the price and was not stupid enough to believe the ads Jack put out. The things I wanted the Amiga for were simply not possible on the Atari ST. Maybe the most significant thing was the incredible Amiga sound chip which introduced the world to software synthesizers (today they are best known as VST's on modern computers) and no other computer in the mid 80s could do anything like that. Using the Amiga's built in MIDI (that's right, built in. Just needed din ports) I saved myself a fortune on the new sampling keyboards and other kinds of synthesizers.
Being an early owner of a video camera, I also had an interest in the Amiga's desktop video abilities and I worked in broadcast television in the late 80s before becoming a computer consultant in the early 90s.
Video games were a strong interest of mine since getting my Atari Sears Pong in 1975 which I still have. The Amiga was designed by important former Atari engineers and due to the classic Atari company's lack of interest in the Amiga technology, they split and founded Amiga. As you know "Have you you played Atari today" has a lot more in common with the Amiga than the Atari ST which was designed by former C-64 engineers and Atari was now owned an managed by the former Commodore founder.
The Amiga was truly superior in almost every way, and easily worth twice the price. But in 1987 the cheaper Amiga 500 came out, and people here in America where computers had cost half the price than they did in England and other parts of Europe had little reason to choose the Atari ST. The Amiga quickly out sold the Atari ST by a margin of 10 to 1. People weren't dumb.
I know things were a big different in Europe than here. Pricing was very different. Also, by 1992 as you mentioned the Rivalry you mentioned was over. The winner.....neither. The PC won out. By 1992 most Americans were ditching the Amiga's in favor of PC's. The Amiga for a short time became sort of a budget home computer for those that couldn't afford a PC, or just wanted to use it as a game console, or special purpose like video production. The Amiga 600 wasn't even sold here. The Amiga 1200 clearly was headed no where. I bought one reluctantly anyway just in case, but knew it was a dead end. The Atari Falcon design made no sense at all. It was simply made for bragging rights created by the rivalry as a way of saying....."You were far superior for 7 years....Take that". But it's release made no sense at the time, it sold almost no units, barely any software made for it and it wasn't in production for more than a year if that. The PC's clearly already won the war. As a huge Amiga fan (I owned 4 Amiga's and was President of a group), I adapted to the PC when it was time and Windows was taking over the world.
I've never heard of most of the software titles you mentioned, because.....the days of the Amiga being a viable platform (and the Atari ST) were generally over by 1992 or well on their way out. 1985 is when they were impressive. A 7 year run wasn't too bad.
Great video as always. With an ST upbringing, Workbench is also a mystery for me. Very keen to learn more, get to grips with WHDLoad and do a “pimp my workbench” video 😎
PS that workbench colour scheme is a big improvement ;-)
Commodore's original was the A1000. The A500 was a cut down version "wedge" of the biggish box A1000. The A2000 was a proper big box version - all had basically the same guts.
I find it quite amusing that at the same time you - a lifelong Atari fan - are just dipping your toe into the world of Amiga, I - a lifelong Amiga fan - have just got my first STe.
Well done on the re-cap though. My A600 wasn't so successful (it had leaked a fair bit).
Oh awesome! I think it's finally time to put aside those differences and finally let those old wounds heal 😅
I think I got really lucky with the re-cap - I was under such time pressure that I didn't even practise, I literally took the hot air gun out of the box for the very first time and went at it. I've seen some real horror stories with these but apart from the smell and one pad that had come half unstuck there wasn't any evidence of leakage at all.
@@ctrlaltrees tbh, I just like the older machines. They're great fun to play with no matter what. I remember seeing the ST in the Argos catalogue and wanting to play with one. Any computer is a good one to me!
SMT recaps can be troublesome, but the caps seem to cause more problems than soldering. I need to get back to my 600; leaky caps killed the blue video output, the audio is still screwed, and it won't boot from floppy. It's a step up from the fact it wouldn't even power on, mind!
@@ctrlaltrees I think we need another platform war lol
You hardly scratched the surface of what Amiga is. The A600 is not the best example,but useable. Not to mention its so easy to add a CF card as a HD,network it via cheap pcmcia card and and host of other handy items. Workbench looked like it did default because it was designed to work on the lowest common denominator Amiga(512K) but could be expanded quite a bit with even the included stuff that was not activated. Add a host of addons like Genlocks,DCTV,accelerators and/or ram expansions etc. and the sky is the limit-or so it seemed back then.
Yes, sadly a product of the time constraints I had to work under in putting this together for the charity livestream. I'd certainly like to revisit the Amiga in future and get it fully kitted out with upgrades. It's impressive what's possible with some of the modern add-ons.
Very cool video! My childhood was 2600 --> 800 --> 520ST (no F), and finally 1040STfm. The only exposure I had to the Amiga back in the day was playing the game Rogue on the Amiga 1000. Unfortunately this game didn't use any of the capabilities of the Amiga so I assumed it was just an overhyped machine. Years later, I have an A1200 sitting next to a Mega STe and enjoy both :). When I left the ST for the PC, it was for running a large BBS and running a lot of DOS applications; I left in 1990 so I missed out a bit on the ST and even more on the Amiga, so it's great getting hit with both the nostalgia of "I played that" and "oh, I didn't know the ST/Amiga could do that.."
Loved the st my brother had the stfm.
I allways wanted the Atari 1040ste
Lately STFM homebrew are surprising me a lot! Wish surviving amiga devs were more bold on what they are doing
By the time the A500 was released I was working so missed the playground debates/insults, but not so for the 8 bit systems lol
Haha, yes I think it had all calmed down a bit by the time it was Amiga vs. ST, I hear Spectrum vs. C64 was much worse 😅
@@ctrlaltrees Actual blood spilt in the playground in those wars!
Thanks for the video! It’s nice to see the A600 to get some love. Did the recap help with the composite output issue?
It actually didn't! I really should have mentioned this in the video but it got overlooked... Apparently there's a transistor in the video output circuit to the right of the IDE connector that can fail, causing this issue. I was going to try replacing that as well but didn't have the part in stock and ran out of time. Hopefully a subject for a future video.
The ST was a great machine, but after upgrading to my first miggy (A500 Batman pack), it was VERY quickly forgotten. The Amiga was simply the best machine in the late 80's/early 90's.
I think Acorn Archimedes owners would disagree. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees I had an Atari STe first it was the powerpack version with the big pack of software plus I managed to get the summer pack collection separately for £30 so I had a huge amount of games for my ST. It didn't seem that long before I got an Amiga 500 plus maybe 6 months. I actually preferred the Atari ST. I always thought the ST was a bit like a cheap Macintosh with also decent games sort of package but the Amiga was really just a games machine, workbench was awful, the computer wasn't very stable with quite frequent guru meditations and mine had occasional problems reading discs.
I loved the fact the OS on the ST was built in. You could put in any disc even blank and formatted and you got to the desktop straight away. I had a Phillips CM8833 monitor so would set the ST up so it had no border using the pots at the back to remove the border but the Amiga kept switching between borders and borderless so I had to leave it with a border when using the same monitor. So for me the Amiga had borders perversely.
I think in the end the ST was used exclusively for the serious stuff and with the Phillips monitor and the Amiga was pretty much under the TV as a games machine only and that worked for me. I didn't really do any serious stuff on the Amiga at all, it was just games and demos on the main tv.
Later I got an Archimedes A3000 secondhand and both Atari ST and Amiga seemed primitive and a bit crap to be honest. I enjoyed the 3D games of the Archimedes like Starfighter and Stuntracer 2000 a lot more than 2D games too. Risc OS is still my favourite operating system and GUI environment.
So I'm a rare person who had both Atari ST and Amiga at the same time but actually preferred the Atari St as an overall package but totally accept Amiga versions of games were typically a little better. I must admit though at the time I would buy the versions of games I could find cheaper and as I was more into 3D games I would favour the ST slightly more as they typically ran a smidgen faster.
My Atari ST got a lot more use than my Amiga perhaps 10x as much because it was my main wordprocessor and other tasks (bulletin boards, midi etc). It was just such a reliable stable machine.
Nice. If the STE had been released as the first ST, then I think we would have seen some truly amazing games on it rivaling the Amiga. As for the Formula one game, that looks like A1200 or A3000 video as it is way smoother than an A500 or A600.
Indeed, seems Atari thought they'd have the upper hand by being first to market but it really hurt them in the long run. The big install base of ST/F/M users and the STE's backward compatibility meant that developers would only ever target the lowest common denominator.
@@ctrlaltrees From what I understand (I know someone high up at Atari,) an STE like machine with sprite hardware was meant to be release from Day 1, but apparently Atari had wanted to include the Blitter on the MMU IC, and the rest on the Shifter, but had issues getting them to work, and using separate chips was a whole lot more expensive.
there is 1 Amiga guy here.. he votes thumps down LOL.
you are right: nostalgic experience makes each system unique unless you had multiple systems at that time.
Those Amiga users are a spiteful bunch! 😉
Or perhaps it's the Atari Mafia disapproving of me saying nice things about the competition...
@@ctrlaltrees LOL yes it is possible Atari puritans I got it.
Atari did eventually release an upgraded OS on disk. It was called MultiTos and will run slowly on a 4mb ST
I own an Amiga 500 and Atari 1040 ST. I still prefer the Atari ST.
An interesting take on the Amiga. I think you should have compared your "nostalgia" for the GEM Desktop/TOS with your new experience with Workbench/AmigaOS. The Amiga/ST had such similar games catalogues in the 80s that I see the OCS/ECS Amigas and 520/1040STs as fairly interchangeable on the gaming front. The difference for me was Deluxe Paint vs Canvas, PageStream vs Papyrus and Cyber Studio CAD-3D 2 vs Lightwave. Yes, the ST monochrome modes were great but what kid in the 80s was utilising there ST as a Jackintosh DTP machine at home with a fancy monochrome hi-res monitor? As an ST owner with Amiga owning friends, I have to say that my nostalgia is more for the Amiga now which had Turrican and Rainbow Islands but gave a better more compatible (but still not ideal) upgrade path to AGA machines and basically pushed the extra hardware it had (blitter and copper) to create much more unique experiences than the standard STs could muster (thanks Team17 and EA especially). I know you had an STE but it didn't lead to Alien Breed being ported k
or a passible version of Lemmings 2 sadly. Just my view! I still have a soft spot for the 'busy bee' loading pointer and Blue War III (please check that game out). Thanks.
Funny you should say Workbench is intuitive, the interface is called "Intuition" :)
Goog conclusion ;)
There's a few games that offers cross-compatible "multiplayer" via Serial-Null-Modem.
Lotus III and Battle Chess.
Maybe there's others..
But basically what it means, is that you can hook up and AtariST with an Amiga and play against each other.
Love that there is no stupid fanboy stuff going on (all systems have their merits and faults) in this video so for that I shall sub. I also loved that you cheeked out the operating system Workbench before gameplay as on these 16 bit computers it's often overlooked that these were meant as work machines first and gaming systems second.
Amiga 600 has two things going for it. IDE hdd and small form factor.
And the PCMCIA port comes in handy too for network, specially if you have a heavily expanded one.
Both machines Atari and Amigas are both MC68000 Cpus but Atari has a slightly faster Mhz than Amiga. Then the diffrence is Amiga has Workbench on a Disk, and Tos/ Gem on roms chips that is slightly quicker. eather way they are both grate and still a master peace of history today.
i had both, and i have to say them both were very similar with the amiga coming out on top as the best machine, but it was close..
A twinge of jealousy here with the music.... :) That's usually the thing that sticks out to me most between the platforms (although I haven't really played much on the Amiga, TBH)
You guys had Jochen Hippel. There can be no inadequacy when you have Jochen Hippel.
That's where I got my Caps from for my A1200, totally worth it :)
Yeah, i totally get your last summary words - its the best for you becouse of your nostalgia. And today there is no sense arguing which one of the old 8 or 16 bit computers are the best. Its the matter of our memories, past experience from our childhood. To be honest i will always "love" small Ataris like 65XE or 800XL becouse it was my first computer and i know C64 were better "programmed" with time and their graphics/music were objectively better. For me, 65XE is the best microcomputer, period.
thanks for your vids!
💖
For me the whole UV curiosity with plastic is that direct sunlight is fine but the light passing through windows was the main culprit for yellowing. Nice looking box of gear there. ;)
When you were on the ST I was mostly into GEN/MD but also C64 since I got a used one around that time, kind of old news by then but it did have some fun games included and it's monitor gave me my first taste of Composite on GEN/MD.
I used to look at Amiga magazines at this big book store so I knew a little about it bitd, but not actually trying an A500 until around 2010. ^_^ Then online I've learned about various Atari I didn't know about and became a fan of the Amstrad CPC despite no model of it ever reaching NA lol.
12:20 there was a similar program on the ST which was indeed a lot of fun to play with. It was especially fun to try to make it speak French or German with ot a too heavy english accent.
I use one called SPEAKTEXT for my regular intro (not the Amiga-themed one I had in this video).
I hope to one day do something very similar to this... Don't have the hardware (yet), but will probably go with emulation. I'm just as clueless though as to how everything worked. Loved the palette shift! :)
OK, but I think a face-to-face comparison of features would work better than a personally reflexive first look. Obviously you can't really get the feel of a platform until you have had enough time to explore its depths.
There are plenty of those out there. This was a fun little video I was asked to put together for a one-off charity stream for an Amiga channel.
I also had an Amiga (500) for about four years or so. And I call me an Atari guy, too. Hey, who cares, it was a great gaming machine! I think I loaded Workbench about two or three times in theses years! 😂
Yeah, the Amiga has multitasking, but overall usability is way better on the ST imho! Let the war begin... 😛
Funny you keep saying "intuitive." The Amiga windowing system and UI are actually called "Intuition," not "Workbench."
TIL!
why does the ST Amiga Format coverdisc read into steem emulator?? it works in winuae but not steem or winston or stew?? thanks......... I have an ST Amiga format coverdisc and it wont read in steem but reads fine in winuae thanks......
Let's not fool ourselves here ..amiga is better in almost every single area ...I had an atari st 520 then the ste 1040 ..all my memories are from st and I loved it .Back in the 80s 90s at school I would defend st against amiga all day long and I truly believed st was as good if not better ,but who was I kidding lol ..I've now got an amiga 1200 and it gives me all the same nostalgia but with that extra bit of graphics ,speech ,scrolling, etc ..the only 2 things I miss about st is the sound was more cheesy retro not better but I miss the sound ..and the look of the keyboard ...everything else amiga excells in ..its better in sound to ,just I miss hearing the st but no doubt the reality is it would sound crap side by side ...I'll always love my memories of st but I can now finally admit amiga is a bit better in everything where it counts
OK, but I'm not really sure what so many people think they have to gain by repeatedly making this point on Atari content all over the internet. Perhaps just let people enjoy things?
bUt aN A600 iS nO rEaL aMiGa 😉
Sorry, could not resist 😉 I never had love for the 600. The Numpad was THE thing after the C64 and I still use it so very much today. No need to say that I don't use bare notebook keyboards either 🤣 The Amiga keyboard was nearly a standard keyboard back in the days and I got used to it since then.
Yeah, so I hear! A lot of flight sim fans complain about them too due to the lack of numpad. Also that weird blank key that doesn't do anything, what was that all about!? 😆
@@ctrlaltrees Blank key is so that it can be configured for multiple languages by just changing key caps without having to have a completely different keyboard. It was oddly forward thinking for Commodore :-\
Also that missing numpad was a pain not just flight sims but for many applications.
Blink out SOS if someone is holding you against your will and making you publish Amiga content
The thing that annoyed me the most with workbench when I had my Amiga500 was that the windows didn't display the content of the disk as such, just the icons someone deigned put in there. If you wanted to do file operation you either had to load a filer program or use the command line, which opened another can of worms when you only had the internal floppy. On GEM you could format, copy, move files without needing extra tools.
Find the 'State of the Art' Demo ..
And Eon by The Black Lotus.
@@EdgeOfPanic that's really good. But state of the art was amazing 30 years ago..
I didn't have an Amiga myself, but my brother had. And he would always say the Amiga is the best computer, and he would especially hate on the pc :P And nintendo copied great giana sisters and made super mario. I couldn't be the other way around of course :P Today when I asked about it, he said he was brainwashed. Oh, and great job recapping :)
Haha sounds familiar specially about the PC hating, oh well PC's where awful clunky machines back then and we as Amiga users always made fun of PC's users.
In the end the PeeCee users got the last laugh i guess 😂
Your beloved machine had no rival. That what suggest that the ATARI was a machine that could rival the AMIGA in the first place. And that my dear mate is nonsense ;-)
I have used both machines for 25+ years. In my experience the Atari ST is more reliable with floppy disks than the Amiga and booting to the OS without needing a floppy is nice if you have no hard drive. I have had probably 1 Atari disk go bad per 40+ Amiga disks go bad. I am not joking!!
Amiga used a more compact track layout which allowed for more storage, but unless you have good quality DD floppies it doesn't have as much leeway for data loss. Also as a side note using HD floppies is worse (even for DD drive on PC I can't say for ST as I don't know the FDD system as well) than using DD as the magnetic media was changed. Many floppies sold as DD were in fact HD when they changed the manufacturing over for convenience, as it mostly worked. 3M did this and then had to reopen a DD line again, as the HD floppies failed QC on DD drives.
I like to rub it into the commodore nuts that poopoo the ST and brag about the AMIGA . I ALWAYS point out the AMIGA is really an ATARI since it was made by the creator of the 400/800 computers and we all know it's more powerful than the C64 😈
Plastic degrades in UV I utterly fail to see why it's a good idea to put parts in the sun. Just leave them be.
ONLY AMIIIIIIGAAAAA!!!!!