A side by side comparison of Stardust from Bloodhouse (1993) Captured via cycle-exact emulation. For optimal performance please view in 720p. (50fps) If you like what I do and wish to support me then please visit me on: / gurumediator
Nice comparison, but was some of this done with emulation as the STE shows glitches and sound issues that are not present in the real game. Also, the volumes are set at different levels which does not give a true comparison. The Amiga clearly shows more colors, but the STE does pretty well keeping up.
yes I agree emulation does not do real justice e.g the Atari st monitor 1224 has deep rich color's due to high end picture tube, the early Amiga 1081 had a similar screen
Great to see the STe getting some love, and a very good conversion with only the slightly more muffled sound and the reduction in on screen colours putting it a hair behind the Amiga version. I also notice the background animations present in the Amiga version are missing on the STe version, which seems odd as the STe is more than capable of doing that.
Good example of a port done right, they didn't try to reduce the colours too much on the STE version by dropping the pink colour in order to keep the rest of the main sprites looking great.
Having owned many Atari STs (ST,STe & Falcon) and owned an Amiga A500, I always felt the Amiga sound was far better, the custom chips in the Amiga helped a lot even on gfx. For this game, the creators did really well to make them very similar but again I think the Amiga did better. I found coding assembly on the Atari to be a lot easier but maybe that is because I started on an Atari.
Yes, the Amiga used a custom sound chip. Jack Tramiel ordered Atari to stop working on their new custom sound chip. Jack was trying to build a usable 68000 machine and wasn't that interested in it playing games. I used an ST to get through 3 years of college BUT I really wanted an Amiga being a former Atari 800 guy but I just couldn't afford the $1600 they were asking at the time.
@@bjbell52 I have some music from the new ZX Spectrum Next and it has 2 AY-3-8910 sounds chips and it sounded great. I think they may have been cheating on some music and used the FPGA but the ST would have been a lot better if they could have fitted two sound chips. It was all down to cost and time. Yamaha would not sell Atari the better sound chip as they thought the ST would compete with some of their products which is a real shame.
When the ST first came out, I always wanted one. Not because it was "the MOST powerful" but it was because of the "Power Without The Price" motto... the ton of RAM, the blazing fast Processor. I think their advertising campaign was spectacular!! So, I've always wanted one, and I thought it was the sportier model, like a sportier sportscar. (I did have an Atari 130XE when they first came out)
Shows that developers were getting there, but didn't quite have a hang on all that the STE could do visually as the Amiga version is nicer, but the STE one is a close second.
I prefer the STE's tunnel music which ironically, according to an interview with Teq was through enforced limitations: The Amiga versions used mod files with relatively few restrictions imposed on the music allowing use of all channels, commands and an average amount of samples. For the STE version Teq was told by the coders to limit his use of volume commands and number of samples were heavily restricted which means he had to be creative with the drum loops and reusing and resampling the main synth into different instruments which gives it that really weird but cool crunchy drum triggers and bass synth sounds.
Quite surprised at how well the ST version held up against the Amiga one. I thought the Amiga one would have blown it out of the water in every regard, but the ST edition of the game is really quite respectable on all fronts, and isn't too far behind its Amiga counterpart.
Bear in mind that it's running on an STE, which is a slightly improved version of the original ST that features hardware support for sample playback. (Albeit with some annoying limitations). The STE also features an expanded colour palette- 4096 instead of 512- which sounds good until you realise you can *still* only have 16 colours on-screen at once in normal use, which means you can't really take advantage of it in practice.
The Amiga probably edges it because of the colours, but the overall feel and sensation is very similar. The STe didn't fully match the Amiga but definitely got it a lot closer (and kept the ST's advantages in MIDI and clock speed) - but probably a year or two too late for it to achieve its potential.
Well, the Amiga version is better, but as everybody else already said, STE was pretty close. Gap widens during tunnel sections tho as frame rate clearly suffered on the atari. I do prefer the volume balance between bg music and the fx of the atari version tho, amiga fx are a tad louder than they ought to.
This looks like a solid port to the ST but the Amiga version wins out with better visuals and better sound I feel and I'm not 100% but it looked like the Amiga version looked smoother but that's hard to tell with youtube.
@@perihelion7445 Don't forget STE is limited to 16 color registers (4 bitplanes) with 4096 color palette. Amiga OCS/ECS has 32 color registers (5 bitplanes) or 64 color EHB (6 bitplanes) with 4096 color palette. Amiga has hardware dual playfield support besides the hardware Blitter functions.
I had BOTH, and I can tell you, it depended on the game, but in that case Stardust was better on the amiga. Also, games were MUCH EASIER to copy on amiga than Atari ST! That's an important point many forget to tell!
The Amiga 500 was just a repackaged Amiga 1000, which runs this game exactly the same. The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985. The Atari STE came out in 1989, four years later.
Nice to actually see a game that uses the pcm audio of the STE...the machine matches an Amiga better, but one would think that in 4 years, they would not just match an Amiga, but add extra improvements that may have spurred more developer support.
ATARI STE version uses much less colours and its a limit of hardware, however overally very good port.On ATARI you have only 16 colours so basically we have shades of ORANGE and shades of BLUE.On Amiga we have also shades of PINK and shades of GREY. For example planet is in Pink, while on Atari its using the same orange colours like expolosions. Spaceship is in grey, while on atari its using the same blue colours like background. Details were preserved but colours are not.Atari STE was enhanced version of the original ST, but still it was inferior to Amiga in hardware possibilities.
I don't think Atari managing to hold on for two years longer than Commodore is much to brag about - especially when you consider that they spent most of those years accusing potential customers of being morons for buying the PS1 instead of the Jaguar.
Interesting comparison. The Amiga version uses 32 colours; the STE 16. The Amiga uses a slightly bigger play area and has noticeably faster, smoother animation. That is entirely consistent with the hardware differences between the machines.
@@GuruMediator Apologies for sounding arrogant. Have edited my comment to retract my dubious remark. I must have had a senior moment when writing it. You're right: of course it is perfectly legitimate to compare things. Thanks for taking the time to do so. On a separate note, I would like to see what the regular ST version of this is like, as opposed to the STE version that had extra hardware to help with a game like this.
@@Midwinter2 no apologies needed, I'm no stranger to having senior moments either :D on the subject of a regular ST version I'm not sure there was one. Pretty sure it would be possible though. Cool name by the way, Midwinter was an awesome game back in the day,.
I had both STE and 500. Both were good at what they did. I preferred the Atari at highest screen resolution for office work. Sound was much better through a scart socket on Atari which was much better than the Phono plugs. I could play sound at 50 Mhz. The graphics used an advanced processor and was awesome. But software support for the STE was not very good and this was a massive let down for the technology that was used. I made my very first computer generated video on the STE and could even do video editing. Couldn't much as much with the Amiga. But not everyone was a geeky tech like me.
In hindsight, I don't get what Atari were trying to achieve with the STE. My guess is that it was meant to keep the ST competitive with the Amiga (which started out *way* more expensive, but came much closer in price later on). If they'd replaced the STFM with the STE at the same price point (i.e. £300), it'd probably have achieved that and (in the long term) resulted in a large enough base of STE owners to make it worthwhile for developers to exploit its extra power. But they sold it for the same price as the Amiga, which was still a better machine overall and the one almost everyone would have gone for. So- I'm guessing- most of those who *did* buy the ST would have bought the STFM, few bought the STE which meant it wasn't worth supporting, which meant it was less appealing to buyers, etc. By the time the STE did replace the STFM completely in 1991, it was too late.
A500 with ECS Denise has non-interlace high-resolution screen modes but's limited to four colors. Meanwhile, 1987 VGA has 640x480 16 colors without interlace. PC industry has moved away from monochrome productivity screen modes in 1987 while the two Commodore mindset corporations offered either four colors or monochrome productivity screen modes. 1990 Amiga 3000 has the flicker fixer for its interlace 640x512 16 color mode, hence competing against 1987 VGA's 640x480 16 colors non-interlace mode. I prefer the 1987 canceled Amiga Ranger's 128 colors 320x256 screen mode over ECS Denise's productivity screen modes.
@@valenrn8657 ECS was released at the end of 1990. It means that in term of good quality resolution, Amiga was five years behind the ST. BTW, the same year as ECS, was released Atari TT with 1280x960 resolution (60Hz noninterlace), again a few years ahead of Amiga (only the AGA had similar resolution)
@@blast4722 High resolution with limited colors is useless for gaming which is the core market for Commodore. 1989's Amiga 500 6A already has ECS Agnus and can accept Amiga 3000's ECS Denise update without any hacks. Amiga 500 6A's ECS Agnus has the updated Bilter for larger block transfers. Amiga 3000 has Flicker Fixer for 15Khz screen modes in an attempt to rival PC VGA's 640x480 16 colors. By 1991, both Atari's TT/STE and Commodore's ECS are obsolete when compared to PC SVGA chipsets. Amiga 2000 and 3000 have a video slot for graphics card upgrade that merge with Amiga's graphics. PC VGA has a build-in feature that boosts legacy resolution modes into 31 Khz VGA standards, hence most PC games and productivity modes can use cheap PC VGA clone monitors. PC has VGA/SVGA, TIGA, and XGA.
Amiga wins :) that's easy to spot, better sound, more colors and animated elements. Still Atari STE is not bad, game is still fast and got every element of gameplay.
Lol louder does not mean better, tbh i am an atari guy, i like both but the tunnel change in STE made it win :) Though the green flashing screen was a lot better on Amiga so id say 50/50
The STE has fixed sample playback rates, the Amiga is anything you want up to 28khz (56khz in double pal/NTSC or VGA monitor refresh modes selected in the OS)
Actually Amiga uses 32 colours while STE only 16. You can clearly see the difference in planet level where on Amiga you have blue and grey metheoriths, and violet planet, while on STE planet is using tghe same colours like the ships and only blue metherits appear.
Normally I'd agree, but this game actually seems to level the playing field, any difference between quality is personal preference rather than fact. There's a marginal difference in sound quality and graphics. The glitches in the video are being caused by poor emulation.
The top down game looks better on the ST the Amiga has some better effects and better sound. Really going to come down to personal tastes. I prefer the ST in this one.
@@paulstevens9409 Amiga 500 OCS/ECS > Atari STE. I welcome a technical debate. Amiga 500 OCS/ECS can support up to 6 bit-planes while Atari STE supports up to 4 bi-planes.
Amiga seems better only at frame rate, color range and some screen FX.. Sound on Amiga is very aggressive and palette is a bit off.. HUD is.. hmmm.. just like Captive!
Amazing that all these years later, many of these 50+ yr old Amiga fanboys are still boasting about the Amiga's supposed superiority over the ST. It's like your whole identity is wrapped up in the Amiga being better than everything else. I'm sorry, but your infatuation with the Amiga doesn't override your other failures in life. Grow up and stop being man-children.
Amiga 500 has god awful actual sound quality at the phono ports due to low quality components and motherboard design. You need to listen to all Amiga games or MODs on an A1000/3000/4000 or even an A1200 to know what the machine actually sounds like, not the cheap n cheerful A500 on your desks. The A500 has the same audio build quality as a hissy treble devoid Amstrad amplifier for a few quid of the era. The A2000 PSU is too f^%king noisy to hear any kind of quality sound anyway.
Sorry, but the Amiga 500 was quite expensive to the use of high quality components parts. On the other side however, with the Atari ST series...... LOL !
@@dlfrsilver I am talking about higher frequencies missing from sample playback output from phono ports compared to Amiga 1000 or A1200/4000/CDTV not the crap Yamaha ST sound chip. It's like a budget hi-fi compared to some other models in the range, too much bass sweet FA higher frequencies. Horrible machine doesn't even have an on/off switch LOL
@@madcommodore The sound circuit on the Amiga is the same in every model. You can pick any game you want, it will sound the same on A500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 600, 1200, and so on.
@@madcommodore the hardware filter on A500 is programmable, you can activate it or disactivate it in a program. For instance, the sound is muffled on Vroom Amiga, because the programmer did not shut the filter off in its program.
Interesting how the ST version looks much better than the Amiga version. Shouldn't the Amiga have the same range of colors as the STE? Yet, the Amiga only has a grey ship, and they made the planet and comets odd colors instead of the more striking and natural red/orange.
"ST Version looks much better than Amiga" is just a matter of taste. I prefer the Amiga version as it is much colorful. The Amiga has twice (32 colors) or 4 times (64 colors EHB Mode) the amount of colors available than the ST (16 colors) therefore less limitations during the development. We can see that on Amiga, the sprites (ship, explosions, asteroids) have a completely different color palette than the background : Sprites = grey shades, orange shades and red. Background = blue shades and pink shades. My guess is that there were 2 separate people at the development: One for the background design, one for the sprites design which were pre-rendered CGI objects. Both could use their own 16- color palette as they want, and then they compiled both projects at the end without limitation. This makes the development much easier and faster, as they don't care what color the other team uses. The graphics on Amiga (especially the background) could have been much colorful if the sprite color palette has been added for it, we would have backgrounds with blue shades, pink shades, orange shades and grey shades, but then the development would have been longer. When porting the Amiga version to the ST, a lot of color optimisations have been required as the ST can display only 16 colors simultaneously and the developers have to use those colors for everything on screen. The 32 color palette of the Amiga must be reduced to 16 for the ST. For the planet, they replaced the pink shades by the orange ones (as the explosions must remain orange), and for the ship they re-use the bluish background colors (light shades of it), as they do for the asteroids. That's why everything on the ST is blueish and orange-ish, and the Amiga is a mix of blue shades, orange shades, grey shades and pink shades.
@@paulstevens9409 It's sixteens colours on screen from a palete of 4096 on the ste compared to 16 colours on earlier st's with a palete 512 colours trust me i know i had an Atari Ste.
@@jasont6287 They had a chance to take on the amiga properly (hardware wise) and they make a schoolboy error like that! The STE should have surpassed the amiga in every category. I guess that's why after atari released the falcon, with blew everything away but was too late
@@paulstevens9409 Atari was run by ex-Commodore Jack Tramiel, hence the C64/C16 schoolboy error. Atari Falcon/030 was equipped with a 16bit bus for LOL. The Commodore mindset is still showing in Jack Tramiel's Atari. A1200's 32bit bus being shared CPU and IGP are bad enough when Atari Falcon's 16-bit bus takes it to another level of crap.
STE was a hell of a machine. It was nicely off-beat compared to the Amiga lineup, the was no direct competitor. Better than 500, inferior to 1200 but that was roughly a generation after, and different price point so not comparable.
+RNL Valencia yes, by far. the Amiga had the custom chipset as well as a preemptive multitasking operating system - better than ANYTHING on the home computer market at the time - including the PC or Mac for that matter. I don't think the ST had multitasking of any sort.
Agreed about 500, revolutionary for its time. But STE is is newer and slightly more powerful. Perhaps you're confusing ST and STE. STE had seemingly small revisions, but they brought it up to par, and I think past the 500. Having a dedicated blitter chip is the big thing I guess, that was lacking from the original ST.
DeckerFI Flawed reasoning. STE's maximum displayable palette without programming tricks was still limited to 16 colors in the lowest 320x200 resolution.
I had amiga back in the day and to be honest - I always thought they were overrated. The Atari ST was a much more simple design and applied graphics to the screen in a much faster way than the amiga. Atari ST got to the point - whereas the amiga seemed slower at starting applications. The sound chip is the big difference but creativity makes good music - not the instruments you are using.
My story is somewhat the inverse of yours, coming from the ST the difference was night and day, the massive collection of creative software given away on coverdisks did it for me, that and seeing Turrican 2 running on my brothers A500. It was awesome to plug a Midi Keyboard into the ST and hear space quest 3 coming out of it though..
Amiga's problem was often just the laziness (and/or money) of game devs. It was lot easier to make a game for ST, and straight port it to amiga using only 16 colors, and not using blitter/copper etc. Many titles have music that uses as little samples (and as low quality) as possible, probably because the games took roughly same amount of memory, but amiga music needed that extra bit. Also, the graphics were not "much faster" in ST. Both have very similar bitplane system, where ST 8mhz processor performed a bit better. The games that used amiga blitter, were a LOT faster than ST, have to remember that blitting image didn't stop the cpu so it could go on calculating the next thing while blitter did its work. (Though in my opinion, blitter was still horribly slow and lacked features compared to what it could have been. For example the whole amiga would've been in totally different level if blitter had actual bitmap stretching or rotating in it...)
Even STE can't cope with the amiga capabilities. Less colors (only 16!) and lower resolution (no overscan). And sound glitches are also on real Atari hardware. Amiga wins here.
Its a cheap MIDI remote device. Not a real music computer or gaming machine. I own one and after many years i now appreciate it. Its not match for the Amiga and it wasnt never to be. It was better than bw MAC and cheap. Amiga was made with passion (with Ja ck Tremel on charge it would b cost efficent without mojo! Like ST/e)
There were much better gaming machines than Amiga, like MegaDrive, SNES or NeoGeo. The only reason Amiga existed was just piracy. BTW it was just poor design, e.g. cheap sprites (only eight 16pixel wide, only 3color), some design errors like issue TAS instruction, irritating small Chip RAM in OCS, no HDD support, low graphics resolution etc. The numbers speak for themselves: Amiga - 5 millions sold, MegaDrive 30 millions, SNES 49 millions...
@@blast4722 Those better gaming machines (especially the megadrive) were marginally better, depending on the type of game you'd play, games that were on both systems could go either way. Good examples of the Amiga beating the MD are lotus 2 (called simply lotus esprit on the MD), cannon fodder, turrican 2, toki and vroom just to name a few. But, most importantly, the MD hardware was four+ years newer than the Amiga hardware (Amiga1000 being the original one and having the same hardware as the A500 except for less ram). Took four years five months to outdo the Amiga and by the same token by that time the A1200 was out that was (on paper at least) much more capable than the MD. Too bad the hardware was never really taken advantage of.
@@jimkrom Actually, there is TONS of A1200 AGA software, both for the actual A1200 unexpanded and for the A1200 with accelerators and extra RAM. The downside for gamers is that almost all the software is for the Demoscene, but it sure is awesome, and sceners have been releasing productions since Commodore went bust up to the present day! There is a lot of outstanding stuff out there!
@@blast4722 Atari around 3 millions sold, and the piracy killed the Atari ST straight up. Next the Amiga was a computer, not a console. It had HDD support (better than those on the ST, i know, i have one on my Atari computers and one on my A500).
Bahahaha, they even try to compare the two? Amiga destroys the Atari version, it's not even close. Nice try, Atari fanboys. Go and get some glasses, some hearing aids, then come back and see me
No need. Of course the Amiga is soooooo much better than the Atari....... considering the Amiga was an Atari project and the ST was designed by former Commodore engineers. Now what were you saying about glasses and hearing aids Commodore buttboy?
@@bjbell52 Amiga wasn't an Atari project when Atari loan wasn't used. Commodore engineers designed a working prototype C65 with on-screen 256 colors and 4096 color palette. Commodore management canceled C65 project. C65 was the true follow-on product after C64/C128. Atari ST used a 3rd party Yamaha FM sound chip. C64 used the Commodore's SID sound chip.
