AMIGA vs Atari ST: The GAMES | Which machine was the best? Atari ST|Amiga|Dos|Megadrive

[@stunthumb]

I had the ST back in the day, loved it, still love the ST - but I love the Amiga too. It's clear that the Amiga was the better gaming machine, but the ST was different, it's a lot easier to use for one thing, but regardless... back in the day we usually got what was practical, what we could get games for, what our friends and family had - and then we were mostly just really glad to have whatever computer we could get.

[@CaptainDangeax]

The Amiga was better for gaming because copper, because more sprites, because far better sound. The Atari was a better productivity machine because higher BW résolution and midi software

[@xxnoxx-xp5bl]

Devs often didn't want to do extra work taking advantage of the extra grunt of the Amiga, so make ST games and ported them to the Amiga. Eventually as the Amiga become more popular they just made Amiga games, giving Amiga owners more games to choose from. Amiga wins hands down.

[@oortcloud210]

I loved my ST. (I still love my ST - I kept it and it still works perfectly to this day). Spent so much of my childhood playing Dungeon Master, Geoff Crammond F1, Elite etc and making music with a MIDI keyboard and Cubase. Possibly the best Christmas present I ever got. Happy days...

[@DJ_Dopamine]

For me, Wakefield's Team 17 used to produce some of the most technically polished Amiga games.

[@NXGamer]

love the team, they were a huge part of my gaming and certainly Amiga days.

[@erolbrown]

Never knew they were from Wakey! Always assumed they were from mainland Europe.

[@SerBallister]

@@erolbrown The main developers of most of their earlier Amiga games (Alien Breed, Full Contact, Project X) were Swedish

[@mininovaq]

I owned Amiga 600, even later when first PCs shown up and I still preferred my 16-bit monster over regular PCs. Excellent work.

[@immortalsofar5314]

I got my fun from coding on my A1000 in assembler. I didn't even bother to learn C until I was faced with Intel's monstrosity, at which point I definitely wanted something between me and the hardware.

[@TheVanillatech]

As soon as the 386 became standard, with plug n play and 256 colour VGA and dedicated sound cards were affordable (ie. circa 1992/3), the PC just catapulted ahead of every other system except the arcade. Just compare UFO : Enemy Unknown on the Amiga / PC. PC could do it all. First person shooters, 2D platform games, fighting games, racing games, polygons, adventures, simulations etc - and it could do it all WAY faster than anything else. Once 3D cards became affordable around 1996/7, along with DirectX in Windows 95 giving amazingly fast 64k colour support, the PC even spelled the death of the arcade.

[@signalzero77]

As someone born in '96 I didn't grow up with these machines but I do very much appreciate the retrospective offered in your videos. Someday I hope to add both of these to my collection.

[@adroharv9213]

loved both these awesome machines. Very fond memories of my Atari ST and the fun had paying some great games but to say I was happy when I upgraded to the Amiga 500 would be a massive understatement. Great times so much that I still play these great machines. Excellent informative video

[@NXGamer]

Thanks, and they are special times for us all, my ST was firm favourite, but once I had to choose and sell it for the Amiga, I was sad but never looked back once it was in my room. Both excellent machines and to this day, the Amiga was something special.

[@rnichol22]

Owning both machines I'm afraid 90% were better on amiga but still love both machines. Started with an ST and then got the amiga as the sound was just amazing. Used to hang out with the crews in Bradford uk was great times

[@MrSammotube]

If I recall, Zool was a game that had STE enhancements and was actually really smooth and more colourful than the ST version.

[@valenrn8657]

STe Zool is still limited to 16-color mode.

[@Harfinou]

I still have my old 1040 STF and a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48+, both working nowadays. Thank you for this video, it's bringing me some good memories !

[@jbanks979]

As an American: we largely missed this fight and I’m just kind of fascinated with it. The ST was far superior to whatever Atari was pushing in the states and the Amiga feels like it transported in from 5 years from the future in 1985. It’s a shame both were not more successful than they were

[@Error_4x5]

I'm American and I didn't miss this fight. Thanks to a great news agent in downtown Oakland called DeLauer's Super Newsstand I had access to all the UK gaming magazines in the 80's. I had Amiga when all my friends had NES thanks to those magazines.

[@NXGamer]

Really great to hear these views and impacts from others at the time from over the pond. Glad that some Americans did get to experience it at the time and, as you say, it was in the Amiga 5 years at least from the future. Cheers

[@ChrisP872]

I'm American and hadn't turned my attention to PCs, thinking them boring office work machines, and so I made the Amiga or Atari ST choice and chose Amiga! It was the Amiga 500 to be exact (I think it was early enough that it came with Workbench 1.2). The Amiga had video and audio others couldn't match plus a Multi-tasking OS. I could tell it was way ahead of its time. Plus, I loved my Commodore 64 so buying a new Commodore machine was fine with me. Note: This was in 1987 and I was 16 years old.

[@DanielDanckaert]

I had a Mega ST4 in 87 with 4MB RAM and a 100MB SCSI HD and a 16MHz CPU upgrade. Still works. It is configured to dual-boot into Rainbow TOS and Mac OS. Had it for high school and college. Connected to Unix and Vax systems in college and browsed the Internet and web (Lynx) before Netscape.(I had alternate desktops, replacement file selectors, WP4.1, LDW, and even ran BBS Express in high school.)

[@mjp29]

missed the fight in America? The Amiga vs. ST fight largely occurred in the U.S. market...

[@newloversarrival]

the amiga v atari war was actually quite bitter from what i remember. being about 12 or 13 and at school at the time i recall many playground fights over which machine was superior over the other.

[@bjbell52]

I wanted an Amiga but couldn't afford it at the time. I ended up with the monochrome ST and it got me three out of four years of college. My final year I took a class on compiler design and was required to use an IBM PC or clone. For the price at the time, the ST was great.

[@pagb666]

Oh dear, Monkey Island on the Atari sounds almost like my Internal PC Speaker did XD. Well, after all, the Amiga costed almost twice as the ST did.

[@Ytrearneindre]

25:04 "A clear draw if I ever saw one" What? The Amiga version has better graphics, is faster, and scrolls smoother - that is no draw. After seeing this video, I'm very glad I had the Amiga when growing up, not the Atari, some of those games looks absolutely unplayable on the ST.

[@rasmadrak]

And I'm finally ready to accept that my friends Amiga was, in fact, better than my Atari ST. But I knew that already. :P

[@HungarianDerrickRose]

I was (and to a certain degree still am) a hardcore ST fan, but the title of this video made me cringe. Even if you just look at the specs of the systems, it is obvious that the Amiga is supposed to be a better gaming system. Regardless, the ST has some of the best games I have ever played and f@ck the Amiga :) Btw an A500 is not "faster" than a stock ST, as it is clocked @ 7.16 Mhz and the ST runs @ 8 Mhz, so take that, b@tches :)

[@dacsus]

@@HungarianDerrickRose thanks to coprocessors (Paula, Denise and Agnus) it actually is.

[@dlfrsilver]

@@HungarianDerrickRose if only this was true. The great Mcoder, one of the best ST coders living at the time explained that the CPU speed story was bullshit. The chipset gives back the hand faster to the CPU, when the CPU on ST just take a huge hit.

[@HungarianDerrickRose]

@@dlfrsilver The fact that 3D games which are not specifically coded for the Amiga run faster / with better frame rates on the ST kinda contradicts the above, but whatever :)

[@SvenElven]

I wasn't aware that the ST had the Yamaha sound chip from the Master System and Game Gear and related to the Megadrive/Genesis! Now I can't unhear it!

[@ZxSpectrumplus]

The ST chip is actually a variant of the AY-3912 with only 3 sound channels....same chip used in Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSXs etc 8 bit home computers of the time. The Sega Genesis chip is a superior Yamaha chip (YM-2612) with 6 sound channels instead of 3 sound channels of the SYT (YM-2149).

[@heidirichter]

So, in summary, in most cases at worst the Amiga version would be similar to the ST version, but it always had the potential for better graphics and sound. There were exceptions, but it seems to me that the Amiga was the machine to have if you wanted to play games - I'm glad I chose the Amiga back in the day. Some of those Atari versions really sounded bloody awful to my ears. But even the Atari was quite a leap over what had come before, and certainly a nail in the coffin games on platforms such as the C64 and Speccy.

[@NXGamer]

yep, the Amiga was a leap above, but not always possible to be used at a level it deserved. The ST was a great machine and was the clear winner for £ for performance.

[@dlfrsilver]

Did you knew that the ST was not a profitable machine, and that the Companies were forced to develop on the Amiga in order to not get bankrupt ? The Amiga was more expensive, but also more powerful.

[@DutchRetroGuy]

@dlfrsilver: AFAIK this is not true - Game companies tended to develop on PC like hardware and cross compile, using special hardware (i.e. a nifty serial or parallel port) to transfer the results into the target machine. Failing that, they tended to use the actual hardware the game was to run on. I do not have any sources for your statement that Atari sold ST's below cost, but it seems very unlikely considering how long the company stayed in business.

[@dlfrsilver]

cross dev on PC via specific hardware boards only happened a bit later. quite a lot of games were developped directly from an ST machine. The piracy was extremely strong on the ST. The software dried up quickly, never mind the fact that the ST was not able to display enough colors, it make porting even more harder, and devs stopped pulling their hair off.

[@SlavomirG]

Nope. MegaDrive or SNES were the machines to have if you wanted to play games. I had A500 at the time and enjoyed it a lot though.

[@frankjohansen3132]

The Amiga 500 was a very affordable computer at a time where PCs costed 2-3 times more and Macs 6 times more.

[@RetroGG-74]

Excellent work on these videos . Highly entertaining .

[@NXGamer]

Thanks man, music to my ears :-)

[@littlebritain64]

Hi, great video!! I am now speaking about some A1200 sound features. I purchased an Audio-Midi interface for my trusty Commodore A1200. Very tight Midi timing. It was a Clarity-16. It allowed also to record in very clean 16 bits. Too bad there was no software houses making Cubase for Amiga. But...... There was a freeware powerful software from Blue Ribbon: Bars'n'Pipes and Super Jam. Lots of fun and very original workflow!

[@thewelder3538]

I liked this video, but the way you describe certain things are wrong. As someone who coded loads of demos for parties, did a couple of released games, your copper explanation isn't exactly accurate. The copper (or copperlist) controlled the Amiga screen. It couldn't execute instructions as such, although you could get it to trigger things, some protection systems used this technique. It has very little to do with playfields, although you do define them in the copperlist. It's one of the reasons why you often see colours extending beyond the playfield (unless you were using overscan). The playfields or bitplanes were controlled by the DIsplayWindowSTaRT/DIsplayWindowSTOP and the DisplayDataFetchSTaRT and DisplayDataFetchSTOP along with the appropriate modulos. The copper was something that you could essentially get for free, for colour and resolution changes down the raster. You could do it across the raster too, but each copper instruction took 2 cycles and so were limited to color changes every 4 pixels as each copper instruction consisted of two 16bit words. This is why many plasmas effects were this big, but again you could achieve 1 pixel plasma using bitplanes. Also the bitter was just a chip that could be used to move data. The beauty of it was that could do boolean operations between its sources AB & C and it ran in the background the moment you wrote to BltSize and could move about twice as much data as the CPU in the same time. So for very fast clear screen routines, you'd have the bitter clearing from top to bottom whilst the CPU was clearing from bottom to top. Two thirds of the clear would be done by the blitter. Also because you could do boolean operations with it, many people used it for decoding MFM data coming from the disk drive. In fact, that used to catch a lot of people out because AmigaDOS uses the blitter for decoding and they used to wonder why their VBL scrollers were jumping when they were loading. The simple answer was that both the Vertical BLanking and Blitter interrupts were both level 3 IRQs and so you have to use the INTerrupt REQuest Read register to figure out where the interrupt came from. The copper could also gererate level 3 IRQs, which you could trigger on any raster you wished.

[@NXGamer]

Sorry for missing your message, this has been a popular video so I have missed a few. I really appreciate your effort to reply and update the info. As I am making this video for everyone I did take some liberty's on the explanation for ease of flow, this is something I always do to simplify the point. That said I made this from my memory of 25+ years ago so I may have absolutely got some bits and bobs wrong, thanks for offering your insight into this. Would be good to have more detail on this and I have some more detailed planned, maybe we can have a further chat? Cheers.

[@StefanReich]

Houston, Houston, we have a level 3 IRQ, I repeat LEVEL 3 I R Q

[@ChemBustaRhymes]

Please name some your Demos and Games. I wonder NX Gamer replied to your comment and did not ask you to name some. Opportunity missed ;)

[@goognamgoognw6637]

@@ChemBustaRhymes With a bit of more insight you'd guess why. The devs ecosystem was alive and demos were often associated with the hackers, you get the drift..

[@markveganism5003]

I feel I'm in one of the best positions to answer this ..grew up with an st and argued with amiga owners that atari st was the best ..I now have amiga and the amiga was just better literally 99% of the time ...I still love st and had a great childhood playing one 👌 no regrets at all ..but if I knew better back In the day I'd have asked for an amiga ..

[@Dan-wi3uh]

Nearly spit my coffee out when i read 'blitter rivals', very clever

[@NXGamer]

he he, seemed apt :-)

[@Ori-Retro-Gamer]

Fantastic review, I also share the same background as your self, owning both great machines, i often prefer the ST. being 14years old in 1987, it was the golden time in gaming and home computers for me.

[@timnorton4000]

I really give Atari and Jack Tamiel a lot of credit in developing the ST as quickly as they did, and it looks so cool. I am and have always been an Amiga fan but both companies were in turmoil in the mid-80's. Huge shake-ups especially in the upper levels left both companies with many of each others executives and many other employees. From that, Commodore swiped Amiga right from under Atari's nose and in retaliation Jack, now at Atari, developed the ST as unbelievably quickly as possible, and it was really really well done. Commodore, for its part, almost bankrupted itself releasing the Amiga, and didn't have any money to actually build it until '86, then really got the ball rolling with the 500 and 2000 in '87. Alternate history time: Imagine if Commodore and Atari had actually worked together... I know, waaaaayyyyy to much bad blood there but with Atari hitting the low end plus desktop publishing and music, and Commodore getting the high end plus, video, business, and other stuff they could have...

[@NameCallingIsWeak]

Yeah, instead of fighting over the budget enthusiast market. The ST's GEM, MIDI, and 70Hz monochrome monitors, along with the Amiga's Hardware and Multitasking, would have destroyed the Mac and Windows. Sad.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@NameCallingIsWeak well, since Mac was a thing in US only, and windows 3.0 (the first usable win) was still in future, in Europe both Mac and Win was destroyed, especially by ST which was a much better overall computer of them both.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Great in depth analysis on the differences of those two machines! This was really interesting! I had the luck to use both machines extensively (even if I didn't really own one of them back then)and I appreciated what each one had to offer. As an owner of an 8bit Atari back then, which btw is still my favorite ever machine, I would be satisfied having any of those two....knowing that the Amiga was and is a far superior machine.

[@luis46coco]

Yea Atari 8 bits forever

[@bitsnbobsbobsnbits368]

The Amiga was the best, smoother scrolling, more colour on screen and better sound output in gaming. There was a great jump between the Amiga 500 and Atari St. It's a shame the Atari falcon never arrived earlier as that was a beast

[@NXGamer]

Agreed, I would love to get my hands on a Falcon and cover some in-depth look at that as it was a beast for sure.

[@bitsnbobsbobsnbits368]

Made a mistake of not buying the Falcon on Ebay about 5 years ago for £190. would of been interesting with the home brew. The prices keep sky rocketing every year

[@daishi5571]

I built a couple of studios around the Falcon (and a few more ST's) I think the biggest mistake of the Falcon was sticking a full 32 bit processor on a 16 bit data bus, while not a huge issue it's a disappointment. Love that DSP though.

[@bitsnbobsbobsnbits368]

daishi5571 yeah I read up that it was not a true 32bit machine because of the limitations of the data bus, I think it was designed to cut a few corners, still a solid machine back then.

[@daishi5571]

Whats odd is that the TT used a 32bit bus, and it was out before the Falcon. As you say probably to (cost) cut a few corners.

[@stuzaroo2244]

Would love to see you include the Amiga 1200 in a future video. I wonder what gaming, or computing in general would be like now if Commodore had survived and kept producing machines...

[@OriginalMergatroid]

Maybe something like this: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/the-a-eon-amiga-x5000-reviewed-the-beloved-amiga-meets-2017/

[@paulolameiras861]

Great vid. I had the A500, brilliant machine.

[@NXGamer]

It really, really was, way ahead of its time.

[@pazuzu9495]

AMIGA FOREVER !!!!

[@smurr45]

Loved my amiga remember getting it for Christmas the best present I ever got!🙂

[@goognamgoognw6637]

Your video is a lot of fun and i like how you get into the coding and hardware details which is rarely seen in these youtube flashback videos on 16bit cpu forerunners gaming. I am on the Atari 1040 STf side and back in the days i never gave a thought about why Amiga owners always strongly wanted to berate the ST. But now i see why, being whiny about having spent quite a bit more money for the Amiga which had a bit more side hardware (but not easily exploited) and yet has never been able to distance itself from its rivalry with the ST. In fact we're really brothers in arms of the same family. I happened to buy a ST because of the year (1990) and the price. I vaguely remember that i was impressed by the Atari professional looking monochrome display SM124 running at 70Hz which was extremely pleasing to the eye and the fact that i could still plug the ST to a regular TV with just a cable to enjoy the gaming experience as well. This meant i could do publishing and bought an Epson dot printer as well. Amiga could not beat this package in any way. Then also the professional editing application (don't you hate how Apple smartphone marketers chopped that word into the brainless 'app') were coming well and strong for the ST while the Amiga at that time still had an uncertain future in how many years it would get devs attention. I understand your point how the amiga was the better machine for replicating arcade games, but i think it missed the mark in that its CPU was actually slower than the ST's, condemning it to never be able to make a clear cut superiority argument with the ST. As you pointed out well, it could shine but only if game devs exploited its extra hardware. And that too became problematic because the ST price point and exploding variety of games meant that many gaming houses chose to port games from the ST and not seeing it worthwhile commercially to take full advantage of the Amiga's incrementally better hardware. As you step back a bit from the arcade scrolling and sprites blitter comparison and look at the bigger picture i painted above you realize why a bitterness developed in Amiga owners. "But we have the more gaming capable machine !" is the tone you still have in this video. Well, that is true but you left a whole lot out. It turns out the ST was the Professional Audio sequencer most recognized platform well into the late 1990's. Atari was profitable for years until like Amiga it revenues no longer were enough. In conclusion i see the Amiga as a brother of the Atari (very similar) that wasn't given enough advantages and capability to break away and trace its own path. One thing we had in common in those days we both disliked PC compatibles. But the widely adopted open platform and the arrival of GPU and sound cards for PC's meant the end of brand specific computers with a personality of their own. Still, i believe something has been lost, and games never have been so innovative since. It occurs to me that people who focused purely on gaming and wanted the closest possible arcade experience in an era when gaming console did not exist had little choice other than the Amiga. But the idea of a pure gaming console wasn't yet created and the Amiga was still trying to be able to be a general computer without focus. In conclusion the Atari JAck Tramiel team did an impressive job at defining what the ST would be and why it would sell well. The amiga people only tried to push the ball a bit further, i think they should have been more audacious, like putting two CPU cores on the same memory bus or something like that so that Amiga would not just have been an incrementally better machine albeit with lower performance to cost ratio. That said i want to end on a good note because we shared a common era experience. It's probably the first time that i see in your video how some (and i insist on that word) amiga games had an almost arcade fluidity in scrolling and sprite while the ST had to jump more pixels at a slower frame refresh rate.

[@dlfrsilver]

Amiga could be the package. There were many screens for the Amiga made for productivity and professional amiga models. No one in families bought those, we were using standard configurations. Next, the Amiga has a professional Soft library that is the Double of the ST's. Next, the CPU in the ST alone is weaker than the CPU+Chipset in the Amiga. This is exactly why ST games looked like 8 bits games. Publishers had to port in the first times (1986-1989) the games from the ST on the Amiga, because due to piracy they could not recoup their cost. So by porting on Amiga, they found a way to stabilize their financial situation. Atari computers have only really been "profitable" (way to speak) only 3 years. After 1989 up to 1993, Atari ST machines just went down the drain. The ST spanned from 1985 to early 1992, and the Amiga from 1985 up to 1997.

[@phreakinpher]

6:35 Wow it's nice to hear someone use "circa" correctly. It's ridiculous how many people think it means "started" instead of "about".

[@NXGamer]

Yeah, I do also hear words and phrases being misused at times, can be frustrating lol.

[@kraenk12]

Americans don’t know the difference between their, there and they’re, or your and you’re. Don’t disturb them with Latin.

[@DavePhillipsTheProToolsGuy]

I was impressed with “analogous” and “discontiguous”. Two great words

[@pablorai769]

And it's or its!

[@ziggyjinx]

I asked for the Atari St for Christmas and got it, when I played on my mates Amiga I regretted it instantly 😂😂

[@GaryBusey-sLaserdiscCollection]

Kind of surprising how well the aesthetics of these older games still hold up despite limited color.

[@Picnicl]

Many people went straight from 64k the previous generation to 500k . It was a huge leap unparalleled before or since and even now the Amiga can amaze. A console over 30 years old is often recognisably of the same kinds of storytelling and cut scene ideas as today's consoles.

[@FlukeyHeadshot]

Great video! Loved Lotus Esprit! Looking forward to more videos!

[@NXGamer]

Cheers, more to come.

[@julienmorris7051]

Great couple of videos. Just watched them back to back I was an Amiga owner and demo coder at the time - and always felt a little cheated by ST ports - but hey - just get your X-COPY out and stick something else on that disc lol

[@peterward2275]

I had an ST, but I have no hestation in saying that the Amiga had far better graphics capabilities (esp. Sprite graphics which were essential for most games of the day). The ST ruled for music with its MIDI interface. Horses for courses.

[@sluggotg]

Come on Folks! The Amiga CPU was clocked at 7.16 mhz to match NTSC video. The ST was clocked at 8 mhz. That was Absolutely the only advantage the ST had over the Amiga. The ST was one Channel Mono Sound, the Amiga was 4 channel Stereo.. (The ST fans will say "Oh, the ST had a MIDI interface".. yep that was a 20 buck add on for the Amiga. The amiga Graphics were vastly superior. The Amiga had a Fully Pre-emptive Multitasking OS. (Something the Mac did not have till the 21 century.). The Amiga had Expansion ports to upgrade the CPU, RAM, SCSI Drives etc. You could replace the Video Card. The Amiga had Hardware Accelerated Graphics for Animation or Games. Really folks. The ST was a Miracle in that it was developed so fast.. but it was Off the Shelf Hardware Cobbled together and combined with a good OS. The Developement Time was like 6 months. No computer has ever been created in that small amount of time since. I like the ST, but certainly preferred the Amiga. The ST was just plain a cheaper, simpler alternative to the Amiga. In Real world performance, the Amiga always won.

[@beezle1976]

You could also upgrade the cpu, ram, gfx cards, etc. on the ST. In fact the ST expansion cards perform a bit better. There's no 100mhz '060 or coldfire cards for the Amiga for example. As for adding midi to the Amiga, sure, it's an option, but with unbuffered parallel and serial ports no-one using it seriously would use that kind of setup. Contrary to how it may sound I do prefer the Amiga. It's more interesting hardware and more mature (although still very basic compared to modern systems) API's make it much more fun to develop for.

[@davidv776]

I'm a bit tired of these kind of comments. ST is not like a "cut down version" of the Amiga, and that's the way you clearly see the system. Yea, you were able to get a MIDI port for the Amiga, so... Then? Cubase was on the ST... Not on the Amiga... So forget about professional MIDI use. In fact ST had quite a lot of professional productivity programs, while Amiga only had that share on the graphical (2D/3D) design, and video editing applications.... It was really good on that, hell yeah, but nothing more on the professional side. The Amiga graphics were vastly superior? Well, ST was not meant to be a "graphical workstation", the graphical capabilities were just correct. "Fully pre-emptive multitasking OS"... Oh, perfect, yes you can type some text, and have the clock and a mod on the background... Yes? Remember, multitasking was mostly not needed back in the mid 80s, and multitasking using a plain 68000 was really limited. Yes, yes, using more powerful CPUs and WB2.0 or 3.0 improved the thing very much... Yes, OK, then MINT came to the ST, TT, and Falcon, and it works fairly good even on the 16mhz Mega ST. MINT was started on 1989, howevery it didn't see light until 1993 because it was a third party OS. However, you can't come with the... Amiga had multitasking OS... Atari had it too. Was capable of it too. "Amiga had expansion ports"... Oh wait... Hmmm... Amiga (talking about the A500) had ONE expansion port, because the trap door expansion was only meant to be used for RAM (slow) expansion, despite later, some 8086 expansion PC cards could be used there... The side port, (pre-zorro, with zorro standards), allowed a high-speed connection to the A500, however, despite HDD units, RAM expansions, CPU accelerators or even a CD-DRive could be attached to them, at the very end, best accelerators for the A500 relied on the same system the ST had... Direct plug over the existing CPU. The ST had the external HDD units like the Megafile, using the ACSI connector, and to add extra ram to the later ST models, was quite easy, and it was a common service offered by the distributors. Because, yes, the ST range of machines had quite more variety of models than the Amiga, since it was in constant development. It's not the same to expand a later STfm than an early ST. Not to mention the STe, that can be upgraded to 4mb by just fitting 4 32pin RAM modules. So yes, you could plug several sidecar expansions to the A500, and make an ugly train that will barely fit on your desk... Or you could forget about that and buy an A2000, that was meant for that use by the beginning. On the ST there was the Mega, well, A2000 had much more expansion capabilities, you're right if you refer to this model, but we're talking about the A500, taht was meant to be targeting the home range of computers. The Mega had less expansion ports (in fact just one), but had internal ACSI or SCSI controller, and only needed one expansion port for a PC or video card... MIDI capabilities were still available thru the MIDI port and it had a stock double speed CPU that was much more competent than the one included on the Amiga counterpart. "You could replace your video card"... C'mon. That can't be achieved on the A500. Are you talking about the A2000 or A3000? A4000? The Mega series can achieve that too. Remember we're talking about the keyboard-shaped range of computers, meant to be for home use. "The Amiga had accelerated graphics for animation or games"... Wrong, it had support chips, the concept "acceleration" comes from the late 90's when talking about 2D acceleration like the Matrox Millennium or 3D like the Matrox Mystique or earlier Number Nine 3D video cards. Even back in the 486 era, when the Local Bus appeared, was not called "accelerated"... Acceleration was a term adopted in the Pentium MMX era, and later developed to the AGP port. The Blitter didn't accelerate a single thing, it just handled over graphical tasks without the intervention of the CPU, so it didn't speed the video system. Graphics were more fluent using Blitter? Of course, it spared all the CPU for other processes... Did you know you can install a Blitter on the ST? Did you know you only need to have it soldered it on? And yes, the programs that use the Blitter, will use it on your ST if you have it soldered. Again... ST was not designed to be a console, neither a gfx workstation. However, you seem to forget the ST was launched before the Amiga, with the available resources, while Amiga had a longer development due the custom chips that meant to be designed and manufactured. The response to the Amiga came in 1989 and was called STe and Mega STe. These computers that are INDEED ST computers, had improved capabilities, 2 8bit PCM channels that allowed higher frequencies than the Paula, that could be combined with the existing YM, a Blitter (not as advanced as the one included on the Amiga) that handled sprites quite efficiently, an expanded pallette up to 4096 colours (same as the HAM6), and other little adavantages that made the ST much closer to the Amiga than some people would like to recognise. Well, they were stuck on the 16 colours on screen, what was very critizised back in the time since there were no reasons for that, easilly 32 or even 64 colours on screen could have been achieved with very little effort. You could say, well, that machine appeared 3 years after the A500. Well, the ST appeared some months before the A1000 that had a very limited success, and 2 years before the A500, computer we are talking about. What did Commodore launch in the time of the STe? The A500+... Was it an improvement to the A500? Not really, just was able to handle some extra high resolution modes due the improved size of the allowed video RAM... Oh wait, yes it could have a RTC added... An stupidity since almost all the ram expansions had it. The only apportation to the system by the Plus was the Fat Agnus. Not to mention, the late A500 units before the Plus had the same rev8a mobo, including the Fat Agnus, but were just configured to act like an standard A500. So, you can figure the "great difference" between models. Maybe you could add the A600 to the equation, it appeared 3 years after the STe, and it just gave NOTHING to the Amiga OCS/ECS standard, but the PCMCIA port, a more compact design, and, well, marginally slower speeds. Do you want to talk about the A1200? Let's talk about the Falcon, much better machine than any desktop Amiga. And, yes, i've been an Amiga and ST user since many years ago. I know both sistems quite well and each one has his strong points... Not just "1mhz plus" speed. Cheers.

[@RomanRoman-xi3dv]

@@davidv776 ok. Lets compare Falcon with A1200. Tell me percentage ratio of published games on both. Are they equal or lets say 30-70%

David V gotta love the fanboy stuff. Markets already solved this argument long time ago.

[@dlfrsilver]

@@davidv776 the Atari ST was the gap between the 8 bits and 16 bits machine. The ST has a faster clocking, no luck for it, the amiga chipset give back the hand very fast, closing the gap about the CPU clocking. Then, Atari kept on the ST 8 bits hardware limitations. the amiga has none of those. Next,the Amiga will always be faster than the ST series, whatever you want or turn things in every possible way, it won't change that.

[@Peter-MH]

Some great memories brought back there! Actually really pleased I grew up through that era - there were so many games being released, and it was quite a good social scene to copy games off each other and try them out together!

[@smurr45]

Yup I remember my friends used to come round and fetch there games so I could copy them and they would copy mine anyone remember xcopy god these where good days

[@edstar83]

Commodore Amiga Master Race.

[@jackdaddypfc]

(with 1mb expansion card I was immortal)

[@Gunzee]

@@jackdaddypfc you had the 500+?

[@aboriginalmang]

Amiga sucked at productivity softwares. Atari ST had a more high res screen mode and lotus compatible softwares as well as built in midi. Plus its cheaper. Amiga is a better choice for 2D gaming, but ST was a jack of all trades for a low price. Both got crushed by IBM anyway in the end.

[@AdurianJ]

@@Gunzee Mine had a 500+ board but it was a 500. I got mine like the year before the 500+ came out so they seemed to have changed hardware beforehand. It has space for extra memory to be soldered an everything. That might explain why it was a little funky compared to older 500's when it came to behavior

[@dacsus]

@@aboriginalmang dude, Amiga was a game computer, what are you talking about, lol.

[@MartinJSUK]

Arcade games are the big area where the Amiga wins (better scrolling and sound / music especially). Comparing the same game on both systems underestimates the Amiga's advantage, because the really impressive Amiga stuff (such as Lionheart and Battle Squadron here) was developed for it first and usually not later ported down to the ST. Capabilities-wise the STe was very close to the A500, but quite under-supported. For 'serious' games it's closer. The ST edges it for 3D. For strategy / adventure / RPG a like-for-like comparison of individual games is close, but the Amiga stayed competitive for longer so it got lots of great games the ST didn't - Monkey 2, the Eye of the Beholders, Dune 2, Gunship 2000, Syndicate, Settlers etc. Serious stuff is different though. The Amiga also wins for video production (on really high-end systems), but everything else is close or a win for the ST, especially before Workbench 2 and the extra chip RAM of the A1200. And the ST was usually cheaper and/or came with more software. That said, you could do serious tasks on an Amiga, and you could enjoy playing games on an ST. Both really good systems for their time. Which one was right for you depends on the time, your budget, what you already had, and what you planned to do with it. I had an Amiga and loved it, but I'll defend the ST to an extent. Both certainly beat the more expensive PCs of 1987 in most areas.

[@DTM-Books]

Tha Amiga was created by the same geniuses who created the Atari 800, so I feel that computer is the true successor. The ST has a lot of strengths, especially wi5 MIDI. For videogames, it’s no contest, Amiga all the way. But I’m sure there’s a lot of fun to be had playing ST games.

[@alexatkin]

I owned both, despite some nostalgia for chip tunes its Amiga all the way, it was a HUGE upgrade. Didn't help hardly anyone supported STe functionality.

[@SyntheToonz]

Right, I had an Atari 800. The magazines back in the day covered the Amiga Lorraine with everyone assuming it would be the successor to the Ataris. In the end, the Amiga was the best Atari computer that Atari never sold. That still did not deter me from getting the obviously much more advanced Amiga even though it had a different company logo on it. In the successor train of thought the ST hardware design was effectively complete when Jack bought Atari -- by ex-Commodore engineers. So, if the two companies had not played industry musical chairs, then the real successor to the C64 would have been an ST-like system.

[@dipi71]

The ST was not only good for MIDI, its relatively simple hardware design made it great for electronics hobbyists as well. But when I first saw the incredibly stable and crisp black-and-white display the Atari SM124 monitor provided, I was sold - mind you, back in the 1980s, I experienced the Amiga only with horrifically flickery and blurry RGB color monitors, or worse, TV sets using FBAS/PAL converters. Nowadays, with emulators like UAE and LCD displays, anything looks sharp and crisp, even Amiga HAM mode. ;-) I seriously can’t imagine coding for hours and weekends on end in front of a blurry color CRT using one of those Amiga resolutions with coloful but usually non-square pixels. On the other hand, in front of a relatively cheap ST and ultra-crisp SM124, not only was coding and debugging relaxing, typesetting (Calamus, Signum!3) beautiful and sheets of musical notation in Steinberg and Notator stunning to watch and work with - monochrome games were fun too: Esprit, Oxyd, Bolo, Spacoly, any contemplative board game, several excellent vector graphics ports of Asteroids and other vector titles ported from the Vectrex game console. These games were incredible to play in crisp 640×400/70Hz, no Amiga could to that without separate video hardware. Cheers!

[@gibs2b]

@@dipi71 Bullshit ! The SM124 can't go over Middle resolution. I know I have one. The Amiga doesn't flicker at Middle Resolution. Question : What have you coded on the ST ? Please something we can check ! Lol.

[@dipi71]

@@gibs2b You mad?

[@Ama-hi5kn]

The ST exists because of the Amiga. Any computer historian that paid attention knows that. Jack (Tramiel) wasted his chance of getting it (i.e the Amiga). Because he didn't listen to the developers. But ok. It's kind of the short and simple explanation. But if you delve into it furthermore the story is somewhat more complicated. As another point of interest for those who don't know. The Amiga and the Atari 8-bit computers are also intertwined in a strange way. Jay Miner, the father of the Amiga had a role at at Atari and was part of designing the chipset for those computers. I have owned both the ST and the Amiga though.

[@Juganawt]

Very few games ran better on the ST in comparison to the Amiga. Amiga games were usually superior in terms of frame rate, sound, and graphics

[@NXGamer]

Well, actually more titles than you may think ran the same and some even worse, the ST was a big player in the market and this dictated the centre piece for many titles during the mid to late 80's, this shifted into 89-90 to the Amiga though.

[@Juganawt]

The first game I remember seeing that truly showed the quality gap between the two systems was when Shadow of the Beast launched. I think Psygnosis inadvertently signed Atari's death warrant.

[@daishi5571]

+NX Gamer I think most ppl remember the more standout games which were available later than the early ones.

[@daishi5571]

What I'm looking for is a comparison of accelerated ST/Amiga games either an 68020/030 (processors easily available at the time) at the same speed. Then a comparison against a comparible PC of the time. I know by 92/93 PC's had run away with faster CPU's as standard, but even at that time there were comparable 680x0 processor availible and with both the ST and Amiga a better platform to use over the PC.

[@dlfrsilver]

yes. Martin edmonson vowed Atari ST to death. He was sick of the bad or non use of the Amiga.

[@Autos389]

No contest. The Amiga ran circles around the ST. If, for no other, reason that it had dedicated custom chips for handling audio, I/I and graphics.

[@david-spliso1928]

Great video, thanks. But no mention of the STE version of Zool with hardware scrolling?

[@pedrotimoteo329]

Yeah, I was waiting as well for that to be mentioned. Even under emulation, the STE vs. ST difference is very noticeable, with the game being Amiga-smooth on the STE. Pity so few developers supported it...

[@ayth81]

I had an Atari ST and was also an avid reader of gaming magazines in the early 90s. By 1992 or so, very few games were still being released for the Atari, to my chagrin. The Amiga on the other hand was able to withstand the assault of the PC for a couple more years. There were some good "exclusive" titles from the likes of Team17 and also some desirable PC ports like Monkey Island 2, Dune 2 and quite a few others.

[@wimwiddershins]

In-depth! Just brilliant video. Fascinating.

[@NXGamer]

Great stuff, thanks

[@d_vibe-swe]

I'm so glad our father bought us an Amiga 500, not an Atari ST. The ST is such an uninspiring machine..

[@robintst]

Out of pure convenience and ease of setup, I go with the Genesis/Mega Drive for my favorite Amiga games. They're close enough to the originals and the YM2612 sound chip offers an interesting take on their music as well as both music + sound FX during gameplay.

[@Picnicl]

Except that you can't play Superfrog, Magic Pockets, Monkey Island, Fire and Ice, Deluxe Paint on the Mega Drive. But, yes, the Mega Drive's smooth , fast, processor, cool game types more geared to European audiences than the SNES made the Mega Drive more the console equivalent of the Amiga.

[@paulstevens9409]

@@Picnicl The mega drive was like an arcade machine compared to the ST and amiga, I remember loading up golden axe on it and being blown away by it at the time.

[@JensHove]

You put so much effort into your video's. Highly appreciated!

[@NXGamer]

Thanks, always good to hear.

[@feamatar]

What was not clear from your description, that it is not 16 colour per screen, but per scanline. For example in case of Shadow of the Beast, the changing background is palette swap on a given scanline. For the ST there was Spectrum 512, which was able to display 512 colours on screen maximum, thouse were still images though. Nonetheless, games could display up to 50 colours on screen. The ST used raster interrupts, which is slow compared to programming the copper on the Amiga to do the palette swap. That's why there is smooth background changes on Amiga but not on ST. Also, I really missed Falcon and Flight Simulator II from this comparison. Great video though.

[@NXGamer]

Yes it is, I try to cover the details in simplified way, I have covered the raster techniques before and even here referencing the method and the colours including the Megadrive's use of the same method called Shadow and Highlight mode. The Raster drawing methods and palette swapping techniques, even more so with the copper of the Amiga, were a huge boost to pushing the technical envelope.

[@Foebane72]

Yeah, and the Amiga had HAM, superior in every way. What's your point? Well, OK, it wasn't good for moving images and games, but that doesn't mean they didn't try. Check out a game called Pioneer Plague on Amiga, and see how mind-blowing that looked in the 1980s!

[@SyntheToonz]

"smooth background changes" is partly a fact or of easier/faster interrupts/custom hardware servicing color changes, and also the fact the Amiga palette is 8 times larger. (4 bits per R, G, B value vs ST's 3 bits per value.)

[@MrJGD77]

I had an ST520 then 1040STE. My best mate as a kid had an Amiga 500. I was constantly jealous of the quality of games he had. Amiga was the winner, however that didn't stop me from having great memories growing up with the ST.

[@tonyciantar6417]

Xenon 2 was amazing on the ST, people seem to forget the price difference, for the price of the Amiga I bought an Atari ST and a printer enabling me to print reports and I took disks into work as they were IBM compatible. I guess for children with well off parents the Amiga was a better option, at least until the consoles killed a games machine with a keyboard.

[@kingofmambo]

Exactly

[@YouNiktor]

I don't think computers were ever killed by consoles in the Europe.

[@burnedeye]

I own both A1200 with TF1260 and 520STE with 4MB ram and SD4ST+. Comparing an Amiga 500 to an ST (not STE) the Amiga clearly wins, better graphics, much better sound, smoother scrolling. STE is definitely closer in terms of capabilities to A500 but unfortunately it came too late and the software was lagging behind and in the end not many games took full advantage of the STE features. I like the STE's ease of ram upgradeability but Amigas have expansion slots which open up a whole new world of accelerators. My A1200 has a TF1260 and it rocks. the STE is not as straight forward with the accelerators (or Boosters as some may call them) and the options are very limited. I love my STE regardless and periodically use one over the other for fun. Imho A1200 is more comparable to Atari Falcon than the ST(E) especially when both equipped with a 68060 accelerator butr again Falcon came out too late and software options are very limited.

[@tenbob1972]

had both machines and Amiga was the best hands down. can not think of any game that was better on ST than Amiga

[@NXGamer]

Both were great machines, but the Amiga was that little bit greater IMOP :-)

[@DutchRetroGuy]

Well, almost any 3D game was better on the ST. As well as a bunch of the really early ports ;)

[@trip2themoon]

@Caster Troy. I preferred Xenon on the ST. The ST's poor sound chip actually worked in it's favour for Xenon's music which sounds a lot nicer than on the Amiga version. Sometimes you'd get the occasional game developer who could really make the ST's sound chip sing.

[@snkneo-geo933]

Are u the Caster Troy off 606?

[@atariteki]

vroom,popolous,stuntcar racer, starglider ... all these games and lot more are faster on st ... and over 0 modem you will see it even as amiga user if you always lost in stuntcar racer with a 7 mhz only machine against a 8 mhz machine :)

[@DeafMacBoi]

After owning an Atari 130XE, I wanted to buy an Atari 520ST because of good looking design but I could not find one at the stores so I ended up with Amiga 500 and I was pleased with this hardware. Missed that video games of yours. Great memories.

[@mofologic1882]

Amiga the best computer I've ever owned. Fond memories. Iconic machine and games from the era that I think is reason gaming is massive today.

[@MaffeyZilog]

That's thanks to Nintendo and Sega. Not commodore!

[@Kingsland1988]

That was great! Funny, informative, interesting and thorough, as well as unbiased. I'll sub! Didn't watch part 1 (stumbled across this to be fair) but I think the tech specs would go over my head.

[@GordonBraicks]

It’s very simple. The graphics were mostly a bit better on Amiga. Scrolling was smoother on Amiga. The big difference was the sound. The Amiga used 4 channel sample playing and had great music. The Atari used either a sampled down version of the same music which sounded horrible or used it’s own 3 channel sound chip which sounded like it’s 8 bit little brother such as the XE. But the Atari shines with Cubase and midi!

[@NXGamer]

It does, the MIDI options on the ST made it a very popular machine for a long time and helped it establish a good market. The Amiga was way ahead of its time, and for a good while afterwards, if only Commodore has marketed it better, things could have been very different.

[@elmariachi5133]

I got to say that I am really disappointed of the ST, after having been an Amiga guy all the way from 1987 to 1998. From screenshots in magazines I always thought that the games for both where pretty similar, but after seing the ST's scrolling and hearing it's 'sound capabilities' I really wonder, if some parents intended to punish their kids by buying an ST over the Amiga..

[@julienbraudel7109]

That is a very basic opinion. Music on the ST was great, and better when it comes with synth sounds. You have to listen to works of Jochen Hippel, David Whittaker, Ben Daglish, or even Rob Hubbard. Lots of them are actually better on the ST. Plus, Atari ST had a different sound processor than the XL (which sounds different), actually older. The ST was also great with large samples, and sounded sometimes better as the Amiga in this case (Captain Blood).

[@cesaru3619]

Both were cute until the PC Compatibles destroyed both with Doom, 486DX and SB16. PC MASTER RACE. Rip console computers. 1:56

[@KesMonkey]

Quiz answers: Switchblade, Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight, Another World, X-Out, Power Drift, Mega Lo Mania, IK+, Rocket Ranger, Cruise for a Corpse, Cannon Fodder, Populous, Gods, Midwinter, Jaguar XJ220, Lemmings, Speedball 2, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Dragon Breed. No idea what game the music is from.

[@NXGamer]

Superb work sir, well done indeed, I will give you that internet star, you earned it. The tune was from Ninja Warriors and it was/is a superb tune.

[@ArwinvanArum]

Great to look back at this. I started with an Atari 800XL with a tape recorder and some cartridges ... the ST gave me so many great experiences at the time, highlights being Populous 2, Warhead, Barbarians (and countless others), Geoff Crammond's F1GP, many Sierra adventures (I loved being able to just type anything ... ), up to 16 player Midi Maze 2 matches, Gods, Blood Money 2 (both of those some of the rare games I actually completed), Stunt Car Racer, Virus, Gauntlet II, the list goes on surprisingly long ... I had a friend with an Amiga so we occasionally did comparisons like you did and noticed similar differences. I later got an Amiga 600HD (lovely) to play all the great exclusives such as Body Blows, SuperFrog, those amazing pinball games ... Team17 ruled. Yes, everyone knows now that the Amiga was the stronger machine, but as mentioned many times by you, the ST came in at an affordable price, and the Amiga reached affordable much, much later. I also experienced by the way various improvements through hardware upgrades. Gauntlet II for instance had upgrades for double sided 3.5 drives and 1MB of memory on ST. Oh, and I thought the colors in the background of Gods were done by palette switching at the end of a scanline? That was a neat trick ...

[@NXGamer]

Thanks for sharing, the ST was a special machine for many and the price made it a real bargain and way outside of anything else for £ for return. I had also like the boosts 1meg titles offered for both machines and extra space, even the Blitter addition on ST adds a great deal to some games. You are correct, the raster line swap was used heavily during the era on many machines and helped push the colour count up on many titles.

[@maceatari4127]

The ST is superior bang for buck. There are also many other examples not shown in this video in which the ST wins, especially 3d.

[@dlfrsilver]

it's yet to be seen..... the Amiga processing power is above the one of the ST ;)

[@artbell259]

ST had the faster CPU, pity that Atari didn't release the machine with Blitter built-in, then we'd have a more even comparison of developers and the games they made...

Art Bell it lacked the custom support chips amiga had. It was often slower in actual implementation because you had to use cpu for everything whereas amiga left part of the processing to the support chips.

[@insoft_uk]

Both machines did equally well, in market terms they both competed close and only one year showed a significant increase in Amiga 500, then both squashed by IBM PCs and what a gray and gloomy time they were not like the exciting times of Amiga 500 v Atari ST that drove developers to really think about maximum code optimisation

[@dlfrsilver]

@@insoft_uk The Amiga had higher market share than the ST and by far, even in the country were the ST overcame the Amiga (France). the Amiga has 11% vs 10% of market share here for the ST.

[@OriginalMergatroid]

Great video man. Unfortunately, between then and now I've smoked far too many joints to remember the names of all those games, and more to the point there was so much software on the Amiga that many of the games you showed I have never seen, as I believe we could find many games on this side of the Atlantic that never made their wait there. I seem to recall installing two mod switches in Amigas, specifically the A500 but also the A2000 to a lesser extent. One was purchasing a newer version of the Fat Agnus chip that could address more "chip RAM" (I hope I'm remembering these names correctly). The chip RAM was soldered onto the main board, and was accessible on the local bus to all the chips. Some of the later boards were capable of holding more chip RAM, but the mounting points were not populated. Adding in the RAM, and the upgraded Fat Agnus would allow you to double the chip RAM to 1MB, and by installing a hardware switch you could switch back and forth from 512KB to 1MB for games that would not work properly with the additional chip RAM. Memory expansions would then add what was referred to as "Fast RAM", which I believe was not accessible by the custom chips on their bus, but only on the motorola 680X0 bus (if I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while). The second switch we commonly installed was a PAL/NTSC switch. If we ran PAL games over here, the game would go off the screen because the slightly higher resolution would push it right off of the NTSC monitor screen. By installing a switch, we could actually switch the Amiga into PAL mode and if you had the right monitor, you could accurately display the PAL games (without the right monitor it would cause the vertical deflection to go out-of-sync). This was a great advantage as it made many previously unplayable games work perfectly. Oddly enough, the monitors that could handle both 60Hz and 50Hz refresh rates anticipated later PC monitors with multiple refresh rates and resolution modes. When the new AGA machines came out, such as the A1200, they came with the 1MB chip RAM mod built-in, but we still made a few bucks installing switches for people allowing the machines to play those incompatible games. We also made PC/Amiga PSUs for people by removing the cable from Amiga power supplies, removing all the cables from a PC power supply and transplanting the Amiga cable into the PC power supply, along with any peripheral cables such as hard drive power cables. This allowed the Amigas to have 200W+ power available and allowed future peripherals to be powered from this modded PSU. It helped that PC PSUs are pretty much completely enclosed and had a mains power switch. Hell, we even installed little rubber feet. It was sure a pretty exciting time for computers. We lived through the vacuum tube era (toward the end), to the first ICs and transistors, to simple calculators, and early home computers. Lol, I had a Timex-Sinclare 1000 at one time, with a 16KB RAM expansion and monochrome graphics. Loved the tape drive. I also had a VIC 20 with the Dataset (tape drive). Floppy driver were a whole world of goodness when they came along. Imagine going from sequential access to random access in one fell swoop. I hope you do more Amiga videos. I would love to wax nostalgic on some of those old games. One of my favs was Deutoros. Great game at the time. Had me hooked...

[@jaydy71]

For me, the ST as a gaming machine was a bit of a let-down. It was usually a very choppy and not very fun experience. I came to the ST after the MSX2, and besides some pretty fantastic games like Dungeon Master, a pretty fun version of Super Hang On and some impressive (at the time) 3D games, I have more memorable gaming experiences with the MSX2. Not that the MSX2 was more powerful in any way (it wasn't), but it had more good games that looked often looked in the ball-park of ST games. I bought the ST mainly for Cubase though, and as a MIDI workhorse it never let me down. It had some interesting games at the side as a bonus, but a great gaming machine it was not (not to me).

[@NXGamer]

The MIDI functions were incredible for the ST and really helped it succeed in the market and gave it legs long beyond the gaming scene.

[@MrSEA-ok2ll]

Ah, Psygnosis...those were the days...one of my first games on my ST was Obliterator. Amiga audio? This was the reason for abandoning my 520stfm for an Amiga 500...great video.

[@backudog]

Amiga. That is all. Message ends.

[@NXGamer]

lol

[@AnthonyCook78]

Was that a Red Dwarf reference I just heard?

[@SnakeEngine]

399. Message ends.

[@paulstevens9409]

Not true

[@dipi71]

Esprit, Oxyd, Bolo, Spacola and any Atari ST game running on 640x400 (»ST high«) with an SM124 with - for the time - ultra-smooth 72 FPS. That's the stuff. Only the ST and some Macs could do that. Also: MIDI and SCSI. Cheers!

[@ridiculous_gaming]

What this really illustrates is that custom games produced for the Amiga and ST by experienced software houses could produce very decent titles on both systems. I started with an ST in 1988 and moved over to an Amiga 500 when I was presented with the audio, which back in the day, simply blew me away. The STE was a fantastic improvement over the original hardware, but the hardware was sadly often not really used even though it could keep up with the Amiga now in many cases. However, at the end of the day, I still celebrate both computers and using them today brings a smile to my face. Also, I would like to mention that several games on the ST also worked via monochrome with a monochrome monitor. Not only did the 1 bit graphic mode speed up functions dramatically, but games also ran at 640 X 480. I think this mode was overlooked by many gamers. Regarding the much celebrated Zool? The game actually visually is very well done, but the sounds used are simply terrible choices and simply annoying.

[@victorc2989]

Great video love your content. Can't wait to see your God of War coverage. 👌👍

[@NXGamer]

Always good to hear, thank you.

[@atrotet]

Cant thank my dad enough to have bought me an atari 1040ste when i was 10 or 11. And although it was made obsolete way earlier than amiga, it was such a privilege to have a computer that i never felt left out at the time.Many games after 1991 were just not released for the ST. I had to wait a long time (7 years)to get my hands on monkey island 2 after buying my first PC in the late nineties.

[@ΣπύροςΚουκάκης-ι6β]

Amiga best home computer ever made!!!

[@yeraysantanaaday6827]

My firends, amiga vs atari was the conflic of our youth time, because we have friends with atari and with amiga, but always amiga victory, and i am victorius with my amiga.

[@s_t_s4846]

Even though I'm an ATARI STe hardcore fan there's no challenge here : the AMIGA was a gaming machine, displaying more colours, better scrollings and sound thanks to additionnal chips that made it a lot more expensive than the STe. But the STe is still alive today and we don't need accelerating cards ! :p

[@NXGamer]

True, the STe and Falcon were superb machines, sad they never got used as much as possible.

[@Nick-GR]

Actually, as i 've said before the Amiga was designed as a relatively cheap graphics workstation. That was the original idea, thats why their first model was the Amiga 1000. The A500 became a gaming machine because of the famous Amiga custom chips and the.. ehm.. lets say, almost affordable price back then. It was a great machine though, for its time. And this comes from someone who had an ST back then.

[@skullleader-hw9hi]

Productivity for Both is even better than Games My ST was great machine which paid for itself in about 3 months. I had an Atari 800XL and wanted the Amiga before the suite. But the 1040ST and then later STE with Monochrome monitor and printer was the main stay of our family typing service. I learned to progam C (not Atari C ugh) we spread sheet and database program. I had friend that bored it to do music with the MIDI ports. later I had the please of getting color monitor and using to to emulate the MAC with Color Apple. The Amiga with the Video Toaster wasn't also great machine. These machine allowed for a lot professional level work for 1/4 the prices. Look at vide production.

[@lgmspetsnaz]

Great video as always. Keep up the good work.

[@senrak]

Amiga 1000 then 2000 for me. They were hands down the best machines!

[@shahnawazshahin3781]

So Atari did succeeded against Commodore with the launch of the Atari ST, which has led to crippled software being ported to the Amiga. I guess one way of putting it. 🤷‍♂️

[@MorrisseyMuse]

Is this even a contest? the AMIGA decimated everything at the time!

[@CFalcon030]

Especially the X68000. It beat it out of the water

[@NXGamer]

Was a great machine, the ST put up a decent challenge mind, but the price target was a clear decider.

[@dlfrsilver]

this lasted only 2-3 years at best. The Amiga took the lead quite quickly.

[@MrLtia1234]

Archimedes

[@dlfrsilver]

decimated as well and stuck in a niche market.

[@daromirfirunsson]

Don't want to know what Lionheart would look like on the Atari ST...

[@fernandomilito9379]

Commodore Amiga rules!

[@classicarcadeamusementpark4242]

There really was no contest between these systems. In 1985, the issue was that the Amiga had cost double the price, but I felt offered many times the ability and we bought one. When the Amiga 500 came out 2 years later, the price gap narrowed.

[@ZxSpectrumplus]

Amiga made a good choice to start with a strong base line. Prices of hardware goes down with time...but baseline specs out of the door will be stuck forever, even with later advance STE model, the war was already lost. Luckily the ST has MIDI, else it would really be a forgetable micro in history.

[@classicarcadeamusementpark4242]

@@ZxSpectrumplusThe Amiga was even better at MIDI too for those that wanted to use it like I used it. The Amiga invented the software synth concept. This was my biggest area of interest in 1985 when the Amiga came out. Using the incredible custom sound chip, the Amiga could emulate all different types of synthesizer keyboards. The most significant of them at the time was sampling keyboards. Just a year before the Amiga came out, to buy a sampling keyboard was $10,000 or more with a Fairlight, Synclavier, Emulator or Kuzweil. The Ensoniq Mirage brought the price down under $2000, and the Amiga had very similar abilities out the gate. I used my Amiga for MIDI sampling and other kinds of synthesis. No other computer for several years had this kind of ability. This meant I didn't need to spend a fortune on additional synthesizers other than a MIDI controller keyboard. While I was highly impressed with this, the software synth concept didn't really catch on with the masses until the VST format almost 15 years later. It's kind of ironic that Steinberg software came out with Cubase for the Atari ST and failed to see this amazing ability of the Amiga. They could have essentially come out with the VST format on the Amiga more than a decade earlier and changed the face of synthesizers for everyone much sooner. I consider this a huge missed opportunity. Instead, it was only select few people like me that knew of this awesome ability of the Amiga and fully utilized it. It should have been better known by the masses interested in synthesizers. Not only provided the ability for all kinds of synthesizers are much lower cost, but also that a single computer could replicate many different synthesizers as one device. I used my Amiga in my bands for this and could see the potential that it was easy to transport vs a bunch of synthesizers. And your personal computer at home could do so many different things for you such as general computing needs, state of the art video game system, and emulate various types of synthesizers too. The Atari ST's sound chip by comparison was old and out dated, 1979 technology or older as used in TI home computers.

[@MrAnime74]

Ive still got my Amiga. Will never ever sell it. Best computer ever! Well... Spectrum 48k being a very close 2nd =)

[@yannisgk]

even i totally respect your post, because i'm sure i'm older than you, i give the best computer vote to c64, and my close second to amstrad pc1512 (i didn't own them but i wish i had....unfortunately i started computing in a greek ibm pc compatible "machine").

[@cheekyegg]

Yeh but does your modulator still work?

[@damiencgreen]

Great video, well presented with some very interesting side by side comparisons, it must have taken a quite a bit of research. Just a quick correction. When you say 50 fields per second, in the case of Zool on the Amiga, it's actually 50 frames per second (PAL) as the game is running in a non-interlaced low resolution screen mode which works by drawing one field and leaving the other blank. The drawn field is refreshed at twice the speed of a PAL interlaced display i.e. 50hz which not only makes the non-drawn field appear less apparent (as the phosphor in the CRT would have had less time to decay) but also means the screen provides true 50 frame per second motion. If the screen was drawing at 50 fields per second (i.e. by using an interlaced format), it is likely you would observe a combing effect as the different frames drawn on each field would be slightly out of alignment due to the difference in motion (assuming there is motion of course). This would be especially apparent in games with fast moving objects. That is one reason why interlaced modes weren't used for arcade games. Others were that the lack of colour made the low refresh flicker of interlace much more apparent (few people had flicker fixers back in the day). The higher resolution offered by the interlaced modes also required the machine to push more data around and as you say in the previous video, the memory chips weren't particularly fast and not really up to that task.

[@NXGamer]

Thank you for the info and comment, you are of course correct and my mistake for not clarifying in the video, as many titles used interlace modes I was more confirming that than stating which ones use i or P modes, sorry. As you say Zool is progressive mode and as such has that cleaner display, but the info on the flicker and colour is interesting, thank you very much.

[@cloerenjackson3699]

. You can only update at 50fps on low resolution screens because the same frame is displayed on an both odd and even PAL fields You don't get tearing. Look at any game on an 8 bit micro like a SNES or Commodore 64.

[@marcin3701]

of course, Amiga, until the "Doom" came :)

[@NXGamer]

Doomed by Doom, weren't they all :-)

[@clok1966]

I wonder how many of Amiga people say that? I had zero interest in PC's, and while it wasnt Doom it was another big one, Wing Commander, a couple years earlier. Friend had just got WC and had a very early version(nice way of describing it) of Alone in the dark and i was hooked.. Though my amiga hung in there a few more years beside my PC.. and i still crank up a game of Walker or any of the Psygnosis games i liked to this day.

[@Foebane72]

Wing Commander SUCKS. Doom was the real deal for me, I see it on a friend's PC at the height of my Amiga zealotry and am converted, almost on the spot. It took Commodore going bust to finally get my PC.

[@Cthulhu1970]

I was quite lucky I suppose, by 1995 I had a very powerful Amiga (68060 @ 50mhz) that could run Doom quite easily. Quake not so well, but I got it running at about 22 FPS, which was considerably better than a 50mhz 486 at that time. The Pentium was another matter entirely though, as their clock speeds kept on rising all the time. I still have that Amiga though, and it still feels pretty nippy. 😃

[@kaisersoymilk6912]

Luckily Doom was converted on everything, there was no need to buy a PC, I enjoyed it on the playstation.

[@8bitrocketstudios]

Another incredibly thorough video!

[@simonebiagini1409]

...the winner is.............AMIGA

[@peter486]

wonderful video cant name all the games, i had spectrum, then Atari defended Atari like a "god" against the Amiga fan boys. But that basically got me started with Game design, and graphic design :) I like to say Thank you so much for this video.

[@stewartfullerton1965]

Amiga hands down, like the Spectrum, we laughed at the ST. Inferior graphics to the Mega Drive, no hardware scrolling and it sounded like a Master System!, for a 16 bit computer thats inexcusable.

[@YQN2149]

The ST was more affordable and allowed more kids to enjoy a computer. Totally worth it. The YM2149 is a fantastic chip that, unlike the crap digitized sounds heard on the Amiga, has character, especially once hacked by creative programmers. As they say, less is more ;)

[@kleanthispapadopoulos2555]

Awesome video and analysis

[@seanmccafferty3189]

I'll save you 41 minutes of your life. It was the Amiga. ;)

[@SkynetCyb]

Of course it was the Amiga!

[@missionDan]

Thanks man, i got 2 mins in and it got technically fucking boring. Now i can leave

[@ΞενοφωνΒασιλοπουλος]

Awesome review Atari ST , Atari STF , Atari STFM , Atari STE . Atari Falcon 030 and Commodore Amiga 500 , Commodore Amiga 600 , Commodore Amiga 1200 were the best computers ever made . I wish computer technology had stopped in 1994 .All computers since suck

[@KorenLesthe]

How dare you use a Turrican picture on the video snapshot ? Now I'm forced to watch the video from start to finish ! ^^.

[@NXGamer]

The lure is just too strong.

[@KorenLesthe]

I'm amazed how the Atari ST sounds exactly like the Amstrad CPC. And the CPC also didn't have hardware scrolling. Loved your video and gosh, I CANNOT wait for your Factor 5 video ! I'm... kind of a Turrican & Factor 5 nerd :p.

[@daishi5571]

At 1:17 it states that 24 bit addressing wasn't standard, but the Mac, ST & Amiga all used it and I think between those system that accounts for the vast majority of 68000 based computers. And having an address bus that was different to the rest of the processor wasn't unusual, take a look at the 8-bit processors if they had an only 8-bit address bus they would only allow for 256 Bytes and the Intel 8086 had a 20-bit bus.

[@NXGamer]

You have to remember these videos are made in isolation, I have to create them as a single piece for many that have not programmed on them at all. Also the Amigia/St was different in that the external bus was smaller than the registers, halving the external transfer with many 8-bit devices as you state having the opposite issue. 24-Bit addressing was limted by this and had to occur across 2 cycles instead of one, again I could dive into this on more depth but would lose the point and focus of the video.

[@daishi5571]

@@NXGamer This wasn't a knock on the video (which I enjoyed) I was just pointing out that the Bus being of different size to the internal structure/registers was in fact quite normal for CPU's of the time. It was more for those ppl who may have been curious about it and thought it was a stupid design. It would be quite a video getting into the data/address bus lanes and how the bus speed vs the CPU cycles to read/write memory so I kept my comment short (which is difficult to me)

[@daishi5571]

Anyone really interested in some light reading:- www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/MC68000UM.pdf

[@markosaggelakis3055]

Amiga amigos!😉👍

[@V3ntilator]

Amiga dominated in Europe and became so big that IBM felt Amiga became a threat. I skipped Atari ST because Amiga had a way better operating system. Secondly, everyone else only had Amiga. At demo scene parties early 1990's 99% of all computers were Amiga as neither PC or Atari had that culture. AMIGA still have hardware and software companies supporting it in 2022.

[@CaptainDangeax]

Really, the sound of the ST makes my ears bleed.

[@CastleKnight7]

CaptainDangeax I feel the same about the Amiga’s sound. It’s inferior.

[@CaptainDangeax]

@@CastleKnight7 How can you compare the sound of the ST, just able to play square waves and white noise (like computers from the 70th like Ti99, MSX and Amstrad CPC), and the Amiga able to play mod files ? Just trolling to occupy your lonely evenings answering to me ?

[@fradd182]

One of the best retro reviews out there.

[@nashismox3]

The Japanese where incredibly ahead of their time. The Famicom/Nes in most games is clearly superior than both the ST and Amiga, even though having weaker hardware. Same for the Master system.

[@SerBallister]

Amiga/Atari ST had to be a jack-of-all-trades, needing to run desktop applications as well as play games. The Nintendo machines were mostly optimised toward tilemap based games.

[@mmestari]

NES had nothing but absolutely garbage children's games. Even MSX was far superior. Dungeon Master, Eye of Beholder, Elite 2: Frontier, Populous etc. Nothing on NES comes even close.

[@mark12358]

You're drunk, how could 8bit NES be superior to Amiga or ST? Only in 1991/92 the SNES came and showed its superior color graphics (vs the A500/A600). Though, an A1200 still had the necessary advantage over it. Real "battle" was lost against PC hardware, that by 92/93 had tons of CHEAP 386 with VGA/SB/CD and good software (games). And please, bear in mind that Amiga original platform was designed starting 1982 to 1986, and released in 1986. It was amazing how advanced it was, battling over almost ten years against more modern systems. It failed when Commodore stopped to innovate, not releasing in time what RD department had ready in the pocket, and Marketing in US failed to advertise it properly, like done in EU for example. Cheers, M

[@paul1979uk2000]

The Nes was more in line with the C64 then the Amiga whereas the Amiga was more in line with the Mega Drive and Snes, a lot of the games at the time showed that.

[@OriginalMergatroid]

The NES sucked compared to either the ST or the Amiga. I was authorized for Commodore service and Nintendo service (up until the Wii came out). The difference between the Amiga and the NES was like night and day. Nintendo only really raised the bar when they came out with the SNES.

[@mark12358]

10:14 wrong. Amiga audio chip (named Paula) offers 4 independent audio channel, organized in stereo 2x2 (1-2 left, 0-3 right); when you say 3 channel + 1 sound effect that is the ST or the C64 SID audio chip.

[@NXGamer]

Sorry for the confusion, I do state in the Hardware video the 4 channel Paula of the Amiga, but the limit was that if you had both sound effects AND music then you could only have 1 channel for effects and 3 for music, you can see this in the video when I talk about Xenon II and show the loss of music tracks to the sound effects.

[@mark12358]

You're correct, standard audio output is only four at a time without using particular techniques. Another example could be Afterburner 2, or others. Cheers, M

[@ChrisP872]

"4 channel Paula of the Amiga, but the limit was that if you had both sound effects AND music then you could only have 1 channel for effects and 3 for music," This isn't true. The programmers could choose to use all 4 for music but interrupt one or two of the sound channels as needed for sound effects. Because sound effects are often the focus of attention and "push" to the foreground and you could prioritize which channel of the song was interrupted (less critical instruments), so it didn't hurt the song much and this technique worked pretty well. You might even get some sound effects out between the gaps in the music tracks on the channels.

[@NXGamer]

ChrisP872 It is, all you mention are the work arounds which I show with Xenon II, the machine could only play 4 tracks at once within hardware constraints, some played sound in mono and 3 channel music, some had music OR sound and some dropped tracks(see channels) to sound effects as needed like Xenon. All valid and great uses but still confined to 4 simultaneously.

[@beezle1976]

Jeez guys, pedantic much? Apply even a TINY bit of thought and it's very obvious that he's saying what often happened and is in no way, shape or form is talking from a technical stand point. Very sad when adults need to be taught how to think. NX Gamer: there's only confusion if you're pedantic, an idiot, or a robot. Pretty much EVERY SINGLE normal person with the ability to think understood clearly :-) It's even funnier when these mindless droids "correct" you with information that's incorrect.

[@meyou9655]

In the early nineties, you could buy an Amiga 500 at the local Canadian Tire store here. I forgot the price back then but I really wanted one.

[@gordonjeffrey231076]

Fantastic video. Got a new sub here!!