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0 pointscmrdporcupine3y ago0 comments

Honestly, while the Amiga was a better graphics and sound machine and was better for games and some early video and digital audio stuff (trackers, etc.) -- the ST had a better "productivity" story. 640x400 paperwhite monochrome monitor + MIDI ports + MSDOS-compatible floppy format.

High resolution on Amiga was interlaced and required a scan doubler to be tolerable. Reading MSDOS formatted floppies required special software. DTP and other productivity software tended to find their way to the ST first. Atari made a rock bottom price cheap laser printer. The total package price for a 1Mb ST + high res monitor was lower than anything Commodore ever offered, and far lower than anything Apple offered, but still got you an 8mhz 68000, a GUI, MIDI ports, etc.

I always try to say: the competition for the ST was the Mac and a PC, not the Amiga. Different market segment. Yes, on a low-res colour monitor many people purchased the ST as a games machine, but it wasn't great for that, really. It was a cheap productivity machine, "power without the price". More memory and more Mhz per dollar than anything else out at the time. And that's the segment Tramiel was targeting, he was going after the Mac ("computers for the masses, not for the classes."). The "Jackintosh"

For MIDI sequencing, there's no comparison. The breadth of software on the ST was far beyond anything on the Amiga and some giants of the current DAW software market like Cubase and Logic got their start there.

And honestly, while onboard sampled sound generation on the Amiga was better than its competition, that's kind of a dubious distinction when we're talking about grainy low-bitrate 28khz 8 bit audio. Not exactly CD quality. Within a few years it was outdated relative to what you could get on a commodity PC ISA sound card.

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foobarian3y ago

It's funny you mention this, where I grew up the ST was known exactly as a DAW because of the built-in MIDI ports. But more interestingly the Amigas were super popular as broadcast TV workstations because they had some kind of v-sync functionality built-in that made it possible to overlay graphics on the TV signal. A bunch of local TV stations had tell-tale Amiga graphics in their transitions / credits messages / news overlays. The ST kids always lamented the lack of this because it made it impossible for the ST to be used this way (never mind the worse graphics capabilities).

AaronM3y ago

With the Amiga it is possible to use an external clock source as the system clock and to switch the video chip horizontal and vertical sync pins to inputs so they can come from external source instead of internal system clock based sync generator.

The addition of the Amiga toaster, meant that Amiga saw use in the TV and Movie Industry in the late 80's and 90's. A number of high profile projects used the Amiga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

Here's a listing of some of the famous uses of the Amiga https://www.amigareport.com/ar134/p1-12.html

Some notable ones, were Babylon 5, Titanic,

cmrdporcupineOP3y ago

Interestingly enough this genlock feature was also possible with the Sharp X68000, which was kind of like an Amiga but on steroids. Or maybe more like a late-80s/early-90s arcade cabinet machine but in a PC form factor. Beautiful machines, too bad Japanese only though they sold boatloads there.

LocalH3y ago

I actually remember crashing my uncle’s A2000 more than once by feeding a raw VCR signal into the genlock and seeking the tape too fast. It would screw up the timings going into the vertical blank

usrn3y ago

I poked around with TOS the other year. It's super easy to write graphical apps that will build on DOS with TCC and also TOS with whatever C dev tools it had.

It's kind of sad how much things seem to have regressed.

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