When The Atari ST Beat The Amiga

[@Sharopolis]

A lot of people are mentioning the parallax scrolling on the Amiga version of 1943. It doesn't come across in the video at all, KZbin has mangled it, but on the ST the clouds appear to move above the water, not with it.

[@blakespot]

I believe I could see it in the full-screen but not in the split-screen, smaller view.

[@Optimus6128]

It's not a big deal as the sea is a crappy pattern I wouldn't even notice normally, and in fact it scrolls more chopily in Atari and more smoothly pixel perfect (even though at the same rate as the clouds) in Amiga. Both games look very similar in how smooth the action moves.

[@TheTurnipKing]

However, in comparison to the island, the clouds are clearly moving at a different rate from the ground layer, so there's parallax scrolling present. I have a feeling that this isn't actually what it appears to be, but some kind of timing quirk where they've accidently synchronised the speed of the water animation and the movement of the cloud layer. Dunno about the speed, though, that's hard to account for but it may also be a factor in the scrolling.

[@Booruvcheek]

Both versions look lackluster though

[@TheTurnipKing]

@@Booruvcheek most japanese arcade game ports to western home computers, particuarly in the early 16 bit era, weren't great for a bunch of reasons.

[@G7ennx]

I worked on two games where the Amiga version was basically identical to the ST (Populous and Powermonger), a completely naive port means a slightly slower Amiga version, simply because the CPU is 10% slower. The thing is, you can claw this back with a couple of simple blitter functions. In the case of both the games I mentioned, just using the blitter to clear the screen at the start of each frame more than made up the difference. As for the 3D stuff, if you're drawing the polygons with the CPU, memory is laid out much more conveniently on ST. The blitter was also not worth talking to unless you gave it enough pixels to cover which means it's not worth asking it to draw a line of filled polygon anyway. I may well be wrong about that, in that there's a way of organising strides so multiple bitplanes can be blitted at once or something but i'd be surprised if any 3D game released at the time for both platforms used the blitter for polygon renders on Amiga. Powermonger would have been faster on ST than Amiga if we hadn't had to use 10% of the CPU for sample playback.

[@elbiggus]

*"i'd be surprised if any 3D game released at the time for both platforms used the blitter for polygon renders on Amiga"* Starglider did; it's not very efficient at it but it does go to show that in some cases it's worth the effort. That said, it's *very* primitive 3D, and the more complex your 3D engine the smaller the benefits of using the blitter become. The more polygons you have the more frame time is going to be spent on vector calculations vs actual rendering so the more apparent the CPU speed difference becomes, and the smaller and more numerous your polygons the less efficient the blitter becomes -- filling one 100*100 pixel block with a blit is fast, filling one hundred 10*10 blocks is much less effective. Couple that with the ball-ache of having to develop two very different rendering pipelines and it becomes a tough sell.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

well, the Powermonger actually is still a bit faster on ST, despite the use of Blitter on Amiga. Not much but it is a bit smoother.

[@tonihaukijarvi]

Are you implying that Atari was the more powerful of the 2 machines????? Do some UNBIASED port comparisons on any game between those 2 and see for yourself.... Amiga had better colors, far better framerate, better graphics and don't even dare compare the sound department. Even 8-bit NES had superior sounds than that underpowered paperweight. I truly don't understand some of you guys who feel the need to troll here on KZbin. Atari version of CHAOS ENGINE HAD NO MUSIC AT ALL!!!!! Please check JIM POWER and it's "silky smooth" gameplay..... Those are just 2 examples out of my head I gave you.

[@stancooper5436]

Thanks Glenn. Very interesting.

[@Xenon0000000000001]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Imagine a proper STe version! Faster CPU of the ST + blitter and sound like the Amiga.

[@peterpereira3653]

After the 8 bit era bought an Atari 1040 STFM.Because at the time for the price gave more RAM it had a bit faster CPU and had better serious software and could still play games too.Never bothered with the Amiga computers as they were mainly used as games machines and didn't have as good a serious software lineup.And would have had to pay more for the same amount of RAM of the Atari 1040 STFM.And went on to buy an Atari Falcon 030 4MB RAM which I had modified for a faster CPU 32 MHz instead of the standard 16MHz.An had installed 68882 FPU clocked at 50MHz.And had it all in a desktop case.Served me very well and was a very capable machine.Used it until later bought a Windows 95 PC some years later.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

Amiga fanboy here. Two Summers ago I read a book about the ATARI ST demo scene and learned that the ATARI ST basically has no hardware to speak of, and after understanding that, I'm really (and constantly) impressed by how much has been squeezed out of so little on the ATARI ST.

[@smilertoo]

The ST was much more affordable until the A500 released.

[@Sinisteve]

Wow I’m a huge Amiga fan but defender of the crown looks great on the ST!

[@daishi5571]

Take a look at the Apple II version. For the Complete DotC experience on the Amiga, take a look at DotC II. I read it was the original game completed and tweaked.

[@Sinisteve]

Daishi5571 yeah I own DotC 2 for the cdtv and it is pretty awesome with the extra detail but something I noticed it doesn’t have the power bar on the enemies whilst raiding castles like that st version had

[@MarkxUK1]

The music on the ST version is rubbish, though as a whole the game is one of the best on the ST. I think the C64 disk version is the best of the original versions of DOTC. It has very good graphics and music, including all the graphic scenes and gameplay of the ST version.

[@edstar83]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@Grumpyowd2hat]

Fantastic video, the old school wars bring back a happier world to me 👍🏻

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks!

[@MariaEngstrom]

Amiga fan girl here. Great interesting video. :) I think you can add Outrun to the list too, it's an abomination both the systems, but on the ST it is at least not a pointless slideshow as on the Amiga.

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks! I'll have to take a look at Outrun.

[@eightiesguy494]

@@Sharopolis do more of these "Vs" series 👍

[@glenaitken9581]

Amiga Outrun ruined my childhood..........

[@Sharopolis]

@@glenaitken9581 It could have been worse, it could have been the Speccy version!

[@robbiew73]

The Amiga now has a better port of Outrun called Cannonball (technically still a WIP but it's been around for a couple of years now)..

[@andyknowles666]

I had an Atari, but would rather have had the Amiga... Still I didn't know any better at the time. Great times those were!!!

[@patsfan4life]

Wow as a huge Defender of the Crown fan from the c64 days, I had no idea the ST version was done so well!

[@_devik]

one of the few games ST did better than C64 :)

[@pjcnet]

@@_devik The C64 had an amazing sound chip that was way superior even to the Atari ST, it was beaten by the Amiga, but the unique unmistakable C64 SID sound will always have it's place in computer history.

[@Martin_Demsky]

​@@pjcnetchoice of Yamaha YM chip for 16-bit computer like Atari ST was always little bit shocking for me, chip maybe can be compared to AY-3-8910/12 used in ZX Spectrum 128k.

[@KingCrimson82]

Have a friend that kept his atari ST installed unless there already were 100MHZ windows PC's (Midi,Nerding and programming) St's had something very funny, an Atari community that outlasted the more game oriented amiga community by a few miles. Its a beautiful and good looking serious workhorse

[@Siraj75]

Other honourable mentions include: Barbarian (Palace Software) Buggy Boy Wizball Powerdrome.

[@immortalsofar5314]

The bugbear of Amiga fans was that games were developed for the ST and then just shifted straight across without using any of the more powerful hardware. This meant that the faster processor gave it the edge. Even simple games like Arkenoid were poorly ported. Looking back on it, even the paddle was block-enlarged from an obviously lower resolution.

[@Larry]

Wan't the ST version of Robocop 3 a lot faster/smoother than the Amiga port?

[@Sharopolis]

It was quite a bit smoother and I nearly put it in, but the Amiga had some visual effects that the ST didn't have and of course the sound was way better. It's such a cinematic game that side by side I thought it was hard to argue the ST was the winner. Nice to see your name popping up Larry! Thanks for subscribing!

[@Larry]

@@Sharopolis I loved Robocop 3 so much, I hacked up my Amiga 600 to fit that bloody security dongle in in order for it to fit in the joystick port, highly regret that, should have just got a pirate copy. But no worries dude, really enjoying your videos :)

[@daishi5571]

I would hardly call the ST version "a lot faster/smoother" while it was most certainly faster, let's keep context. Like most 3D games of this time, the frame rate was poor on both systems (although DID was good at getting the most out of the hardware) when you are looking at around 15 FPS (probably lower) the ST might have a 2-3 FPS (3 being generous) advantage and it is noticeable at those frames, but that's hardly a lot faster. I would like to see a direct CPU speed comparison of ST vs Amiga playing 3D games as I have read many time the ST was a better system for writing to the screen in vectors. I would like to know if that was true or if the CPU was really the only deciding factor in 3D.

[@KuraIthys]

@@daishi5571 You do have to consider that the lower the framerate, the higher the relative performance gap implied by each frame. At 60 fps, 1 extra frame (61 fps) is about a 1.7% difference in performance. At 10 fps, 3 fps is a 30% performance change. That's nothing to sneeze at when you consider the implications for the hardware... But as for 3d graphics... One thing I learnt from dealing with the SNES (And the Amiga has the same exact weakness) is that when your graphics workload is being done by a CPU as opposed to graphics hardware. (eg drawing 3d graphics, lines, vector geometry, etc - unless there's dedicated graphics hardware for said functions), then what you DO NOT want to be dealing with is bitplanes. Case in point. Mega Drive vs SNES. The basis of CPU drawn graphics is pixel plotting. Since the Mega Drive is limited to 4 bit per pixel graphics (without hacks), but has packed pixel graphics (all of the bits are adjacent in memory) That means each pixel you draw requires a memory write. (aka 1 byte written per pixel) In ideal circumstances and if your code is properly optimised, you can draw 2 pixels with a single write. (2 pixels per byte written). But that's situational, and may not be possible. So, best case scenario: 2 pixels for 1 byte written. Worse case: 1 byte per pixel. (well, technically for less than 8 bits a pixel you end up needing masking, which slows things down further.) SNES: 4 bits per pixel in the most common graphics modes. (also has 2bpp and 8 bpp modes. Including mode 7 which works completely differently to any other mode) Alas, these 4 bits are bitplanes. That means rather than 4 bits being adjacent in memory in a single byte, they are spread across 4 different bytes in different memory locations. Bitplanes do have upsides for some purposes, but many downsides too. (The main reason to implement them is memory speed limitations. It lets you use multiple slower memory chips in parallel vs needing a single faster chip) Each byte has 1 bit for 8 different pixels. As a result, the best case scenario is drawing 8 pixels using 4 memory writes. When you calculate this, it averages to 2 pixels per byte. Same as the mega drive. That's great. Best case is identical. But the worst case? You need to write four. FOUR! bytes to update a single pixel. So in the best case scenario the SNES is as fast as a Mega Drive (leaving aside memory bandwith/CPU speed limitations. Clock for clock a 68000 has 1/4 the memory access speed of a 65816, but writes 16 bit instead of 8 bit values, fo a net of half the performance per clock.) But for the worst case scenario, the Mega Drive is 4 times faster at the job than the SNES. And unfortunately unless you are very good at optimisation, the worst case is likely to dominate most usage... So... The Amiga? It has exactly the same problem the SNES has. - bitplane based graphics...

[@daishi5571]

​@@KuraIthys I believe my message was to another that has since been deleted (The "a lot faster/smoother" is not in any other message here) so the context of my message is a bit garbled. I hear what you say, but what I was talking about was the actual result. Lets just say it was really hitting 15 fps although I think that was being generous (and there are certainly areas of single digits) adding 2 fps is not going to make the experience "a lot faster/smoother" (reusing the original quote for context) it does make a difference (and I did say so) that is noticable but it's still choppy, and I think many ppl would miss it without comparison. What I was getting at was the exaggeration which I keep hearing in many of these YT videos. In regards to the technical aspect of your message (which btw is nicely written) I didn't code on either of the consoles so my technical understandings of them is a bit limited, I have however programmed machine code for Z80, 6502/6510, 6809, 8086 ect, 680x0, ARM so I get the CPU side of things without a problem. But from what I have read about the Mega Drive/Genesis it does have some direct comparisons to the Amiga working having a 68000 and DMA GPU (Probably down to similar problems, similar solutions). Handling real 3D graphics (vectors) on the Amiga wasn't really the issue, that was really down to CPU speed (add a faster CPU issue resolved). Solid vectors could have been filled by the blitter (which wasn't done very often due to other systems not having this possibility, and programmers often go for lowest common denominator) Where the Amiga graphics started to have issues was when Wolfenstein/Doom type 3D(2.5D) graphics were being used as they were using direct byte writes per pixel to the video memory. The Amiga was originally designed when memory bandwidth for writing that much graphical data was extremely expensive/didn't exist. Planar was much more efficient for lower bit count and having that be handled by the Amiga graphics chip which is a DMA coprocessor made it even more so. By the time of Doom the Amiga should have had a graphics chip with chunky graphics (byte) but didn't (there were graphics cards for the Amiga that could have done that however) and this hurt porting. However the Amigas biggest issue wasn't the graphics chip but that ppl didn't upgrade their CPUs. Since the Doom source code was released and an Amiga port was done, it showed that Doom is/was possible on the Amiga. The problem is when most ppl say Amiga they think A500 running a 68000 ~7 Mhz not A3000 or A4000 big box Amigas more comparable to the PC (in regard to upgrades) which had processors capable of running Doom comparable to an equivalent PC CPU. The A1200 and even the A500 had CPU upgrades that would allow DOOM to run on it.

[@jurassicmatt2796]

Was an ST darling but at our local club, it was inevitable that I had to jump to the Amiga. Then people started to bring the SNES in. There's no shame in following whatever gaming experience that suits you. Personally, I love every system I've ever owned for different reasons.

[@DJ_Dopamine]

As a former 520 ST, 1040 STE and A500 Plus owner... some 'general' observations I made back in the 80's and 90's were: 2D games tended to be more colourful and had far better sound on the Amiga. Scrolling was usually smoother and FPS (in this case - Fields Per Second) were higher. There was often more parallax scrolling, Addams Family aside. Exceptions (as seen in this video) would be earlier ports from the ST. These might have looked the same, but due to the devs not bothering to use the custom chips, could perform worse than the ST version. You could always 'spot' an ST port on the Amiga as I recall. On the other hand, 3D titles frequently enjoyed higher FPS on the ST making them far more playable compared to a lot of Amiga 3D games (that barely scraped by). Although I recall Robocop 3 and Hunter on the Amiga A500 were simply superb!! When games were programmed to take advantage of the STE (expanded colour palette, blitter, hardware scrolling and better sound etc.) they came much closer to OCS/ECS Amiga releases. Some games even had the Amiga's 'Copper Bar' effect (Fire and Ice for example). But sadly, the STE came far too late for devs to produce 'STE enhanced' games in any great numbers.

[@pianoman1379]

I have always been an Atari Fan back in the days when I converted from both Zx80 and 81 and my first Atari was the 800 and STXE versions to finally the Atari STFM but my decision to buy the Atari St over the Amiga was because being a musician the Atari beat the Amiga because of the Midi Ports to connect to my keyboards and of course Pro Midi 9 In my opinion Atari Beat Amiga but I Do Know that Amiga had a superb sound chip yes but buying extras to get Amiga Hooked up and faffing about when all I had to do was buy midi leads made it hands down for me

[@Elbas_Tardo]

You justify a purchase for a simple connector that cost about 10-15 dollars, less expensive than buying a 4 or even 8 channel sampler by software. :D

[@pianoman1379]

@@Elbas_Tardo I was a total Atari fan and the Atari Stfm had everything there built in and I naturally upgraded - was not interested in Amiga but if you agree, it is a matter of preference

[@Elbas_Tardo]

@@pianoman1379 Sure, if you buy STe or a Falcon but not stfm. :D

[@Moloko_b]

Carrier Command also ;) Used to love that on the ST ;) ❤️👍🏻

[@10veryintelligentlevels35]

Interphase was amazing

[@R_T_Ralph]

Ive always been an Atari kid, but my recent series was a car boot sale Amiga 500 restoration. I respect the Amiga, but the ST is still my favourite.

[@wishusknight3009]

I think both systems had charm and appeal to their owners. I grew up on an Apple ][ but to be honest my favorite for some odd reason are 386's.

[@KuraIthys]

I'm too young to have any preference in that realm. But I did technically grow up with an Atari 800XL (alongside a SNES and various PC's...) Fast Forward a few decades and I favour the Amiga not out of any Atari vs Commodore loyalty, but because it's hardware was designed by largely the same people as the 800XL, and design wise it is the true 16 bit successor to the Atari design... It's funny how much the Amiga went back and forth between being it's own thing, being an Atari system and being a Commodore one. Really is a fairly random quirk of history that it carried the company name badges it did...

[@edstar83]

@@KuraIthys I'll help you out kid. I lived through and survived the Amiga vs St war. But for some reason I.. I can't let go of the past. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@_devik]

love has nothing to do with reason. Amiga is superior system.

[@MechanicaMenace]

​@@_devikFor most 80s gaming yeah but for what would now be called "productivity apps" it really depended on what you were doing. DTP, WP, spreadsheets, and CAD were somewhere STs outshined Amigas for example.

[@rakido7388]

I knew people that worked in the industry. It was an open secret that many Amiga games were just lazy ST ports, to the point that they had the same source code, with just a switch at the top for which version you wanted to build, ST or Amiga. Sometimes the Amiga version would do everything in software, cos the job would have been given to an ST developer who couldn't be arsed to learn how to do bobs. In terms of 3D-ness, anyone with half an ounce of competence would know that the DMA bus timings in the Amiga were properly managed, so the blitter could do something like a block copy or fill without taking cycles from the CPU. What this meant, was that while you were doing the 3D maths, the blitter would be clearing the screen *in parallel, for free*, which would have taken a massive wadge of movem.l's on the ST, wiping out the speed advantage.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

After all these years? I accept the ST into my heart. The old rivalry only served to push both systems to the limits - plus we were both slain by a common enemy. It's a matter of honor.

[@SomePotato]

A superior enemy! 😉 (I love all the old machines, I even own an Amiga and a few STs now.)

[@rikswift]

Common enemy? Oh yeah, the Spectrum was a beast.

[@nyisziati]

@@rikswift XD XD XD and the Commodore +4

[@noop9k]

Common enemy was called Id Software :)

[@edstar83]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@zootsanchez]

The apex triumph of ST gaming was Dungeon Master, which Amiga owners needed an extra 512MB of RAM to play at all :) :) :) :)

[@dlfrsilver]

normal, the Amiga version had been enhanced with better music/SFX. The ST was the inferior one here ;)

[@zootsanchez]

@@dlfrsilver you'd expect some improvements for double the RAM 🐏

[@dlfrsilver]

@@zootsanchez yes :) 1mb for enhanced sound, i take it !

[@ryzmaker11]

@@dlfrsilver the amiga hardware was already significantly more expensive so it's rather lame that it couldn't handle those improvements out of the box which really is the whole point in this debate: the ST cost less than two thirds of the amiga price and was developed during a much shorter development time. as such, it's just *logical* that the amiga was technically more advanced, there's nothing to brag on about here except that amiga fanboys *do* brag on, a LOT, as if they need to reassure themselves... and despite the price and development time differences, the ST actually has many advantages over the amiga: faster CPU, MIDI ports, better MIDI sequencing, more reliable hardware... and many games are almost as good or better on ST! (dungeon master, falcon, bio challenge, stunt car racer, turrican, maupiti island, vroom...) anyway both are great computers and I think that things would have been much worse if one or the other wouldn't have existed BTW the amiga was created by ex-atari employees whereas the ST was mostly designed by ex-commodore employees, the irony is real hehe

[@dlfrsilver]

@@ryzmaker11 faster CPU ? LOL ! The ST has a faster CPU for itself, because it's a slow computer. With a lower CPU clock, it would be the country of slowness ! Dungeon master is better on the amiga due to the enhanced given by FTL, turrican is better on Amiga (normal), Vroom is faster on the amiga than on the ST, ahah, sorry XD !

[@franklinnash]

I bought my Atari ST on the back of Jeff Minter creating his new lightsynth Colourspace exclusively on the machine. Also, our version of Llamatron was slightly faster.

[@jonsevern]

Games I preferred on the Atari ST: Rampage, Bubble Bobble, Superprint, Dungeon Master and Stuntcar Racer

[@pianoman1379]

With what can be achieved with computers today, I would love to see Dungeon Master updated with the monsters more animated - it gets the heart racing when they chase you through them corridors Lol

[@edstar83]

There is no difference between the Amiga version of Stuncar racer and ST version apart from slight difference is sound fx, I prefer the engine sound of the Amiga version.

[@colinbrydon7659]

@@edstar83marginally quicker on ST, but you wouldn’t even notice. completely agree about sound. But one of my favourite games of all time.

[@marcroulleau9510]

Interesting, being an Amiga user since 1987, it bring back lots of memories. I will watch your videos about ST's stuff as I will soon have 2 Atari ST and I want to feed them with goodies. Thanks

[@diddrumdontdrum]

Lol. Loads of passionate comments here. Amiga games were more often better than the ST version. It’s not overly surprising that the ST managed the odd victory. I owned both but favoured gaming on the Amiga by far. However there was one area where the ST did reign supreme and that was in the recording studio. There are those who know and......

[@J0MBi]

Another game to add to the list - UBI Soft classic Zombi. The ST version had some pretty great in game music which really added to the atmosphere. The Amiga version was sadly lacking it. Both were great systems. I had both growing up and the Amiga was no doubt the better machine for games over all, but the ST was still pretty good in the early days.

[@pentelegomenon1175]

My understanding is that the versions of Defender of the Crown get better as time goes on regardless of the platform, so even the NES version exceeds the Amiga, up until the CD-i version which is the best of all of them.

[@fryke]

Where the ST really, truly shined, though, was with Application Systems Heidelberg's black and white games. Bolo springs to mind (plus its successor). The absolutely perfect screen (truly flicker-free compared to anything the Amiga sported) and with a physics engine that puts any other Breakout-style game to shame. Any. Other. Breakout. Style. Game.

[@gonzales2011]

Fully agree. Bolo and Esprit were great!

[@Trusteft]

As a once owner of both ST and Amiga lines of computers (back in the day), I have never encountered anyone as annoying as Amiga fanboys. Not just owners or supporters, but fanboys. I never understood it as their main argument was always how superior the Amiga series was, which even if one says that they were 100% right, makes even less sense as to how much these morons 35 years on later still find it necessary to not only support the Amiga, but actively bash the ST line. I just hope they don't have kids yet or in the future. Great video.

[@edstar83]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@IsaacKuo]

Here in NTSC land, there were actually a lot of 2D games which were more sluggish on the Amiga - ones I'm particularly jealous about are Bubble Bobble (which I LOVE even if it's a big slower on my Amiga) and Rampage (I have a soft spot for the generally criticized ST version because it's the one I played first). Here in NTSC land, there's only 1/60th of a second per frame to try and animate all the stuff out there. Bubble Bobble has zillions of bubbles on the screen -- too many to use hardware sprites. So, there's just plain less time for the CPU to try and get to it all. Rampage is another one where there's often a lot of stuff moving around on screen. Oh, another game with oodles of stuff on screen was Jeff Minter's Llamatron.

[@litjellyfish]

Isaac Kuo why would NTSC be slower? Most time the increased frame time in pal was used for DMA time to show more graphics due to the largee height. Many time though it was just ported from the NTSC resulting in black top bottom borders And NTSC is faster with 60fps compared to PALs 50fps

[@IsaacKuo]

@@litjellyfish I'm saying that often the Atari ST version would be much less sluggish than the Amiga version because they don't have as much time to try and do all the rendering in 1/60 (or 1/30) of a second. The size of a level in Bubble Bobble and the number of moving objects would be the same in either NTSC or PAL. The difference is how much time per frame it's got to animate it all. The PAL version is only trying to go 5/6 the frame rate, so the Amiga version is more likely to keep up.

[@litjellyfish]

Isaac Kuo well it’s not how it works. You need to compare pal Amiga / ST and NTSC Amiga / ST main reason Atari st is quicker is wen the game do only use the CPU for both. And the Atari CPU is a little quicker than the one one Amiga

[@Henrik_Holst]

AFAIK the bobbles in Bubble Bobble are hardware sprites, on the C64 they are hardware sprites but only updated every 3d frame due to the large amount and the problem of multiplexing them otherwise. Since both Atari ST and the Amiga have better sprite capabilities than the C64 they surely used hardware sprites as well. However as is usual back then both the Atari and Amiga ports where created by the same single guy so yet again we see here the faster cpu of the Atari winning over the slower Amiga cpu when the none of the hardware offloading tricks have been used.

[@IsaacKuo]

@@litjellyfish I am comparing NTSC Amiga vs NTSC Atari ST. And I'm contrasting that with how PAL Amiga vs PAL Atari ST was. I don't think you understand my point. My point is that here in the USA (and other NTSC countries), there were a lot of 2D games where the Amiga version was more sluggish. Blame lazy developers if you want, but that doesn't change the reality. And the CPU speed advantage was significant - about 12% faster. My point is that in PAL versions, that was less likely to be noticed. Like it or not, Bubble Bobble is an arcade port with level design designed around Japanese screen size (NTSC). So a PAL port isn't going to expand the level size, nor is it going to add more sprites to fill that nonexistent extra level size. Rather, the screen size remains the same and the number of sprites to draw remains the same. But the PAL Amiga has 20% more time to draw those sprites (1/50 vs 1/60 second). It's much more likely to be able to draw them all without any slowdown. The PAL Atari ST will simply "waste" the extra time it gets, while the PAL Amiga takes advantage of the extra time to keep up.

[@AcornElectron]

Considering the hundreds of games that were better on Amiga then I think this is a fair list.

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks!

[@mjjack389]

@Brad Viviviyal eventually ??? It's easy to make an amiga game impossible to do for an st even with the best atari st coders team but every atari st games are easily doable by a good amiga coder !!! No way to challenge this statement or you are a troll. Or prove me wrong and make a perfect port of brian the lion or kid chaos !!! No way, not even in your dreams !!

[@daishi5571]

@@mjjack389 Brad isn't wrong with the "eventually" but his time time is off, and is missing contextual info. He mentioned A1000 returns for PSU and floppy failures, but the ST also suffered from these issues (I worked with several computer stores around this time) what isn't mentioned is how many ST systems were returned (or tried to be returned) when a new model came out or was upgraded in a sneaky way. As was mentioned in his text, his1st ST's had the Boot and OS on disk not on ROM (like the A1000) and was replaced with barely a mention, also PSU's were external, floppy was external and only single sided (this became a non-standard) and was changed to double-sided with barely a mention making the single sided drive quickly incompatible with much of the software (replacement disks were often available via the mail, yes I said the mail) and it required a dedicated monitor. When the follow up model(s) were released integrating the FDD, PSU and adding tv output ppl returned the previous ST models considered as inferior. As a side note the STFM was a great system design having it all integrated in the main unit. ST did have more games in the beginning, but ended with less. The two games mentioned were released towards the end of the Amiga's life but show what was capable and you are right they are not have been done on an ST without severe cuts. "Quite a few games on the Atari ST were superior to the Amiga versions" I would like to add "early" into that and also mention there were many more Amiga titles that were superior to ST. A1200 was released in in 1992. I got mine 2 week before official release (know ppl and pay cash) While it did take a few years before Amiga titles were consistently better that the ST counterpart, even from the beginning the Amiga audio was better. You have to take into account that in 1985 when the A1000 was released there hadn't been another computer as ambitious as the Amiga. Computers up till then were more like the ST in that they were designed to be CPU centric. When the Amiga came along with it's custom DMA coprocessors it took a while to learn that while you could just program like an ST, if you wanted your program to be something special, you had to learn how to pass off scrolling, sprites, BOB's, Audio (this was really the first to get mastered as it was basically a requirement) on to the relevant hardware freeing the CPU up to get on with other things.

[@Chordonblue]

@@daishi5571 Spot on. But I would add that there was a price differential to be paid. The A1000 was ridiculously expensive on launch. I spent a good deal of time with it in the computer store, and it seemed to display the guru meditation far too much for me to pay that kind of money. The Atari ST came out, and yes it was lacking ROMs initially, and yes, you could say that it's equivalent crashing symbol, the bomb, happened more often than it should as well. However, when I received the ROMs in the mail, the speed of operation and system stability improved and the machine was still far cheaper than the Amiga at the time. I switched when the A500 came out, which was far more reasonably priced. Back then, at least to my 20-year-old self, that really mattered.

[@daishi5571]

@@Chordonblue I disagree that the A1000 was ridiculously expensive if you compare against PC & Mac (the A1000 wasn't marketed at the home). Now having said that, comparison against 8-bit systems (which were incredible value at this time) would make the A1000 look very expensive despite it being a completely different class of computer. The ST was also a great value offering and an obvious upgrade path from the 8-bit systems. I'm not saying the A1000 was cheap (I had to wait for the 500 myself) but when I looked at the market at the time, Amiga was the technically clear winner. Most 1st gen computers had issues back then.....let me take that back, just about all 1st gen anything complex has issues even now, so I don't hold hold the ST/Amiga to some different standard. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you have to expect some pain. It all comes down to how ppl (and it is an individual thing) calculate value. A1000 - 68000 CPU, custom DMA video co-processor - 4096 colours (still image) 32 colours with sprites, hardware scrolling, BOB's, Hardware line and fill. Custom DMA audio co-processor - 4 Channel stereo PCM, capable of complex waveforms and FM synthesis. Preemptive multitasking microkernel OS with GUI & CLI all low memory overhead. Individually the specs have a certain value, but combined I think the value was much more. This is starting to sound like a sales pitch ;-)

[@tommylakindasorta3068]

Clearly the ST was better at rendering polygons,. However the scrolling on that Addams Family game is all jerky and a bit crap on the ST. I'd much rather play the Amiga version with its smooth scrolling, even with the background graphics layer absent.

[@lacharriere6300]

Not true. Amiga versions of 3D games were often slower because the coding had been done on ST without further optimization for Amiga. But Amiga's capabilities (Agnus chip & blitter) could more than compensate this when taken in use.

[@tommylakindasorta3068]

@@lacharriere6300 Aha. That makes sense.

[@MacMelmac]

@@lacharriere6300 the Amiga blitter chip was never at work with polygons, only with sprites. ST had a faster processor so the eD polygon games was a bit smoother onnthe ST

[@lacharriere6300]

It typically wasn't used in games for polygons but it was used especially in demos. When filling polygons with blitter, there's basically no limit for shapes, it's pretty effective if it's just taken in use.

[@simonoleary9264]

Great video. 😊 In most cases the Amiga would come out on top (when properly coded) because it could hand over much of the graphics & sound workload to the custom chips. But... In true 3D games, most of the work is taken up with working out WHAT to draw... perspective, depth of field, hidden line removal, shading etc.. This is all heavily maths based so the CPU (& FPU if fitted) have to do most of the workload. Consequence is that the ST, with its slightly faster clock speed and larger memory bandwidth will be able to do this slightly better. This is why in the 90's the PC gfx cards started including 3D processing, to take the load away from the CPU... which was another nail in the Amiga's coffin.

[@simonoleary9264]

@Requiem4aDr3Am I am unsure what you mean by "outdated". The rule of thumb at that time (mid 90's) was that CPU power would double every 18 months(ish). But just like now, these top flight PC's were too expensive for most people, so most people would keep their PC's for 5 years or more. As to why Commodore didn't update the Amiga, one word... incompetence. Commodore US never really understood what they had with the Amiga, so never really pumped much money into R&D. In 1985, the Amiga was ahead of its time in many ways, by 1995 it was pretty much obsolete. But the design of the hardware & OS were so good that with sufficient investment there could still be some form of Amiga today.

[@cosmoscoronado8862]

Why do some people love to slam the Amiga with comparisons be to the Sharp X68000? A machine launched not only years later but at twice the cost to a "price is no object" dedicated gamer niche target. Might as well rag on the Mega Drive by comparing it directly to the Neo Geo.

[@cosmoscoronado8862]

@Apharmd Battler Hmm. Well that's more candor than I would expect, basically admitting that you're a troll. Okay, so you seem to have some perspective but, you project the same crap as the type of people you think deserve to be messed with. Every platform has its fanboys, Amiga fans aren't on any higher horse than another. I don't expect you to care, your agenda is plain as day, your intentional spinning of the context of the times makes this all a waste of words. The X68000 was a technology demonstration lead as much as a consumer product, good for you that those games are more interesting, now there's MAME so most of its notable library is even less relevant. Oh wait, you seemed to think the fact Amiga games got ported to later consoles means something... like how Thunder Force became known as a Mega Drive series? I know what the OCS Amiga is and isn't capable of better than most, have my own laundry list of things I wish it did better or different. None of it really matters because the context is more relevant than the technology details. As a point of simple fact, the Amiga was the best fixed target platform, for most people in Europe and other markets, which was affordable and accessible enough with dedicated gaming features. This was the best machine available for any kind of independent publishing, and for any kind of fast arcade style 2D games, for OVER five years. All the technical points you feel the need to throw out don't change that. There is a good reason so few people remember the Sharp X68000, because it was never a relevant market for anyone outside of Japan, and even there it was a flash in the pan boutique gimmick. People remember Amiga and Atari ST because they were actual competitors, you know, getting compared to each other directly, every god damn day, by so called professional people and stuff. You wouldn't know and wouldn't care, again I understand, you only care (A LOT to go by this comment section) about telling people who experienced something directly, at a time you didn't and never could, how lame and ignorant we all are.

[@cosmoscoronado8862]

@Apharmd Battler I wouldn't have bothered with the troll line if you didn't keep refuting yourself, you make it clear that people outside of Japan had no good reason to care about the X68000, but then that doesn't stop you from berating people with nonsense nationalistic accusations. Keep talking about how much others are projecting, keep talking about how stupid the people who care about this or that are... it's entertaining in any case.

[@wijskinner6048]

I proper lol'd at this. I had an ST and my cousin had an amiga back in the day and we definitely compared a few of these. Awesome vid. Thanks.

[@amigamagic5754]

About "The Addams Family", the Atari ST developers were able to include a parallax layer because they used that horrible "push" scrolling technique (which hurts my eyes very much) like in Alien Syndrome, Bionic Commandos and many other games developed with the hardware of the ST in mind and then directly ported to the Amiga without changing a single bit (apart from some -- usually -- better music & sound fx). So I thank the Amiga developers of this game for choosing a smoother arcade gaming experience with 32 colors on screen, rather than a parallax with very jerky scrolling or a smooth but horrible looking dual playfield with only 7+8 colors (where most of the animated objects had to share those same very few colors). Yes, I recognize that on the Amiga, even without a parallax effect, they could at least draw some more background tiles instead of leaving them black, but I guess the graphics guys were not given enough time to redraw all the tiles and the maps of the levels, so in the end they had to give up the background layer. But, honestly, it was not such a big deal, considering the dark setting of this game... IMHO "great smoothness without parallax" is much better than "jerky push scrolling with parallax", especially in this type of games where you have to jump very very carefully and precisely from a platform to another one... And I like much more the music & sound fx of the Amiga version (the ST sounds like an 8-bit machine). So, between the two versions of Addams Family, to me there is no doubt: the Amiga version is the winner...

[@bangerbangerbro]

To me it just looked like the background was static and everything else was drawn over it, avoiding redrawing it where possible and only redrawing parts of it when a transparent bit of the foreground appears again.

[@amigamagic5754]

@@bangerbangerbro It looks to me that the framerate in the ST version is between 12.5 and 15fps. This means the CPU has enough time to redraw all (background, foreground and objects). IMHO the background is static just to put all on a single floppy disk.

[@bangerbangerbro]

@@amigamagic5754 I suppose though you'd think it could just loop.

[@amigamagic5754]

@@bangerbangerbro Well, another thing it came to my mind is that the ST has no hardware assistance for horizontal scrolling or bitmap copying, so to make the background layer scroll horizontally of just 1-pixel at a time is very taxing on the CPU (it has to work very hard to read, rotate and add 16bit words before writing them in the new positions). This is probably the real reason for the static background layer. Smooth and slow vertical scrolling is doable on the ST, but horizontal is very difficult.

[@bangerbangerbro]

@@amigamagic5754 Which is what I was saying in the first place. Good to know it has hardware vscroll. Spectrum doesn't have that. Bk0010 apparently has. You'd think that you could change that each line for horizontal scrolling?

[@inphanta]

A lot of earlier cross platform games were better on the ST only because the Amiga versions were lazy ports that didn’t use the hardware. The Amiga generally fared better with games developed with its hardware in mind first.

[@KuraIthys]

Seems to be the way of things. Go back a generation and early Commodore 64 ports of Atari 8 bit games were really bad. Then you go forward a bit and the Commodore 64 games were getting vastly better while the Atari 8 bit system was such an afterthought it's ports were absolute trash if they existed at all. Not for lack of capabilities either. Just that getting the most out of the Atari was VERY different to getting the most out of a C64. (ironically programming an 8 bit atari has more in common with programming an Amiga than it does with programming a c64... Well, perhaps it's not THAT ironic, given who designed each system... But still...) The same issue is mirrored with the Mega Drive and SNES, and arguably, still with the playstation, n64 and Saturn... Possibly even the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. You can generally tell what the originating system was for a given game by how badly it runs on other systems compared to exclusives for the system in question... Come to think of it, due to architectural issues, games ported from the Xbox 360 to the PS3 were frequently a lot worse than games taken the other direction. And that isn't a reflection of the hardware directly, just of the different kinds of optimisation strategies the two devices require...

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

@@AussieArcade it's not as straightforward as lazy ports. Coders, artists etc working under strict commercial deadlines, were often paid exactly the same to port ST code to the Amiga as they were to write Custom Amiga code from scratch. In cases like Robocop, you have a single individual doing everything, where you needed a full team. If software houses were unwilling to pay for the resources to be dedicated to an Amiga version, then it was sadly always going to be the case where the superior capabilites of the Amiga were sadly ignored.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

@@KuraIthys A400/800 had a faster CPU and more colours than the C64 so it handled things like:Ninja, Elktraglide, Dropzone, Rescue On Fract, Ballblazer, K. Rift and isometric 3D titles better than the C64. Games written for the A400/800 hardware were always going to be difficult to translate well to the C64 and Amstrad CPC. C64 had better sprite ability than Atari with it's PMG's Sadly the days of Virgin"s Gang Of Five doing specific versions of games for host platforms, each bloody superb, with Dan Dare.. came and went in the blink of an eye 😭 C64, CPC and ZX Spectrum versions are all amazing and all different.

[@stimorolication9480]

@mPky1 although they both have a 68000 cpu they don't have the same hardware. Not making use of the Amiga special chips and doing everything in the lower clocked cpu will of course make it slower.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

well, there was no hardware to use in early games, the A1000 had terrible hardware, very limiting to programmer. Just the A500 introduction and massive influx of money from Commodore to gaming studios changed the things...

[@MarcoMugnatto]

"When Spectrum beats the C64" would be an entire day long video...

[@bangerbangerbro]

Only thanks to US gold, where both versions are unplayably slow but spectrum has big objects.

[@bangerbangerbro]

@Kurt Pedersen *real* joysticks? My quickshot that would work with either machine isn't *real* ?

[@tarstarkusz]

Cool video. The ST sometimes had the edge over the Amiga! I do think this method is flawed, however. One problem the Amiga always had was that it shared a base with the ST and the developers would design the graphics to the ST limits. I think a better comparison is to compare native games.

[@Lucasrainford]

Spot on!

[@daishi5571]

You know two other systems had a similar issue having the same CPU - ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC.The CPC technically was a better system but very few programs ever used it.

[@tarstarkusz]

The CPC got a port of Pinball Dreams which to me looks outstanding. Better than anything seen on the other 8 bits.

[@Lucasrainford]

tarstarkusz yeah, that is a outstanding port.

[@dominicsmith7793]

Great viewing...many thanks! I have both the Atari ST and the Amiga (still), but out of the two, the Atari ST is my favourite.

[@pianoman1379]

Dominic Smith - I still have my Atari St with a 40meg hard drive and although stored away in a box, It really needs a colour monitor because plugging into today’s televisions does not produce a clear picture and I so miss using it - at the moment I’m using emulators on my Mac and OpenEmu but I have a box full of Atari St floppies full of games and just to experience that retro feeling and show off to my mates of what it used to be like playing games programmed with just under ‘1meg’

[@MrPetari]

@@pianoman1379 Oh yes, it can produce clean picture on today TVs - but you need RGB connection - what is possible with Scart input on TV. Without it - maybe VGA - depends on capability of TV/monitor to display lower refresh rates 50/60 Hz. Situation is indeed better in Europe than Northern America with it. Or can use cheaper solution - USB video converter - I recently bought one (Nedis) - not so sharp as RGB. S-Video mod in ST can make it better. (my videos here were recorded mostly from S-Video out) . And can record all it . Supports PAL and NTSC .

[@JohnDRobinsonelectronicdrums]

another brilliant walk down memory lane.. thank you!

[@Sharopolis]

Cheers!

[@mtoshii2530]

With about 33 years of retrospect the machines were much more alike than different. I owned them both (and still do). The Amiga was mostly used for games and got replaced with a Sega Megadrive, my ST was setup for DTP and worked well as a cheap Mac substitute. They got the retrobright treatment last summer and are now looking as good as new!

[@pianoman1379]

Lovely video and the two comparisons between the Atari and Amiga - My wife jokingly said your narration reminds her of John Noakes from Blue Peter and you presented the video quite well

[@bighairydel]

great commentary! very funny! i had both machines in the day and know the strengths of both machines. great video!!

[@Sharopolis]

Thank you!

[@johannkrist]

Adams family, I would much rather have the scorlling of the Amiga without background instead of non scorlling Atari version with background.

[@daneast]

One downside of the Amiga's complex chipset (which is very true of some consoles over the years too) is it takes a lot more skill and technical knowledge to properly take advantage of the system. There were obviously a number of developers that really had no idea how to properly utilize the Amiga's more advanced capabilities. For example, creating custom code for the Copper that runs totally in parallel (and very fast) to the main 68000 CPU.

[@TheLairdsLair]

As an Atari ST guy I definitely enjoyed this! This is actually a subject I wrote about in Retro Gamer magazine so I'd like to add a few suggestions: OutRun, Rolling Thunder, Forgotten Worlds, Captain Blood, Time Bandit and, as you mentioned, pretty much anything that's in 3D.

[@edstar83]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@markofthefonz]

Yeah I agree with captain blood...it is so much better on the ST and I am an Amiga user

[@Wagoo]

Agreed on Captain Blood. The Bluddian language audio only works properly on the ST version

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@markofthefonzLooking at the titles listed: Rolling Thunder was clearly never coded with the Amiga hardware in mind,screen resolution of 258x198,only 16 colours on-screen,it's a classic Tiertex travesty. Thankfully McGeezer has hacked it for a 30% speed increase,so that just lraves the ST version with more accomplished music,but both are absolute dogs to play compared to the Arcade. Forgotten World's? Again, if you want to play a home version don't bother with the home micro's, the PCE has the best home version. ARC Developments made the Amiga the host platform for the 16-bit home conversions, but they couldn't fit all 9 levels in, plus, the ST version lacks the buildings backdrops. Outrun follows suit. The speed of the ST version was painfully slow and stuttered. In-Game music sounds like it has gone through a phaser guitar pedal.The Amiga version just added a horrendous intro, that has no effect on the actual gameplay. If you want a decent home version, try the Sega Saturn version. Amiga Time Bandit falls down by featuring worse animation than the ST version. But the games creator, Harry Lafnear certainly doesn't feel the ST version is superior to the Amiga one.. "... the Atari ST version [and Amiga version] of Time Bandit is the best" I find it very odd someone who covered the ST for RG magazine, was unable to describe the key differences between Amiga and ST, so the reader can understand what made 1 superior to the other.

[@spacepirateivynova]

Adams Family on ST doesn't scroll the same way the amiga does in realtime, this is how they can get away with that kind of graphical fidelity in that case.

[@jayminer]

Interesting video, the only game I don't agree with is Addams Family, I think that is the reverse case of Defender of the Crown. The Amiga version lacks the backgrounds so I can agree that the ST version might look a bit nicer, but the Amiga has a bigger playfield, scrolls good and everything moves smoother which makes for way more pleasant gameplay. The ST only scrolls when the player reaches the end of the screen.

[@wolfgangfrost8043]

Great video! Never used original Amiga or ST hardware, so I can't speak with certainty, but I respect both systems as main players in the 80's Euro computer scene. I'm a 90's kid from California. I grew up on my mom's old C64 and a Sega Genesis, so obviously I pull towards Commodore, but Atari was certainly no slouch!

[@KuraIthys]

I was a European console and PC gamer... But, I still ended up with an Atari 800XL somehow. (in 1990, so well after it's best days were a distant memory). Nostalgia does have an impact huh. I don't have any affinity for Atari as a company, but I DO have an affinity for hardware designed by Jay Miner and his various associates. (of which the 3 most prominent examples are the Atari 8 bit computers, the Amiga, and the Atari Lynx)

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

@@KuraIthys The lynx was not designed by Jay Miner. Dave Needle and R.J. Mical, who did the design, were on Jay's team for the Amiga. That might be your confusion.

[@belovedconsole]

Your commentary is awesome! It sounds like you really went through and pre-scripted it and we're the better for it. The strict pronunciation of words like "harumph" is noted and enjoyed!

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks a lot, yeah it's all scripted, glad you think it works though!

[@insoft_uk]

Yes games Amiga, an all round machine especially MIDI and other areas Atari STe, both we’re great and for games not really much between them I for one much prefer chip sounds over samples even tho the STe had the ability for sample sounds and also had a blitter chip and hardware scrolling it’s a pity STe wasn’t released earlier

[@leeh3568]

I'm guessing its like when speccy beats C64 When using only cpu and not using sprite chips doing 3d and isometric.

[@Sharopolis]

Yep!

[@Booruvcheek]

Rendering 3D in software requires every ounce of brute force the machine could muster

[@AndyHewco]

I've always thought that the C64 / Spectrum comparison carried over very well to the Amiga / ST. Both had their strengths and some unique games came out on both that stood out amongst the ports.

[@noop9k]

Speccy can fill its screen faster than the ST

[@noop9k]

Andy H With Spectrum the difference is more pronoinced. Z80 just much more powerful at rendering if C64 can’t rely on its hardware

[@sheppo]

Basically any 3D game was better on the st. Stunt car racer, no second prize, both spring to mind. Typically the graphics and sound might be a bit better on the Amiga but the st would run 3D games smoother.

[@madcommodore]

I wouldn't say DotC on ST/PC/64 was better than Amiga 1000/CDTV release as such, depends how much effort you want to put into games. Not everybody was ready for a strategy game on a computer with quad 28khz DACs, 4096 colours and the best blitter implementation ever seen on any computer in 1986 ;) It's better to think of it as different rather than better IMO.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The CDTV version is seen as the definitive version, even the NES version had extra content, so the ST version isn't anything that special in that regard.

[@madcommodore]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 CDTV port has the same simplistic game engine as floppy A1000 early release doesn't it, ST/c64 is much more challenging and can not be beaten in 10 mins.

[@ncf1]

Woah... 1943 on the ST is just as I wish it had of been on the Amiga... unforgiveable the slowness of the AMiga version.. so many tears shed back then... sniffs... so many tears.

[@dlfrsilver]

1943 was pure shit and designed around the ST limitation, and ported without any care on the Amiga. Sharing the same CPU doesn't make it right.

[@reneberthold334]

You say that in 1943 is no parallaxscrolling of the clouds on the Amiga version... then there are clouds that moves... on the Amiga too

[@intel386DX]

Yea, he did not noticed this

[@KuraIthys]

They move in sync with the rest of the background. Parallax is when different parts of the background move by at different speeds...

[@dan_loup]

Only half of 3D drawing is the actual drawing. The rest is a metric ton of multiply operations. So when the game is heavier on the drawing part, Amiga wins, when its the multiplies, ST wins.

[@Henrik_Holst]

I would actually be surprised if the 3d games shown in this video used the line drawing functionality of the blitter at all. Most likely is that they use the same cpu renderer as the ST original and thus are victims to the lower cpu frequency and memory bandwidth of the Amiga 500.

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

Don't overestimate the speed of the Amiga's blitter. Once you have a 030 or higher CPU, drawing vector graphics with the CPU is superior.

[@roygalaasen]

Henrik Holst yes, I agree with you there. I don’t remember anyone using the blitter for line drawing at all.

[@daishi5571]

Line drawing isn't the issue, math is the issue. Even if you drew the line with the blitter it wouldn't make the math involved in the 3D vector calculation any faster. What I would like to see is a direct MHz comparison with either an 68020 or 030.

[@litjellyfish]

Findecanor yes but this video is talking about vanilla 6800 of Atari st / Amiga OCS

[@MoreUniqueThanMost]

Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker.

[@Edgel-in6bs]

Excellent video as ever, but Addams family? Amiga smoothly scrolls, st uses horrid Jerky push scrolling!

[@stephenhall2980]

The Adams family is a surprise, the amiga should have had parallax backdrounds with it's dual playfeild hardware scrolling. Unforgiveable...

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

With Dual Playfield, the palette would have had to be dropped from 16 to 8 colours on OCS/ECS Amigas. Notice how choppy the horizontal scrolling is on the ST: one tile at a time. Maybe they could have copied that, but I suppose they had prioritised smooth scrolling.

[@TonimanGalvez]

@findecanor Dual Play Field got 8 colours on background and 7 colours+transparent on foreground. But if you use HW sprites wisely, you may have 16 colours foreground and another 16 colours background. Take a look to Risky Woods for example.

[@litjellyfish]

Toni Galvez yes but often with compromises in gameplay. Adams familyn seems a bit to sprite dynamic to use hardware sprites even with a good multiplexer routine.

[@dlfrsilver]

@@litjellyfish we know the story about this : the coders were unable to program correctly the background playfield, hence they removed it.

[@beezle1976]

@@TonimanGalvez It's not that simple. Multiplexing sprites is limited and has restrictions. Notice how in Risky Woods its the same 64 pixel wide pattern repeated over and over? That isnt by choice, its a hardware restriction. You can't use an entire layer of different graphics using sprites.

[@wishusknight3009]

Equipping the Amiga with Zorro Ram did help offset its processing power quite a bit. It would then take an advantage in bandwidth and latency over the ST which was perhaps enough to overcome its lower clock. But unfortunatly there were few 500 owners who ever did this. And opted for the 512k trapdoor expansion which was basically ranger ram along side chip ram. And still subject to the high latency of fat angus.

[@madgeordierob7890]

Graphically there's not much between them but I maintain that the music was nicer on the ST on a LOT of games. For example, Rick Dangerous and Thunderbirds, both of them have nice clean intro themes versus the awful raspy synth of the Amiga.

[@edstar83]

You w0t mate? kzbin.info/www/bejne/hqe2l6R4f85jqdU

[@loganjorgensen]

I'm not even a big ST fan(No hardware sprites? :P) but that counts, DOTC performing that well without the graphics hardware of the Amiga is surely a programming triumph on the ST. With 1943 I think that shows just like DOTC on Amiga that you can get really sloppy when the hardware can compensate for slack. There's always cases where certain software rendering on one platform doesn't work well on another, makes me think of Doom on SS where it could have run faster with polygons but Carmack insisted on the original sectors which it wasn't good at.

[@kasperchristensen8416]

Even back in the day I always felt like the background graphics were missing when I played The Addams Family on my Amiga. Seems like it was in fact the case.

[@DJ_Dopamine]

I agree. I can still remember talking about it at school! I was lucky enough to have an ST and Amiga 500, so I compared the 2 games. We were all shocked to see the black backgrounds and therefore lack of parallax!

[@fourthhorseman4531]

I really miss those 16 bit days.

[@blakespot]

Interesting to note that there is an Apple IIgs version of Defender of the Crown that has music notably better than the ST version and does contain the portions of the game absent on the Amiga. The IIgs has a 4096 color palette but is limited to 16-colors onscreen at once. I am not sure whether the IIgs version got fresh conversions of the Amiga's 32-color graphics scenes or if it used the ST's already-converted 16-color scenes. If it did, then it would likely have slightly better graphics than the ST version due to the larger palette over the ST's 512-colors. However, the IIgs runs a 2.8MHz 65C816 which is slower than the 8MHz 68000 in the ST, so... Here's the ST version: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jl6UZpp6dtWem5I

[@daishi5571]

Better music because better sound chip (ST chip was not good) and the processor while sounding way slower (2.8 vs 8) was in fact more efficient with command execution (CPU wasn't as flexible) so was actually closer performance wise than the number appears.

[@blackcathardware6238]

Comment from an ST owner. Please consider one aspect: if the design studio had to program two versions for Amiga and ST they might made the decision to program the ST version and then use this code mostly for the Amiga, too. Without integrating the Amiga's chipset features into the code. Time-to-market probably made a decision here.

[@AndyHewco]

Dungeon Master - developed for the ST and ported to the Amiga much later, the Amiga version suffered from needing double the RAM, but otherwise was a respectable port of a great game in the end. You could blame that on the developer, but of course the point here is that what was produced in these cases was better for one reason or another on the ST. I had both systems, and agree the Amiga had the better hardware, but I do love the ST just as much, it's GEM desktop and uncomplicated memory were a delight to program on and perhaps the biggest thing, Oids never made it over to the Amiga. ;)

[@pianoman1379]

Andy With the graphics and memory available today, I wish someone would bring out a version of Dungeon Master with proper animated monsters chasing you just like in Tomb Raider in that secret valley where the dinosaur comes after you - believe me, I was really running - scary- now can you imagine exploring the dungeons as in old DM on Atari ST and the monsters coming at you?

[@stimorolication9480]

Now I never programmed on the ST beyond STOS, but after getting an Amiga I found the Gem desktop laughably limited. The Amiga Workbench and its true multitasking OS seemed at least a whole generation ahead. With an hdd and the OS 3.x improvements like Arexx etc. Amiga was my main computer until Windows 95/98 came out. Amiga hardware was brilliant when it came out, but the true genious was in the OS imo.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@stimorolication9480 well, this was not very true in the time of late 80s, Amiga had very slow and unusable desktop. And it was ugly as hell... Things changed after A3000 and A1200 came with the Workbench 2.0 and 3.1 and HDD was a must. Atari ST had much better to use more clean and professional GEM that was light years faster to operate then Workbench, especially if you had just a floppy drive and no HDD. The overhyped multitasking was of a no use until Amiga moved up from x68000 CPU, there was a reason Atari didnt implement it, the hardware was to slow, zero use except the demo of lines, clock etc. Great achievement.... Today we have access to all hardware upgrades with more/max RAM, faster Turbo cards and cheap and fast HDD/CF solutions, so yes today Amigas Workbench looks nice. But keep in mind that even ATARI world has same possibilities, there is multiTOS, MagiC and MiNT with various alternative desktops surpassing visuals of Workbench... But as I said, back then Amiga was good for games only, workbench was slow, ugly, useless for any professional work...

[@Xenon0000000000001]

@@stimorolication9480 The ST had lots of replacement desktops for GEM (like Neodesk) with added features, and software accelerators to speed up the interface. Later on, there were replacement operating systems like MagiC (a.k.a. Mag!X), which had full multitasking and great performance (while still running the same GEM apps). You could also run a Unix OS that could still run GEM apps called MiNT, but that really needed a beefier TT or Falcon. I used an STE with an upgrade to 4MB of RAM (using simple plug-in SIMMs), a HDD (actually, two drives), running Mag!X 2.0 as my main machine until I had to face the music and jump to PC. I much prefered it for proper work to my parents PC running Windows 3.1, and my Amiga owning friends would sometimes come around to do DTP type work on it.

[@MartinJSUK]

Amiga Dungeon Master has better graphics and sound, but it was 18 months later and needed twice the memory. Still, upgrading memory was much easier on the Amiga than the ST. Amiga not getting Oids was a pity though, probably the best ST-but-not-Amiga game.

[@tommybahama9350]

Great channel! You make gaming history fun - keep it up!!!

[@eddietorres1059]

It was the bloody bitplanes graphics which made this much more complex and the st had bitmap graphics.

[@leeannewillson7342]

WOW particale effects on Virus was the only thing i seen better in the video IMO , and didnt care to much for missing backgrounds in Adams family it was still an enjoyable game

[@vandammesque]

The backgrounds were probably dropped in favour of smooth scrolling, rather than the ST's block scrolling.

[@bangerbangerbro]

9:00 just 8 MHz, not 8 MHz quicker.

[@RETROCENGO]

The Amiga clearly won the battle back then, and still have a huge crowd today, collectors that still use and love there Amigas. The few games mentioned in this video is just bad/lazy programming by the developers, nothing about the real hardware. Yes im a huge Amiga-fan😁

[@ethanwilliams285]

Castlegrad the Atari ST was just a rushed out version of the Amiga hardware that was made cheaply and sold cheaply. It was a petty way for Jack Tremmel to get revenge on Commodore. Also, there's no way the Atari ST could be considered a micro.

[@Chordonblue]

So I started out as an Atari ST owner, but when the A500 finally came out, I went with the Amiga. One thing that was immediately apparent to me was that megahertz matters. I found that on the Amiga you had better color gradient, but when it came to 3D games, ST was king. Take an honest look at something like Captain Blood or Starglider. Sure, the colors on the Amiga were more varied, but the frame rate was certainly much snappier on the ST. When I finally got a 68020 hardware accelerator, that really helped the frame rate on games like FA/18 Interceptor. And if you've ever seen Elite II on either platform, it was a wonder to behold on A1200. There, you not only had more acceleration, but the graphics were much faster on that machine.

[@ethanwilliams285]

Castlegrad you got me 😉.

[@AmstradExin]

Hunter on the Atari still ran faster than on the Amiga, and the Amiga used the Blitter in that game for HW Accelleration. You can see the accelleration missing on older OCS with missing long-blits.

[@33ordie]

The Amiga won over the ST since day 1 over the graphics and sound capabilities for sure. Yet in terms of sales, it took the Amiga 500 and then for Atari to forget to launch the STE until late 1989 for sales of the Amiga to catch up and basically match and then surpass ST sales. The real culprit was again Atari to fail to properly launch the Falcon030 and then to completely forget about the Falcon040 and focus on the failed Jaguar... Pitty, silly Tramiel gang at it's best. They were clueless, a bit like when they Released the C64m they probably thought it was a failed system, until they quit Commodore and bought Atari, then to be surpassed by the C64 then as it had nicer overall graphics and sounds for many games on C64 than Atari 8bit, and more importantly more and better games genrally speaking from 1986 or so and onwards. Hey that was a bit OT, but I absolutely adore my Commodore, and also I really like my Atari's. Both companies had good systems.

[@paulstevens9409]

I didnt realise the ST had a better CPU and the other thing you mentioned, cool

[@discoHR]

You missed Vroom!

[@illegalquantity]

Vroom is fast and smooth on A500. Its just perfect.

[@mwaawm]

Indeed Vroom looks and sounds better on ST. The pseudo sequel F1 was also quicker on the ST.

[@SpiffyBiscuits5]

The scrolling on Addams family ST version is super choppy compared to Amiga. Nice vid though.

[@roartjrhom4932]

I was just about to say that! :-D So 100% agree!

[@BilisNegra]

Maybe the backgrounds were eliminated from the Amiga version to avoid just that?

[@roartjrhom4932]

@@BilisNegra no. If you look at Lionheart on the Amiga or Shadow of the beast you will see that the Amiga could handle many layers of parallax scrolling. 😊

[@roartjrhom4932]

@@BilisNegra yes in addition to smooth scrolling of course! :-D

[@infesticon]

@@roartjrhom4932 Well... Both Shadow of the beast was doing all kinds of wierd sprite tricks to make the game work. Lionheart was using a wierd dual playfield mode that hardly any one did.. Also Lionheart did slow down if you had more than one bad guy on screen.. Seriously the levels are designed that you rarely see more than one bad guy at a time. Levels that had more going on (the insect cave, the abonded city, the dragon flight) didn't have any parallax scrolling.

[@jasper-byrne]

captain blood?

[@jrherita]

ST should have advantages in some 3D stuff. 10% faster cpu and 16 colors instead of 32 means faster for some operations

[@craigcharlesworth1538]

I think most of the time if a game came out better on the ST it was early in the 16-bit era when the ST was lead format and the Amiga got poorly optimised ports of ST games. Once the Amiga's install base was large enough that developers were willing to take the time to properly optimise games for it, it pulled away from the ST pretty quickly and never looked back.

[@daishi5571]

@Requiem4aDr3Am As I put in other replies it was actually closer to $300 difference. Atari didn't suck they were arguably better than the PC and Mac just not quite an Amiga.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@daishi5571 Most of the time was ST actually better then Amiga, A1000 was a developer limiting joke when compared to ST, A500 was better for games then ST, but this was just a short 2 year leadership. The STE was again better then Amiga 500 in most instances, the thing is that Commodore already pumped up a lot of money into game studios so they do develop for Amiga so the studios didnt implement STE improvements... And in fact most late games ran better on ST, since the trend was moving away from sprite 2d games to vector 3d games, which was ST faster at.

[@Mandrax1138]

I used to love Carrier Command. I first played it on the ZX Spectrum, and then again on the Amiga. I would have liked to see a comparison with the ST version, as well as F/A-18 Interceptor.

[@blakespot]

I don't think F/A-18 Interceptor was ported to the ST...was it?

[@Mandrax1138]

@@blakespot No idea, I was just throwing it out there.

[@MIKIEC71]

starglider 2 ran faster on the ST. I don't think it was that there was an ST conspiracy, but, particularly in the early days, a lot of Amiga games were ST ports with mainly just improved sound. I imagine that there would have been a lot of extra work required to utilise the Amiga's dedicated hardware once the game was ported over from the ST, so it wasn't worth the hassle when a slightly slower frame rate would have been 'good enough'. For disclosure, I had an Amiga

[@jfs2761]

I also prefer Wrath of the demon , Last duel and Barbarian from palace on the Atari ST.

[@gamingtonight1526]

I preferred my ST, but then I was into music, and ANYONE interested in music got the ST, just like graphics people got the Amiga. But, in any event, I was into adventure, simulation, roleplaying and strategy, And for all those genres it's the gameplay/story that counts.

[@buddyrevell4329]

I had virus for the Amiga. Excellent, albeit difficult game to play. The ST may have the edge here. Kudos for a very original game though!

[@10p6]

The Amiga can have some amazing graphics and sound, but when it comes to 3D it's fancy hardware becomes a bottleneck, so the ST's faster CPU and streamlined hardware always wins out.

[@MajoradeMayhem]

Oh no, you have awoken my primal genetic memory with that Virus footage. That game was impossible. I still have no idea. None at all.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

You've also got to take into account software companies like Probe, Tiertex, Imagitec Design etc got contracts for being the cheapest, being able to juggle multiple Conversions etc. Coders, artists etc often weren't paid any more to code specifically for the Amiga hardware, than they were to port ST code and since it took longer to code for the Amiga, it didn't make sense for them to stretch projects out.

[@aaronmicalowe]

10:35 The first version of this I saw was on the Archimedes and looked pretty much identical to the footage in this video.

[@daishi5571]

Archimedes version had more colour & faster frame rate. I think the game got tweaked a little on the ST/Amiga but the engine was better on the Arc. Not a big surprise as the Arc had the performance advantage when it came to raw computing power but was a pain to program for.

[@noop9k]

Daishi5571 ARM is a beautiful and way more powerful CPU. But Archimedes was expensive.

[@OdeeOz]

_Still have _*_both,_*_ and they work just fine._

[@Over9000GOATS]

Here in Canada I didn't know anyone that had a personal computer in 1989 other than PC compatible, everyone had a NES or a Sega Genesis, except that one British kid who wanted to trade me that Sisters game for Super Mario Bros but would play on disk for I guess what he must have had was a commodore 64 and piles of 5 1/4 disks

[@blatherskite3009]

Well, this'll be a short video, snark snark ;) Apologies... I'm a veteran of the Amiga/ST wars :) OK, so the ST had a slightly higher CPU clock, built-in MIDI port, and the OS was arguably more stable than the Amiga. The ST's "Guru" was less prone to Meditating, if you will. I think that's literally it for the ST's advantages, isn't it? So (haven't watched the video yet) I predict the ST's wins have got to be: serious MIDI music applications, 3D games (because there was no 3D hardware in either machine, so such games relied entirely on raw CPU speed to pump out the frames), and of course any lazy-ass multi-format game where the ST was the lead format and the code was ported over to the Amiga without making any use of the Amiga's additional chipset for handling 2D graphics in hardware. I guess, back then, Amiga vs ST was a bit like PC vs Mac today. The ST was the choice of serious musicians and the like, people who valued stability over pizzazz, but the Amiga was absolutely the gamer's choice. EDIT: Ah, OK, this was all about some specific games. Fair enough and, yep, mostly down to that 1MHz CPU speed advantage. 1MHz extra on your CPU clock is pretty much meaningless these days, but back then when machines only had 7 or 8 MHz to be playing with, it represented a hefty ~12% speed advantage! :) 6:30 Are we just going to ignore the fact that the ST version has horrible half-screen push-scroll, like some 8-bit computer game, while the Amiga version has constant smooth scrolling, more like a 16-bit console game? If the price of that proper scrolling was losing a static backdrop image then Ocean made the right call, IMHO :) EDIT EDIT: Apologies, I'm putting spaces between paragraphs but YT is stripping them out. The "solid wall of text" format really isn't intentional... Gah! :)

[@edstar83]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ7bk2icoLqLnrM

[@fryke]

Not by a long shot is your first paragraph "it". Connect an SM124 display to an Atari ST and actually work on text or DTP apps or play the game Bolo, and you'll wonder "So, the Amiga is only for games, then?" And the answer is: Yes. (I had a 1040 STf for a few years and later on an Amiga 2000. I soon bought a Chameleon ST emulator for it and missed the SM124 display a lot when working with the much better productivity apps on it.)

[@mr.painkiller4908]

Even if I still think that the Amiga was the better gaming-machine.. In terms of looks the ST was my favourite. Still looks fine today. Such a nice design!

[@nicholasstones1104]

To me even though some games may have been slower or had slightly different graphics, it was the over all experience including sound as well. So the Amiga versions were better to me as an experience.

[@wallacelang1374]

I wanted to get an Atari ST computer system back in the 1980s for myself, but the local computer stores didn't have in stock nor would willingly order an Atari ST computer system. I wanted to have the game of "Defender Of The Crown" for the Atari ST computer system. I did however get "Defender Of The Crown" for the Nintendo NES which is really broken down from its original complexities.

[@ldisc66]

As an Amiga fanboi, I'm okay with this. 👍

[@gamingtonight1526]

We're older and wiser, right? :)

[@AmstradExin]

I had Hard Drivin' on the Mega STE. In 16Mhz it didn't run bad, but ran alot better on my Vortex 386sx16 card in the same machine. :D

[@daishi5571]

Taking a general look at the Vortex board the main reason for the speed increase was the 387 math coprocessor. I would say without that the 386 would in fact be slower. Also the screen and the rest of the IO is handed off to the 68000 to deal with, leaving the 386 relatively hands off on system upkeep. Quite a nice setup for the 386, it's like it has a an Mega STE as a coprocessor.

[@drzeissler]

More of that please!

[@Sharopolis]

I'm working on it!

[@TechRyze]

If it's ported directly from ST with no hardware optimisation, it'll run more slowly - like 1943 does.