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Originally Posted by mcgeezer
You're comparing Apples with Oranges.
At the time the ST was the biggest rival to the Amiga as lots of games were coded on the ST first because it was more established as a games machine given it had the luxury of more time on the shelves.
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Biggest rival ? I would say that the ST was simply the 1st 16 bits machine, and the publishers had to get their grip on it.
Publishers had to port their games on Amiga because they were not selling enough copies on Atari ST. they needed to make more bucks by doing Amiga versions as well.
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When the Amiga got traction software houses just did the ports of ST games cos they could get them out of the way in a matter of weeks, in reality all they had to deal with was the bitplane, sound, input and floppy differences - everything else was pretty much the same. The slightly faster CPU in the ST was probably negligible and perhaps is the reason that the odd port is more shit on the Amiga than it was on the ST.
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The CPU is slightly faster on the ST because the Atari Engineers had a nasty surprise on the prototype they were testing before the ST went mass builded in factory : The quartz they choose at first had the same speed as the one used on the Amiga. Unfortunately, the ST to the contrary of the Amiga had no hardware acceleration, and the prototype was too slow, too slow to the point that it could not be sold. They changed the quartz initially used for a 8mhz one, so that the ST speed could be sufficient to be used. Then they gave green light for mass production of the ST.
This is why the CPU clock speed between both machines is bullshit. It's faster on the ST because the machine was at first way way too slow. The Amiga is the opposite, the machine had to be slowed down so that the CPU gets synchronised with the chipset.
And so far, since you're talking about ports on the Amiga, this was simple : the coders made the Amiga replicates with its chipset what the ST could do with its CPU alone. the result could just be weak in the end. The Amiga has its CPU and its chipset.