What was better for 'serious' tasks, Amiga or ST?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by desiv

Yep, and that's why the ST was so successful in government and corporate areas!!!

It wasn't, but neither was the Amiga. The schools I went to in the 90s had both STs and Amigas, for different purposes. The STs were used for MIDIs and CAD and the Amigas were used for information displays. I think there might have been some DTV usage of Amiga 2000s before my time, too.

But whilst the Atari ST with Calamus and a cheap laser printer could be sold as a poor man's Macintosh DTP station, the Amiga didn't have much of a chance in that niche. And it was all down to the screen display, and possibly the software, though the latter was mostly a result of the combination of the screen + printer offer of Atari.

One must also keep in mind that Atari was a clown company to an even greater extent than Commodore, so they had to fight an even steeper uphill battle to sell to government, schools or enterprises than Commodore. But things would have been much easier for Commodore if they had cheap highres screens which were legal for professional use, or had localised Workbench (which wasn't available until it was too late to even try).

Yes, the ST had it's HIRES, but you needed two monitors if you wanted to take advantage of that and regular ST programs.

Definitely not. All regular ST programs worked on mono monitors, and many even assumed or required one. You needed a colour screen (or TV) for games, but if that wasn't your interest or line of work, who cared?

I also wouldn't be surprised if the slow and clunky Megafiles were cheaper than Amiga hard drives.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

As said above, no one using the amiga for pro use bought the family configuration.

People doing graphics or DTP on Amiga were using appropriate multisync monitors (no need for flicker fixer).

How so? A multisync monitors flickers just as much as a 1084.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by desiv

But that makes me think of something where the ST did seriously beat the Amiga for serious tasks, and that is disk format compatibility!
The ability to read/write PC formatted disks out of the box was, IMHO, a big plus in that area...
Yes, the Amiga eventually got that, but I really don't see why they didn't do that out of the box too (I am guessing licensing fees... Cheap Commodore! ;-).

How would you insert a 3,5 inch disk from the Amiga into a PC?

Even Workbench 1.3 had a PC transfer program included, but it required an A1020 5,25 inch floppy drive since all PCs used 5,25 inch floppies.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by idrougge

How would you insert a 3,5 inch disk from the Amiga into a PC?

You slide it in until it clicks. ;-)

As long as I used a program on the Amiga to make sure it was a PC formatted disk (which I did MessyDOS I believe it was called, or something like that (Nope, Disk2Disk or DOS2DOS!); there were others), it worked great.
I just wish Commodore had used that format by default, the way the ST did.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by desiv

If that was required, I probably would have looked into something like a High Persistence monitor, like the A2024, that supposedly decreased the visible effect of flicker... Or so the reviews said. ;-)

You are confusing the A2024 with the 2080.

The 2080 was the high-persistence phosphor monitor. It has a blueish display. Interlace flicker is still very noticeable, and mouse cursor movements leave spooky trails. It is better than the 1084 if you must work in interlace, but it is miles away from a flicker-free monitor.

The A2024 was a very special monitor which had a built-in "graphics card" that received four Amiga screens in succession in order to build a 1280×1024 display. That meant that the screen refresh rate slowed down to an abysmal 12,5 Hz and it certainly wasn't cheap.

Any solution to get a stable high resolution display on the Amiga before RTG cards involved extra investments and compromises. The 2080 looked awful and was still flickery, the 2024 was slow and flicker fixers had artefacts when moving the mouse pointer (or other objects) around.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You didn't need an 'expensive' monitor, but a mono VGA monitor wasn't what most Amiga users would want.

A 'serious' user was quite prepared to pay for a better monitor though. By 1988 you could plug a flicker fixer into your A2000 and use a VGA monitor for everything. Several of my friends did that. My A3000 came with an expensive multisync monitor that was largely wasted because everything went through the flicker fixer (another peculiar choice by Commodore that nobody talks about!).

This is an ahistorical view of things. VGA is 31,5 kHz at 60 Hz. You can't trust a cheap VGA monitor (at least before SVGA and the PC definition of "multisync") to handle 50 Hz refresh rates in a graceful way.
The flicker fixed output of the Amiga wasn't within VGA specs, especially not on PAL machines, so you couldn't just pick any off-the-shelf VGA monitor and expect it to work when the A3000 debuted.

One must also keep in mind that the Atari ST buyer didn't have to "invest" in a monitor; the SM124 was cheaper than the colour SC1224.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This was important because the Amiga market was too small for developers to target only high-end machines with productivity apps.

If the Amiga market was too small, what was the ST market?

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The truth is, while the Amiga was perceived as not being suited to 'serious' use, in reality it got used for it lot more than is generally realized. One of the most popular addons I sold to A500 users was a printer. The bundled Kindwords got a lot of flack for being slow and awkward, but many people did use it to write letters etc. Magazines like Amiga Format and Amiga World were full of articles showing how to do 'serious' stuff even on 'low-end' Amigas, and adverts were full of 'serious' software and hardware.

ST magazines were stuffed with tips how to work with the bundled 1st Word, which was laughable in every respect to Amiga users. That doesn't mean that 1st Word was entirely useless, or that Kindwords was good. It just means that you make do with what you have. But they certainly couldn't hold a candle to MacWrite II or even proper word processors on the ST or Amiga.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You are confusing the A2024 with the 2080.
The 2080 was the high-persistence phosphor monitor. It has a blueish display. Interlace flicker is still very noticeable, and mouse cursor movements leave spooky trails. It is better than the 1084 if you must work in interlace, but it is miles away from a flicker-free monitor.

Yep, got them flipped.
I saw some reviews of the 2080 and they said it was better. But didn't totally get rid of flicker.
One of the reviews also mentioned lighting making a difference...

As I said originally, it's not flicker free. Just better... ;-)

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yeah, but the Mac got there first with the LaserWriter. This more than anything else is what put the Mac 'on the map'. The combo was expensive, but you could produce professional quality output suitable for commercial printing. Later on the Amiga could do it too of course (just needed the right software), but by that time the Mac had 'brand recognition' on its side.

Whilst the Amiga could do it on paper, you quickly learn to recognise Amiga output because the text rendering of ProPage or PPM is markedly inferior to that from Quark Xpress or even PageMaker. Or, if you so like, Calamus on the ST.

It's not just brand recognition. Once you have MIDI ports, you have Cubase. Once you have the LaserWriter, you have Quark. Once you have the A2000 video port, you have VideoToaster.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

THIS was the *only* thing Apple was not happy with when I did a demo for Scully and the other execs and engineers at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino in 1994.

What was your purpose in doing that demo?

[JimDrew]

I was trying to get Apple to license the ROMs to Commodore. This was a project that Commodore and I were working on to get A4000's to be a standard in the film industry. We were already selling a record number of EMPLANT boards to film makers who used post production studios, who were running Avid Video systems. There were a lot of movies back in the early/mid 90's that were edited on an Amiga running EMPLANT setups. Typically these post production studios were rented for thousands of dollars a day ($10K was not uncommon) and when people learned that they could purchase an A4000, EMPLANT board, Mac ROMs, and system software for less than 1/2 the cost of a typical single day fee they all jumped at the chance.

My goal with my meeting with Apple was two fold - to prevent any type of legal action against us, and also to see if we could really license the ROMs. Commodore wanted to create video production packages where the Toaster and EMPLANT could be bundled.

Apple declined to license the ROMs, and ordered all of their service centers world-wide to no longer sell ROMs to the public. They admitted that there was nothing that they could do to stop what we were doing, and their main concern really was tarnishing Apple's brand by having something that was buggy or slow. Clearly, running ALL Mac software, and faster than their own native machines could run it, proved this to be a non-issue.

There was an EMPLANT bundle made through Commodore and Creative Computers. People had to find their own ROMs, and it was soon discovered that the ROMs from the older Mac II machines were cheap (because they were many years old and slow by that point), so those machines were purchased by video studios (like Amblin Entertainment, who I worked with personally) so they could have legal setups.

[JimDrew]

On the subject of Quark Express - I designed all of our full page/full color ads for Amiga World magazine using EMPLANT's Mac emulation and Quark Express. I shipped Mac formatted Syquest cartridges to them for direct printing. Amiga World's printing company used Macs for everything.

[Retro1234]

Why didn't you make a good ST emulater?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Photon

I'm sure you don't have a source to back that up.

What "source" do you need to accept that a 1084 is a horrible screen to work with for 8 hours a day — especially in interlace mode?

As a Swede, you know very well what TCO is, and guess why their mark is on monitors since the late 80s. Monitor ergonomics (and radiation) in the workplace (as keyboard ergonomics a few years earlier) was a big thing in those days.

Atari didn't hesitate to promote the ergonomics of their SM124 at the same time (see attachment).

Meanwhile, every single PC user left their thinner phosphor CRTs on 60Hz for decades, and this made the PC CRT monitors much more flickery. I have seen many, many PCs in the workplace, and not a single one of them had its monitor drivers installed. The rig could do 100+Hz, and nobody on any company in the world would know, because no workplace cared about ergonomics.

More flickery than what? The Amiga used 50 Hz at low resolutions, and flickered intolerably at interlaced resolutions.

Furthermore, millions of people used their CRT monitors for any computer for 8h/day at work, then continued using the home ones for 8 more hours. Every day. "Illegal death by CRT" seems very farfetched.

The monitors they used weren't Commodore monitors, thankfully.

[ImmortalA1000]

My ECS Agnus equipped A2000 I got in 1990 was capable of 60hz mode, don't think I ever used it though in the UK.

60hz does improve the situation, all my PAL TVs were capable of 60hz too.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

My ECS Agnus equipped A2000 I got in 1990 was capable of 60hz mode, don't think I ever used it though in the UK.

60hz does improve the situation, all my PAL TVs were capable of 60hz too.

Never thought of that. So with the A500+ I had, I guess it was possible too. How did you the switch to 60Hz ? There was a tool in the Workbench ?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by TEG

Never thought of that. So with the A500+ I had, I guess it was possible too. How did you the switch to 60Hz ? There was a tool in the Workbench ?

Here's a thread about it (with the tools listed): https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...27#post1103927

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Why didn't you make a good ST emulater?

I had no interest in the ST and frankly, the public in general didn't have much interest in the ST. The Mac was a better computer because of it's software, and people wanted it. The only thing that the Atari line had going for it was built-in midi. I had a midi interface for my Amiga, and the software to drive it was the same (port) as used on the ST. I guess if I had needed ST emulation myself I might have done it just because, but I was running a business and so it just didn't make sense to spend thousands of hours on something that would never pay for itself.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

My ECS Agnus equipped A2000 I got in 1990 was capable of 60hz mode, don't think I ever used it though in the UK.

60hz does improve the situation, all my PAL TVs were capable of 60hz too.

I ran my Amiga's in 60hz interlaced to get the extra vertical resolution. It wasn't perfect but it was usable. I couldn't afford a multi-sync monitor or rather I guess I decided that other upgrades were more important.

I used my Amiga for both gaming and serious use very successfully on the budget i had

[drHirudo]

I used to have professional Atari Mega STE, in the professional sense that it was used by a business. The machine was bundled together with monochrome black and white display. It had 20 MB hard drive inside and some PC emulation card (not sure which), but the whole drive was partitioned to two 10 MB partitions. The first was with the GEM DOS and was empty and the second was with MS-DOS for the PC and had MS Word some version and some files inside. So the Atari STE was actually used as a PC machine, for whatever reasons. I tried to run some games on it, but only some crap turn based black and white strategy games were available. Then I downloaded some music players and songs. The YM sound was okay at first, but gets pretty fast annoying, especially for my back then Amiga listeners ears. If I wanted to play some cool games, I had to connect the STE to color monitor. The PC side was useless for me for other than word processing, which I had on the Amiga as well.

So far, I got bored with the machine pretty fast (having Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 at the time), so I gave it away to a fellow colleague at the university.

Now look back at its specs, it has many improvements over the original ST, some of which could have been cool if they came on the Amiga 2000 (after the Amiga 1000), for making it more suitable for professional use (from Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_MEGA_STE)

Technical specifications
CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8 or 16 MHz with 16kB cache
FPU: Motorola 68881 or Motorola 68882
BLiTTER - graphics co-processor chip
RAM: 1, 2 or 4 MB ST RAM expandable to 4 MB using 30-pin SIMMs
Sound: Yamaha YM2149 + enhanced sound chip same as in Atari STe
Drive: 720 KB (first MEGA STE version) or 1.44 MB (later version) 3½" floppy disk drive
Ports: MIDI In/Out, 3 x RS-232, "Serial LAN" LocalTalk/RS-422, printer, monitor (RGB and Mono), RF modulator, extra disk drive port, ACSI, SCSI (ACSI/SCSI daughterboard), port, VMEbus inside case, detachable keyboard, joystick and mouse ports on keyboard
Operating System: TOS (The Operating System) with the Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) graphical user interface (GUI) TOS versions: 2.05 in ROM or 2.06 in ROM
Display modes: 320×200 (16 out of 4096 colors), 640×200 (4 out of 4096 colors), 640×400 (mono)
Character set: Atari ST character set (based on code page 437)
Case: Two-piece slim desktop-style.

So in this case, the Mega STE is more suitable than the Amiga 2000 (which was just Amiga 500 with some extra slots) for professional use.

[Phantasm]

That's a lot of stats but which of these in particular do you feel the a2000 would have benefited from?