Amiga vs Atari ST

Pick one! (Or two or three)

  • Total voters
    29
Maturin said:
This is just another nostalgia thread again.
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No. Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, ain’t what it used to be.
Which made it pretty complete. Nothing was what it used to be — not even nostalgia.
-- Peter De Vries (in his "The Tents of Wickedness" novel) [one of my favorite authors]
 
Maybe the IBM PS/2. I grew up on IBM's, but not sure if that's the model I used at home. By the mid 90's, around the time of the Pentium, the brand went away for home PC's. I wondered where it went. The company was still successful, just in other computer markets it seemed.

Used a Zenith PC too. Over this time, from the 80's and early 90's on MsDOS, played Joust, Joe the Janitor, Mickey's Space Adventure, Flight Simulator 1.0, Summer Olympics, Q-bert, Asteroids, Treasure Island, Bouncing Babies, Paratrooper, Striker, Sopwith. There was also Kids on Keys, which was a typing program. Mickey's Space Adventure used an external speech synthesis peripheral, which was hardly coherent. Yet, over a decade later, this game could be played with any sound card with much better sound. My parents used Mavis Bacon for typing, Star Office, Quicken Books and CAD programs. We had OS/2 sitting on the shelf, and don't think we were able to figure out why to use it. Looking back at dot matrix printers, they seem primitive.

I also had a hand-me down TI-994A, which I did basic Basic on. It was nifty, but between these two, the IBM. On cartridge, played: Munch Man, Car Wars, TI Invaders, Parsec. Later played a few games on it using a cassette player. I barely remember: Jump the Moon.

At school, also played on a TI-994A that a teacher had. The computer room had Apple computers, where we rarely got to play Number Munchers and Oregon's Quest.

For nostalgic purposes, I've looked at what games Atari ST had, and wondered about Commodore and Amiga.

I wish to emulate this era on an SBC (Raspberry Pi).
 
I used Amiga for years. But since my last A1200 with Blizzard 1240 died, i only use Emulation. WinUAE on my Laptop, Later FS-UAE on Linux and now FreeBSD. But i gave up FS-UAE and use now Amiberry on my FreeBSD PC. With the recent AmigaOS 3.2.3.
 
covacat said:
domestic (romanian) computer were by far the shittier both industrial design and reliability / build quality
looks like a terminal you'd put in a high security prison or something
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:oops: If anybody had seen you owned such ...'a brown thing' as your computer as a west-pupil before 1989 chances had been good you might got bought a 'real computer' just for having pity on you. In theory.
Reality: Eastern computers were almost unknown, and practically unavailable in the west.

As far as I heard you could have bought the one or the other Robotron model in an Intershop (maybe others from other countries, too. I cannot say. I've never been in the GDR.) But for that you had to travel into the GDR (for the younger ones: Not a casual shopping trip, because of the fence/wall), and they cost at least twice as a comparable western computer.
Plus in west germany were lots of badmouthing rumours about eastern products. In this case some told us kids eastern computers were not in english (BASIC), but in russian, and with cyrillic keyboards. If there even had the slightest interest in computers 'from over there', at the latest it was finally killed by that lie.
So I neither knew nor heard of anybody owned an eastern machine, until 1990 I met my first people from the former GDR. Many (most?) quickly bought western hardware.
And I also heard, there was no so much software available (especially games.) Many, so I was told later, were happy when they got hardcopies of western SW they then typed into their Robotrons.

Since the 1980s were the time when the very first computers were bought by private, computer interested people, many (most?) by and for kids. So many chose the model not primarily about the kind of hardware, and available software, but simply the price was crucial. Thinking about that now, I get to the conspiracy theory, prices for east computers had had to be higher than west machines. Otherwise maybe we had been using way more eastern computers, if not in the majority. :-/
 
SirDice said:
I thought the project died
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Besides emulators the Amiga community still seems to be small but actually alive.
When you dig the net a bit for Amiga you will find a lot of stuff. There still are people not only actually using the original hardware, but there really is still software written for, and ported to Amigas - the Amiga is not dead at all!
 
Maturin said:
Besides emulators the Amiga community still seems to be small but actually alive.
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Frode, the one and only developer of FS-UAE, went AWOL for a few years. I specifically meant the FS-UAE project.

Maturin said:
There already people not only actually using the original hardware, but there really is still software written for, and ported to Amigas - the Amiga is not dead at all!
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Aminet is still around with new uploads. The Amiga community itself is still very much alive and kicking. There's even some new hardware being developed, like accelerator cards and RTG graphics for the big box Amigas.
 
Maturin said:
Thinking about that now, I get to the conspiracy theory, prices for east computers had had to be higher than west machines. Otherwise maybe we had been using way more eastern computers, if not in the majority. :-/
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Well, not exactly, it was way more complicated than that. For example, in ex-Yugoslavia double-entry accounting was not only the norm, but it was also required by law, because one couldn't count workers salaries as expenses in Socialist society 🤦‍♂️

Or, we had in the shops legally available Sharp MZ-700, Oric Atmos (sold as Nova 64 here), few Apple clones, but they were ridiculously expensive because whole trading and manufacturing infrastructure was heavily bloated and utterly inefficient. It was cheaper to buy Amstrad PC 1512/1640 with a color monitor in München and smuggle it in than to buy MZ-700 in the local shop.

We had some great engineers, but their work was constrained by Party-only management.
 
here the eastern block/domestic clones were officially sold only to institutions (education/companies/etc). they were hugely expensive even considering the black market currency rates (which were an order of magnitude higher than the official ones). at the very end they were sold to general public with a sort of fair price but they were obsolete by then.
 
and all these computers are probably 100 times slower than a $5 pi zero..... while drawing 10x of the power
thats for the ~8mhz versions; the amiga 4000 is probably only 10-15x slower than a pi zero
the original pi zero is probably the slowest computer (that can run a general purpose os) you can (maybe) buy right now as new
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
And the 4000T with its '060 is even faster than the 4000/040. (A small amount of 4000Ts were released with an '040, but the 040 models are so extremely rare they basically don't exist.)
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Please, allow me to repeat what I said, for all Amiga/Atari enthusiasts (that are still alive 😈). IMHO the best solution today is:
vmisev said:
Funny that no one mentioned Apollo Computer V4 Standalone, where one can choose ROM and OS and have Amiga or Atari (or even 68K Mac) with the same, modern and quite advanced hardware.

They are the first to bring the end to this eternal Atari vs Amiga war 😉
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The closest I ever got was Atari 800 and drives I got from Dad.

I did write a port of Xmodem in 6502 ASM. Most everything else was Atari basic.
 
I went from BASIC on Ti99 or something and VIC20 to my own VC64, quickly moving to 6502 assembler. Then came an affordable A500 with 68000 and C - awesome times. I loved the down to the metal control of languages, learning about multithreading and MMUs later on and still being efficient with C++ down to the bits and bytes today - if so desired.
Can't say much on AtariST, a friend had such a machine but he was no programmer. So less co-chips, more flat than A500, but exposing a MIDI interface for like musicians.
Both machines exposing all hardware/software openly, inviting everybody to hack along. Manuals and specs were plenty. This is something surely missing on "today's" "playstations" and I never cared about these - but then we have MAME, so why bother :)
 
jaubits said:
I went from BASIC on Ti99 or something and VIC20 to my own VC64, quickly moving to 6502 assembler. Then came an affordable A500 with 68000 and C - awesome times. I loved the down to the metal control of languages, learning about multithreading and MMUs later on and still being efficient with C++ down to the bits and bytes today - if so desired.
Can't say much on AtariST, a friend had such a machine but he was no programmer. So less co-chips, more flat than A500, but exposing a MIDI interface for like musicians.
Both machines exposing all hardware/software openly, inviting everybody to hack along. Manuals and specs were plenty. This is something surely missing on "today's" "playstations" and I never cared about these - but then we have MAME, so why bother :)
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I did very little programming on my Atari ST, and far from low-level or demos, all of C I wrote (and I was just starting to learn about C) were routines to prepare text from various word processors coming from PC and ST (and using various encodings for Serbian chars) for Calamus DTP program. Nothing that sed or awk couldn’t do much better and faster, but IDK about them back then 🤦‍♂️
 
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