Commodore Amiga vs Atari ST: Part 1 Hardware & Operating systems explained 

The Atari ST was completely created in like 6 months. A Record that has never been broken. These folks created all the hardware and OS in that time Period. They had to use off the shelf Sound and Video chips. They created a Cheap, Very High Performance Machine! Amazing!

This sure brings back a lot of memories. I started out on the Vic 20, moved to the C=64. A friend of mine bought an Amiga 1000, which was really expensive. All my friends were drooling over it when another friend purchased one. It was a year or two before they finally came out with the Amiga 500, and to a T, all the people in my circles who were C=64 users sold their C=64 with their huge software collections and purchased Amiga 500 computers, with the new monitors and the external floppy drive. We were pretty amazed at the power of this machine. This is when I started taking Engineering Technology courses at college, and I was doing all my homework on the Amiga, including drawing schematics using IntroCAD. No one else in the courses I was taking had the marks I achieved from doing such a great job on my assignments. After graduating I started working at a local franchise of National Electronic Service Association. They were doing warranty repaires for both Commodore and Atari (not to mention Intellivision and Vectrex and Coleco). I got to be quite familiar with all the machines these companies produced. This is what I have to say about the Atari St: It was a good MIDI machine. That's it. It wouldn't multitask, had shitty audio, it was cheaply built and often would break when being disassembled because the plastic was so cheap, the units with the internal power supplies would go bad all the time as those units had no fans and would overheat, damaging the boards. To top it off, the GUI was horrid. It looked so primitive beside the Amiga it was comical. Even more so when the Amiga was upgraded to Kickstart and Workbench 2.0, and later 3.0 with AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). I couldn't even use an ST for any more than a few minutes because I found the interface so distasteful. The Amiga was amazing because of the expansions available to it. You touched on the bay under the computer, which could be used for memory expansions, but more importantly for combo memory expansion and accelerator cards which, at the time, sported a replacement CPU in the form of a 68020 or a 68030 cpu usually with another 8 MB of RAM (which was super expensive at the time). However, there was another expansion port on the left side of the machine, which was used for hard drive expansions. These expansions would also plug directly into the bus, and allowed the Amiga to reach it's full potential as easily the best computer of its time, a decade ahead of its time. In fact, it wasn't until PCs started using 3D graphics cards (Ala 3DFX) and finally got a multitasking operating system (Windows 95) with a sound card, that there was any real competition for the Amiga. Once a hard drive was added, they became real powerhouses. I ended up purchasing an Arrow expansion case from Germany, which looked like a larger Amiga 1000, with an internal power supply and a riser card converting that left side expansion into four expansion slots similar to what the newer Amiga 2000 had, and two hard drive bays. It even came with a housing to install your keyboard in, so it looked like any other keyboard on a PC at the time. Later I traded in my Amiga 500 and all it's mods for an Amiga 1200 with a 68030 CPU and 8MB of RAM (2MB of graphics RAM) via another expansion card (the Amiga 1200 came with a 68020 CPU and just the 2GB of "fastRAM". What really killed us all was seeing a demo in Sears at the time the Amiga 1000 first came out, and this demo showed an animated scene of a city block with all sorts of animated toons walking around, and every one of those toons was a separate program. We were just amazed. The Amiga was easily out in front of all its competition at the time, and the only thing that killed it was the incompetence of Commodore Business Machines management. They came out with the C16, and the Plus 4 which were both pieces of trash. Months after hitting the stores they were discounted to the bargain bins. This basically killed Commodore with all the resources they spent on two computers that any Commodore customer could have told them would fail. Right when this was happening, the PC was seeing two revolutionary games, Descent and Mechwarrior II. Descent was a two player game played over a modem, a true 3D game where you would pilot a fighter craft through tunnels to kill robots that had gone crazy. You could play with a friend over a modem, and this was almost revolutionary at the time (the Amiga had Stunt Car Racer, but the graphics were pretty weak). That game, combined with a segment on the News on CBC showing this amazing new game called Mechwarrior II, where you were actually piloting a mech, convinced me to finally sell my Amiga 1200 while the selling was good, and purchase my first PC. The Amiga was most likely right up there with the Commodore 64 as the most revolutionary home computers of all time.

I loved my Amiga 500+, saved my paper round money for a whole year and Dad gave me the rest to buy it :)

In terms of power, it definitely has to be the Amiga, the ST definitely wasn't up to snuff In terms of aesthetics, I love the ST more, with its lines and slants, its a very attractive machine Overall though, if I had the choice, I would have to pick an Amiga

My gosh that Turrican ][ soundtrack is still sounding epic...

Amiga 500 was a beast for its time. It came out in 85, yet ended up competing with most platforms of early 90s.

"The blitter rivals"..... ....... So glad you're back! This has made my good weekend turn great. What a nostalgia trip.

Welcome back! Great video as always. I was an Amiga 500 fan back in the day and that short clip of lotus esprit turbo challenge reminded me of the great times I had with friends as a nipper. Such a long time ago.

What an amazingly informative video. Very well done! I am an Atari ST fan at heart and will always be. But you paid tribute to both machines in this video! Great stuff.

Having moved up from my Commodore 16, to a Commodore 64.. when that got old I spent a fortune of Paper round money on an Atari 800xl.. it used to take hours to load games from cassette - as a platform it never caught on.. so I went back to my Commodore roots and got the Amiga 500 - i used to earn £3.60 a week as a paper round and i think it cost £399! - luckily once i'd saved up 50% my parents chipped in the rest for Xmas :)

Welcome back !!! My best mate had the Amiga 1000, I had the A500, I recall getting a 500kb memory expansion

I enjoy your videos. Happy, that you still decided to continue. And I really hope, you get more recognition. All the best and keep 'em coming!

I remember getting the flight of the fantasy pack amiga 500 in the summer of 89. Set it all up only to have a piece of cardboard stuck in the drive, got it out but the drive was making a nasty sound and wouldn't read the disks. Had to wait a fortnight for a replacement, but well worth it. All time favourite machine and taught me a lot about computers. Very informative video really well put together.

Probably one of the best under the hood comparisons I've seen so far. Kudos!

They were both part of my past and I still own and appreciate them today...great video

Welcome back NX! Really enjoyed this one!

Great analysis, I'm looking forward to part 2.

Imagine a Universe where Amiga and Atari merged into one company.

Terrific work! Very informative and enjoyable.

Love this! seeing that old amiga manual brought some great memories back!

Welcome back! NX! 😎👍🏽 and it's great to see the early beginnings of gaming hardware with your in-depth analysis 👌🏽

Welcome back, great video as always

I had the normal Amiga 500. Awesome gaming pc. I will never forget Lotus Turbo Challenge and Cannon Fodder.

Me and my friend had these battles all the time. He was all Amiga, I was all Atari...we never settled! I loved my Atari (and I was a musician, so the software was better given Emagic's entries with their early Logic software) and he loved his Amiga. We both played on both all the time. But I loved my Atari and still do!

@NX Gamer My first computer was an Atari 800 in 1981. Other than my first ST in about 1986, the 800 was the best until I got my Amiga 500 in 1991. I owned almost ALL Atari models, starting from the 2600 all the way through the 1040 ST. But when I got the A500, I was hooked, hardcore. I even got a job at my local computer store and sold and repaired C64's, Ataris, and Amigas for about 5 years. I eventually ended up becoming the service department manager. The reason I mention all that, is because watching your videos brings back a flood of memories repairing computers down to the component level, unlike we do today. In this day and age, it's a pull and toss parts method, instead of replacing blown capacitors, resistors, and IC's. I un/soldered many Paula, Agnus, and Denise chips, but I always took the time to be professional and socket any chip I replaced. In those 5 years, I repaired probably 1,000 C64, Amiga, and Atari computers. Great times. I wish I could go back, but man, I'd miss Google and RU-vid...lol EDIT: I love and appreciate these two Amiga vs Atari ST videos I've watched. I know I'm a couple of years late to the party, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. Well done. Great work.

You probibly have no idea just how perfect a video this is for me. I had the Atari ST and then later the STE. One of these systems later had an additional 512k of memory soldiered on to the motherboard which also needed some resisters changing. A family friend did this. Poor sod. Some of the best years in gaming. I miss psygnosis. Thank you so much for the very informative insight you have provided. Can't wait for part 2. I remember there was some revolutionary anti-piracy protection back in the day but the name escapes me. Everything about those days were great. Lending games to friends, couch co-op. Demo scene. Magazines. Demo disks. Perfection. Thank you :)

Excellent Vid, thanks for making it. I was an Atari fan, had a 520STFM (upgraded to 1mb), and an STE upgraded to 2mb. I miss them and the 100s of games

great video, many thanks. i had both machines when i was younger and could clearly see amiga was a far better machine!

Just found this channel today, suggested via 'Nostalgia Nerd' subscribed, love the content.

You seemed to have sadly disappeared and then you come back with this slice of gold! Brilliant stuff.

Damn RU-vid notifications didn't notify me for a month you had new videos. Welcome back NX Gamer!

Glad you're back! :D

Excellent video, many thanks.

I can watch videos like that all day long. GJ!

Excellent stuff as always. 👍

Glad you are back man!!

Fantastic video! I Started with an st and saw shadow of the beast and drivin’ force on the Amiga and i was sold. Sold my soul to get an Amiga but it was worth it. If you pause at 12:50 you can see the face they used on the Amiga power pack packaging! Long time avid watcher - first time commenter!

So Glad your back love your content : - )

Fantastic video, watched it over a few times now. When is Part 2 likely to be released as I cannot wait to see it. Thanks again for creating this.

Awesome video! A friend actually got the early Amiga 1000 and it was a mindblowing experience even with the very early games. Our C64s were looking very old suddenly.

Awesome to see you back ! Had some great times on the Amiga ! Moonstone !

Waiting for Part 2, thanks 👍

Awesome to see you back mate! great video! I had the Amiga 600 which did the job for 2 player Sensible Soccer that's all i needed :)

Glad yoa are back!

And then the old 1 meg expansion, Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon.... ah the good old days! Great video BTW

This will be fun to watch. Loved my Amiga 500.

How interesting.... great video buddy

I was in the Amiga camp but I never cared for fueling the rivalry with the ST owners. Both lines of machines had their pros and cons and the one commonality we all had to experience anyway was the original bridge burner himself, Jack Tramiel. Besides, neither company survived the overtaking of the market by the IBM-compatibles in the early/mid-90s so it's been a moot point for a long time now.

Welcome back!!

Great Video, though you didn't mention much about the amiga 500 left side expansion port. I had a GVP HD expansion mounted back in the day... which rocked :)

Was there ever a part 2 to this? would love to see it!

Good and very thorough stuff here!

Another masterpiece of hardware review deserved to these legendary machines!

Awesome Review , Atari ST , STF ,STFM , STE , FALCON 030 , Commodore Amiga 500 , 600 , 1200 were the best computers ever , I wish computer technology would have stopped in 1994

man i though you left but thank God that your are back

Fantastic, insightful, interesting!

I remember the excitement when I got my Amiga which I felt was a huge upgrade from my c64 its hard to think of a time recently when I was so excited about technology maybe my first smart phone but that still doesnt compete with the excitement of the Amiga!

The Atari ST is like the Genesis/Mega Drive while the Amiga is the Super Nintendo. Both great machines with strengths and weaknesses. I myself fell on the Atari side and got a 1040STe with a 320 meg SCSI hard drive with the Geneva OS and NeoDesk 4. Made the interface much nicer and polished than the original basic GEM/TOS.

@4:05 music from double dragon... Geez i remember playing that in the arcade when it came out

Excelente comparación y analisis

Blitter rivals...love it, love everthing about it well played sir! Unfortunately, I never really experienced the micros as an American. I started with the Nes (1985) and Master System (1986) and finally becoming a gamer in 1989 with my launch Sega Genesis (I lucked out as a kid and had all three consoles the first year they came out). It looks like both the Amiga and Atari ST had sprite scalling and rotation which the Genesis could do through brute force but not by design...amazing!

I was always on the Commodore fence, starting with the C16 Plus/4, , C64, Amiga 500 and then 1200 glad i was a part of it

I bought my Amiga in December 1989 I had the Barman Pack for £399 and I've still got it 😉

Guess who back NX gamer back tell a friend.........welcome back awesome video I had Atari 800xl and I loved it had a simple code book and I created a simple clock working clock with the code I was using can’t remember the name of the code but it was like 10 print something 20 goto10 etc etc I was around 13 yrs old I think long time ago now

thank goodness hes back

Sweet nostalgia, i've got a couple of Atari 520ST waiting to be revived, really hope they will come out as great as yours :)

I remember some games on the ST were awkward to play, like Super Hang On for example. You had to push up to accelerate whilst trying to steer with the joystick. My mate adapted a Mega Drive pad to work on the ST with an extra button. He took the wire from the up direction on the MD pad and soldered it to the C button on the MD pad so pressing C would act like the joystick's up direction. It made a huge difference in some games. Having a button to accelerate in Super Hang On made the game playable and having a jump button turned the ST's Rainbow Islands into a whole new game. It was like playing the arcade game. Only having one fire button really hindered the 16 bit computers. I think they would have whooped the consoles of the time in the gaming market if they had the extra fire buttons. Imagine back then: console quality games at a fraction of the price of a game cartridge. You could pirate the consoles back then but you needed very expensive equipment. With the computers all you needed to copy your mate's games was a copy of X Copy or Fast Copy. My friendly neighbourhood pirate dealer used X Copy to make is pirates. Their stall was open only on Saturdays and Sundays and they made an absolute fortune.

Great video. The Amiga was really a games machine and everyone knows had better sound than the ST. However this fact did not effect my game play on the ST as I didn't know better. I also used my ST for writing out hundreds of reports, so it was a real computer with a decent OS. I still have my final machine, 1040 STE with 2.5 meg of ram. I have two a500s one of which is still boxed with the free T shirt, I just love looking at these old machines of which I have quite a collection. NES, SNES, MEGADRIVE, Just about every Atari bar 3. Even have my first ever computer the 48 ZX spectrum. Things sure have changed.

@25:10 Jeebus, I never saw the Shadow of the Beast Atari port until today...Man, I'm very happy my dad bought an Amiga, the graphics and sound for this particular conversion/port are simply abysmal.

Xenon 2 and Turrican on the Atari 1040 STe, sound of my youth...

Hahahaha great to see u back lad ....hope the break did u good!!!

Good stuff.

Welcome back:)

The amiga has 32 colors from a 4096 palette, (or, with no performance penalty.. 64 colors in extra Half Bright Mode.. very useful). The Atari ST had 16 colors our of 512 color palette). The Amiga can display 4096 colors in HAM mode or in Sliced HAM mode.. but it is very limited in actual Gaming Modes. The 4 channel Stereo mode on the Amiga was Vastly superior to the Atari's crude sound chip. The Atari had a built in MIDI interface, very handy. The Amiga Users had to spend extra money to buy a MIDI interface, ($25-$50 ). The Amiga had a fully Pre-Emptive Multitasking Operating System. The Atari did not.. nor did the MAC.. until a few decades later... (Windows NT and IBM's OS/2 had it fairly early). The Amiga has Hardware Accelerated Graphics to help with gaming. The Atari ST was totally designed and produced in a shockingly short period of time..!!!! Jack, through his Personality.. Made it happen! No computer has EVER been developed in such a short period of Time. Everyone who was involved are GODS. They went from nothing to an actual computer in like 6 months. The ST was shockingly Cheap, and was a killer computer and gaming platform. Great Job folks!

@NX gamer Did you have mono monitor for ST back in '80s? Or just color?

Ahhh you've made me start thinking about my amiga lol. I have a 500plus and I need to re-cap it and replace the battery. Also sort out some method of hooking it up to a modern display. I also have the old commodore monitor, but it just demands too much space.

21:40 That's kinda spooky almost real life foreshadowing.

Very good and unbiased video, liked it a lot (I was a Commodore guy by the way) Just one extremely minor thing to add... the part with the one and only mr. Huelsbeck, Turrican 2, actually sports *intro* music, not ingame: this is due to the an issue you talked about a lot for the AtariST, i.e. intro, credits and high score music was written with TFMX 7voice routine, that used CPU to mix sound in real time so to have more audio channels... that was basically not possible during normal gameplay AFAIK, so it was restricted to less demanding parts of the game (I can't remember any Amiga game that used this tecnique ingame, I'd gladly hear from Amiga fellows anyway if they know about some that actually did) Best regards!

Would love to see a side-by-side play of *Rescue on Fractalus,* and/or *Air Warrior* between these two games. _I still have working; _*_VIC-20, C-64, Amiga-1000, and Atari 1040-ST._* 👍👍👍

Another Point on the A500.. It had a memory expansion port in the bottom and a very high end expansion port on the left side of the machine! (you could buy SCSI controllers/Memory expansions../Genlocks or many other things for it).

I am biased...I had an A500 (one of the last before the plus was released). I had a 512mb upgrade and it was a blessing. The machine ran perfectly until I moved to a PC in around 1999. I still love the Amiga and lament Commodores demise.

I can still vividly remember getting the Cartoon Classics pack for Christmas. Firing up the machine to play Lemmings (superb) and rather naff Captain Planet and Simpsons games. What a fanatic machine it was. I later added a hard disk and a printer, so it was a true 'PC' in that respect. But it was with games that the Amiga really justified its price tag. Piracy was a big problem though. I initially bought all my games, but my school friends would share their pirated copies of virtually every game with me. A box of cheap floppy disks and X-Copy and you were good to go!

Around 2:58 you show Ballblazer. That's an 8 bit game, never released on the ST AFAIK

Altough the amiga was a bit slower (7,16 MHz versus 8 MHz for the ST), the ST was only a reference design from Motorola with nothing fancy, while the Amiga had a handful of specialised co-processors. A friend of mine lend me an ST for some weeks, and I wasn't impressed, specialy by the sound really under what my C64 was capable of. I finally bought an Amiga500, which was the real step forward.

Amiga - the FIRST multimedia machine in a World!

The description says the battle was in the late 80s. The battle actually started as both machines were released in 1985, so please update the description to "mid 80s until the early 90s." I joined in on the battle with an Amiga 1000 in 1985.

Allways wanted to see this experiment done : Have the Amiga and ST run the same small 68K-code (fx. adding numbers from 0 to 100M) on their respective OSes (Workbench/GEM), and see the performance difference. 8MHz is not 8Mhz. On an early mac it's more like 6MHz as many cycles are taken by the display. So how fast is the Atari's 8 MHz compared to the Amiga's 7 MHz when doing CPU-work (compiling, calculating, ie. non-games)? ...thanx for the video.

I had an Atari ST 520STFM, remember playing a Submarine game on it

The A500 had an expansion slot on the left. You could replace the CPU to an 68030 or add memory/hardrives or an Action Replay cart. Basically you could upgrade it to what ever you wanted!

Nice video but most of the text is cut off on the left O.o

The Demos depicted above, did not understand the Fully Preemptive Multitasking OS that the Amiga had.

I still have the Amiga 500 I bought new back in the 80's. I also have a 520ST. Both have 1 meg of RAM. I am thinking about setting up a room in my house for classic computing.

I had the ST back in the early 90s really annoyed me when buying a game in the shops the St section was very limited, turn round and there were wall to wall of amiga games

The SNES didn't have true sample based music though, it had a wavetable (or more presicesly «graintable») synthesizer chip using tiny lengths (or grains) of digital sound in place of oscillators. It simply did not have the memory to do what the Amiga could, even if the Amiga was limited by its 4 channels. This Wavetable synthesis would later be used by legendary PC sound interfaces like the Gravis Ultrasound and the SoundBlaster AWE32, but by then, pre-mixed stereo 16 bit PCM (CD quality) music could be decoded without taxing the system so sequenced (MIDI) music was being left behind in games.

Whats the racing game at 1:04 ?

Amiga OS was based on PDP-11 TripOS, a flexible version of unix.

I had both. The Amiga wins hands down.

Our family owned an Atari ST throughout the 80s-early 90s. I heard and had the notion -though I never ever saw or used on in person- that the Commodore Amiga was a somewhat more advanced PC esp. for gaming. This video seems to also suggest this... I believe that both PCs were well ahead of their times and also their games...

To be a little more clearer than what was said in the video, using a 1040 for sequencing that's a Tim Simenon(Bomb The Bass) way of working, not a DEPECHE MODE one. Tim produced a Depeche's piece of art, the album ULTRA 😉

I loved my amiga, started off with amiga 500 then upgraded to a amiga 2000.