The ATARI ST was great because....

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by jizmo

^This.

If ST didn't exist there's absolutely no guarantee most of the the coders back then could've make use of the Amiga chipset. One could argue coders did not really know how to push the Atari ST to its limits either, as demos and other more recent game projects have shown.

If ST never was it would've still been pretty much the same story of most of the games for Amiga being quite basic, with those few exceptional titles by exceptional coders and above average teams that had taken the hardware to the limits.

Politely, youre talking bollocks as is the other guy weeping.

Let's pretend the ST didnt exist.

There would have been zero reason to convert any graphics to 16 colour because the ST wouldn't have been a consideration, using solely the cpu to move all that around would have been a non-starter, it would have been a necessity to understand the hardware sooner than later.

Psygnosis would still have existed, with no need to consider the economics of doing an ST version, their earlier stuff would have looked even better.

This means that with early Psygnosis stuff looking even better, other development teams would have to be at least looking to equal or best their output.

Cope-com, Discovery International, all of their output would still have been of a level that showed what Amiga could do.

Now tell me, when there is literally no reason for anything on Amiga to be 16 colours and not using the hardware better, because there is no ST version that would dictate those terms, please explain why Amiga titles wouldn't naturally look and play better?

[Tigerskunk]

I never owned an ST, but I kind of fondly remember it.

My dream was owning an Amiga, and happily my mom bought me one for Christmas 1987, but damn it, most of the games that interested me back then looked as good on the ST as they di on the Amiga.

Was more interested in RPGs, graphics adventures and 3D games/flight sims, than action games. Which were not really good for a long time on Amiga, anyway until Turrican arrived.

So what I think is great about the ST is how much they achieved with so little back then.
I remember reading an interview with a british game developer back in 1987/88 then how Amiga was a nice machine, but the ST crushed it. Lol.
But, yeah, from 1986 to at least 1989 the ST seemed to be driving a lot of game dev.

Seeing this from hindsight doesn't shine the brightest light on the ST, but back then I remember it being the cool new thing everybody wanted. It was just that the Amiga was such a crazy overpowered futuristic monster, which made it even more desirable.

[Foebane]

The irony is, from my own experience of such computer ownership around 1990, that I probably put in more gaming hours on my Atari 520STFM than my Amiga 500, with a whole slew of games I bought with my bus grant for college (yes, I did that).

I mean, I played hours and hours of Carrier Command and Damocles on my ST, followed by E-Motion and Vaxine, and some other games that interested me out of the ones I bought.

When I got my Amiga, I played Carrier Command's less well-known sequel, Battle Command, for many hours too, but I don't think I played many Amiga games for such a long time. I even bought Damocles for Amiga as well, but only spent a tiny fraction of the time as I did on ST. My memories of Amiga gaming are a bit hazy, all I remember is that most of it was game demos on magazine coverdisks, which probably convinced me that such gaming was not for me.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Politely, youre talking bollocks as is the other guy weeping.

Let's pretend the ST didnt exist.

There would have been zero reason to convert any graphics to 16 colour because the ST wouldn't have been a consideration, using solely the cpu to move all that around would have been a non-starter, it would have been a necessity to understand the hardware sooner than later.

Now tell me, when there is literally no reason for anything on Amiga to be 16 colours and not using the hardware better, because there is no ST version that would dictate those terms, please explain why Amiga titles wouldn't naturally look and play better?

Plenty of dodgy Amiga exclusives proof this a wishful thinking at best. Even with the added power of A1200 and CD32 at their hands and the chance to build up an Amiga exclusive game from a scratch most developers struggled to produce anything remarkable.

As for why Amiga titles would not have "naturally looked and played better" – not something that I said. But let's pretend that I did.

Even though we love the machine, Amiga is not a magic wand that you can wave to immediately make everything better. Plenty of bad art, bad code, bad gameplay and plain bad game design choices would have riddled any 16-bit home computer, even with Atari never releasing ST. Heck, some downright awful Amiga games were being released years after Atari was completely out of the picture.

Talented coders, musicians and artists thrived both on Atari and Amiga, and bad ones struggled horribly on both. What may have saved us from all this would not been the absence of ST, but rather any sort of quality control from the platform and the publishing side.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by jizmo

Plenty of dodgy Amiga exclusives proof this a wishful thinking at best. Even with the added power of A1200 and CD32 at their hands and the chance to build up an Amiga exclusive game from a scratch most developers struggled to produce anything remarkable.

As for why Amiga titles would not have "naturally looked and played better" – not something that I said. But let's pretend that I did.

Even though we love the machine, Amiga is not a magic wand that you can wave to immediately make everything better. Plenty of bad art, bad code, bad gameplay and plain bad game design choices would have riddled any 16-bit home computer, even with Atari never releasing ST. Heck, some downright awful Amiga games were being released years after Atari was completely out of the picture.

Talented coders, musicians and artists thrived both on Atari and Amiga, and bad ones struggled horribly on both. What may have saved us from all this would not been the absence of ST, but rather any sort of quality control from the platform and the publishing side.

Youre just not getting it.

With no rival 68000 based competition for the Amiga of a spec as low as the ST, naturally it simply wouldn't have been acceptable to produce poorer looking games, because they would no longer be compared to ST games but other Amiga games.

The benchmark would have been set higher.

You can clearly see during then Amigas lifetime where ST ports were no longer considered by the majority of publishers to be acceptable.

That benchmark would have been reached sooner.

[Foebane]

I think Jizmo is just horrified and mortified of the possibility of the idea of a world where the Atari ST never existed.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

You can clearly see during then Amigas lifetime where ST ports were no longer considered by the majority of publishers to be acceptable.

That benchmark would have been reached sooner.

Again, wishful thinking with nothing really backing this claim up. All titles on all computers and consoles throughout the history of gaming have improved through the lifetime of those platforms. If something, Amiga games getting vastly ramping up in quality towards the early 90s is more accounted by some exceptional teams finally getting knowledgeable with the hardware, as well as Sega and Nintendo setting the new standard for games, which in general was quite higher than what western publishers were used to shovelling on people.

As long as people kept on voting with their wallets and buying games for just the arcade title and a nice splash screen, plenty of shovelware arcade ports would have riddled Amiga as well, just the same as they did with the previous computer generations.

Originally Posted by Foebane

I think Jizmo is just horrified and mortified of the possibility of the idea of a world where the Atari ST never existed.

This is getting outright stupid. Even if we disagree, let's try to keep the discussion objective.

[khph_re]

Playing devils advocate, the A1000 didn't sell very well. Without cheap ST ports to keep it afloat, how many releases would it have had? And did the early A500 also receive a push from ports?


Later when the A500 got going, some (but not all) were a hindrance.

[Shadowfire]

Knowing nothing about the Atari series, I decided to look at the schematics of the Atari Falcon.
Oh boy, that's a 16-bit data bus architecture for sure. D0-D15 just dangling in the breeze on the 68030, and the FPU even wired up for a 16-bit bus.
I mean, even commodore's first 32-bit motherboard (A3000) at least had 32-bit RAM; they even put a bridge circuit so that the processor had 32-bit access to (admittedly, slower to access) the 16-bit CHIP ram.
I mean, it's not the end of the world, any loops that run in the 68030's (admittedly small) cache would probably run full speed. But wow, no 32-bit RAM on a processor with a 32-bit data bus...

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by jizmo

Again, wishful thinking with nothing really backing this claim up. All titles on all computers and consoles throughout the history of gaming have improved through the lifetime of those platforms. If something, Amiga games getting vastly ramping up in quality towards the early 90s is more accounted by some exceptional teams finally getting knowledgeable with the hardware, as well as Sega and Nintendo setting the new standard for games, which in general was quite higher than what western publishers were used to shovelling on people.

As long as people kept on voting with their wallets and buying games for just the arcade title and a nice splash screen, plenty of shovelware arcade ports would have riddled Amiga as well, just the same as they did with the previous computer generations.



This is getting outright stupid. Even if we disagree, let's try to keep the discussion objective.

No wishful thinking whatsoever

The ST not existing means not having to cater for 16 colours anymore.

The ST was the lead machine until Amiga sales took off.

If the ST didnt exist, the Amiga would have been the base specification, I.e. 32 colours would have been the norm.

You can claim "wishful thinking" as much as you like, but if you remove why the Amiga had 16 colour ports in the first place, it is logical that graphics artists wouldn't restrict themselves if there was no good reason to.

You haven't provided any reason why they would want to.

Therefore you claim of "wishful thinking" is dismissed.

[redblade]

If it was 1985 I would choose the Atari St because of the price and then buy A A500 in 1987.

A well selected 16 colour palette with dithering can work wonders. So the Atari struggles with horizontal scrolling, Nothing wrong with vertical scrolling games (Rainbow Islands).
Even single screen games are good, Solomons Key, Bubble bobble, Snow Bros, Tetris, Arkanoid, Metal Gear, card games
Also point and click games Monkey Island.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

If the ST didnt exist, the Amiga would have been the base specification, I.e. 32 colours would have been the norm.

You can claim "wishful thinking" as much as you like, but if you remove why the Amiga had 16 colour ports in the first place, it is logical that graphics artists wouldn't restrict themselves if there was no good reason to.

If we are talking about 32 colors being gfx base line Amiga only approach might have brought to the table, then sure, we can find some common ground there.

As for the games being any better for this, that's still purely speculative. There are a plenty of completely off-putting 32c/ham games made late in the Amiga timeline as well as early awesome looking 16-color titles to prove it was mainly the skillset of a team or an artist that was capping the visual fidelity, not so much the few missing colors.

I simply don't buy this alternative timeline where all Amiga games would've been pure diamond just because Atari didn't exist.

Without ST around mediocre teams and publishers would have still done mediocre games for Amiga and still made a decent buck out of it (they were still a step up compared to the 8-bit games of the time), and the few exceptional teams with exceptional publishers that strived for excellence would have done so nonetheless.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by jizmo

If we are talking about 32 colors being gfx base line Amiga only approach might have brought to the table, then sure, we can find some common ground there.

As for the games being any better for this, that's still purely speculative. There are a plenty of completely off-putting 32c/ham games made late in the Amiga timeline as well as early awesome looking 16-color titles to prove it was mainly the skillset of a team or an artist that was capping the visual fidelity, not so much the few missing colors.

I simply don't buy this alternative timeline where all Amiga games would've been pure diamond just because Atari didn't exist.

Without ST around mediocre teams and publishers would have still done mediocre games for Amiga and still made a decent buck out of it (they were still a step up compared to the 8-bit games of the time), and the few exceptional teams with exceptional publishers that strived for excellence would have done so nonetheless.

Better in the sense that to have a hope in hell of moving stuff around in 32colours, knowledge of the hardware would be a given.

The games can still be shovelware, but, without the ST, the Amiga would have had a better start, I.e. no consideration whatsoever for what the ST could or couldn't do.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The games can still be shovelware, but, without the ST, the Amiga would have had a better start, I.e. no consideration whatsoever for what the ST could or couldn't do.

Here's where we can agree again. There would've been plenty of other pitfalls for the Amiga developers to run into capable of ruining a game, just one less in the form of Atari legacy.

[Retro1234]

probably already put this but could read 720 disks and word processing and DTP always looked sharper.

If there had been a real hardware ST emulator back in the day for Amiga that let you run games yes I probably would of got it, such a thing would of been so cool and I knew as many people who had ST that had Amiga's.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by jizmo

Here's where we can agree again. There would've been plenty of other pitfalls for the Amiga developers to run into capable of ruining a game, just one less in the form of Atari legacy.

Dont get me wrong, 32 colour Human Killing Machine is still going to be a pile of shit, but the original bar set by the ST just wouldnt have been acceptable.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Dont get me wrong, 32 colour Human Killing Machine is still going to be a pile of shit, but the original bar set by the ST just wouldnt have been acceptable.

Well, it's Tiertex – they would have had no shame releasing their games as is no matter what the baseline quality for Amiga had been at the time.

Same goes for the likes of Kingsoft, Anco or Impressions. No breakthroughs elsewhere in Amiga universum would have stopped them shoveling out one disappointing title after another.

[LongLifeA1200]

The Atari seems to be getting a lot of praise on this forum lately. Which reminds me, I've got to watch some more episodes of the Twilight Zone.

I hadn't thought about what things would be like if the world never got an Atari ST.

What I find interesting is that it debuted in the wedge shape (1985). Meanwhile Commodore wants their more expensive A1000 to be thought of as a serious computer, not a toy to play games on. The A500 would appear a couple of years later (1987) and perhaps only as an answer to the Atari ST's popularity.

So, thanks Atari ST for "inspiring" Commodore to release the A500 and later A1200.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by LongLifeA1200

So, thanks Atari ST for "inspiring" Commodore to release the A500 and later A1200.

Wedge shapes for home computers had been around for a long time before the ST and Amiga.

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Let's pretend the ST didnt exist.

There would have been zero reason to convert any graphics to 16 colour because the ST wouldn't have been a consideration, using solely the cpu to move all that around would have been a non-starter, it would have been a necessity to understand the hardware sooner than later.

https://codetapper.com/amiga/intervi...eket-weeserik/

"Were 16 colours chosen so it could be easily ported to the Atari ST? Or was that all Ned wanted/needed to create an awesome atmosphere?
No, the choice to use only four bitplanes was made for memory and performance reasons."