Games where the Atari ST version was.....

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Yeah.... thats not true either. Uses the blitter for redrawing the background

Oh my god, it's even worse than i tought !

1 poor sprite to move, 1 enemy now and then, a few wall torch, and it goes slow motion like if there was 50 sprites on screen to move !

How Dan gorlin has achieved to make the Amiga crawling like a slug ?

You have an idea ?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Oh my god, it's even worse than i tought !

1 poor sprite to move, 1 enemy now and then, a few wall torch, and it goes slow motion like if there was 50 sprites on screen to move !

How Dan gorlin has achieved to make the Amiga crawling like a slug ?

You have an idea ?

Reblitting the entire screen every frame probably didn't help!

[frank_b]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Reblitting the entire screen every frame probably didn't help!

Apparently the reason for Persia's slow downs on the ST is the sample playback!
Ppera has patched the ST version to use the STe DMA sound. No more slow downs.

[NorthWay]

"No Second Prize". Endlessly paraded as 'ST over Amiga' superiority. (But I guess I have said this often enough other places.)

Possibly because of 1MHz more grunt making enough of a difference.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

"No Second Prize". Endlessly paraded as 'ST over Amiga' superiority. (But I guess I have said this often enough other places.)

Possibly because of 1MHz more grunt making enough of a difference.

I don't know why, the game is plenty fast enough on an A500, plus have you heard the music, the Amiga has a great guitar tune vs plinky plonky ST, they must have compared with the volume down

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I don't know why, the game is plenty fast enough on an A500, plus have you heard the music, the Amiga has a great guitar tune vs plinky plonky ST, they must have compared with the volume down

[ Show youtube player ]

The ST version runs fine, as does the Amiga. Sound, well that's a matter of preference I suppose.

[ExiE]

ST sound of No Second Prize is closer to C64 than Amiga...

[StingRay]

Good game on both machines! The ST music by Big Alec is OK too but I much prefer the Amiga music.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

"No Second Prize". Endlessly paraded as 'ST over Amiga' superiority. (But I guess I have said this often enough other places.)

Possibly because of 1MHz more grunt making enough of a difference.

The true story behind the quartz clocked at 8 mhz instead of 7 something like the Amiga for the Atari ST, was that the engineers were not satisfied with the ST computer speed, it was way too slow. So just before putting the machine on the assembly lines, they swapped the 7 something mhz quartz for an 8 mhz one.

So basically, the ST was a too slow computer, which got a little speed up, allowing it to be not that SLOW.

The Amiga has an opposite story, the engineers had to slow down the CPU in order to synchronize it with the chipset.

So in the end, the ST being clocked 1mhz higher doesn't make it superior or faster than the Amiga, it just makes it faster than it was for itself from the start.

And the great Mcoder, very well known as one if not the best ST coder out there, told a while ago on the Atari Forum that the 1mhz story allowing the ST to be superior to the Amiga is a myth, and a legend.

Myself, i don't see any differences between Vroom on ST and Vroom on Amiga. The fps difference is unoticeable, and even worse, the Amiga version is smoother than the ST version.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by ExiE

ST sound of No Second Prize is closer to C64 than Amiga...

That wouldn't be so bad as the SID rocks! However in this case...

[Seiya]

1943 on Atari St is much faster than Amiga version

[ Show youtube player ]

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Seiya

1943 on Atari St is much faster than Amiga version

[ Show youtube player ]

ahem.... the game is slow on both machine

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

And the great Mcoder, very well known as one if not the best ST coder out there, told a while ago on the Atari Forum that the 1mhz story allowing the ST to be superior to the Amiga is a myth, and a legend.

I love myths. So do you have a link?

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

So in the end, the ST being clocked 1mhz higher doesn't make it superior or faster than the Amiga, it just makes it faster than it was for itself from the start.

And the great Mcoder, very well known as one if not the best ST coder out there, told a while ago on the Atari Forum that the 1mhz story allowing the ST to be superior to the Amiga is a myth, and a legend.

The fact is that the 68000 on the ST is really faster by a little less than 1Mhz than the 68000 on the Amiga, and so everything that relies heavily on the cpu will be faster on the ST. For example Powermonger is faster on the ST.

But the Amiga has better hardware so things are usually faster on the Amiga. I heard long ago that the Amiga's blitter was faster than the STE's blitter but i can't confirm - and anyway normal ST don't have a blitter at all.

[frank_b]

Originally Posted by meynaf

The fact is that the 68000 on the ST is really faster by a little less than 1Mhz than the 68000 on the Amiga, and so everything that relies heavily on the cpu will be faster on the ST. For example Powermonger is faster on the ST.

But the Amiga has better hardware so things are usually faster on the Amiga. I heard long ago that the Amiga's blitter was faster than the STE's blitter but i can't confirm - and anyway normal ST don't have a blitter at all.

They were both pretty fast in 86. Short of work station machines i'm not sure there was anything faster than an 8 mhz 68k available. Certainly nothing at that price point. The Atari blitter debut came with the Mega ST in 87. It's available as an upgrade on any ST FM after 1987. There's a space for it on the motherboard. I have various non STE machines with an after market blitter upgrade. It's different than the Amiga one but it's still quite neat. It is much faster than the CPU. It has a barrel shifter. It has a full 24 bit address range (add a monster board and you can blit 12 meg of ST/Alt RAM). You can hammer the hardware registers with it to use it for rasters. It's slower than the Amiga for complex operations like masking but it's quicker on some simpler operations. It has an indirect addressing mode which allows for fast brush magnification and raster hflipping. On a blit blit raster translate it's 8 cycles for the interior and 12 for the fringes. There is no DMA contention. It always runs at that speed. There are some very clever tricks you can do with it to exceed its masking speed. Here's 17 32*32 fully masked bobs in 4 planes with background restoration at 50 hz. [ Show youtube player ] It's not slow at all.

[idrougge]

The biggest problem with the ST blitter was that you couldn't count on it being there. Hence no games or demos made use of it.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by AnimaInCorpore

I love myths. So do you have a link?

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic...12530&start=25

Choosen pieces :

A french atarist called Leglod wrote this :

"leglod wrote:
Si non on a pas parler d'un truc ou le ST etait un poil meilleur que l'Amiga, les jeu en 3D grace a son 1 mhz de plus me semble qu'il etaient plus, quoi que j'ai jamais eu d'Amiga pour comparer et que finalement avec les fond des decor en Bitmap et les son digitaliser dans la realiter peut etre que l'Amiga s'en sortait mieux ?? Rhaaaa Armour Geddon :angel:"

in english :

"Other than that, we didn't talked yet about a a thing where the ST was a bit better than the Amiga, the games in 3D thanks to its 1mhz higher clocking, but i never had any amiga to compare and that in the end with the backgrounds in bitmap and the digitized sounds in reality maybe the Amiga got a better result ?? Rhaaaa Armour Geddon :angel:

Then Mcoder answer him this :

"Hein ? C'est une légende !!! En effet, l'Amiga avait les bitplanes séparés (sur le ST, ils sont consécutifs), donc le remplissage est en pratique beaucoup plus rapide. Mais comme les programmeurs Amiga étaient globalement beaucoup moins doués..."

in english :

"What ? It's a myth !!! Indeed, the Amiga had seperated bitplans (on the ST, they are consecutives), so the filling up is in pratical way more faster. But since the Amiga programmers were globally way less gifted... (than the ST coders)"

"Le STE n'a jamais cassé trois pattes à un canard.
Le blitter STE est incroyablement merdique: pour Toki, j'avais testé le blitter, et franchement, ma routine de sprites SOFTWARE allait plus vite que le hardware !!! Pour le scroll hardware: à quoi ça sert, puisque le jeu doit tourner sur ST aussi ???"

In english :

"The STE is nothing to write home about. The STE blitter is incredibly shitty: for Toki, i had tested the blitter, and frankly, my SOFTWARE sprites routine was running faster than the hardware !!! About the hardware scroll: what's the point, since the game must run on ST too ???"

About the fact that the Atari engineers used an 8 mhz clock instead of the same clock as the Amiga, i got this information on a forum where an Amiga guy posted a piece of article stating that they changed the quartz for a faster version because with the first one, the ST was impossibly slow, so much that they would have not been able to sell it as it was.

I need to get my hands back on this

[Anakirob]

(Prince of Persia)

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Still a tough game.

Maybe if you're a little girl.

We clearly differ on our opinions of what makes a 'tough' game, I think that any serious gamer should be able to complete Prince of Persia at least once within a dozen plays of the game.

I know I did this easily back in the 90's, and required around half as many attempts when playing it last year in the EAB/Lemon competition. Also I originally played on A500+A590 with 2Mb fastram and I don't recall any slowdown, and I would usually notice that. Maybe the fastram helps?

I remember that I felt the graphics and gameplay were impressive, but the difficulty was lacking. There are a couple of spots where I might possibly come unstuck, but then there's only a small time penalty.

[dlfrsilver]

i love Prince of Persia. However, the huge slowdown on the Amiga version is really breaking the pace of the game as well as the game pleasure.

As soon as 3 or 4 objects are animated on the screen, the game drop down to 1 or 2 fps.

Other than that, the game can perfectly be finished, the main problem being the time.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

i love Prince of Persia. However, the huge slowdown on the Amiga version is really breaking the pace of the game as well as the game pleasure.

As soon as 3 or 4 objects are animated on the screen, the game drop down to 1 or 2 fps.

Other than that, the game can perfectly be finished, the main problem being the time.

Despite the slowdowns, the game is definitely playable and second only to the PC version.

On top of being the best version out there, DOS version is also incredibly compatible and runs with impressive amount of different setups without hitch. I used to carry it around on a disk as a kid and managed to play it even on the most modest library hercules terminals of the time.