Atari St Owners!!!!

(rolls up sleeves) Right, what was that about ST owners?

Seriously, after recently acquiring an Amiga (well, two actually; I found a 500 with the memory module, tv-modulator, manual, workbench disks and about 40 games for £5 today I get all the luck) I have to admit most of the Amiga games were far better than the ST versions. 'Cept 3D stuff anyway. I tried Hunter on the Amiga today and it seems far jerkier than the ST version.
Still, I'll always love my Atari. And I prefer Green to Antiseptic Blue

As far as chip-music goes, Check out the St music to Seven Gates of Jambala, the game-over music is stunning. Actually check out all the chip music Thalion did, most of it's pretty cool. Dave Whittickers stuff too

[Amiga1992]

Common, don't tell me that poopie 0.8Mhz make 3D games run faster. I cannot believe that, really

[Bloodwych]

You forget, a mere 0.8 Mhz increase represents an 11% increase in performance on these old machines!

The modern equivalent is to compare a Pentium III 650 to a Pentium III 733, again approx. 11% increase in performance.

Or a Thunderbird to a Duron at the same clock speed, ~10% performance increase.

Do you notice the increase in FPS between these CPUs in your favourite games - of course you do (if the vid card is not limiting the performance).

3d (vector) games did run faster on the ST - I've owned both machines for comparison.

After all why would I lie, I've already said the Amiga was by far the best and my preferred machine for like 95% of games due to it's awesome sound and custom chip graphics capabilities.

Early vector games ran faster on the ST for reasons I stated above, but get a decent vector routine and optimise to hell on both machines and the Amiga would win hands down over the ST.

The blitter was added to make graphics VERY fast and it was. Only the Archimedes and Zarch at the time beat the Amiga in graphic speed. I worked with a company that made Amiga/ST/Arch software.

[Amiga1992]

Hey, I was not saying you were lying, I was looking for a detailed tech explanation like the one you gave me Thanks.

As for checking the differences in PCs.... first, I don't play poop PC games, second, I have a Pentium 133 at home, so I only notice the difference while working at the studio with a P3 800

I also think the blitter would help the Amiga make faster 3D routines. Anyway, there were not many vector games on both, unless you mean solid polygon games, when you say 'vector'. Vector game is something like Star Wars or Asteroids.

BTW Kheph, I always heard about teh Archimedes but never seen one running. What was its best application? And is it hard to get one nowadays?

I'm also interested in nabbing a Falcon or a TT030. Anybody has a spare one to sell?

[Bloodwych]

Akira,

Sorry, bad choice of words. I never meant to imply that you were calling me a liar, I just trying to make a point that I had no reason to defend the ST as I'm an Amiga man through and through!

And yes you're right, I meant polygon AND vector games.

Khephren,

I appreciate what your saying and I agree with you - I was just trying to quickly explain my original statement why 3D games were faster on the ST.

In more detail:

Many Amiga titles were converted UP from the Atari ST versions - meaning they used 16-color graphics modes with 512-color palettes. Certain games originally written for the ST, particularly 3D polygon (and a few role-playing games), performed VERY poorly on the Amiga because they were written with the ST's FASTER CPU in mind, and simply recompiled with a few small tweaks to make them Amiga-compatible. Moving these games to a slower CPU saw ~11% speed decreases.

Linking with what you said, they might have been great 3D games if the developers had added blitter support, but unfortunately they never quite made it.

Overall I think we got our wires crossed. I was trying to say purely on a software front, that ST 3D games released back then were faster and the only example of ST superiority . You on the other hand rightly explained that the Amiga could have been faster looking at the hardware on the two machines.

Hope we’ve cleared things up!

Yeah that's a fair comment.

Coders were just to fucking lazy to do the work, and the software companies were after money for substandard software for the machine.

I remember Sidewinder on the ST being faster than the Amiga version, but as time went by the Amiga showed how much better it was. The ST was a good machine if I was being honest, but it was just graphically piss poor.

The same can be said for PC coders. It's just not hard work anymore to code a PC game as the 3D engines are licensed from Unreal or Quake most of the time.

I'm an old-timer coder who just believes that C++ is a shite language to write a game in, but that's just the way Windows hooks work. Said situation all round really.

Akira,

I use vector in the sense of what you see in demos, Elite 2 being a good example (although a shite game overall).

I worked on several Archy programs which was all written is basic, and Archy basic ran like shit off a shovel compared to anything on the Amiga. GammaPaint was one I tested and suggested improvements to make it more like Deluxe Paint (so I could draw my stuff in work as well).

We had an archy in the shop window running Zarch, which was like Virus and Conqueror. VERY fast!!

I think we had the 330 in the development section. I personally didn't like using them, but each to their own.

[Amiga1992]

Bloodwych, all understood now You just gave me the answer I was looking for.

Kheph, about the Archimedes, thanks for your info. If you have some site with more detailed info about it, I'd be glad to visit it. And I completely agree with your views about today's programmers. One of the reasons why I hate teh GNU

"Let's make a game. I get the 2D platformer engine from here, the music loading routine from there, the video handling driver from here.... i make 2 different graphics.. presto! It's all under the GNU license so we can use it as long as we mention the original authors. Boy, are we creative?"

We used to have Archies in school- I never really liked using them that much, although it was possible to format 720K MS- DOS disks on an Amiga and then port text files etc. over to the Archie, which helped for some school work.

I only saw a few games for the Archie but most seemed at least reasonable, though possibly nothing that couldn't have been done on the Amiga with a little work...

I think I do remember Zarch on the Archie, and it ran faster than the Amiga version (Virus). Wasn't Zarch/ Virus first coded on the Archie before being ported over to the Amiga?

Cheers,

Well it was a 32 bit RISC processor. No even the 68000 could keep up with that, but thankfully Acorn were shite marketeers so the Archy died. Shame eh

[Ian]

Get your emu here:- http://www.red-squirrel.org

Or

Here:- http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...427/index.html

Get your rom files (Archy's version's of kickstart) here:- http://madjock.emulationworld.com/

Get your ADF's, yes ADF's from here:- http://www.tagew.co.uk/

Here:- http://www.deepcut.org.uk/acorn/

And here:- http://www.diskimage.co.uk/

If this was rhetorical I bet I look a right or maybe left TIT now!!


I also used these at school and the version it has of Elite, Elite Plus I think it's called is regarded as the best ever version.

Elite Plus was also released on the PC- I haven't played it much at all as it looks primitive compared to the Amiga version, and it will also need a slowdown program.

The Amiga version had at least one ship (definitely the Wolf Mk II, and possibly the Transporter and Orbit Shuttle?) and a trading commodity (Medical Supplies) which weren't seen in any other version. However the PC version had a WORM ship, which I think is basically the Orbit Shuttle.

Cheers,

[Ian]

... Don't confuse the PC version of Elite Plus with the Archy version, the archy version is far, far better looking. I think for a short time the Archy was the most powerful system you could get here in Blighty, far better than a 486 PC, which were out about the same sort of time.

Only one ship was playable in any Elite 1 game the Cobra, as far as I know anyway.

Will writing this post I actually found a good looking picture of the PC version, in MCGA mode, whatever that is. Howerer saying that the EGA/VGA version does look a pile of festering pig dodo (Crap).

About the ships- the only ship you could ever pilot was the Cobra MkIII. The ships I mentioned were unique to their versions- no Wolf MkII's in the PC version, for instance.

I'm not too sure what MCGA is either, possibly 16 or 32 colours? How does it look compared to the Amiga version?

In addition, I don't like the music in the PC version, its too short and sounds weird to me when compared to the Amiga version (but then I'm biased).

How can you tell I still play Elite ?

[Ian]

Here :- http://www.mobygames.com/game/shots/...84/gameId,3433

256 colours, Nice!!!

There's also pictures of the crappy EGA/VGA version, be sure to click previous and next to view all the pictures!!

I think everyone still plays Elite from time to time, they may not admit it, but they still do.

Damn, I'd always thought that VGA/ SVGA were the only graphics modes on PCs that could give 256 colours .

I downloaded both of those versions some time ago for the PC. Although I liked how Elite Plus (MCGA) looked, I only tinkered around with it. I've always preferred the Amiga version.

I may download Elite Plus one day to see if there really is a bigger difference between Amiga Elite and PC Elite Plus other than graphics and sound.

By the way, do you know how you get to be offered missions in Elite? I read somewhere about having to make 'x' number off galactic hyperdrive jumps, reach a planet with a tech level of at least 'x' etc. I did it once when I had a real Amiga, when I had to destroy a ship with a cloaking device, but being young I never wrote down where to find the ship so I could never do it !

Thanks for posting those links Ian.

About 7 years ago I only used to use my Amiga for games but I was doing an Information System GCSE. The computers at School were Acorn Archemedes'

After learning how to program BASIC on spectrums I stopped programming when I go an Amiga. The Archemedes got me programming again and made me the programmer that I am today

I have great memories of that old machine. Thanks again IanCharge

[Ian]

Subject says it all

[Shatterhand]

This thing about porting ST games direct for Amiga remebers me the time when I had my MSX, and had to deal with direct ports of Spectrum games.... so, I had my MSX, capable of showing at least 16 colors at the same time in the screen, move 64 1-color sprites in a black background (Ok, not that useful), and playing those crap looking monocromatic games..

I never saw an Atari ST running, the only atari machine that reached Brazil was the Atari 2600.. I am discovering the Atari ST NOW, with emulation... but it seems like ST emulation is rather bad yet....

About Elite... the Wolf MK II, the Shuttle and the Transporter are in te MSX version too..., and I believe at least the Wolf MK II was in the C64 version too...
Elite PLUS on PC has nice graphics, but the gameplays isn't very good (comparing to other versions) for me, the Amiga version was the best one (Ian Bell said the NES version was the best one!, but maybe it's just because it was a hell of work to code it, and he probably was very proud of it)

I don't think there's a "guide" to get this mission on Elite, it just happens after some time playing... anyway, I'll do a quick research and see if this really true

[Marcuz]

you know when the tv news during summer shows up endless people interviews to turists or they get out old reportage from the footage because as fill-in? fill-in: they were used also in comic' industry specially in the '80 because maybe a deadline getting too fast, maybe because an artist switched title or editor company as well... they were also kinda overused. i miss them a lot nowadays as there were true gems here and there. like Badlands of Frank Miller / John Bushema on Daredevil, just the first to come in mind. bah anyway...