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

I think the hardware In-depth review I covered In Part 1, tells a clear story of the gap these machines presented, but as I always say, software is the real deciding factor in all of this. So, with a sample of games across these machines we get a good spread of just how the numbers fall, once developers started using the kit.
All games are shown running on real hardware with no emulation, check out Part 1 which dives into the Hardware and Operating systems • Commodore Amiga vs Ata...
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[@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.

[@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

[@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

[@error4159]

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...

[@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 !

[@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...

[@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.

[@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.

[@RetroGG-74]

Excellent work on these videos . Highly entertaining .

[@NXGamer]

Thanks man, music to my ears :-)

[@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

[@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.

[@JensHove]

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

[@NXGamer]

Thanks, always good to hear.

[@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.

[@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.

[@frankjohansen3132]

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

[@Dan-wi3uh]

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

[@NXGamer]

he he, seemed apt :-)

[@FlukeyHeadshot]

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

[@NXGamer]

Cheers, more to come.

[@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.

[@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!🙂

[@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.

[@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.

[@8bitrocketstudios]

Another incredibly thorough video!

[@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.

[@bighairydel]

love this video, could you do another comparison video with the best of the later games on these machines?

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@fradd182]

One of the best retro reviews out there.

[@AtariLegend]

Another beautiful video and the best, and friendliest, st vs amiga compare out there. Thank you for this objective look.

[@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

[@gordonjeffrey231076]

Fantastic video. Got a new sub here!!

[@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.

[@kleanthispapadopoulos2555]

Awesome video and analysis

[@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.

[@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...

[@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.

[@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.

[@wimwiddershins]

In-depth! Just brilliant video. Fascinating.

[@NXGamer]

Great stuff, thanks

[@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/

[@Mikebumpful]

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).

[@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...

[@Turricani]

Fantastic video, thanks

[@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!

[@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.

[@ryanyoder7573]

Great video. I loved the NES and Tandy 1000 in the 80s and my custom 286 16 VGA in 1991 which I built with the money I made mowing lawns. However, my Genesis played games better than even my 286. MechWarrior was a standout 3D game on that 286 though and couldn’t have been played on the Sega without a 32x.

[@DutchRetroGuy]

@Ryan Yoder: I only got into the Mega Drive/Genesis a few years back and I'm very much impressed, it's a great console!

[@lgmspetsnaz]

Great video as always. Keep up the good work.

[@bobfromsoireegames4309]

Great video mate

[@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.

[@Bransfiiiield]

Oh great now I have to play Midwinter. Great video!

[@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..

[@104d_3rr0r_vince]

Fantastic video!!! 12:40 wait, what? How did u get the framerate here???

[@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!

[@OdeeOz]

33:59 That game was turned into a pretty funny movie a few years ago. Well worth watching.

[@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.

[@bazza5699]

great vid.. can't believe how many games were ST ports.. such a shame the amiga was never truly realised.

[@NXGamer]

Yep, many, many ST ports, not a bad thing by default but sometimes it was.

[@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.

[@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.

[@margento101]

Those were the times. Your closing words - so true...!

[@NXGamer]

True indeed....

[@Maraka77i]

Great video. Like the indepth explanation and the fps counter. Would have been great to mention the STe too. Games like Zool or Elvira arcade game rans much smoother on that model. There were also games like Obsession or Zero 5 which gave you a very "Amiga-like" gaming experience. Many ST games also break the 16 color limit with palette splitting techniques or rasters. Gods for example uses around 50 colors onscreen on STe. Probably many more on the Amiga aswell. For shooters, Lethal Xcess really shows what an ST can do without customchips. There were some true wizzcoders out there on the ST who pushed the machine beyond it's designed limits and still do today.

[@NXGamer]

Good point on colours and how some games pushed above that, I will cover that and some of the more impressive titles for each in future videos, we have a HUGE catalogue to pick from that pushed the base ST really hard and the Amiga, let alone the STe, thanks

[@philgoodson7754]

Great video, did you know the hardware on the Amiga allowed for the mouse to run at 60Hz independend of the rest of the hardware.

[@insoft_uk]

At the end of the day each platform played games just as well to each other to the owner, both platform offered great games to play and then offered there own advantages, like the ST it was music industry with its onboard MIDI and the Amiga it was its graphics at the end of the day both offered great enjoyment

[@Storm_.]

Great video, must have been a lot of effort to make. Only one thing I would have loved to have seen: some specific STE (enhanced) versions of the games.

[@NXGamer]

Yeah, I would love to and the Falcon, but I do not have access to a Falcon, but I am working on an STe, home made possibly again as I modded a few many years ago.

[@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.

[@phonedork]

Excellent video!!!

[@DanielIvanovDecsev]

Hi! Can i ask how did you made the fps measurement, what software did you use ? Finally a good and accurate video about 16 bit rivals !

[@NXGamer]

It is my own software that I wrote, it is a C++ application.

[@theogster]

I loved my STe 512.... B.A.T with the soundcard, Bloodwych, Captive, Super sprint....

[@telemaster]

Great stuff!

[@michaelwhite6461]

oh some fond memories from the past. I owned an Amiga A600 (eventually after playing for years on a C64 and occasionally borrowing my friend's A500 now and again), but got the chance to see The Atari ST side by side with an original A500 playing the same game - Speedball 2 (which has to be my favourite game of all time). There was very little difference in the graphical detail or movement as far as I remember (the amiga looked a little sharper but I put that down to it being played on a monitor rather than a normal TV), but the difference in sound was enormous. The Atari didn't sound any better than the old Sinclair spectrum in a lot of cases, which was a shame really as it was certainly a lot more advanced in other aspects. The Amiga was a fantastic games machine and far outperformed PC games for a very long time in many ways. Unfortunately it couldn't handle 3D graphics anywhere near as well as a PC, so the explosion in popularity of games like Wolfenstein and Doom pretty much heralded the end of it's lifetime. However, in a lot of ways it was very premature as the Amiga performed much better in 2D games than the PC for many years to come. A good example was SWOS (Sensible World of Soccer for those who don't know). Probably the most basic graphics ever for a football game, but my god was it fast, slick and smooth to play. On PC, it would be many years before I acquired a machine that could get anywhere near the same slickness (a 486 DX4 - 75 was the first level that got close). The other aspect I remember the Amiga being way ahead of the PC with, was plug and play peripherals. My god the hours and days I spent messing about with drivers and settings on PC's before things improved. Loved the mention of the link play feature for Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge - Lot's of fond memories of 4 of us playing on two machines in different rooms (I made a link cable that was over 10 metres long). I still play a few of the old Amiga games on my PS vita (Speedball, Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies & Superfrog were reworked for the little handheld marvel), but I'm very tempted to buy the A500 mini that's coming this year, just for a pure nostalgia trip :-)

[@SwainyAtRetroAsylum]

Great video 2 parter 👍

[@peloquin1979]

I think a lot of us know the answer to this already. Having said that I grew up with an Atari ST and have fond memories. There is a great catalogue of games from Dungeon Master, Oids, Super Sprint to later titles like Rainbow Islands, Speedball 2, Ishar trilogy, Vroom and Stunt Car Racer.

[@Daz555Daz]

There were a few game types than the ST had the upper hand due to the faster CPU but yes the Amiga almost always won out - and this was magnified once Amiga gained market share and games were ported from Amiga to ST rather than the other way around.

[@SQron188]

The soundtrack in the beginning of the video (ST, then transitions to the Amiga version) is from The Ninja Warriors.

[@deku812]

Gremlin's Lotus series led into the spectacular Top Gear franchise on the SNES, which was later back ported to the Amiga.

[@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.

[@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.

[@alanmacaskill6121]

A lovely flashback. I loved my ST. I always wanted an Amiga but my folks shelled out £400 for the Atari so I had to wait until the UK launch of the Megadrive for the parallax scrolling :D. Pre-ordered through the distributor - Virgin Megastore.

[@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.

[@CastleKnight7]

The Amiga sounded tinny and fuzzy to me, whereas the ST’s sound was sharp and clear.

[@vincentg8390]

Great video. I would suggest using a pop filter when dubbing voice, there's a lot of low-end pop and rumble throughout.

[@NXGamer]

Ah, I do use a Pop Filter and I could not hear that, but thanks, I will check my settings and across some devices to see if I can here it.

[@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..

[@jokilmurray553]

love both these great machines. Owned both and despite the obvious technical differences I enjoyed and still do these great machines of our time. In truth it was more about the feel from the machine itself as you were playing these games because in truth much like 8bits before, they felt decidedly different past just the graphics and sounds

[@xenorac]

I totally get what you mean!

[@pazuzu9495]

I was an AMIGA KID! I LOVE THE AMIGA STILL TODAY!!!

[@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?

[@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!

[@Dayta]

enjoyed the video brought back alot of nice memorys. with you creating that video and ending up writing software you are propably the person who could help me with a question im having for some time now. today its rather easy to just get the unreal engine or unity create a game from template export it and end up with something nothing short of 300 mb filesize which just shows a white qube but then again its rendered in real 3d and what not. what im looking for would be to create a game using source material such as iff bmp or what ever as pictures that could be loaded placed and moved in 2d space across the screen no bluring no antialasing and make it as small as possible. im not looking for like a 64kb asambler coding thingy but i would like to keep it in the range of ... one exe file somewhere around 1 mb (less is better) and then maybe a folder with all source material or config files as txt format. would you happen to know where i could start doing that ? im not aiming to be rich or endup with a super mega great game. it would be just for personal fun to tinker around abit. thanks in advance and thanks again for putting all those games together also the performance information was nice to see

[@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.

[@victorc2989]

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

[@NXGamer]

Always good to hear, thank you.

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

Now I want to see a Populous retrospective with all the ports, especially the Game Boy port.

[@NXGamer]

It is something I would love to do, with chats with the dev teams, great idea.

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

That would just be lovely. Do think Powermonger and Utopia also deserve a mention?

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

And did you know that there is an active community for The Beginning? kzbin.info/www/bejne/pISndYqhrqp1rLc

[@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.

[@Geforcefly]

Ah, Daddy Mulk from The Ninja Warriors... such a rockin' tune.

[@NXGamer]

My man, well done and I concur, such a great tune :-)

[@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

[@estrayk]

Great video. btw, How did you check and show the real framerate? what software?

[@NXGamer]

It is my own software, a C++ application, thanks

[@estrayk]

ah!, ok, good!

[@MarkLincs2099]

Having gone from a Speccy 48k to a Speccy 128k (with a side radiator you could dry your socks on) and also a C64 shortly after, I sadly ended up missing the ST and Amiga generation mainly due to being skint but I was aware of the ST/Amiga 'war' ensuing and watched envious from afar. I've thought of buying one from eBay but without the nostalgia of having owned one all those years back, suspect it would just get left in a box after a brief boot up.

[@davidv776]

Both great machines indeed. I also enjoy them both. They're very different machines, yet, very similar. ST was a true all-round computer, that really had very professional productivity apps, it wasn't meant to be a gaming machine, but it handled them decently. I guess ST could be compared to the Amstrad CPC, and STe to the CPC Plus. The Amiga was designed to be a multimedia machine ahead of it's time, multimedia was popularized by PCs in the early-mid 90s, but Amiga was able to do that almost 10 years before. Subsequently, as a collateral effect, Amiga was good on games due the sound and graphic capabilities. Sadly, not much productivity apps reached professional level, except on the 3D and 2D gfx design. Lightwave and Maya started on the Amiga and were damn good back in the time, also SCALA did a great work making the Amiga a very widely used platform on local TV broadcast channels, and photograph studios... If you had a genlock, then the Amiga capabilities would allow you to add all kind of effects to real footages. The main error back then, when people tried to compare Amiga with ST, was the fact, the ST was looked like a "poor brother" or a "cut down version" of the Amiga, wich is not. If ST was sort of a 68K powered CPC, Amiga was sort of a 68K powered Atari 800. Cheers.

[@Dumbledork_Prime]

My parents never bought me one of those, but I got an IBM compatible 386 in 1987/88 with 2 Mb of RAM 80 Mb hard drive, VGA graphics card and Sound Blaster audio, and a lot of the game ports were at least as good if not better than the Amiga versions.

[@leowagner1366]

I've been seeing a lot of comment wars here over the superiority of either the ST or Amiga. These are quite entertaining to read :D

[@elmariachi5133]

I always switched my PAL Amiga 2000HD to NTSC for playing racing games like Lotus and vector games, like Enterceptor or Epic. The 20% speed boosr was really noticeable and made for nice fluid fps.

[@NXGamer]

Yes, that was a huge boost and one of the costs when I went from my Japanese import Megadrive to the PAL version...felt slow.

[@johnnydee6340]

Zool was my favert game when I had an amega 500+ what a brilliant computer for its time

[@PregnantSausage]

Quality work.

[@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.