We had an Atari 1040 STE with 4MB and a SCSI hard disk - it was amazing at the time. I was studying music at the time, so the built in MIDI was useful for plugging in a synth. The RCA jacks meant that everything sounded amazing on the stereo and having 4 joystick ports was great for multiplayer fun. My dad used it for word processing and seemed to like it (got the hi res monochrome screen, but we used a TV for gaming). My school built a music studio without about 10 Ataris and plugged them into Korg X5 synths for music production. Good times. I believe The Prodigy also used them for their music.
Allan Holdsworth (famous influential guitarist) used Cubase on his Atari ST right up until his death in 2017. He said they were just reliable and were bulletproof.
Being an Atari 800/130XE lover I wanted an Amiga for my next computer but didn't have the money so I went with the ST. It at least got me through 3 1/2 years of college.
Yes, both are good but when I want to replace my aging C-64 I'd compared both of them mostly in sound and graphic department and I give my due to Amiga 500. Maybe that's just me though. Although that Amiga 500 long gone but I did acquired a dead A1000 and C-64 for nostalgic purposes.
@@MHMajid-yi8iu that is if you(we) had the luxury to spend the extra money. Coming from the 8bit era everything appeared "good enough" compared to our previous machines. At hindsight, sure Amiga is superior....but STs were more than good enough.
@@bjbell52 Atari 8bit -> Amiga was the most reasonable path since they both were the most innovative machines in their categories and period. The 8bit Atari got its recognition only recently mainly due the work of the homebrew community but Amiga also had a rough 2 years before managing to draw the attention of game developers. I happen to own all those machines and I've found out that real world specifications do not really have an effect on our childhood "Indoctrination". I daily prefer and fire my Atari 8bit over my 16bit machines, my cpc and c64. So I think that computer users who grew up during that period don't really care about technical comparisons, but which of those machines can take them back in time.
+Matthew Richards Back in 1988 I even would have preferred a Commodore 64 over our VGA 386. Most games were CGA and had beeper sounds. Seriously 4 colour CGA with pc beeper sounds is volatile for your senses
+Ricdeau VGA did come out about 1987 but it was not until 486SX based PCs arrived that they were of any use anyway for arcade games. Even in the 90s games are best played on Amiga for Europeans and some US titles like Rocket Ranger/It Came from the Desert/Defender of the Crown II etc as they all stuck with EGA graphics for XT or AT class PCs.
+Matthew Richards I had a fair bit of fun and success running PC-DOS emulators on the ST. It rather shows us how much more powerful these platforms were - and makes me regret that neither the ST nor the Amiga managed to follow up successfully with 32-bit incarnations. A great era.
Yay! An ST Video from Kookytech!. I'm actually an original ST user (1986 on), machine I grew up with after the Atari 8bit. I started exploring Amigas last year and now have a 500 and 1200. Just a couple of comments on the video -- Great video, very fair comparison. The Hard disk port was DMA (fast) and came standard on all STs -- even the 1985 520ST. Also, The other main reason MIDI took off on the ST was ironically TOS -- being a single tasking user interface, timing on MIDI was quite good on the ST. The cheap but excellent high resolution monochrome monitor (640x400, 72 hz) was a great way for low cost productivity on this machine as well. Being here in the US, I just wish we could cheaply get a 520/1040STE -- they're extremely rare over here.
I was one of those guys who got an ST for Christmas, and of course school was a steam of continuous "banter" between Amiga and Atari users. However as much as I love the ST, of late you can can consider me equally impressed by the Amiga. I had no idea the Amiga is still being tweaked and upgraded long after the Atari. Guys still developing newer versions of workbench, third party PC style cases etc etc. That's admirable.
Great story. I love the ST/Amiga story. Also I loved the playground rivalry. I remember defending the Master System against 16 bit machines, then the ST against the Amiga, then the Amiga against everything else! Apparently my allegiance was somewhat fickle. I bailed on the ST as ST Format was becoming unnervingly thin on pages.... then the same started happening to Amiga Format :O
@@TheLemminkainen except for the horrible color (colour) scheme Sinclair used... I mean FFS talk about color clash. It was better when it was just black+white (ZX80/1)
I left high school in '98, I always remember my mate making music on this machine, using a monochrome crt and using the music software you have shown. The ST was also hooked upto a 386 I believe using some kind of midi interface. There was also a high end music keyboard hooked up, in which he made his own custom effects and loops. He made some very good techno and hard house style music. I still remember to this day the music room filled with people amazed at the quality of the sounds in which came from this machine. Thank You for taking the time to review this!
Early 90's I started programming music with an ST, Cubase V1 (shown in this video) and a Roland D-10. Been using Cubase for 30 years and it all started on an Atari ST
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
I'm not knocking the games, but if you REALLY want the best from your STe, you need to hook up some sound sources to the MIDI ports. The MIDI ports wasn't the big deal for me, the stability of the MIDI ports was. Rock solid timing, comparable to sync units worth $1000s
The ST wasn't just about having the MIDI built in for musicians, it was also the high resolution flicker free monitor, and PC compatible floppies. I have Amiga's too which I love, but when it comes to professional software, the Amiga could not touch the ST's monochrome resolution for stability or speed. Obviously the Amiga was better than the ST in general sound and graphics and media graphics, but the Amiga was never going to beat the ST/E/Falcon with Midi music as it used hardware interrupts for control so it never goes out of sync, and the high res on the ST wins for things like CAD and DTP.
i had one in my younger days absolutely loved it, finally got an Amiga last year and yeah the sound is so much better on the miggy but they are two fantastic machines and personally think everyone should have a go on one before writing it off
I'm an Amiga head, but had an ST/FM first. They are lovely machines. Up till then, I had always used my c64/speccy for games only. The ST introduced me to painting, music making fractals etc. ..and the B.IG demo! and it was affordable with loads of free games and software.
The Joystick / Mouse ports were put underneath to save money. The Keyboard controller chip that also does the 9 pin Mouse / Joystick ports is mounted on the keyboard. The controller chip communicates to the ST similar to USB with just +5V, Ground, RX, and TX, and also has a Floppy LED wire for only 5 wires; but to have the Joystick / Mouse Ports on the ST motherboard (like the origional 520 ST) means having to send an additional 12 lines / wires back to the ST from the keyboard. Like nowadays, wires and connectors cost a lot of money, so having the 2 ports on the keyboard saved money on production cost.
170mb back then?! That's like storage royalty! The best it got for me was a 2.5mb STFM (solder in upgrade from Power Computing) and later a 4mb STE and the use of a RAM drive... damn you, volatile memory!
Let me clean some errors: - Amiga&Atari deal happened before Tramiel bought Atari. After Tramiel left commodore, he started which started developing ST. Around the same time, Amiga guys were looking for money, and Atari (owned by Warner) lend them 500k USD, which, if not payed in time, would give whole Amiga IP to the Atari. Just After that, Tramiel made a deal with Warner and bought all Atari assets related to home computers and started Atari Corporation (at the same time, Atari Inc., owned by Warner still existed and made coin-op games). Few days before deal went live, Amiga guys got money from Commodore, and payed back the loan. - GEM was originally written by Digital Research for PC (8088), and they were not interested in porting it to 68000. Atari did the port by itself.
+crouchypony The ST operating system was handled mainly by ex-Atari Inc staff so in truth, both the ST and the Amiga are children of the original Atari. In hindsight, both platforms should've been merged once the lawsuits between Atari and Commodore were settled after 1987. Had that happened, we might still have that combined platform as a commercial option today.
+Jeremy Holloway : Well said (for the merge). It never would have happened in our universe simply because Jack Tramiel effectively funded Atari Corp. in order to "kill" Irvin Gould, his former associate at Commodore, that succeeded to seize the company that Tramiel originally funded in the 60's. And then IBM won..... (ok the Mac is still here but they are actually x86 PCs now whereas IBM definitely sold its personnal computing division to Lenovo a long time ago)
When the Amiga developers tried to get a deal with Jack Tramiel, Tramiel tried to screw them over for the Amiga. It was bottom dollar. No hiring them for future work or anything. Jack Tramiel screwed himself by this. He always screwed himself by screwing others, including the consumer.
The ATARI ST had a lot of really great productivity software, and if you hook either an MT 32 or Sound Canvas 55 using MIDI, then it's pretty fantastic.
The STE has more or less the same functions as the Amiga had. Hardware scrolling and blitter chip. Not many games use this since they wanted to make as much money as possible so they made the games to work on the lower ST model. Two games I always liked was Pacmania and Giana sisters. They are not so great on the ST model so a few years ago I redid them for the STE and besides the music, it's the same as the Amiga versions. Pacmania: ua-cam.com/video/07MIDzSEp58/v-deo.html Giana sisters: ua-cam.com/video/fy1bbymVuZ4/v-deo.html
The Atari ST was the pioneer for Midi music and 90's dance music being the first computer with a built in Midi Port and the first to have CUBASE. Many famous tracks were composed on it.
I just got an Atari 520STE for free today. :). It came with 200+ disks, two mice and a joystick/game controller. Along with the other needed cables. Apparently it has had a double memory upgrade too.
There is beauty in those YM-2149 chip tunes. Proud owner of an Atari 520STE from 1991 until 1996. Despite hours of use each week she never once let me down.
Dungeon Master, first LAN parties with MIDI cables and Midi maze and the superb sharp mono display on the proper monitor was just gorgeous. The functions keys could be a pain though it being easy to press two instead of the one you wanted to press.
Well Dan i think you said you got your first Amiga for xmas in 1991. Well that same xmas i got the STE ... really wanted the Amiga but my parents could not afford it. I really enjoyed using my ST ... had many a laugh with it over the years. Got my first Amiga for xmas in 93. I still use both machines on an almost daily basis ... great times. The sound did let the Atari down ... but in some ways i liked the Atari sound. Turrican 2 and Cannon Fodder and Epic had great intro tracks and the demo scene was just as active as the Amiga scene and still is to this day.
My amiga did Midi just fine. It wasn’t built-in but was easy to add. (And for most users, the built-in music of Amiga was good enough to compose music.)
Another great video! I, like you grew up with an Amiga and got into a few Amiga vs Atari debates at school! Funnily enough our school library had a number of Atari STs in them. I, and some friends used to play Carrier Command on them. It was a fantastic game! I have been wanting to add an Atari ST to my retro collection, and your video has convinced me to get one ASAP :)
There were quite a few games which sounded horribly, however if you let the Atari st connected to a midi keyboard, some games would detect the keyboard and re route the sound notes throughout the keyboard so you would have 16 channel orchestra and the quality would depend on your keyboard and amplifier. I had a Roland E5 at that time and the effect was stunning
I moved up from a ZX Spectrum 128 to an Atari STFM and within a few months started coding in assembly. I experienced a little fame with my Atari activities :). I bought an Amiga A500 and for a while coded on my Atari and sent the executable code to my Amiga via a dev system my mate wrote but I found the Amiga more challenging to code for so in the end used it for games only. I wish Atari had sorted the sound chip out on the ST and STe. I bought an Atari Falcon which as the 68030 in (I still have it) but it was too little, too late.
Both Are awesome machines, i got a 520STF back in the day, then sold it a few years later to get an Amiga 500+. The sound was better of course, but always had a preference for the ST, nostalgia maybe. The ST was an inferior machine, but the programmers were more skilled (especially on the demo scene) because they had to deal with the limitations of the hardware but they achieved outstanding results : border removal techniques and so on. I'm now a proud owner of a Falcon 030 and of an Amiga 1200. You should review the Falcon by the way, they are really cool machines.
A big difference between ST and Amiga MIDI is the ST's Midi works on Hardware interrupts so the timing is rock solid, whereas the Amiga is software bases so the timing was frequently out; sort of like the Amiga having hardware Genlock which the ST did not have until the STE; the DMA for hard drive was on every ST based system except the Falcon. Oh and the Cart port was never intended for software, just dongles for Midi and a sneaky way to add MAC OS ROMS. The ST Mouse / Joystick ports underneath were done to save cost as the keyboard controller (On the Keyboard PCB) does the signal processing for them, if they had them on the motherboard like the enhanced Joystick ports, then they would have had to have another cable going back to the motherboard, or have the keyboard controller on the motherboard and have a larger cable going to the keyboard; the ST keyboard cable is very much like USB with only Ground, +5V, TX and RX; the Mega STE / TT keyboard used the same keyboard controller, but instead of the ports being underneath, put one port at each end of the keyboard. The STE's enhancements include: 4096 Color Pallet, Hardware scrolling, Blitter Chip, 2 channels of DMA sound at up to 50 Khz (6 Total Channels with Stereo Mixer IC and 2 x RCA Audio Jacks.) 4 x SIMM Memory sockets for PC like RAM expansion, 2 Enhanced Joystick Ports. Has hardware Genlock for Video and a couple of other smaller updates.
i was firmly in the atari st camp growing up. lots of love for the atari but i was always secretly impressed when i went to me mates house and had a go on his amiga!
I remember that Commodore vs. Atari rivalry very well. Interestingly, while those two companies fought out a fierce battle, both lost to the IBM PC clones running (the boring) DOS/Windows. After the release of games like Doom and Wing Commander, the Amigas and Ataris were done. It is sad though that these machines and their OSs disappeared (except of those tiny, still existing communities who continued to modernize the Amiga operating system.).
I had an Atari ST 520 and absolutely loved it. The games you could get for it were absolute classics. I am only sorry I don't have mine anymore. By the way, you are absolutely right about the fierce rivalry between ST and Amiga owners. It was FIERCE, truly. There was no middle ground. No give and take. You were either an Amiga fan or an Atari fan and that was it. I, being an Atari ST user, was obviously [ and still am] a massive fan of the ST. I didn't even consider for one second, moving over to the Amiga. I was ST and that was it, I wasn't budging. Lol.
I live in the states where both Amigas and Ataris were rare, but my uncle had a 1040ST and that was my first PC in the mid nineties that was mine alone. We had a family IBM, but I would spend hours playing my uncle's massive game collection in my room. Gunship was my favorite game!
I had both systems as a kid; technically the ST was my brother's, but we all shared. The one huge advantage the ST had in terms of gaming, was that it had Dungeon Master, which was easily my favourite game of all time at that point. For that game alone, it was well worth investing in an ST. Oids was another classic that was not available on the Amiga at the time, although it was ported a couple of years ago. Then you add to it the MIDI capability. I used to play the keyboard and we had our Yamaha connected to the machine so I could live out my Pet Shop Boys/ New Order fantasies. The Amiga really couldn't compete with that. So, overall, certainly the Amiga was a superior gaming machine. Great games such as Speedball 2, Kick Off 2, hell, even Xenon 2 were just fantastic, and superior to the ST versions. But my number 1 16-bit game of all time was only available on the ST. And the fact you could make music with it meant that it was fantastic having both computers in our household growing up.
Hi, FTL's Dungeon Master was definitely available on the Amiga. Released in 1988, the Amiga port was developed by Phil Mercurio, I believe on a contract basis. When I joined FTL in August 1989, my first task was to fix some obscure issues with version 2.x of the Amiga port, as nobody remaining at FTL was an Amiga developer. We subsequently released DM:Chaos Strikes Back for both ST and Amiga at the end of 1989.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I guess in those days and that age, the many months between the ST release and an Amiga port would have felt like an eternity. Thanks for the info!
I seem to recall that dungeon master needed an Amiga upgraded to 1mb to run, something a lot of people didnt have when the conversion was released. The Atari one ran in 512k.
+Evil Twin I always thought that Atari was amazing for making music, And amiga was better for gaming, I remember where they had MOD's that amiga people created to hate on Atari lol, fun old days
My dad was much into music when he was young. I was told he used to own an Atari ST at one point. I guess he replaced it with a PowerPC mac, wich is the first PC I remembered as a kid, before he eventually switched over to PC in 2000.
When he suddenly lifted that Atari ST in front of the camera I flinched, I recoiled in horror, I think it must have been the sudden of shock of suddenly being confronted by my nemesis face to face.
You are quite wrong about the cartridge port, this was very much in use. Not for games but also in the music industry. All kind of samplers and other devices for music production were available for it. Some where really nifty. My friend who was a music producer has a STE with a sampling cartridge that was capable of 24bit and 48khz. It also included a dsp that made performing actions on the samples blinding fast (well, for that time ofcourse, we're talking the 90ties here).
Very cool video mate thanks for making it. I was an ST owner as a kid and bloody loved it. So it was good to hear some honest opinions from an Amiga fan, and not just slating the computer. Some fair and valid points there. I would like to see a video on attaching that drive to it if you get chance as I know a few of my original disk have stopped working and its always nice to play the games on the original platform rather than PC emulator. Cheers ;)
Used to go to computer club at primary school in the evening and it was either NES or Master System, and Atari ST or Amiga. Always preferred the look of the ST but ended up getting the Amiga 500+ in late 1991. Just before it all went down hill. Happy memories.
I had the Amiga 500 back in the day and still have it. The Amiga was a massive step up for me after having the zx spectrum till the end of its life. The Atari was a very capable machine and after seeing your comparisons with the Amiga. I am tempted to give this a try one day. Thank you for the great review.
The cartridge port was actually well used and catered for, but only with hardware upgrades, e.g. Steinberg MIDEX+, Ultimate Ripper, Atari Diagnostic, Aerochopper, Wizztronic adding more cartridge slots, Atari Robokit, realtime clocks, deskcart, CLAB MIDI stuff, video digitisers, audio sampling even 16-bit, disk duplicator, Ethernet LAN, IDE interface, hand scanners, EPROM programmers, Apple Mac emulators, Multiface game state saver...........the list goes on and on!
In my view the age-old argument between Amiga and Atari ST bears more than a passing resemblance to the modern-day arguments relating to Apple Mac vs. PC and iPhone vs. Android. Back in the day when I had just finished university, having graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, I scrimped and saved for an Atari ST. While my peers were pissing around on their Amigas playing games I was running a CP/M emulator on my ST and learning applications such as Ashton Tate dBase, WordStar and SuperCalc and also developing electronic circuit analysis programmes in the C programming language. This knowledge secured my first job in the developing CAD industry and led to my making a lot of money over a long and successful career as an industry leader in that field. While now in semi-retirement I am keeping my brain active by constantly learning new skills on the PC using world-class open source software and selling my services as a freelancer, while my Amiga friends have moved on to giggling at face-swap apps on their iPhones and spaffing money they can’t really afford on placing orders for this years batch of the latest iPads and Apple watches using their beloved Amazon Prime accounts. They also aspire to be one of those idiotic “priority boarders” you see standing in a queue for half an hour before each flight at most airports these days. It’s funny that when you see a physics professor explaining quantum computing or the inner workings of the universe they tend to be using a PC, probably running some Linux or BSD variant but when you have some bubble-headed moron with a shiny new media studies degree fucking up a news or documentary programme on TV they’re sitting in front of a MacBook Air. It’s also interesting to note that while many well-known musicians, even to this day, still use Atari STs as part of their music production workflow, you never hear of anyone still actually using an Amiga for anything. In my experience there are two types of computer owners: those who use them and those who play with them. I’ll leave you to guess which is which.
Oh, the memories. I mainly used programmes like Hyperpaint and ST Writer. I played games sich as Monty Python, Lotus Elite, Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Archons, etc. There was an alternate language for the ST, GFA Basic. I have the disks for GFA Basic V 2.0 and GFA Basic System 2. My ex had a dream of writing games. Now, I have a whole lot of obsolete Atari stuff, my sons are grown up and have no interest.
Nice vid. Just a note It was the SW that made the ST musician`s preferred choice..nothing on Amiga could even dream of competing with Notator, Cubase, etc...and the steady hires picture of monochrome monitor was a big plus too.
I got a 520ST+ with an external floppy dirt cheap from ebay 3 years ago when nobody actually wanted them still. That was one of the best buys I've ever made. A must have for Amiga 500 kids that always wanted to know what their Atari ST friends were talking about back in the day. Replacing the broken floppy drive wasn't easy though due to the strange disc change detection mechanism of the ST (similar to that of the 1541).
As a matter of fact, because of higher resolution (though grayscale), if memory serves, I think the Atari was also picked up by newspapers and publishing houses for desktop publishing, particularly because of Calamus, which was custom-built for the ST. Later versions were ported to Apple, and from there-on Apple machines kept hegemony in the newspapers. Until this day, actually.
I got one when I bought my Amiga 500 a few months ago (job lot) and I was quite impressed, it took me ages to find the joystick ports someone must of got sacked due to that decision, great vid as always m8
I bought an Atari 520ST back in 1987. I had a really nice setup. Both the color and mono monitors, an external SCSI hard drive array, modem, and a big load of peripherals! Tons of software, and I upgraded my 520ST to 4MB of RAM late in 1987. It was, and still is my most beloved computer I have ever owned. I started my computer geek-ism with a Tandy Color Computer Model 1 back in 1982. Then went to an Atari 800XL, then the ST. But, I also owned an Amiga 500 in 1989 as well. I liked it, but I was about to switch to PC's the same year I got the Amiga, and then in 1990 I went completely PC and have been ever since. But, I miss my Atari 520ST, and wish I had one today. I have STeam Atari ST emulator, with just about all the software I had back then, so I can enjoy the software, but I miss the hardware!
Great video and i also always was an Amiga fanboy and did not own an Atari ST until last year. I also was impressed by it's capabilities and enjoy playing games and share the same positive and negative things you mention.
The reason for the weird joystick port locations is that the ST was originally designed without a numeric keypad, which was added as a last-minute decision. The joystick ports are part of the keyboard, so the bottom was apparently the only place they could go. Maybe they were originally thought to go to the top or side maybe?
I had an ST back in the day but I wasn't really even aware of the Amiga for a long time until my cousin got one I never knew anyone else with one. The STFM has a hard disk port also. I just got one off ebay and have just got sooo many extras for it. Loving it. In the expansion port you could put a robot controller card I have one also today you can put things like a lan/usb adapter, hard disks (sd card) or even USB power adapters.
Harddrives were available very early on ! they weren't an STe addition. ASCI Atari came up with their own standard of SCSI because the SCSI people hadn't decided on things when it was time to go! Checkout the max bandwith of ASCI and UltraSatans
great video - as always Dan. I was Amiga all the way since i was a kid in the 80s, and a member of a demo group on it. Recently decided to take the plunge and got a 1040 Ste and kitted it out with an HXC Floppy emulator and an ultrasatan hardrive in order to have access to the whole ST demo scene. Obviously not as good as the Amiga demo scene, but there are some gems on the ST. Like you, glad i got one to compliment my amiga 500 and 1200
Still have my Atari 512ST ... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, BBC Model B. All fully working with software and additional supporting kit. Still got my original Atari 2600 console.. Boxed with games. Panasonic 3D0 boxed with games. Original Playsyation.. The one with all the ports in the back... Boxed with games. All fully working in 2020.
I never owned an Atari ST (until now) and I got my Amiga late , probably in 1997 or later. I grew up playing with my friend's STE and that was enough to make me prefer it over my "late'' Amiga. I found that same Amiga "dead" during the 2020 lock downs and it was my first repair, restore and upgrade project on a retro machins (2020) so now I am proud and I feel attached to that specific machine. Two years later(This month) I bought an 1040STE and..... I subconsciously treat it as a superior machine ( best spot on the bench among the rest of the 8bit and 16 bit machines), hooked on the best Trinitron CRT, the only one protected from the elements of the room (cats and dust)! So when we deal with things that are tied to our childhood period....all objective criteria goout of the window. Sure the scroll on the ST is jerkier in most games, the colors on screen are less, the sound is poor but... my amygdala doesn't agree.
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So, here we go, answering a 6yo question :D. The original atari st had mouse/joystick ports on the right side and no 15-pin ones. After they started including floppy drive within the computer (stf-models) they moved the ports out of the way and under the computer. Apparently when they added those extended ports they didn't move the existing one, but added the new ones to the side..
I was one of those Atari lovers and still feel loyal to the ST. I owned an Atari 520 ST(FM) due to my parents not prepared to shell out £500 for an Amiga 500 - back in 1989. I was gutted but loved my Atari. I didn't play many games (had lots of them) but for me, the Atari had STOS (later became AMOS for the Amiga) and this was the programming platform for me. They were lots of 3rd party extensions out there and loved to write my own games, programs and utilities, such as converting PC images to Atari format. I really like your review of the old faithful Atari Dan - thumbs up.
In Gunnersbury school in very early 90s, in the CDT block, in the wood work teachers office was an Atari ST. A few of us were aloud in at lunch to play on it. We'd play a golf game on it.
Great Video! I am an Amiga guy also, having an A500+ and then an A1200 in my youth! Like you I purchased an Atari ST a few years back just out of curiousity and was pleasantly surprised! Like you say, its not quite an Amiga, but its a great little machine that I don't regret buying!
Yes! Validation!! Twenty-something years too late for those playground amiga-atari fights but still, thank you for the fair and interesting comparison and analysis. Have never lost my fondness for my old childhood buddy, the Atari 520 STe.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
That is a fantastic intro into the Atari ST from a retro perspective. I've been pottering along slowly by myself figuring things out, so this has been quite informative. Thanks for the overview of the Gotek, that's something I definitely want to add, since I have an STe with a duffy floppy disk drive, I think you've pointed me to the best approach to get it into a retro-gaming ready system. thanks! Also, the comparisons with the Amiga helped. I grew up with neither, so it helps fill the gaps to where each system excelled.
I started off on a bbc model b and wrote some some very beautiful looking programs using the structured BASIC available on the computer. Around about 1990-I started making electronic music using the Atari ST and Steinberg Cubase. The whole idea of moving music and cutting and pasting blocks of MIDI instructions like a word processor was the future of music, or so we thought anyway. You still needed lots of outboard gear so we along with others, joined music collectives where you all clubbed together to create music studios which then rented the time back to us cheaply. If you wanted to use audio in the cut and paste mode you needed an outboard sampler with little more than 30 seconds sampling time in total. Time stretching required quick mental arithmetic! Oh, and for some reason, Cubase sped up the music during during fade out slightly! Great times though, and the creative atmosphere in these project studios and rehearsal complexes will never really be bettered. And yes, people did smoke dope in the studio to aid the creative juices!
I worked all summer to buy a 1040e ST and I was a few dollar short. I was so determined to buy a computer that day I purchased the computer sitting next to it an Amiga 500. All my friends had ST and I only knew PC and ST. I wasn't familiar with the Amiga. That day changed my life and I became a die has Amiga fan. :)
Some things i want to mention. - The external hard-disk port is called DMA- or ACSI-Port They are present on all ST machines. It's designed to mimic SCSI with less hardware. There is Hardware to make it a full SCSI Port. - The digital Joystic/Mouse ports are on the bottom because they are connected to the Keyboard-Controller. The ports are on the underside of the keyboard PCB to save costs.
In the 90s I owned both. When it came.to getting things done (esp. anything you had to print) the 1040ST beat out my Amiga 500 but some games were just better on the A500. Overall they pretty much were interchangable until they both started to he eclipsed by the IBM PC. Once the VGA and Soundblaster arrived they were done. Loved them both.
*Historical Fact:* _IBM DOS, used Atari format to copy protect their software. _*_If you had a ST, you could use IBM DOS programs with no problem. Also, the MAC emulator for the ST worked flawlessly! Giving you three computers in one machine._* _Still have both my 1040-ST, Amiga, C-64, _*_and_*_ VIC-20. _*_All in working order too._* ;)
I don't remember the year quite well, but I guess in the late 80s I got a pack of 3rd party rubber domes from an ATARI exibithion, which once put inside, enhanced the original keyboard feeling a lot.
Okay, here is an interesting side bar. The Atari ST was essentially the new Commodore and the Amiga was the new Atari. Let me explain. The fellas that designed the Amiga chipset over at Hi-Toro, Inc. were former Atari 8-bit computer engineers. These guys such as Jay Miner and other ex-Atari engineers designed the Atari 800 and 400. These were 8-bit machines with a lot of special chips such as the GITA, CTIA and ANTIC that gave the Atari 8-bit machines superior graphics compared to the Apple IIe and Commodore 64 of that era. Given that the Atari 800 and 400 had more specialized chips it was more expensive than the Commodore and so the Commodore trounced it in sales. We see a role reversal in 1985 where Tramiel and his gang left Commodore for Atari. Jack liked to build eco-box computers. That's what he did with the Commodore 64 and he applied the same philosophy to the Atari ST. Whereas Jay Miner's philosophy was more elegant from a computer designer's perspective, hence Amiga and all its specialized graphics chips. Amiga would have been a 16-bit computer build and sold by the old pre-Tramiel Atari whereas if Tramiel had stayed at Commodore the ST would have been the 16-bit computer that Commodore would have sold. In terms of design philosophy, the ST and the C64 share a lot (eco-boxes using memory and processor speed instead of expensive specialized chips and dirt cheap Taiwanese assembly). I say all this being a former Atari ST owner/user. I loved my ST, but I am honest about its strengths and weaknesses.
Amiga Format was Amiga ST Format before they split and became two separate magazines. First issue of Amiga format when they split had New Zealand story as a demo on the disk.
"you've only got a speccy sound chip" I can see that fight starting right now 🤣. I'm a child of the 70s, who was lucky enough to have a rubber key spectrum and a black and white TV in my youth. Later working for an independent computer game shop here in the UK on Saturdays from school. I later picked up one of the first batman pack A500 amigas. I ended up with a good collection of computers and game consoles over those years which allowed me to be very neutral in such arguments. Having both Sega and Nintendo, sinclair and commodore. Never did own an St tho🤔
Great video. As a long-term Atari owner -- I knew there were certain advantages with either platform. I wish both companies were still around. Amiga came out a little later, so had slightly better specs with video and audio. Atari had MIDI. One thing you did not mention was the use of the port. I had a Magic Sac cartridge that allowed me to run Mac OS programs with the monochrome monitor. You had to have Mac ROMs, but it worked wonderfully. No emulation and it actually ran slightly faster than a Mac. No issues regarding copyright because your could purchase Mac ROMS for the cartridge. Could an Amiga run PageMaker or Hypercard back in the day? Atari STs could.
Yes my Amga 2000 could run Mac on the Emplant board also ran 386 PC in in the same box at the same time. I could cut and paste between PC, Mac and Amiga.
The last Atari home computer, the Falcon, actually had quite a nice sound chip to it, and that's the model a lot of people look for when they wanna use it for composing music. It's actually a better chip than the Amiga I believe.
One thing Atari did well was update the line - by the time you get to the Falcon you've got a blitter, a DMA subsystem for PCM audio, an '030 and a DSP; check out BadMood and you'll see that even the stock 1992 machine plays a decent Doom thanks to that coprocessor. It's a different design methodology than the Amiga, as each increment is to add another off-the-shelf component, but it adds up.
The problem however was that this fragmented the Atari market so most people coded for the lowest common denominator in order to reach a wider market and hence few took advantage of the blitter or pcm sound.
Falcon had a DSP with 16-bit 48KHz and support for many tracks (DSP mixes in real-time). Amiga was 8-bit 28KHz 4 track (2 left/2 right). AGA didn't upgrade Paula (sound chip).
Its to bad Atari didn't spend a little extra and put the YM2608 chip in the ST computer line. 6 four operator FM chs, 3 (YM2149 backwards compatible) PSG chs, 1 sample ch, and 6 drum chs that used internally stored samples. would have been a completely different monster. might try and mod my 1985 Atari 520ST with one of those chips someday.
+Sam The Multimedia Man Yeah, but can the YM2608 do the printer functions that the YM2149 can do? If it's not 100% compatible with all features, you'd get Cherry Bombs. And does it beat a YM2151? Since the Spectrum fans have dual YM2149 mods now, I'd like to see the same done with an ST. But try your mod. I'd love to hear if it works!
+Jeremy Holloway yeah the ym2608 has the ym2149 core built into it so in theory it should work. the YM2151 only has the 8 FM chs no sample ch no YM2149 core and no percussion chs. the extra 2 FM chs are nice in the ym2151 but over all the YM2608 is better.
Is there any noteworthy hardware that uses the YM2608? I keep going back to the Sharp X68000 computer/game system that also used the YM2151 and it kicked serious bootie. That sucker has so much custom silicon in it that the guy that's porting some of its titles over to the Falcon030 hasn't been able to port its audio because the ports are requiring every bit of juice the 68030 and the Motorola 56K DSP have at their disposal. But then again, Cyrano Jones has figured out some way to use YM2151 audio from Atari Games' arcade games in his latest ST game ports to the Jaguar. I'm not sure if he's converted that audio into MIDI or if he figured out how to get the Jaguar's DSP - which is much weaker than the Falcon030's Motorola 56K DSP, supposedly - to play back YM2151 audio natively. That would be a pioneering move although he's got the Jaguar DSP to playback POKEY, SID, and TIA audio natively previously, not to mention the ST's YM2149. Continuing, it's a little disappointing nobody came up with a Dual YM2149 mod for the ST since there's such mods for the Spectrum and hell, there's a few boards for the ST that allow Dual Shifter graphics chips so it can have a palette of 4,096 colo(u)rs.
First computer I ever owned was a 48K ZX Spectrum. Love that machine to this day. Friend of mine had an Atari ST and I saw some of the games he had. It was the first time I saw Rainbow Islands and Xenon 2 amongst others. As someone with a Speccy I was completely gobsmacked by the sound and colour and graphics on the ST. When I came to upgrading my computer and going for a 16 bit model, at the time the Atari ST came with a fairly bare bones package whilst the Amiga came with the Batman Pack. They were the same price pretty much. Also most of my friends owned Amigas. So I bought the Amiga 500. I don't regret that decision and I do think the Amiga is the better machine but the ST is a more than capable machine in its own right. The ST is very good, the Amiga is just a little better and given that it was the same price for better features and coming with games included it was the right choice. As for the classroom wars, they happen. Back in the 8-bit era it was Speccy v. c64 v. cpc 464 v. Electron. Then you also had NES v. Master System. Come the 16 bit era you had ST v. AMiga and Megadrive v. SNES. I found it all kinda silly and pointless tbh.
the main differences graphically was the lack of parallax scrolling on the platform games. I had a 1040ste and it was very powerful but unfortunately developers never took advantage of the extra power. golden age of home computing amiga and atari st. exciting times back then
Very nice---great to see you getting stuck into yet more machines of intrigue and hopefully there'll be more further action to come showcasing this and that for the ST. I know the Atari homebrew community has done some things, and there's the whole FireBee project out of ACP---but I'm betting you could key everybody into some of the high points comparable to your general Amiga coverage. Heh, I still say the deep end of the MSX scene's pool is one that stands a good chance at being of interest---the community is strong and varied in their ongoing accomplishments, has a colorful hardware timeline...I suppose had you came up a bit further east on the old spinning globe it just might've been your alt universe Amiga.
I had a Atari ST as a kid, i remember my parents getting it for me from Curry's / Comet and it cost £300 compared to the Amigas £400. I really wanted an Amiga but they were too much money, so got a ST instead. At my school if you didnt have a SNES / Megadrive you had an Amiga / ST and id say the ownership ratio was about 40% of people had a ST versus the Amiga with 60%. Found on occasion i couldnt get a game out on the Amiga for my ST but that was very rare, graphics were nearly always identical to the Amiga version.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
@@electrictroy2010 But it made up for it on the connectivity side, it was used for music production a lot during the era. I also was a fan of the built in PSU and RF output unlike the Amiga 500.
The audio of the Amiga was always a slightly bitter pill, but I had both Amiga and ST, and I tended to prefer the ST, then STe then the Falcon030. I did get the ST first, and my first experience with the Amiga was with a friend. What I did like the best about my Ataris was that every single one of my friends with the Amiga used the exact same statement as some kind of go to: "Well, if Workbench hadn't crashed there, this would have . I still have my Amiga and all Ataris, and wouldn't trade them for anything. Sometimes, I still use them instead of my new machines, just because I want to get something done. My Falcon is hooked up to the internet though IP, and with its resolution, preemptive multitasking, and quick boot, sometimes you just want something that works, and of course, that last statement applies to the Amiga. Anyway, yeah, i would say that this review was a bit bare bones, but most of the comments you made are pretty on the nose. Other than the fact that any Atari user would be able to change out the mouse and joysticks in moments without even thinking about it. :)
Even though it couldn't do graphics as well as the Amiga, it was a powerful machine. It could more than hold it's own in doing computations,with the main competitors IBM or Apple.
I miss Captain Blood on Amiga. I didnt have any friends that had AtariST*, but many had Amiga. Thank you for great review, i allways have been curious about AtariST*
One of the few games that was better on the Atari ST, which it was originally developed on. The Atari ST was more popular in France than any other market.
Thanks, this video takes me back. I picked up a 520STFM on Boxing Day 1987, I think it was £230 (but three decades on can't be 100% accurate on price).
We had an Atari 1040 STE with 4MB and a SCSI hard disk - it was amazing at the time. I was studying music at the time, so the built in MIDI was useful for plugging in a synth. The RCA jacks meant that everything sounded amazing on the stereo and having 4 joystick ports was great for multiplayer fun. My dad used it for word processing and seemed to like it (got the hi res monochrome screen, but we used a TV for gaming). My school built a music studio without about 10 Ataris and plugged them into Korg X5 synths for music production. Good times. I believe The Prodigy also used them for their music.
The ST with Cubase was unbelievably solid, and was the industry standard well into the 90's. I didn't stop using mine until 1999!
Allan Holdsworth (famous influential guitarist) used Cubase on his Atari ST right up until his death in 2017. He said they were just reliable and were bulletproof.
The Atari ST 1040 and the Amiga 500 were both fantastic machines.
Being an Atari 800/130XE lover I wanted an Amiga for my next computer but didn't have the money so I went with the ST. It at least got me through 3 1/2 years of college.
The game Bolo was better than Doom and Halflife combined.
Yes, both are good but when I want to replace my aging C-64 I'd compared both of them mostly in sound and graphic department and I give my due to Amiga 500. Maybe that's just me though. Although that Amiga 500 long gone but I did acquired a dead A1000 and C-64 for nostalgic purposes.
@@MHMajid-yi8iu that is if you(we) had the luxury to spend the extra money. Coming from the 8bit era everything appeared "good enough" compared to our previous machines. At hindsight, sure Amiga is superior....but STs were more than good enough.
@@bjbell52 Atari 8bit -> Amiga was the most reasonable path since they both were the most innovative machines in their categories and period. The 8bit Atari got its recognition only recently mainly due the work of the homebrew community but Amiga also had a rough 2 years before managing to draw the attention of game developers.
I happen to own all those machines and I've found out that real world specifications do not really have an effect on our childhood "Indoctrination".
I daily prefer and fire my Atari 8bit over my 16bit machines, my cpc and c64.
So I think that computer users who grew up during that period don't really care about technical comparisons, but which of those machines can take them back in time.
They both beat PCs from the time. Both great machines in different ways. I am 27 and owned an Amiga 500.
+Matthew Richards Back in 1988 I even would have preferred a Commodore 64 over our VGA 386. Most games were CGA and had beeper sounds. Seriously 4 colour CGA with pc beeper sounds is volatile for your senses
+Ricdeau VGA did come out about 1987 but it was not until 486SX based PCs arrived that they were of any use anyway for arcade games. Even in the 90s games are best played on Amiga for Europeans and some US titles like Rocket Ranger/It Came from the Desert/Defender of the Crown II etc as they all stuck with EGA graphics for XT or AT class PCs.
+Matthew Richards I had a fair bit of fun and success running PC-DOS emulators on the ST. It rather shows us how much more powerful these platforms were - and makes me regret that neither the ST nor the Amiga managed to follow up successfully with 32-bit incarnations.
A great era.
+Matthew Richards The Amiga and Atari were also "PCs", just not IBM compatibles.
+xyz12345 thanks I was referring yo IBM PC.
Yay! An ST Video from Kookytech!. I'm actually an original ST user (1986 on), machine I grew up with after the Atari 8bit. I started exploring Amigas last year and now have a 500 and 1200. Just a couple of comments on the video -- Great video, very fair comparison. The Hard disk port was DMA (fast) and came standard on all STs -- even the 1985 520ST. Also, The other main reason MIDI took off on the ST was ironically TOS -- being a single tasking user interface, timing on MIDI was quite good on the ST. The cheap but excellent high resolution monochrome monitor (640x400, 72 hz) was a great way for low cost productivity on this machine as well. Being here in the US, I just wish we could cheaply get a 520/1040STE -- they're extremely rare over here.
I was one of those guys who got an ST for Christmas, and of course school was a steam of continuous "banter" between Amiga and Atari users. However as much as I love the ST, of late you can can consider me equally impressed by the Amiga. I had no idea the Amiga is still being tweaked and upgraded long after the Atari. Guys still developing newer versions of workbench, third party PC style cases etc etc. That's admirable.
Great story. I love the ST/Amiga story. Also I loved the playground rivalry. I remember defending the Master System against 16 bit machines, then the ST against the Amiga, then the Amiga against everything else! Apparently my allegiance was somewhat fickle. I bailed on the ST as ST Format was becoming unnervingly thin on pages.... then the same started happening to Amiga Format :O
One thing I loved doing on my ST (and still do on my PC, old habits die hard) was rename the trash can to Amiga.
GASP ! An Atari ST ! - you are the anti-Christ !
@@me0262 If only UA-cam showed us the number of thumbs down on a comment ;) :P
Thats some rank partisan bs right there lol.
,;)
@@QuasarRedshift Dan-tichrist
Any 68000 based system is pretty cool :)
Agree and wish the two companies were still going
QL too ? XD
@@TheLemminkainen except for the horrible color (colour) scheme Sinclair used... I mean FFS talk about color clash. It was better when it was just black+white (ZX80/1)
lactobacillusprime except for Macs which had no hardware assist for game play
@@TheSulross Neither did the ST's until they added a blitter chip.
I left high school in '98, I always remember my mate making music on this machine, using a monochrome crt and using the music software you have shown. The ST was also hooked upto a 386 I believe using some kind of midi interface. There was also a high end music keyboard hooked up, in which he made his own custom effects and loops. He made some very good techno and hard house style music. I still remember to this day the music room filled with people amazed at the quality of the sounds in which came from this machine.
Thank You for taking the time to review this!
I'm taking a bold guess at the Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus or ASR-10 then! ;) Midi is a wonderful invention.
Early 90's I started programming music with an ST, Cubase V1 (shown in this video) and a Roland D-10. Been using Cubase for 30 years and it all started on an Atari ST
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
Cool story. Was using ST in my school and at home to compose a music with Emagic Notator/Logic.
my mates were into STs there was a HUGE scene in Scotland.. it was quite mental.
I'm not knocking the games, but if you REALLY want the best from your STe, you need to hook up some sound sources to the MIDI ports. The MIDI ports wasn't the big deal for me, the stability of the MIDI ports was. Rock solid timing, comparable to sync units worth $1000s
The ST wasn't just about having the MIDI built in for musicians, it was also the high resolution flicker free monitor, and PC compatible floppies. I have Amiga's too which I love, but when it comes to professional software, the Amiga could not touch the ST's monochrome resolution for stability or speed. Obviously the Amiga was better than the ST in general sound and graphics and media graphics, but the Amiga was never going to beat the ST/E/Falcon with Midi music as it used hardware interrupts for control so it never goes out of sync, and the high res on the ST wins for things like CAD and DTP.
the 68000 triplets break down like this:
ST =Music
DTP = Apple
Amiga = Video
i had one in my younger days absolutely loved it, finally got an Amiga last year and yeah the sound is so much better on the miggy but they are two fantastic machines and personally think everyone should have a go on one before writing it off
I'm an Amiga head, but had an ST/FM first. They are lovely machines. Up till then, I had always used my c64/speccy for games only. The ST introduced me to painting, music making fractals etc. ..and the B.IG demo! and it was affordable with loads of free games and software.
The Joystick / Mouse ports were put underneath to save money. The Keyboard controller chip that also does the 9 pin Mouse / Joystick ports is mounted on the keyboard. The controller chip communicates to the ST similar to USB with just +5V, Ground, RX, and TX, and also has a Floppy LED wire for only 5 wires; but to have the Joystick / Mouse Ports on the ST motherboard (like the origional 520 ST) means having to send an additional 12 lines / wires back to the ST from the keyboard. Like nowadays, wires and connectors cost a lot of money, so having the 2 ports on the keyboard saved money on production cost.
brought back happy memories watching this, i was a proud owner of an ST complete with a 170MB Hard drive that was about 2 foot square.
170mb back then?! That's like storage royalty! The best it got for me was a 2.5mb STFM (solder in upgrade from Power Computing) and later a 4mb STE and the use of a RAM drive... damn you, volatile memory!
20-40 MB was the standard HDD size in 1990 so I doubt you had 170 MB.
Let me clean some errors:
- Amiga&Atari deal happened before Tramiel bought Atari. After Tramiel left commodore, he started which started developing ST. Around the same time, Amiga guys were looking for money, and Atari (owned by Warner) lend them 500k USD, which, if not payed in time, would give whole Amiga IP to the Atari. Just After that, Tramiel made a deal with Warner and bought all Atari assets related to home computers and started Atari Corporation (at the same time, Atari Inc., owned by Warner still existed and made coin-op games). Few days before deal went live, Amiga guys got money from Commodore, and payed back the loan.
- GEM was originally written by Digital Research for PC (8088), and they were not interested in porting it to 68000. Atari did the port by itself.
+Adam Klobukowski Yeah, ST was made by some ex- commodore staff, and Amiga by some ex- atari engineers. Swap time!
+crouchypony The ST operating system was handled mainly by ex-Atari Inc staff so in truth, both the ST and the Amiga are children of the original Atari. In hindsight, both platforms should've been merged once the lawsuits between Atari and Commodore were settled after 1987. Had that happened, we might still have that combined platform as a commercial option today.
+Jeremy Holloway : Well said (for the merge). It never would have happened in our universe simply because Jack Tramiel effectively funded Atari Corp. in order to "kill" Irvin Gould, his former associate at Commodore, that succeeded to seize the company that Tramiel originally funded in the 60's.
And then IBM won..... (ok the Mac is still here but they are actually x86 PCs now whereas IBM definitely sold its personnal computing division to Lenovo a long time ago)
When the Amiga developers tried to get a deal with Jack Tramiel, Tramiel tried to screw them over for the Amiga. It was bottom dollar. No hiring them for future work or anything. Jack Tramiel screwed himself by this. He always screwed himself by screwing others, including the consumer.
Thanks for great history lektion!
The ATARI ST had a lot of really great productivity software, and if you hook either an MT 32 or Sound Canvas 55 using MIDI, then it's pretty fantastic.
The STE has more or less the same functions as the Amiga had. Hardware scrolling and blitter chip. Not many games use this since they wanted to make as much money as possible so they made the games to work on the lower ST model. Two games I always liked was Pacmania and Giana sisters. They are not so great on the ST model so a few years ago I redid them for the STE and besides the music, it's the same as the Amiga versions.
Pacmania: ua-cam.com/video/07MIDzSEp58/v-deo.html
Giana sisters: ua-cam.com/video/fy1bbymVuZ4/v-deo.html
The Atari ST was the pioneer for Midi music and 90's dance music being the first computer with a built in Midi Port and the first to have CUBASE. Many famous tracks were composed on it.
I still rock my Atari Teenage Riot T-Shirt.... Atari St was huge in the electronic music scene, like you said.
The best piece of software on the ST was a DTP program called Calamus. To date I've not found anything on the PC that comes anywhere close.
I just got an Atari 520STE for free today. :). It came with 200+ disks, two mice and a joystick/game controller. Along with the other needed cables. Apparently it has had a double memory upgrade too.
Was always an Amiga fan, but the ST certainly deserves its place in the history of home computing of that time.
There is beauty in those YM-2149 chip tunes. Proud owner of an Atari 520STE from 1991 until 1996. Despite hours of use each week she never once let me down.
Dungeon Master, first LAN parties with MIDI cables and Midi maze and the superb sharp mono display on the proper monitor was just gorgeous. The functions keys could be a pain though it being easy to press two instead of the one you wanted to press.
Well Dan i think you said you got your first Amiga for xmas in 1991. Well that same xmas i got the STE ... really wanted the Amiga but my parents could not afford it. I really enjoyed using my ST ... had many a laugh with it over the years. Got my first Amiga for xmas in 93. I still use both machines on an almost daily basis ... great times. The sound did let the Atari down ... but in some ways i liked the Atari sound. Turrican 2 and Cannon Fodder and Epic had great intro tracks and the demo scene was just as active as the Amiga scene and still is to this day.
My amiga did Midi just fine. It wasn’t built-in but was easy to add. (And for most users, the built-in music of Amiga was good enough to compose music.)
Another great video! I, like you grew up with an Amiga and got into a few Amiga vs Atari debates at school! Funnily enough our school library had a number of Atari STs in them. I, and some friends used to play Carrier Command on them. It was a fantastic game! I have been wanting to add an Atari ST to my retro collection, and your video has convinced me to get one ASAP :)
There were quite a few games which sounded horribly, however if you let the Atari st connected to a midi keyboard, some games would detect the keyboard and re route the sound notes throughout the keyboard so you would have 16 channel orchestra and the quality would depend on your keyboard and amplifier. I had a Roland E5 at that time and the effect was stunning
I moved up from a ZX Spectrum 128 to an Atari STFM and within a few months started coding in assembly. I experienced a little fame with my Atari activities :). I bought an Amiga A500 and for a while coded on my Atari and sent the executable code to my Amiga via a dev system my mate wrote but I found the Amiga more challenging to code for so in the end used it for games only. I wish Atari had sorted the sound chip out on the ST and STe. I bought an Atari Falcon which as the 68030 in (I still have it) but it was too little, too late.
Both Are awesome machines, i got a 520STF back in the day, then sold it a few years later to get an Amiga 500+. The sound was better of course, but always had a preference for the ST, nostalgia maybe. The ST was an inferior machine, but the programmers were more skilled (especially on the demo scene) because they had to deal with the limitations of the hardware but they achieved outstanding results : border removal techniques and so on. I'm now a proud owner of a Falcon 030 and of an Amiga 1200. You should review the Falcon by the way, they are really cool machines.
A big difference between ST and Amiga MIDI is the ST's Midi works on Hardware interrupts so the timing is rock solid, whereas the Amiga is software bases so the timing was frequently out; sort of like the Amiga having hardware Genlock which the ST did not have until the STE; the DMA for hard drive was on every ST based system except the Falcon. Oh and the Cart port was never intended for software, just dongles for Midi and a sneaky way to add MAC OS ROMS. The ST Mouse / Joystick ports underneath were done to save cost as the keyboard controller (On the Keyboard PCB) does the signal processing for them, if they had them on the motherboard like the enhanced Joystick ports, then they would have had to have another cable going back to the motherboard, or have the keyboard controller on the motherboard and have a larger cable going to the keyboard; the ST keyboard cable is very much like USB with only Ground, +5V, TX and RX; the Mega STE / TT keyboard used the same keyboard controller, but instead of the ports being underneath, put one port at each end of the keyboard.
The STE's enhancements include: 4096 Color Pallet, Hardware scrolling, Blitter Chip, 2 channels of DMA sound at up to 50 Khz (6 Total Channels with Stereo Mixer IC and 2 x RCA Audio Jacks.) 4 x SIMM Memory sockets for PC like RAM expansion, 2 Enhanced Joystick Ports. Has hardware Genlock for Video and a couple of other smaller updates.
i was firmly in the atari st camp growing up. lots of love for the atari but i was always secretly impressed when i went to me mates house and had a go on his amiga!
I remember that Commodore vs. Atari rivalry very well. Interestingly, while those two companies fought out a fierce battle, both lost to the IBM PC clones running (the boring) DOS/Windows. After the release of games like Doom and Wing Commander, the Amigas and Ataris were done. It is sad though that these machines and their OSs disappeared (except of those tiny, still existing communities who continued to modernize the Amiga operating system.).
I had an Atari ST 520 and absolutely loved it. The games you could get for it were absolute classics. I am only sorry I don't have mine anymore. By the way, you are absolutely right about the fierce rivalry between ST and Amiga owners. It was FIERCE, truly. There was no middle ground. No give and take.
You were either an Amiga fan or an Atari fan and that was it. I, being an Atari ST user, was obviously [ and still am] a massive fan of the ST. I didn't even consider for one second, moving over to the Amiga. I was ST and that was it, I wasn't budging. Lol.
Hook this Atari up to a Roland MT-32 or another MIDI player and we'll see if your opinion on the music stays the same ;)
I live in the states where both Amigas and Ataris were rare, but my uncle had a 1040ST and that was my first PC in the mid nineties that was mine alone. We had a family IBM, but I would spend hours playing my uncle's massive game collection in my room. Gunship was my favorite game!
I had both systems as a kid; technically the ST was my brother's, but we all shared. The one huge advantage the ST had in terms of gaming, was that it had Dungeon Master, which was easily my favourite game of all time at that point. For that game alone, it was well worth investing in an ST. Oids was another classic that was not available on the Amiga at the time, although it was ported a couple of years ago.
Then you add to it the MIDI capability. I used to play the keyboard and we had our Yamaha connected to the machine so I could live out my Pet Shop Boys/ New Order fantasies. The Amiga really couldn't compete with that.
So, overall, certainly the Amiga was a superior gaming machine. Great games such as Speedball 2, Kick Off 2, hell, even Xenon 2 were just fantastic, and superior to the ST versions. But my number 1 16-bit game of all time was only available on the ST. And the fact you could make music with it meant that it was fantastic having both computers in our household growing up.
Hi, FTL's Dungeon Master was definitely available on the Amiga. Released in 1988, the Amiga port was developed by Phil Mercurio, I believe on a contract basis. When I joined FTL in August 1989, my first task was to fix some obscure issues with version 2.x of the Amiga port, as nobody remaining at FTL was an Amiga developer.
We subsequently released DM:Chaos Strikes Back for both ST and Amiga at the end of 1989.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I guess in those days and that age, the many months between the ST release and an Amiga port would have felt like an eternity. Thanks for the info!
Christopher Lancaster - Dungeon Master remains the only game that's made me get a system (ST) just so that I could play that one game.
I hear you, Jay. What a time to be alive!
I seem to recall that dungeon master needed an Amiga upgraded to 1mb to run, something a lot of people didnt have when the conversion was released. The Atari one ran in 512k.
I was always an Amigaphile myself, but I have to admit the ST's casing was nicer looking. I like those slanting function keys.
+Evil Twin I'd like to see a return to using slanted function keys!
+Evil Twin and slatted disk drive button!
+Evil Twin I always thought that Atari was amazing for making music, And amiga was better for gaming, I remember where they had MOD's that amiga people created to hate on Atari lol, fun old days
+Toxix hehehe - I'm sure the opposite was true too! Compared to the good old days the PC v Mac debate is just a lover's tiff!
+GamleErik100 Ha! That'd be a great way to confuse people! I say go for it!
My dad was much into music when he was young. I was told he used to own an Atari ST at one point. I guess he replaced it with a PowerPC mac, wich is the first PC I remembered as a kid, before he eventually switched over to PC in 2000.
I've done the inverse way than you Dan .... Atari ST in my youth and now Amiga 500 :)
When he suddenly lifted that Atari ST in front of the camera I flinched, I recoiled in horror, I think it must have been the sudden of shock of suddenly being confronted by my nemesis face to face.
I had an ST before my Amiga 500 and then 1200, good times.
I wrote my graduate thesis on the Atari ST using WordPerfect. Unbeatable.
You are quite wrong about the cartridge port, this was very much in use. Not for games but also in the music industry.
All kind of samplers and other devices for music production were available for it. Some where really nifty. My friend who was a music producer has a STE with a sampling cartridge that was capable of 24bit and 48khz. It also included a dsp that made performing actions on the samples blinding fast (well, for that time ofcourse, we're talking the 90ties here).
My first computer (the ST). It's a great machine.
Very cool video mate thanks for making it. I was an ST owner as a kid and bloody loved it. So it was good to hear some honest opinions from an Amiga fan, and not just slating the computer. Some fair and valid points there. I would like to see a video on attaching that drive to it if you get chance as I know a few of my original disk have stopped working and its always nice to play the games on the original platform rather than PC emulator. Cheers ;)
Used to go to computer club at primary school in the evening and it was either NES or Master System, and Atari ST or Amiga. Always preferred the look of the ST but ended up getting the Amiga 500+ in late 1991. Just before it all went down hill. Happy memories.
I had the Amiga 500 back in the day and still have it. The Amiga was a massive step up for me after having the zx spectrum till the end of its life. The Atari was a very capable machine and after seeing your comparisons with the Amiga. I am tempted to give this a try one day. Thank you for the great review.
The cartridge port was actually well used and catered for, but only with hardware upgrades, e.g. Steinberg MIDEX+, Ultimate Ripper, Atari Diagnostic, Aerochopper, Wizztronic adding more cartridge slots, Atari Robokit, realtime clocks, deskcart, CLAB MIDI stuff, video digitisers, audio sampling even 16-bit, disk duplicator, Ethernet LAN, IDE interface, hand scanners, EPROM programmers, Apple Mac emulators, Multiface game state saver...........the list goes on and on!
In my view the age-old argument between Amiga and Atari ST bears more than a passing resemblance to the modern-day arguments relating to Apple Mac vs. PC and iPhone vs. Android.
Back in the day when I had just finished university, having graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, I scrimped and saved for an Atari ST.
While my peers were pissing around on their Amigas playing games I was running a CP/M emulator on my ST and learning applications such as Ashton Tate dBase, WordStar and SuperCalc and also developing electronic circuit analysis programmes in the C programming language. This knowledge secured my first job in the developing CAD industry and led to my making a lot of money over a long and successful career as an industry leader in that field.
While now in semi-retirement I am keeping my brain active by constantly learning new skills on the PC using world-class open source software and selling my services as a freelancer, while my Amiga friends have moved on to giggling at face-swap apps on their iPhones and spaffing money they can’t really afford on placing orders for this years batch of the latest iPads and Apple watches using their beloved Amazon Prime accounts. They also aspire to be one of those idiotic “priority boarders” you see standing in a queue for half an hour before each flight at most airports these days.
It’s funny that when you see a physics professor explaining quantum computing or the inner workings of the universe they tend to be using a PC, probably running some Linux or BSD variant but when you have some bubble-headed moron with a shiny new media studies degree fucking up a news or documentary programme on TV they’re sitting in front of a MacBook Air.
It’s also interesting to note that while many well-known musicians, even to this day, still use Atari STs as part of their music production workflow, you never hear of anyone still actually using an Amiga for anything.
In my experience there are two types of computer owners: those who use them and those who play with them. I’ll leave you to guess which is which.
Oh, the memories.
I mainly used programmes like Hyperpaint and ST Writer. I played games sich as Monty Python, Lotus Elite, Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Archons, etc. There was an alternate language for the ST, GFA Basic. I have the disks for GFA Basic V 2.0 and GFA Basic System 2. My ex had a dream of writing games. Now, I have a whole lot of obsolete Atari stuff, my sons are grown up and have no interest.
Nice vid. Just a note It was the SW that made the ST musician`s preferred choice..nothing on Amiga could even dream of competing with Notator, Cubase, etc...and the steady hires picture of monochrome monitor was a big plus too.
I got a 520ST+ with an external floppy dirt cheap from ebay 3 years ago when nobody actually wanted them still. That was one of the best buys I've ever made. A must have for Amiga 500 kids that always wanted to know what their Atari ST friends were talking about back in the day. Replacing the broken floppy drive wasn't easy though due to the strange disc change detection mechanism of the ST (similar to that of the 1541).
As a matter of fact, because of higher resolution (though grayscale), if memory serves, I think the Atari was also picked up by newspapers and publishing houses for desktop publishing, particularly because of Calamus, which was custom-built for the ST. Later versions were ported to Apple, and from there-on Apple machines kept hegemony in the newspapers. Until this day, actually.
I got one when I bought my Amiga 500 a few months ago (job lot) and I was quite impressed, it took me ages to find the joystick ports someone must of got sacked due to that decision, great vid as always m8
I bought an Atari 520ST back in 1987. I had a really nice setup. Both the color and mono monitors, an external SCSI hard drive array, modem, and a big load of peripherals! Tons of software, and I upgraded my 520ST to 4MB of RAM late in 1987. It was, and still is my most beloved computer I have ever owned.
I started my computer geek-ism with a Tandy Color Computer Model 1 back in 1982. Then went to an Atari 800XL, then the ST. But, I also owned an Amiga 500 in 1989 as well. I liked it, but I was about to switch to PC's the same year I got the Amiga, and then in 1990 I went completely PC and have been ever since. But, I miss my Atari 520ST, and wish I had one today. I have STeam Atari ST emulator, with just about all the software I had back then, so I can enjoy the software, but I miss the hardware!
I went from a vic-20 to an ST in 85. Mind=Blown. The ST lost out in '91 to a 486. Nothing has ever equaled that ST experience.
We had Atari ST at high school and it as a good computer it did the job for what we needed it for plus we had the Acorn BBC microcomputer as well
Great video and i also always was an Amiga fanboy and did not own an Atari ST until last year. I also was impressed by it's capabilities and enjoy playing games and share the same positive and negative things you mention.
Still using this beast to make music! Amazing machine....
The reason for the weird joystick port locations is that the ST was originally designed without a numeric keypad, which was added as a last-minute decision. The joystick ports are part of the keyboard, so the bottom was apparently the only place they could go. Maybe they were originally thought to go to the top or side maybe?
I had an ST back in the day but I wasn't really even aware of the Amiga for a long time until my cousin got one I never knew anyone else with one. The STFM has a hard disk port also. I just got one off ebay and have just got sooo many extras for it. Loving it. In the expansion port you could put a robot controller card I have one also today you can put things like a lan/usb adapter, hard disks (sd card) or even USB power adapters.
Harddrives were available very early on ! they weren't an STe addition. ASCI Atari came up with their own standard of SCSI because the SCSI people hadn't decided on things when it was time to go! Checkout the max bandwith of ASCI and UltraSatans
great video - as always Dan. I was Amiga all the way since i was a kid in the 80s, and a member of a demo group on it. Recently decided to take the plunge and got a 1040 Ste and kitted it out with an HXC Floppy emulator and an ultrasatan hardrive in order to have access to the whole ST demo scene. Obviously not as good as the Amiga demo scene, but there are some gems on the ST. Like you, glad i got one to compliment my amiga 500 and 1200
My dad hooked mine up to a synthesizer once too, I remember that too!
Still have my Atari 512ST ... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, BBC Model B.
All fully working with software and additional supporting kit.
Still got my original Atari 2600 console.. Boxed with games.
Panasonic 3D0 boxed with games.
Original Playsyation.. The one with all the ports in the back... Boxed with games.
All fully working in 2020.
I never owned an Atari ST (until now) and I got my Amiga late , probably in 1997 or later. I grew up playing with my friend's STE and that was enough to make me prefer it over my "late'' Amiga.
I found that same Amiga "dead" during the 2020 lock downs and it was my first repair, restore and upgrade project on a retro machins (2020) so now I am proud and I feel attached to that specific machine.
Two years later(This month) I bought an 1040STE and..... I subconsciously treat it as a superior machine ( best spot on the bench among the rest of the 8bit and 16 bit machines), hooked on the best Trinitron CRT, the only one protected from the elements of the room (cats and dust)!
So when we deal with things that are tied to our childhood period....all objective criteria goout of the window.
Sure the scroll on the ST is jerkier in most games, the colors on screen are less, the sound is poor but... my amygdala doesn't agree.
So, here we go, answering a 6yo question :D. The original atari st had mouse/joystick ports on the right side and no 15-pin ones. After they started including floppy drive within the computer (stf-models) they moved the ports out of the way and under the computer. Apparently when they added those extended ports they didn't move the existing one, but added the new ones to the side..
I was one of those Atari lovers and still feel loyal to the ST. I owned an Atari 520 ST(FM) due to my parents not prepared to shell out £500 for an Amiga 500 - back in 1989.
I was gutted but loved my Atari. I didn't play many games (had lots of them) but for me, the Atari had STOS (later became AMOS for the Amiga) and this was the programming platform for me. They were lots of 3rd party extensions out there and loved to write my own games, programs and utilities, such as converting PC images to Atari format.
I really like your review of the old faithful Atari Dan - thumbs up.
I would love to see a video on. How to set up a Gotek for the Atari ST.
In Gunnersbury school in very early 90s, in the CDT block, in the wood work teachers office was an Atari ST. A few of us were aloud in at lunch to play on it. We'd play a golf game on it.
Great Video! I am an Amiga guy also, having an A500+ and then an A1200 in my youth! Like you I purchased an Atari ST a few years back just out of curiousity and was pleasantly surprised! Like you say, its not quite an Amiga, but its a great little machine that I don't regret buying!
Yes! Validation!! Twenty-something years too late for those playground amiga-atari fights but still, thank you for the fair and interesting comparison and analysis. Have never lost my fondness for my old childhood buddy, the Atari 520 STe.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
That is a fantastic intro into the Atari ST from a retro perspective. I've been pottering along slowly by myself figuring things out, so this has been quite informative. Thanks for the overview of the Gotek, that's something I definitely want to add, since I have an STe with a duffy floppy disk drive, I think you've pointed me to the best approach to get it into a retro-gaming ready system. thanks! Also, the comparisons with the Amiga helped. I grew up with neither, so it helps fill the gaps to where each system excelled.
I started off on a bbc model b and wrote some some very beautiful looking programs using the structured BASIC available on the computer. Around about 1990-I started making electronic music using the Atari ST and Steinberg Cubase. The whole idea of moving music and cutting and pasting blocks of MIDI instructions like a word processor was the future of music, or so we thought anyway. You still needed lots of outboard gear so we along with others, joined music collectives where you all clubbed together to create music studios which then rented the time back to us cheaply. If you wanted to use audio in the cut and paste mode you needed an outboard sampler with little more than 30 seconds sampling time in total. Time stretching required quick mental arithmetic! Oh, and for some reason, Cubase sped up the music during during fade out slightly! Great times though, and the creative atmosphere in these project studios and rehearsal complexes will never really be bettered. And yes, people did smoke dope in the studio to aid the creative juices!
I worked all summer to buy a 1040e ST and I was a few dollar short. I was so determined to buy a computer that day I purchased the computer sitting next to it an Amiga 500. All my friends had ST and I only knew PC and ST. I wasn't familiar with the Amiga. That day changed my life and I became a die has Amiga fan. :)
Some things i want to mention.
- The external hard-disk port is called DMA- or ACSI-Port They are present on all ST machines. It's designed to mimic SCSI with less hardware. There is Hardware to make it a full SCSI Port.
- The digital Joystic/Mouse ports are on the bottom because they are connected to the Keyboard-Controller. The ports are on the underside of the keyboard PCB to save costs.
In the 90s I owned both. When it came.to getting things done (esp. anything you had to print) the 1040ST beat out my Amiga 500 but some games were just better on the A500. Overall they pretty much were interchangable until they both started to he eclipsed by the IBM PC. Once the VGA and Soundblaster arrived they were done. Loved them both.
YES! another review! I am decently new and have wstched your reviews numerous, numerous times! woo! love them!
*Historical Fact:* _IBM DOS, used Atari format to copy protect their software. _*_If you had a ST, you could use IBM DOS programs with no problem. Also, the MAC emulator for the ST worked flawlessly! Giving you three computers in one machine._*
_Still have both my 1040-ST, Amiga, C-64, _*_and_*_ VIC-20. _*_All in working order too._* ;)
I don't remember the year quite well, but I guess in the late 80s I got a pack of 3rd party rubber domes from an ATARI exibithion, which once put inside, enhanced the original keyboard feeling a lot.
Okay, here is an interesting side bar. The Atari ST was essentially the new Commodore and the Amiga was the new Atari. Let me explain. The fellas that designed the Amiga chipset over at Hi-Toro, Inc. were former Atari 8-bit computer engineers. These guys such as Jay Miner and other ex-Atari engineers designed the Atari 800 and 400. These were 8-bit machines with a lot of special chips such as the GITA, CTIA and ANTIC that gave the Atari 8-bit machines superior graphics compared to the Apple IIe and Commodore 64 of that era. Given that the Atari 800 and 400 had more specialized chips it was more expensive than the Commodore and so the Commodore trounced it in sales. We see a role reversal in 1985 where Tramiel and his gang left Commodore for Atari. Jack liked to build eco-box computers. That's what he did with the Commodore 64 and he applied the same philosophy to the Atari ST. Whereas Jay Miner's philosophy was more elegant from a computer designer's perspective, hence Amiga and all its specialized graphics chips. Amiga would have been a 16-bit computer build and sold by the old pre-Tramiel Atari whereas if Tramiel had stayed at Commodore the ST would have been the 16-bit computer that Commodore would have sold. In terms of design philosophy, the ST and the C64 share a lot (eco-boxes using memory and processor speed instead of expensive specialized chips and dirt cheap Taiwanese assembly). I say all this being a former Atari ST owner/user. I loved my ST, but I am honest about its strengths and weaknesses.
Amiga Format was Amiga ST Format before they split and became two separate magazines. First issue of Amiga format when they split had New Zealand story as a demo on the disk.
Atari is synonymous with music studio to everyone, has earned his place as a legend. Regards.
"you've only got a speccy sound chip"
I can see that fight starting right now 🤣.
I'm a child of the 70s, who was lucky enough to have a rubber key spectrum and a black and white TV in my youth.
Later working for an independent computer game shop here in the UK on Saturdays from school.
I later picked up one of the first batman pack A500 amigas.
I ended up with a good collection of computers and game consoles over those years which allowed me to be very neutral in such arguments.
Having both Sega and Nintendo, sinclair and commodore.
Never did own an St tho🤔
When I was a kid I had an Atari ST and my best mate had an Amiga, we had the best of both worlds. Good times
Great video. As a long-term Atari owner -- I knew there were certain advantages with either platform. I wish both companies were still around. Amiga came out a little later, so had slightly better specs with video and audio. Atari had MIDI. One thing you did not mention was the use of the port. I had a Magic Sac cartridge that allowed me to run Mac OS programs with the monochrome monitor. You had to have Mac ROMs, but it worked wonderfully. No emulation and it actually ran slightly faster than a Mac. No issues regarding copyright because your could purchase Mac ROMS for the cartridge. Could an Amiga run PageMaker or Hypercard back in the day? Atari STs could.
Yes my Amga 2000 could run Mac on the Emplant board also ran 386 PC in in the same box at the same time. I could cut and paste between PC, Mac and Amiga.
The last Atari home computer, the Falcon, actually had quite a nice sound chip to it, and that's the model a lot of people look for when they wanna use it for composing music. It's actually a better chip than the Amiga I believe.
One thing Atari did well was update the line - by the time you get to the Falcon you've got a blitter, a DMA subsystem for PCM audio, an '030 and a DSP; check out BadMood and you'll see that even the stock 1992 machine plays a decent Doom thanks to that coprocessor. It's a different design methodology than the Amiga, as each increment is to add another off-the-shelf component, but it adds up.
The problem however was that this fragmented the Atari market so most people coded for the lowest common denominator in order to reach a wider market and hence few took advantage of the blitter or pcm sound.
Falcon had a DSP with 16-bit 48KHz and support for many tracks (DSP mixes in real-time). Amiga was 8-bit 28KHz 4 track (2 left/2 right). AGA didn't upgrade Paula (sound chip).
ST/Amiga rivalry was the best thing to happen at that period which brought the best out of both systems without a doubt!!!!
Its to bad Atari didn't spend a little extra and put the YM2608 chip in the ST computer line. 6 four operator FM chs, 3 (YM2149 backwards compatible) PSG chs, 1 sample ch, and 6 drum chs that used internally stored samples. would have been a completely different monster. might try and mod my 1985 Atari 520ST with one of those chips someday.
+Sam The Multimedia Man Yeah, but can the YM2608 do the printer functions that the YM2149 can do? If it's not 100% compatible with all features, you'd get Cherry Bombs. And does it beat a YM2151? Since the Spectrum fans have dual YM2149 mods now, I'd like to see the same done with an ST. But try your mod. I'd love to hear if it works!
+Jeremy Holloway yeah the ym2608 has the ym2149 core built into it so in theory it should work. the YM2151 only has the 8 FM chs no sample ch no YM2149 core and no percussion chs. the extra 2 FM chs are nice in the ym2151 but over all the YM2608 is better.
Is there any noteworthy hardware that uses the YM2608? I keep going back to the Sharp X68000 computer/game system that also used the YM2151 and it kicked serious bootie. That sucker has so much custom silicon in it that the guy that's porting some of its titles over to the Falcon030 hasn't been able to port its audio because the ports are requiring every bit of juice the 68030 and the Motorola 56K DSP have at their disposal. But then again, Cyrano Jones has figured out some way to use YM2151 audio from Atari Games' arcade games in his latest ST game ports to the Jaguar. I'm not sure if he's converted that audio into MIDI or if he figured out how to get the Jaguar's DSP - which is much weaker than the Falcon030's Motorola 56K DSP, supposedly - to play back YM2151 audio natively. That would be a pioneering move although he's got the Jaguar DSP to playback POKEY, SID, and TIA audio natively previously, not to mention the ST's YM2149.
Continuing, it's a little disappointing nobody came up with a Dual YM2149 mod for the ST since there's such mods for the Spectrum and hell, there's a few boards for the ST that allow Dual Shifter graphics chips so it can have a palette of 4,096 colo(u)rs.
The Ym2608 was on an expansion soundcard in the NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers. it was also in some musical keyboards and stuff too.
First computer I ever owned was a 48K ZX Spectrum. Love that machine to this day. Friend of mine had an Atari ST and I saw some of the games he had. It was the first time I saw Rainbow Islands and Xenon 2 amongst others. As someone with a Speccy I was completely gobsmacked by the sound and colour and graphics on the ST.
When I came to upgrading my computer and going for a 16 bit model, at the time the Atari ST came with a fairly bare bones package whilst the Amiga came with the Batman Pack. They were the same price pretty much. Also most of my friends owned Amigas. So I bought the Amiga 500.
I don't regret that decision and I do think the Amiga is the better machine but the ST is a more than capable machine in its own right. The ST is very good, the Amiga is just a little better and given that it was the same price for better features and coming with games included it was the right choice.
As for the classroom wars, they happen. Back in the 8-bit era it was Speccy v. c64 v. cpc 464 v. Electron. Then you also had NES v. Master System. Come the 16 bit era you had ST v. AMiga and Megadrive v. SNES. I found it all kinda silly and pointless tbh.
the main differences graphically was the lack of parallax scrolling on the platform games. I had a 1040ste and it was very powerful but unfortunately developers never took advantage of the extra power. golden age of home computing amiga and atari st. exciting times back then
Even horizontal scrolling without parallax was a challenge for it.
Very nice---great to see you getting stuck into yet more machines of intrigue and hopefully there'll be more further action to come showcasing this and that for the ST. I know the Atari homebrew community has done some things, and there's the whole FireBee project out of ACP---but I'm betting you could key everybody into some of the high points comparable to your general Amiga coverage. Heh, I still say the deep end of the MSX scene's pool is one that stands a good chance at being of interest---the community is strong and varied in their ongoing accomplishments, has a colorful hardware timeline...I suppose had you came up a bit further east on the old spinning globe it just might've been your alt universe Amiga.
I had a Atari ST as a kid, i remember my parents getting it for me from Curry's / Comet and it cost £300 compared to the Amigas £400. I really wanted an Amiga but they were too much money, so got a ST instead. At my school if you didnt have a SNES / Megadrive you had an Amiga / ST and id say the ownership ratio was about 40% of people had a ST versus the Amiga with 60%. Found on occasion i couldnt get a game out on the Amiga for my ST but that was very rare, graphics were nearly always identical to the Amiga version.
Atari ST’s biggest flaw was the sound chip. If you’re playing video games, you want the best sound possible, but the ST was little better than a 8-bit NES in the sound department
@@electrictroy2010 But it made up for it on the connectivity side, it was used for music production a lot during the era. I also was a fan of the built in PSU and RF output unlike the Amiga 500.
The simple fact that Atari ST contained a basic system GUI software in it's ROM makes Atari look a LOT more appealing than Amiga.
The audio of the Amiga was always a slightly bitter pill, but I had both Amiga and ST, and I tended to prefer the ST, then STe then the Falcon030. I did get the ST first, and my first experience with the Amiga was with a friend. What I did like the best about my Ataris was that every single one of my friends with the Amiga used the exact same statement as some kind of go to: "Well, if Workbench hadn't crashed there, this would have .
I still have my Amiga and all Ataris, and wouldn't trade them for anything. Sometimes, I still use them instead of my new machines, just because I want to get something done. My Falcon is hooked up to the internet though IP, and with its resolution, preemptive multitasking, and quick boot, sometimes you just want something that works, and of course, that last statement applies to the Amiga.
Anyway, yeah, i would say that this review was a bit bare bones, but most of the comments you made are pretty on the nose.
Other than the fact that any Atari user would be able to change out the mouse and joysticks in moments without even thinking about it. :)
Why you didn`t show a demos specially made for ste :) ?
Even though it couldn't do graphics as well as the Amiga, it was a powerful machine. It could more than hold it's own in doing computations,with the main competitors IBM or Apple.
I miss Captain Blood on Amiga. I didnt have any friends that had AtariST*, but many had Amiga. Thank you for great review, i allways have been curious about AtariST*
One of the few games that was better on the Atari ST, which it was originally developed on. The Atari ST was more popular in France than any other market.
I had a 520 ST, loved it. Then later I saved up and got an Amiga 1200, loved that too. 16 bit was such a giant leap in capability to 8 bit.
Thanks, this video takes me back. I picked up a 520STFM on Boxing Day 1987, I think it was £230 (but three decades on can't be 100% accurate on price).