Commodore Amiga vs Atari ST: Part 1 Hardware & Operating systems explained

One of the biggest and lengthy platform battles happened during the late 80's and early 90's. Long before the established status quo of IBM compatible PC's had taken over the business world and multi-tasking operating systems became the norm, a whole new path and direction was taking shape.
Personal computers had long since been established with 2 company's taking the lead to grow that market in very bold, exciting and yet similar paths. I start my 2 part dive into a big part of my gaming childhood, 2 titans in Atari and Commodore, I look into the hardware that these machines were built on, the similarities and differences in addition to the leading edge Operating Systems they also helped usher in, and we largely still use derivatives of today.
Part 2 will cover the games and how these machines delivered them, which is just as interesting as the hardware itself. And some of those expectations, which were not always met.
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[@sluggotg]

The Atari ST was completely created in like 6 months. A Record that has never been broken. These folks created all the hardware and OS in that time Period. They had to use off the shelf Sound and Video chips. They created a Cheap, Very High Performance Machine! Amazing!

[@Foebane72]

Is it, though? Amazing? I sincerely doubt it.

[@AlestroBakai]

@@Foebane72 I lived through that time and I owned both, Amiga and Atari ST. Amiga was the graphics monster and gaming monster. I used DPaint and nothing could beat it. I gamed in sheer bliss. Video producing and manipulating - the Amiga was a monster (so I've been told, and I take that at face value). Atari ST on the other hand was the monster when it came to word processing (1st Word), desktop publishing (Calamus) and Basic programming (GfA Basic)... and nothing could beat it. MIDI music - the Atari was a monster (so I've been told, and I take that at face value as well). So... both systems had their strengths and you were lucky when you had access to both. Long time ago, during the Amiga / Atari Wars in full swing I recall a developer (forget his name) give an interview and he said "This bickering is detrimental. The winner in this conflict is IBM compatible. Amiga and Atari users should come forward and say "We are the future - pick one of us". Fast forward to 2022... Amiga and Atari are retro computer systems with a die-hard following of people who dream "what could have been".

[@sideburn]

Well said. I went from Atari 8 bit to a Mac back then but i bought an Atari 520 ST cheap around 1990 and a guy at my work made it into a Hackintosh somehow. I remember we had to wire wrap a hard drive for some reason. I just got it out of the closet and opened it up thinking there would be mac roms in it but it looks like original roms to me. I’ll be firing it up once I get a power supply and see what condition it is in. Today I finally have both and Amiga 2000 that’s loaded with cards and a video toaster a friend gave me that I repaired and just got an Atari Stacy 2 so I’m finally learning all about these machines over 30 years later! I only use my MacBook Pro to do boring modern coding for money 😂 oh and write comments on KZbin…

[@kevinhulse2983]

@@Foebane72 Any 68k machine was a giant leap forward at the time.

[@CaptainDangeax]

Atari created nothing, it was Motorola's reference design from the cpu datasheet. No wonder why Jay Miner left

[@OriginalMergatroid]

This sure brings back a lot of memories. I started out on the Vic 20, moved to the C=64. A friend of mine bought an Amiga 1000, which was really expensive. All my friends were drooling over it when another friend purchased one. It was a year or two before they finally came out with the Amiga 500, and to a T, all the people in my circles who were C=64 users sold their C=64 with their huge software collections and purchased Amiga 500 computers, with the new monitors and the external floppy drive. We were pretty amazed at the power of this machine. This is when I started taking Engineering Technology courses at college, and I was doing all my homework on the Amiga, including drawing schematics using IntroCAD. No one else in the courses I was taking had the marks I achieved from doing such a great job on my assignments. After graduating I started working at a local franchise of National Electronic Service Association. They were doing warranty repaires for both Commodore and Atari (not to mention Intellivision and Vectrex and Coleco). I got to be quite familiar with all the machines these companies produced. This is what I have to say about the Atari St: It was a good MIDI machine. That's it. It wouldn't multitask, had shitty audio, it was cheaply built and often would break when being disassembled because the plastic was so cheap, the units with the internal power supplies would go bad all the time as those units had no fans and would overheat, damaging the boards. To top it off, the GUI was horrid. It looked so primitive beside the Amiga it was comical. Even more so when the Amiga was upgraded to Kickstart and Workbench 2.0, and later 3.0 with AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). I couldn't even use an ST for any more than a few minutes because I found the interface so distasteful. The Amiga was amazing because of the expansions available to it. You touched on the bay under the computer, which could be used for memory expansions, but more importantly for combo memory expansion and accelerator cards which, at the time, sported a replacement CPU in the form of a 68020 or a 68030 cpu usually with another 8 MB of RAM (which was super expensive at the time). However, there was another expansion port on the left side of the machine, which was used for hard drive expansions. These expansions would also plug directly into the bus, and allowed the Amiga to reach it's full potential as easily the best computer of its time, a decade ahead of its time. In fact, it wasn't until PCs started using 3D graphics cards (Ala 3DFX) and finally got a multitasking operating system (Windows 95) with a sound card, that there was any real competition for the Amiga. Once a hard drive was added, they became real powerhouses. I ended up purchasing an Arrow expansion case from Germany, which looked like a larger Amiga 1000, with an internal power supply and a riser card converting that left side expansion into four expansion slots similar to what the newer Amiga 2000 had, and two hard drive bays. It even came with a housing to install your keyboard in, so it looked like any other keyboard on a PC at the time. Later I traded in my Amiga 500 and all it's mods for an Amiga 1200 with a 68030 CPU and 8MB of RAM (2MB of graphics RAM) via another expansion card (the Amiga 1200 came with a 68020 CPU and just the 2GB of "fastRAM". What really killed us all was seeing a demo in Sears at the time the Amiga 1000 first came out, and this demo showed an animated scene of a city block with all sorts of animated toons walking around, and every one of those toons was a separate program. We were just amazed. The Amiga was easily out in front of all its competition at the time, and the only thing that killed it was the incompetence of Commodore Business Machines management. They came out with the C16, and the Plus 4 which were both pieces of trash. Months after hitting the stores they were discounted to the bargain bins. This basically killed Commodore with all the resources they spent on two computers that any Commodore customer could have told them would fail. Right when this was happening, the PC was seeing two revolutionary games, Descent and Mechwarrior II. Descent was a two player game played over a modem, a true 3D game where you would pilot a fighter craft through tunnels to kill robots that had gone crazy. You could play with a friend over a modem, and this was almost revolutionary at the time (the Amiga had Stunt Car Racer, but the graphics were pretty weak). That game, combined with a segment on the News on CBC showing this amazing new game called Mechwarrior II, where you were actually piloting a mech, convinced me to finally sell my Amiga 1200 while the selling was good, and purchase my first PC. The Amiga was most likely right up there with the Commodore 64 as the most revolutionary home computers of all time.

[@NXGamer]

Firstly, thank you for sharing such a detailed and interesting look back at your life and the Amiga. You clearly have a great deal of history with it and experience and I echo so much of what you said. Expansion was a huge, huge part of the Amiga's core hook allowing the system to be improved and augmented gave you such a longer choice and lifespan. I also added a HD to my Amiga after a dual floppy drive did not resolve all my woes, as you can imagine I try to keep these videos as tight and easy to follow as possible, so much of what you have covered with the CPU upgrades and side port I left as a simple reference alongside the base chipset rather than covering the later AGA and various models, but I will cover more and would possibly like to chat with you regards that and a future video if you are interested? Anyway, thanks again for sharing.

[@OriginalMergatroid]

Any time. Happy to help. I still work in electronics, repairing everything from TVs and monitors, to laptops and desktops.

[@somegreenguy]

In terms of power, it definitely has to be the Amiga, the ST definitely wasn't up to snuff In terms of aesthetics, I love the ST more, with its lines and slants, its a very attractive machine Overall though, if I had the choice, I would have to pick an Amiga

[@Sl1pstreams]

The ST was more powerful, actually. A 1040ST cost significantly less than an A500, had twice the RAM, had a stable hi-res display that the Amiga couldn’t match, had built in support for mass storage via SCSI (the A500 didn’t), supported MIDI for music production and networking computers together (the Amiga couldn’t), and was also faster with its 8 MHz chip versus the A500’s 7 MHz. The only area where the Amiga performed better was sound and graphics in low res for video games. As an actual computer for getting stuff done, the ST absolutely slaughtered the Amiga.

[@dangiambrone7350]

"The blitter rivals"..... ....... So glad you're back! This has made my good weekend turn great. What a nostalgia trip.

[@NXGamer]

Cool, that is always what I like to hear.

[@allan.n.7227]

My gosh that Turrican ][ soundtrack is still sounding epic...

[@gallan671]

Having moved up from my Commodore 16, to a Commodore 64.. when that got old I spent a fortune of Paper round money on an Atari 800xl.. it used to take hours to load games from cassette - as a platform it never caught on.. so I went back to my Commodore roots and got the Amiga 500 - i used to earn £3.60 a week as a paper round and i think it cost £399! - luckily once i'd saved up 50% my parents chipped in the rest for Xmas :)

[@davidlowton9359]

You probibly have no idea just how perfect a video this is for me. I had the Atari ST and then later the STE. One of these systems later had an additional 512k of memory soldiered on to the motherboard which also needed some resisters changing. A family friend did this. Poor sod. Some of the best years in gaming. I miss psygnosis. Thank you so much for the very informative insight you have provided. Can't wait for part 2. I remember there was some revolutionary anti-piracy protection back in the day but the name escapes me. Everything about those days were great. Lending games to friends, couch co-op. Demo scene. Magazines. Demo disks. Perfection. Thank you :)

[@davidlowton9359]

BTW my favourite game of the time was Dungeon Master. PSYGNOSIS and BitMap bothers both dished out incredible titles back in the day.

[@NXGamer]

Always great to hear and I remember soldering in my mates ST with a 512Kb update, It was actually my own ST that I sold him in 1988 as I wanted to buy my Amiga, 1 game that I will cover in part 2 made the choice to move over almost instant.. it was an incredible time and I also loved Dungeon master and No second Prize which made me jealous of giving up my ST at the time as I could not afford both.

[@paulolameiras861]

Amiga 500 was a beast for its time. It came out in 85, yet ended up competing with most platforms of early 90s.

[@NXGamer]

So true, it really was a gigantic leap forward from the competition.

[@konrad303]

Amiga 500 came out in 1987. 1985 was when the original Amiga (later called Amiga 1000) hit the market.

[@jamiey5779]

+konrad303 The Amiga 500 is basically a repurposed Amiga 1000. They did update the Angus chip in the A500 which allowed the system to address more total memory over the 1000, as well as adding support for fast RAM, buts its essentially the same core hardware.

[@konrad303]

And you didn't need to boot the Kickstart from disk anymore. It was also cost-reduced and marketed differently. Anyways, this was a product released in 1987, so when the OP references the 500 instead of the 1000, the release date in question is that of the 500.

[@MyKharli]

Mine still works ! its the floppies that are failing ,since chaos engine packed up I haven't played :(

[@thegood9]

Me and my friend had these battles all the time. He was all Amiga, I was all Atari...we never settled! I loved my Atari (and I was a musician, so the software was better given Emagic's entries with their early Logic software) and he loved his Amiga. We both played on both all the time. But I loved my Atari and still do!

[@RobBob555]

ST had built in midi.. so really he should have been the ST guy..

[@aideyp7333]

Welcome back !!! My best mate had the Amiga 1000, I had the A500, I recall getting a 500kb memory expansion

[@NXGamer]

Cheers, they were both superb machines, and the expansion boards sold like hot cakes, such a treat to buy 512KB update AND a second drive, I felt like a king with half the disc swapping :-)

[@gdavies1103]

Welcome back! Great video as always. I was an Amiga 500 fan back in the day and that short clip of lotus esprit turbo challenge reminded me of the great times I had with friends as a nipper. Such a long time ago.

[@bucminster9172]

Imagine a Universe where Amiga and Atari merged into one company.

[@NXGamer]

Glorious...

[@wishusknight3009]

It would have either been epic, or sucked twice as much.

[@Highlander1518]

Commotari. Ataridore.

[@maxxdahl6062]

@Brad Viviviyal I always liked Jack's philosophy of trying to make computer hardware that was very affordable.

[@ΞενοφωνΒασιλοπουλος]

Awesome

[@alexparkish]

Love this! seeing that old amiga manual brought some great memories back!

[@NXGamer]

Yeah, they always do, sitting in bed even when the computer was off, such cool bed time reading thinking about all the things you would try tomorrow when you got home from school lol

[@BondRichBond]

And then the old 1 meg expansion, Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon.... ah the good old days! Great video BTW

[@NXGamer]

Indeed they were, I did have a 1200 and that was a beast at the time, but sadly never owned a Falcon as the cost and path had moved on, I hope to get one at some point to cover it in detail.

[@zarjesve2]

If you buy Falcon, you could check Doom on 16MHz ;) kzbin.info/www/bejne/sJy6kIppqpiEY9U

[@dark1x]

Welcome back NX! Really enjoyed this one!

[@NXGamer]

Cheers John, been a nice break. I need to catch-up on your retro series, as I have not watched any YT for months, but I enjoy your work greatly.

[@ajsingh4545]

John loved your retro features. Would love for you to cover the pc-engine. It has unique hardware as you may know and unique history.

[@mcuthbertson74]

Fantastic video! I Started with an st and saw shadow of the beast and drivin’ force on the Amiga and i was sold. Sold my soul to get an Amiga but it was worth it. If you pause at 12:50 you can see the face they used on the Amiga power pack packaging! Long time avid watcher - first time commenter!

[@robintst]

I was in the Amiga camp but I never cared for fueling the rivalry with the ST owners. Both lines of machines had their pros and cons and the one commonality we all had to experience anyway was the original bridge burner himself, Jack Tramiel. Besides, neither company survived the overtaking of the market by the IBM-compatibles in the early/mid-90s so it's been a moot point for a long time now.

[@GregsGameRoom]

The Atari ST is like the Genesis/Mega Drive while the Amiga is the Super Nintendo. Both great machines with strengths and weaknesses. I myself fell on the Atari side and got a 1040STe with a 320 meg SCSI hard drive with the Geneva OS and NeoDesk 4. Made the interface much nicer and polished than the original basic GEM/TOS.

[@miikasuominen3845]

I enjoy your videos. Happy, that you still decided to continue. And I really hope, you get more recognition. All the best and keep 'em coming!

[@NXGamer]

Thanks for your kind words.

[@petergriffin5256]

Glad you're back! :D

[@NXGamer]

Cheers, I hope this is an enjoyable video for many.

[@karehaqt]

I loved my Amiga 500+, saved my paper round money for a whole year and Dad gave me the rest to buy it :)

[@MrSEA-ok2ll]

They were both part of my past and I still own and appreciate them today...great video

[@sto4713]

I remember the excitement when I got my Amiga which I felt was a huge upgrade from my c64 its hard to think of a time recently when I was so excited about technology maybe my first smart phone but that still doesnt compete with the excitement of the Amiga!

[@mjayjoseph855]

Welcome back! NX! 😎👍🏽 and it's great to see the early beginnings of gaming hardware with your in-depth analysis 👌🏽

[@NXGamer]

Cheers man, I am happy many are enjoying it :-0

[@mjayjoseph855]

NX Gamer Yeah definitely 👍🏽 and plus we need you because this year is going to be a very interesting & technical year, one of the first on the list is God of War and others.

[@sirgwaine2695]

Great Video, though you didn't mention much about the amiga 500 left side expansion port. I had a GVP HD expansion mounted back in the day... which rocked :)

[@NXGamer]

True, sorry, I should have but the expansion options with the Amiga were great. I used Master sound for serial fed sampling to create my own remixes, such a great time.

[@Xenon0000000000001]

@@NXGamer The Atari ST (at least the STFM on) had an expansion port as well. I had a Stereo Master for capturing sound samples, a hand scanner for scanning docs, a clock (the ST didn't have an internal battery for the clock), and even a video capture device all working on an STE. The STE also used SIMMs for memory expansion same as PCs today.

[@joelandersson3168]

This will be fun to watch. Loved my Amiga 500.

[@NXGamer]

Hope you enjoyed it, and a little secret...I did too.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

Awesome video! A friend actually got the early Amiga 1000 and it was a mindblowing experience even with the very early games. Our C64s were looking very old suddenly.

[@matthewlong1978]

I was always on the Commodore fence, starting with the C16 Plus/4, , C64, Amiga 500 and then 1200 glad i was a part of it

[@eurocrusader1724]

Xenon 2 and Turrican on the Atari 1040 STe, sound of my youth...

[@NXGamer]

Love it, what a game and on the STe it used the Blitter chip to be smoother and faster. That and the Falcon came that little bit too late.

[@1960ARC]

Great video. The Amiga was really a games machine and everyone knows had better sound than the ST. However this fact did not effect my game play on the ST as I didn't know better. I also used my ST for writing out hundreds of reports, so it was a real computer with a decent OS. I still have my final machine, 1040 STE with 2.5 meg of ram. I have two a500s one of which is still boxed with the free T shirt, I just love looking at these old machines of which I have quite a collection. NES, SNES, MEGADRIVE, Just about every Atari bar 3. Even have my first ever computer the 48 ZX spectrum. Things sure have changed.

[@eila2088]

How was word processing on it? If you a good wpm would it lag?

[@RedArmsTOR]

I can watch videos like that all day long. GJ!

[@NXGamer]

Great to heat, thanks

[@Rich77UK]

I am biased...I had an A500 (one of the last before the plus was released). I had a 512mb upgrade and it was a blessing. The machine ran perfectly until I moved to a PC in around 1999. I still love the Amiga and lament Commodores demise.

[@snkneo-geo933]

I bought my Amiga in December 1989 I had the Barman Pack for £399 and I've still got it 😉

[@FlukeyHeadshot]

Awesome to see you back mate! great video! I had the Amiga 600 which did the job for 2 player Sensible Soccer that's all i needed :)

[@NXGamer]

Ah, sensible soccer, that was such a tremendous game, 2-players round your mates, with snacks and drinks, hours just sailed past.

[@FlukeyHeadshot]

It was always me Vs my Sisters Boyfriends lol, this continued into Pro Evolution Soccer. An Edgar Davids outside the area shot that hit the underside of the bar and went in was celebrated as though id won the league myself lol

[@NXGamer]

ha ha, I can just picture it now...and we all know, it is just as important as winning the league.

[@FlukeyHeadshot]

Great to see you back on mate! Have to attempt to jump in the same game at some point mate!

[@BDAkaGoat]

Glad yoa are back!

[@Freddie1980]

21:40 That's kinda spooky almost real life foreshadowing.

[@adeelabbasi2811]

man i though you left but thank God that your are back

[@Gamers4um]

Very good and unbiased video, liked it a lot (I was a Commodore guy by the way) Just one extremely minor thing to add... the part with the one and only mr. Huelsbeck, Turrican 2, actually sports *intro* music, not ingame: this is due to the an issue you talked about a lot for the AtariST, i.e. intro, credits and high score music was written with TFMX 7voice routine, that used CPU to mix sound in real time so to have more audio channels... that was basically not possible during normal gameplay AFAIK, so it was restricted to less demanding parts of the game (I can't remember any Amiga game that used this tecnique ingame, I'd gladly hear from Amiga fellows anyway if they know about some that actually did) Best regards!

[@dannymormone]

Fantastic video, watched it over a few times now. When is Part 2 likely to be released as I cannot wait to see it. Thanks again for creating this.

[@AmirKhan-qx2lr]

@4:05 music from double dragon... Geez i remember playing that in the arcade when it came out

[@CaptainDangeax]

Altough the amiga was a bit slower (7,16 MHz versus 8 MHz for the ST), the ST was only a reference design from Motorola with nothing fancy, while the Amiga had a handful of specialised co-processors. A friend of mine lend me an ST for some weeks, and I wasn't impressed, specialy by the sound really under what my C64 was capable of. I finally bought an Amiga500, which was the real step forward.

[@quantass]

Terrific work! Very informative and enjoyable.

[@_Quint_]

Great analysis, I'm looking forward to part 2.

[@telemaster]

Excellent stuff as always. 👍

[@NXGamer]

Thanks, your logo tells me which machine you hold in higher favour :-)

[@sluggotg]

The amiga has 32 colors from a 4096 palette, (or, with no performance penalty.. 64 colors in extra Half Bright Mode.. very useful). The Atari ST had 16 colors our of 512 color palette). The Amiga can display 4096 colors in HAM mode or in Sliced HAM mode.. but it is very limited in actual Gaming Modes. The 4 channel Stereo mode on the Amiga was Vastly superior to the Atari's crude sound chip. The Atari had a built in MIDI interface, very handy. The Amiga Users had to spend extra money to buy a MIDI interface, ($25-$50 ). The Amiga had a fully Pre-Emptive Multitasking Operating System. The Atari did not.. nor did the MAC.. until a few decades later... (Windows NT and IBM's OS/2 had it fairly early). The Amiga has Hardware Accelerated Graphics to help with gaming. The Atari ST was totally designed and produced in a shockingly short period of time..!!!! Jack, through his Personality.. Made it happen! No computer has EVER been developed in such a short period of Time. Everyone who was involved are GODS. They went from nothing to an actual computer in like 6 months. The ST was shockingly Cheap, and was a killer computer and gaming platform. Great Job folks!

[@jojo51ytb]

Another masterpiece of hardware review deserved to these legendary machines!

[@RetroChiZ]

Excellent video, many thanks.

[@Megalocade]

I had the ST back in the early 90s really annoyed me when buying a game in the shops the St section was very limited, turn round and there were wall to wall of amiga games

[@dlfrsilver]

normal, there was 1 ST original game sold for 10 amiga original !

[@yaantsudnbesdai972]

Our family owned an Atari ST throughout the 80s-early 90s. I heard and had the notion -though I never ever saw or used on in person- that the Commodore Amiga was a somewhat more advanced PC esp. for gaming. This video seems to also suggest this... I believe that both PCs were well ahead of their times and also their games...

[@Sinn0100]

Blitter rivals...love it, love everthing about it well played sir! Unfortunately, I never really experienced the micros as an American. I started with the Nes (1985) and Master System (1986) and finally becoming a gamer in 1989 with my launch Sega Genesis (I lucked out as a kid and had all three consoles the first year they came out). It looks like both the Amiga and Atari ST had sprite scalling and rotation which the Genesis could do through brute force but not by design...amazing!

[@CFalcon030]

Nope, both of them did this in software.

[@FF_81_]

Waiting for Part 2, thanks 👍

[@NXGamer]

Great to hear, hope it is enjoyed as much if not more than this one.

[@SvenElven]

The SNES didn't have true sample based music though, it had a wavetable (or more presicesly «graintable») synthesizer chip using tiny lengths (or grains) of digital sound in place of oscillators. It simply did not have the memory to do what the Amiga could, even if the Amiga was limited by its 4 channels. This Wavetable synthesis would later be used by legendary PC sound interfaces like the Gravis Ultrasound and the SoundBlaster AWE32, but by then, pre-mixed stereo 16 bit PCM (CD quality) music could be decoded without taxing the system so sequenced (MIDI) music was being left behind in games.

[@victorc2989]

So Glad your back love your content : - )

[@IsaandAli]

Glad you are back man!!

[@radiozelaza]

in Polish demoscene there was a notorious .MOD made on Amiga (and later distributed among other platforms) which made fun of the "Spectrum-like capabilities" of Atari ST with sampled vocal tracks. check out "Anty Atari Song"

[@violator1017]

To be a little more clearer than what was said in the video, using a 1040 for sequencing that's a Tim Simenon(Bomb The Bass) way of working, not a DEPECHE MODE one. Tim produced a Depeche's piece of art, the album ULTRA 😉

[@DJ_Dopamine]

I can still vividly remember getting the Cartoon Classics pack for Christmas. Firing up the machine to play Lemmings (superb) and rather naff Captain Planet and Simpsons games. What a fanatic machine it was. I later added a hard disk and a printer, so it was a true 'PC' in that respect. But it was with games that the Amiga really justified its price tag. Piracy was a big problem though. I initially bought all my games, but my school friends would share their pirated copies of virtually every game with me. A box of cheap floppy disks and X-Copy and you were good to go!

[@NXGamer]

So true, piracy was a real, real problem for the Amiga. I can recall being at school and literally having discs being swapped and sold in the 100's. X-copy was the go to tool and the various teams that hacked the games to open them up for free share. Those plastic boxes with a key sat next to more Amiga's than a monitor i bet lol, sad but did allow us to play so many more games than we could have afforded.

[@dlfrsilver]

Piracy was a problem on the Amiga, for sure, but it was under the Piracy on the ST. Basically, companies had to develop for the Amiga, because they just didn't earned a buck on the ST ! The Piracy was crushing on this machine. Amiga users were more prone to buy the game. Just to illustrate, in 1994 Mortal Kombat II Amiga sold more than 120.000 copies (source : coder based on its royalties).

[@RetroComputingwithMike]

Sweet nostalgia, i've got a couple of Atari 520ST waiting to be revived, really hope they will come out as great as yours :)

[@welshjay74]

Guess who back NX gamer back tell a friend.........welcome back awesome video I had Atari 800xl and I loved it had a simple code book and I created a simple clock working clock with the code I was using can’t remember the name of the code but it was like 10 print something 20 goto10 etc etc I was around 13 yrs old I think long time ago now

[@NXGamer]

Basic was a superb start to coding as it made you understand the logic of the cycles and how it all hung together, I loved those days of learning, trying, failing, reading, extracting code and even typing your code from magazine listings...and then that infamous message "error at line 2856!" ahhhhhh!

[@jonathont5570]

Jack was great back in the day loved my C64, 128 great memories.... never did Atari, Amiga, ended up in DOS and then Linux.

[@JimmerofOz]

Was there ever a part 2 to this? would love to see it!

[@NXGamer]

Yes, it was released a couple of weeks after this one:- kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYOZZo1_h5x-iZI Thanks

[@sluggotg]

Another Point on the A500.. It had a memory expansion port in the bottom and a very high end expansion port on the left side of the machine! (you could buy SCSI controllers/Memory expansions../Genlocks or many other things for it).

[@AK-vx4dy]

Nice, balanced (in technical detail level) job. I never owned one but by job i became more familiar with Amiga hardware guts (i used own rom). It is a pity that Atari didn't put more effort and rime in ST, especially 800/65 have specialised coprocessors similar to Amiga ones in concept. In my country ST were adopted to Destktop Publishing work widely, Amiga have wide share in animation and video effects but mostly as gaming machine.

[@mattx5499]

Both computers were really awesome. I'm an Amiga fan, but I can't say Atari ST was bad. I would pick ST over any console or PC of the era. I never used ST in real life but I got an emulator and I enjoyed TOS and some software. Having such a machine in the late 80's and early 90's when many people still had 8-bit computers and consoles had to be super fun. I remember seeing GUI OS that was easy to use for a 8 years old kid and being fascinated with all the interactivity. Even such simple things like using a notepad and saving files, exploring what different applications can do felt futuristic.

[@fangerdanga]

I loved my amiga, started off with amiga 500 then upgraded to a amiga 2000.

[@fangerdanga]

Sipa Zang didn’t the A600, A1200 and A3000 have an updated chipset.

[@davidrmcmahon]

I had an Atari ST 520STFM, remember playing a Submarine game on it

[@maxxdahl6062]

Nice, always wanted an Atari ST or an Amiga, my house was IBM by that time, (Though we had the c64 before that.). Closest thing I have now is my raspberry pi I more or less made into a legal Amiga Mini. lol (Bought Amiga Forever, transferred over the kickrom and work bench files. Boom. Legal Mini. lol)

[@mgabrysSF]

Nitpick 02:31 - Atari's meltdown was the 2600 and 5200 - not 7800. The 7800 didn't get wide release until after the ST was introduced. Great viddy regardless!

[@AntneeUK]

Around 2:58 you show Ballblazer. That's an 8 bit game, never released on the ST AFAIK

[@mjp29]

It was most interesting that Jack Tramiel owned both companies - first Commodore & then Atari.... Tramiel was largely responsible for keeping the prices of his machines dirt cheap (c64 and ST).

[@Ten_Pence]

How interesting.... great video buddy

[@fredflintstone505]

My first computer was an Atari 800. I bought it a few years before the C64 came out. When I first saw a C64 I thought it was very cheap. It felt cheap. I remember setting up my Atari 800 next to a friend of mine C64 and loading a game on both simultaneously. The Atari loaded very quickly compared to the C64. It took ages for it to load on the C64. Not only did it load programs slowly, but it also felt slow. I didn't realize then that Atari's CPU ran about 75% faster than the C64 CPU and it didn't have a DOS like the Atari had. Everything ran from basic, which I thought was dumb at the time. However, I did like the sound of the SID chip in the C64 though. I didn't give the C64 much look after that. I couldn't understand how they were selling better than the Atari. It just didn't make any sense to me at all back then. When the Atari ST came out I bought one of those. When I heard about the Amiga a couple of years later, I didn't give it much thought at all because of my encounter with the C64. I just figured it was another cheaply made computer. After my Atari ST, I jumped to the Macintosh. I bought a Quadra 700 in 92. It blew away both the Amiga and the ST. It had 68MB of RAM 250MB SCSI HD (later upgraded to a 1GB HD) and could display millions of colors at 1024x768 resolution but it was pricey to be sure. I also started building my own PC's and installing Windows on them when Windows 95 was released. Windows 3 just plain sucked. Now I mess around with emulators on my home-built PCs that can run all of the above computers. Hindsight being 2020, they all were great computers for their time each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I do miss those days. They were good times.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

If anything, the ST could've benefited from MIDI support had game developers sought to include that in their games. Apparently they never did. While both machines didn't see much traction in the states, they both though fared much better within industrial uses such as the ST's use in the music industry thanks to it's MIDI compatibility out of the box and the Amiga's robust color and graphics support that won it a home in video editing, animation and other television purposes.

[@NXGamer]

This is true, they did manage to secure a good future in areas away from games, but these are still the biggest reason they are loved even to this day.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

NX Gamer I suppose. I didn't really think much about computers having games at all since most of the games sold on computers in the states (like for IBM computers) weren't anywhere near what consoles had and I distanced computers into their own thing (business mostly), the Amiga felt more like my thing because of the art/video applications it had going for it. There was a guy in Ohio I know in Ohio who made all sorts of cool animated shorts on his Amiga computers over the years. I only wish he had persued animation on a professional level but just never left his home state.

[@Xenon0000000000001]

Some of the Sierra Online games, like King's Quest IV used the MIDI capabilities of the ST, but it's a shame that it wasn't more common.

[@itsmatt517]

How Commodore lost it's way with the Amiga brand in the first half of the 90s was a damn shame

[@classicarcadeamusementpark4242]

The description says the battle was in the late 80s. The battle actually started as both machines were released in 1985, so please update the description to "mid 80s until the early 90s." I joined in on the battle with an Amiga 1000 in 1985.

[@NXGamer]

If you watched the video you will understand this all better, I was also working in a computer store in 1985, the Amiga 1000 was released but never made a dent, not until the 500 in 1987 was released, so late 80s.

[@СергейМоскалёв-с3ь]

Amiga - the FIRST multimedia machine in a World!

[@TheNvipy]

Amiga OS was based on PDP-11 TripOS, a flexible version of unix.

[@disgruntledtoons]

Unfortunately, the chief competition between the Amiga and the ST was a competition between the CEOs to see who could most effectively sabotage their product lines.

[@8bitrocketstudios]

Good and very thorough stuff here!

[@th3d3wd3r]

Ahhh you've made me start thinking about my amiga lol. I have a 500plus and I need to re-cap it and replace the battery. Also sort out some method of hooking it up to a modern display. I also have the old commodore monitor, but it just demands too much space.

[@NXGamer]

Do it, the easiest method is to buy an Amiga Scart cable and a cheap upscaller that coverts scart into HDMI. From here you can plug straight into your HD TV.

[@lorumipsum1129]

When you think about it, the st was a commodore machine, and the amiga was a Atari machine.

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

When you think about it, both the Atari ST and the Amiga are "Atari" machines. The ST hardware may have primarily been done by ex-Commodore engineers - and the Amiga's hardware was primarily created by ex-Atari Inc engineers - but ex-Atari Inc. programmers worked on the actual GEM/TOS operating system such as Landon Dyer [who programmed the Atari 8-bit version of "Donkey Kong"]. Had the Atari Corp engineers got Atari Inc's advanced AMY sound chip working inside of the ST, it would've had even more "real Atari" DNA inside it. The two platforms are "brothers from different mothers", so to speak...

[@SuperVstech]

Xinless Vice in truth... the Amiga is a machine that commodore purchased from amiga computing in 83... I remember ads in the original compute magazine selling the Amiga computer as capable of running, Sinclair, Apple II and Commodore software all at once... the article was skeptical of the claim, and the computer company got bought and repurposed as the commodore Amiga...

[@truelazerlight]

Fantastic, insightful, interesting!

[@NXGamer]

Glad you enjoyed it.

[@JoseGonzalez-rh3we]

Love my Amiga 2000.

[@NXGamer]

Such a beast of a machine.

[@faketablet5215]

Co-processors didn't start with the Amiga,that's bad research. Even the C64 was designed around the same idea,and it wasn't the first either...

[@NXGamer]

Well no, not the same as the Amiga. The C64's VICII and SiD were of course designed to specific tasks. I.e. Graphics and sound. The Amiga not only had a chip dedicated for Blending functions but also a dedicated memory channel to use it. Alongside the Copper and the Dma enabled this to work I parallel like nothing else at the time, that is simply the case. I did not mean the Amiga "started" coprocessors but it pushed it on with specific additions that enhanced its ability Because of these, very much like GPU's of today, it could process without the need for the CPU to control everything like prior machines. I hope that explains it clearer for you.

[@Thrill08e]

"...to compensate for the slightly slower cpu... a collection of co-prossors..." is what you said.Well,that is exactly describing the Commodore 64.It is easy to tell that you have been an "Atari" kid back then ;) Good video,though!

[@NXGamer]

Ha ha, nothing is further from the Truth, I was a TRUE AMIGA boy, it was my world for the tail end of the 80's and early 90's incredible machine. My description is more HOW the system and chips were designed i.e. the DMA, Copper, Blitter, Paula and even frequency changes were all working in harmony. In comparison to others before or at the time it was leagues ahead and why it had such a long life, thanks for watching and commenting.

[@SyntheToonz]

Fake Tablet. -- Right. The atari 8-bits have the Antic chip that executes its own program. (The display list. Hmmm . Something like a copper list.) Mixing graphics modes on one screen is free. No assembly. No interrupt. Just change an instruction in the chip's display list. Fine scrolling and coarse scrolling are hardware supported. Change a few pointers , no need to use the cpu to rebuild the screen. This was designed in the late 70s. By some of the same people who would make the Amiga Lorraine custom chips. No surprise there.

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

The Atari 8-bit computers had "co-processors" before the Commodore 64, or the VIC-20. Jay Miner, the "father of the Amiga", created the Atari 2600's TIA chip and most of the custom chips inside the Atari 400/800 8-bit computers. They had the ANTIC, the CTIA [later the GTIA], and the POKEY, plus the MOS/WDC PIA. And the FREDDIE after that...

[@Farshad.Barnoos]

Welcome back:)

[@mrdavester]

An Amiga 500 retro mini would be an instabuy for me.

[@robertgijsen]

If it's called Blitter Rivals, why didn't you point out the Atari STe? That had a blitter. Granted it was years after (and behind) the Amiga but still that would be just a little bit more apples and apples (no pun intended). It wasn't used much in games though, mostly for compatibility reasons I guess, and the install base of the plain ST. I enjoyed every single minute watching this!

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

Atari Corp had planned to create a Blitter for the ST originally but ran out of time getting the system out the door. Owners and enthusiasts alike kept hearing Atari Corp's changing plans - and the rumo(u)r mill - about the Blitter plans all the way up to the Mega ST line being released in early 1987. The STe was supposed to have been released much earlier than 1989. The press had been talking about the "EST" - "Enhanced ST" [which became the STe] - since 1986. And it was rather disappointing in 1989 because ST fans were expecting it to be released with a better CPU than the same stock 8Mhz 68000 [most were expecting a faster 68010 or 68020 by that point], better sound than the Amiga, and VGA graphics. And we didn't get any of that out of the STe, but we later did with the Falcon030... albeit way too late in the game...

[@zarjesve2]

@NX gamer Did you have mono monitor for ST back in '80s? Or just color?

[@NXGamer]

I used a CRT for many years with the Modulator (I had the FM model). I never got a colour monitor until the Amiga in 89. I did have a friend (well his dad) that had the ST with the colour monitor and it looked so much better than my TV, but I was still happy with it.

[@zarjesve2]

Then you miss best feature of ST: 71Hz, crystal clear, hi resolution mono monitor - SM124. It was pure joy to sit in front of ST computer for hours using text processors, CAD, music application... on super sharp, flicker free hi res monitor. I suspect that you did not use ST with SM124 since otherwise you would mention this as ST highlight. Btw here you can find lots of software (bussiness) for ST with screenshots: milan.kovac.cc/atari/software/index.php

[@kraenk12]

Man..you’re so underrated. Much better than Digital Foundry. Did you finally start a patreon?

[@10MARC]

Great analysis of the two systems! Both had there strong points for sure. I remember well thinking that Atari users we're a bit numb for not realizing the superiority of the Amiga. Same thing happens today with console users and Apple vs. PC users.

[@10MARC]

@@Sl1pstreams Bwa hahahahahahaha! You had me going there for a second there! Atari ST superior... That's rich... I should write out this response in "Final Writer" on my Amiga while Multitasking a spreadsheet highlighting the Amigas superiority... Maybe do a graph in DeluxePaint V - AT THE SAME TIME! Did I mention I will do this while playing a MOD file in the background! 😉

[@10MARC]

@@Sl1pstreams I appreciate your well thought out comments. The Amiga probably has two or three times the amount of productivity and business software that the AtariST had, including a full version of Wordperfect. I respectfully disagree with you about Multitasking on the Atari ST - it was for sure an add-on hack never supported by Atari for their ST's. The Falcon was an incredible machine, and was superb for the half-dozen programs ever written for it. I would gladly put up my Amiga 3000 against anything Atari ever came up with, and I suspect it would run circles around any Atari. I encourage you to do some research on the Amiga and see what it was truly capable of. I know I have done the same for the Atari, and have yet to find a real reason to use mine. I am planning on doing a video in a few months highlighting the Atari ST productivity software, please get in touch with me and let me know your favorites - I would love to check them out!

[@hardkoregamer1981]

More competition means more creative freedom more creative risks more possibilities etc..

[@CoolDudeClem]

The Amiga may be a superior machine, but I still like to make Atari ST chip-tunes (although on the emulator). Right now I don't have either but hope to own both at some point.

[@spitfeueranna]

The SQUARE PIXEL and the Lasarprinter killed both of them. The Macintosh Lasarwriter (and cheaper Imagewriter 1, 2, and Stlyewriter/II even), Postscript Fonts, MS Word, Pagemaker, McDraw Pro, and Filemaker Pro royally put the nail in the coffin for those machines and made them look like kiddie machines. You drew a square bit on a Mac screen, you got a square bit printed out 1:1 aspect ratio. Amiga, Atari, and the PC world took a long time to realize, they had be clobbered by the self evident invention called the perfectly square pixel. We take it for granted today that pixels should be square, but back then they were anything but...

[@FhargaZ]

Why they failed? so much better than pcs of those years.

[@SuperVstech]

Bottom line reason? The company officers took all money offshore banks, and killed the company.

[@iXien]

Not really a question of hardware. Main reasons was a bad management and marketing. And surely that this little battle between ST/Amiga blind them all while PC arrived with fast Intel CPUs, VGA and PCM sound. Commodore and Atari was dinosaures, they didn't PC approaching and when they finally tried to react, it was too late and choices were bad (continue with all-in-one systems, Motorola CPU, uncompatible with PC, etc). Amiga and ST were wonderful, but they were not competitive against the PC monster emerging since 1990.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

@@iXien It was hardware too. Namely the lack of high resolution flicker-free modes for the Amiga. The ST had an edge there while the Amiga struggled to capture the business market since it couldn't even do 640x400 without flickering until the later models came out. That just wasn't good enough, even in 1987.

[@iXien]

@@oldtwinsna8347 We are talking about ST and Amiga failure and you're making comparison between ST and Amiga specs. It's interesting as I think it's another reason of this failure. As Commodore and Atari was making was focusing only on the movements of the other, IBM was following its own path, spreading licences worldwide to local manufacturers to impose the PC as a new world standard.To be honest, I think IBM never seen Atari and Commodore as real competitors on business market. And once PC was seen as an evidence in the business world, it was then easy to impose it at home. About this flickering problem: With the purchase of a PC, it was absolutely necessary to buy also a screen and it did not bother anyone. Commodore could have solved the problem in business market by marketing a multisync screen. Sharp did this for its X68000 in 1987 and it was just perfect! But to be honest, did this make a difference for Atari ST? Clearly not. So you can see it was not a hardware problem. ST and Amiga was both really well designed and little hardware flaws could be compensed by good ideas. Bad choices and lack of ideas were the real problem.

[@Corsa15DT]

68000 was a 32 bit cpu, not 16. The sound chip is not inferior to the C64's.

[@NXGamer]

Address space was limited to 24-bit and even this was rare scenarios. I assume you refer to the ST sound chip and it was inferior to to the C64 br8mg able to create all sound patterns, noise and samples across all 3 voices mixing them up all the time allowed it to create such excellent tunes as it was very much like a simple analogue synth.

[@valenrn8657]

68000 has 32-bit instructions, 32-bit registers, 24-bit memory address, 16-bit data bus, and 16-bit hardware ALU. 68020 is the full 32-bit 68K implementation with a hardware barrel shifter.

[@Corsa15DT]

@@valenrn8657 damn boy, can't get away from you 😁. Anyhow, the cpu is 32 bit, I guess he said otherwise in the video...

[@radiozelaza]

I never quite liked the flight/race sims on Amiga and preferred them on ST, they seemed to be running smoother. Why was that if custom chips supposedly helped filled the polygons on Amiga?

[@onkelebert787]

Never understand why the external power supply was a disadventage. Mine stands right under the display and didn't disturb me at all.

[@spinnetti]

Only problem with the 16bit era is that they were real computers. The earlier ones were all about the hobby and wringing all the performance you could out of them. The 16bit machines were just computers. I still like my Zeddy best, though I had the 520ST, 1040SFTM, and TT030 with a Color printer, scanner and syquest drive, upgraded internal HD and maxxed out memory along with both color and monochrome monitors running MINT. I got the Atari for no better reason than the Amiga was more popular lol.

[@trip2themoon]

From a neutral standpoint there's no contest, the Amiga is the better computer. Back in the day I loved both and the ST's Power Pack was a fantastic starter pack with 20 games of which the majority were great (Gauntlet 2, Pac Mania, Space Harrier, Xenon, R Type, Nebulus, Overlander, Bomb Jack to name a few of the Power Pack). Today I have an A1200 and a 520 STE, it's a shame that very few game developers took advantage of the STE's enhanced chips.

[@mrdavester]

I had an A500. I used to debate a friend constantly which was better over the Atari st. It really was no contest.

[@daneast]

You said that the ST used MS DOS format discs. The Amiga did not. For most of us Amiga users, that was a good thing. However you did not point out that the Amiga discs could store 880k of data, compared to 720k in MS DOS format. That 122% capacity was crucial back in the day when you needed to cram as much on a disc as possible. Especially games... imagine the additional graphics and sound that could could ship a single disc game when you have a whopping 22% more capacity.

[@NXGamer]

Absolutely, and I use to cram in every sector of those beautiful, metallic covered, dream fulfilling 3.5” wonders. I cannot stress how much I loved my Amiga and THE Amiga.