The Atari ST: NOT an "Amiga", honest.... 

One significant advantage the ST had over the Amiga was its support for hi resolution monitors. When I first sat in front of one of those little screens I knew this was something special, albeit black and white the definition was amazing and no flicker! Everyone talks about music creation, don't forget DTP!

As a keyboard player, I loved the hell out of my Atari ST. It ran Cubase pretty solidly, the built-in MIDI ports were the thing that sold it to me. Did some programming with GFA Basic, a Basic-variant built for the ST exclusively. I upgraded to a Mega ST later, with a separate hard drive that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Good times.

As a 15 y/o kid I'd have loved an Amiga. But at a time when an Atari 520STFM was £300, plugged into the 14" TV I already had in my bedroom and could be bought in the highstreet electrical shop an Amiga was over £1000 by the time you'd got the required monitor. And barely available. The Atari was simple and Atari moved quickly. By the time the Amiga 500 was released the Atari was established, that ensured too many games were ST ports and didnt use any of the Amiga hardware advantages (specifically hardware scrolling). Of course in time the Amiga took over, but for a time the ST was the 16 bit machine you actually could have. In 1986 the 520STFM was £300 and available, the Amiga 500 was 18 months away and would be £500.

As a student at the time I bought an Amiga 500 mainly it's sound and graphics capabilities. I had a friend who bought an Atari 1040 ST with the monochrome screen and while I was bragging about the superior games on the Amiga I was secretly envious of the productivity software on the Atari. The Amiga had a multitasking OS but GEM looked more polished, especially on the high res monochrome display. Now, so many years later I still have my Amiga and having bought an Atari STE I love them both

The Atari ST industrial design still looks like „the future“ to me. I got all of the 32 Bit Micros including an Archimedes, they are all fantastic and inspiring.

Used to repair these back in the day. We used to see at least 10 ST's for each Amiga. The mouse/joystick ports always broke, the PSU was flakey and the chips always oxidised causing crashes. On the plus side the board was much easier to work on than the Amiga! If there was no midi ports the ST would've flopped, schools used them because of the midi. Then the PC came along.....

The ST was Jack's least successful computer. When he left Commodore, half the computers in the world were Commodores. The C128's life mirrors the ST. It was also designed in five months, launched in January 85 and was discontinued in 1989, sold five million and was considered a failure. And more importantly, both were outlived and outsold by their predecessor the C64.

This video isn't too accurate, but kudos for the effort. in short: - Commodore went out of business 2 years before Atari, - you could buy 260 ST, and it had 512 KB of RAM, half of which was consumed by OS from floppy, MMU supported up to 4 MB. - YM chip is neither mono nor stereo, as it has 3 separate audio output pins. Noise generator isn't independent thing from other sound channels, only another operating mode for them. - blitter chip was a stock chip in MEGA series, and many STFMs were "blitter ready" (there was an empty socket for blitter chip upgrade) - don't know why the joystick ports are "MSX standard", since they are the same as in VCS2600, and were created by Atari - 'DMA port' actually was a SCSI port squeezed into 19-pin socket, so it wasn't only for HDDs and printers

The ST actually beat the Amiga to the market, so one could argue that the Amiga was to compete with the ST. However, the Amiga was under development since 1983 whereas the ST took only five months to develop when the Tramiels took over Atari.

I remember jumping up to the ST from the old tape driven 800 machine. The gygemm desktop (sort of windows) completely stumped me for about 4 hours . I had no idea how to get a game to work.

There are quite a few things for which the Amiga hardware is better suited, including nearly everything related to games and multimedia (presentations). But, the ST hardware was better for 2 use cases: - DTP, typesetting, etc (because of the hires monochrome video mode) - Music production using MIDI

I recall there was an ST maze shooter game (players looked like pacmen) that used the midi port to network other ST's. IMO this should be given the credit as the first multiplayer FPS! There was also a text adventure (that I never tried, my system was B&W) that increased the no. of colours that could be displayed by switching the palette between frames. It was advertised as understanding English: "plant the plant in the plant pot" was the example used. What was it called? Was it good? Where can I get it?

Really nice video, thanks for making it. I think there is more to the story though, which is the chip shortage of the late 80s. This is all from memory so I’m not sure how accurate it is, as I remember… In 1985 Europe was still mostly into 8 bit tape based home computers for gaming, whereas Japan and USA were mainly consoles The ST reached a price of £299 while the Amiga was £499 , so the ST was very popular, it lacked the graphics and sound of the Amiga but was significantly better than what most Europeans had seen before so sold in large numbers. Then one of only 2 factories in the world that made a specialised glue for silicon chip packages was destroyed in a fire which pushed up global prices of chips, mainly memory chips. The shortage lasted 2 years. The ST increased in price overnight to £399 and the Amiga only to £549 , and now the price difference was such that a lot of Europeans paid the extra to get the Amigas When the prices finally came back down again the ST was no longer seen as so amazing compared to the Amiga , and the PC had started to build momentum with its games, so the ST was squeezed out. in Japan they had their own X68000 with even better graphics and audio than the Amiga, so they skipped over both if them.

The joystick ports were 9 pin Atari standard and already in use before the MSX machines launched, The "standard" actually launched with the Atari VCS but went on to be used by Commodore in the C64 as well as the MSX and others. A number of other micros and consoles used the same style of port but had different wiring though.

Ahem. Jay Miner left Atari Inc in 1979. Warner had owned Atari Inc since 1976. Atari Inc loaned Amiga Corp $500K to complete the Amiga Lorraine chipset and Atari Inc had exclusive rights to use the chipset in a console and after 1 year could release a keyboard for it to turn it into a computer as well as release a computer line based upon the chipset at the same time. Plus, the chipset could be used by Atari Inc’s arcade division…although they already had a superior graphics chip which they ultimately used. The plan was to release the console - code named “Mickey” - with 128K RAM for Christmas 1985. The agreement stipulated if Amiga couldn’t pay back the loan, then Amiga would become a division of Atari Inc and Atari could immediately use the chipset without any restrictions. The agreement was going to be amended to prevent Amiga from licensing the tech - or to sell the company outright - to Apple, Commodore, IBM, or TI. Amiga couldn’t pay back the loan. Instead of fessing up, they sold themselves to Commodore and Commodore gave them the $500K to pay back Atari INC. Amiga then defrauded Atari Inc claiming the Lorraine chipset didn’t work and handed over the check [which was not cashed]. Jack Tramiel & Co had left Commodore after the 1984 January CES and set up TTL. Commodore immediately sued TTL and Tramiel as well as several others under the false claim they had stolen IP as they exited Commodore. Warner CEO Steve Ross wanted to sell the assets of Atari Inc’s Consumer Division to Tramiel to quickly get Atari’s losses off Warner’s books but still retain a stake so it could be re-acquired later if the business turned around. That’s why Ross turned down the offers from Philips to buy all of Atari Inc from Warner. Warner sold the promising video phone division known as AtariTel to Mitsubishi while whittling down Atari Inc basically just to the arcade division which became known as “Atari Games” [as well as Tengen later] and the majority stake sold briefly to Namco. Meanwhile, after the Tramiels took control of the remnants of the Atari Inc Consumer Division [which became Atari Corp], Leonard Tramiel discovered the Amiga documents including the check. The Tramiels asked Warner to pass the legal claims over to Atari Corp and then they counter-sued Commodore. This involved tit-for-tat court orders to halt developments on both the ST and the Amiga. But the point is, Commodore started the legal shenanigans, not to mention enabling Amiga to defraud Atari INC. You also mention Microsoft Windows was originally planned for use on the ST. No. Bill Gates did try to persuade Tramiel to license Windows but it wasn’t anywhere near ready. That was not the plan. And the former Atari Inc’s Advanced Research Division’s operating system that ran atop their Dual 68000 powered Atari Gaza workstation, which was BSD with a custom GUI, wasn’t going to run on consumer hardware at that time… so they licensed DRI’s GEM along with GEMDOS aka TOS. You mention ex Commodore employees worked on theST but so did ex Atari Inc employees like Landon Dyer. The ST beat the Amiga 1000 to market and cost a lot less than the Amiga’s $1,600 price tag, not to mention it had twice the amount of RAM standard. That’s why the ST beat the Amiga in sales until the Amiga 500 was released in late 1987. The 260ST was released in small numbers but it was automatically upgraded to 512K RAM. It’s a collector’s item. It was always the intent to release a Blitter chip for the ST but it was delayed thanks to multiple manufacturing issues but later debuted in the Mega ST in early 1987. The Amiga is not special in featuring a Blitter chip. The MindSet PC featured one in 1984 and that company and its engineers were ex-Atari Inc employees. The 1040ST wasn’t released as an attempt to catch up with Amiga. It was released in 1986. The Amiga didn’t start selling well until 1988.

The Atari OS were quite limited vs the unlimited pre-emptive multitasking OS on Amiga. Amiga OS can still do things you can't do in Windows 11.

BTW the Atari ST was more the follow up of the Commodore Plus4 (and thus the C16) which Tramiel was developing at Commodore

Finally, a RU-vid video about the history of Atari & Amiga.

I agree with your analysis if you simply compare the ST to an Amiga 500, on a pure "hardware capable" basis. Yeah undoubtedly the Amiga was in comparison a much more capable machine, both for graphics and also for sound. Atari 520 STE was a more serious competitor but its advanced capabilities weren't used by most software/games for compatibility reasons with the ST (only much later, some music composition software took advantage of it, and were capable to offer 8 voices of simultaneous sound playback which is was really awesome, but too late !). That said if you take into consideration that some "key features" of the ST were, back at the time, REALLY IMPORTANT (hi resolution mode, midi ports, a simple and effective desktop in ROM, and a floppy disk format that was IBM PC COMPATIBLE !), you start to see things differently, and you can only wonder why commodore didn't put more efforts to have those features, too. I worked in the music production industry and I can tell you that, as amazing as it seems, Atari ST's are STILL USED TO THAT DAY, mainly by some musicians who re using them since the 90's, for music production. The reason for that is that there's many fantastic softwares for vintage MIDI keyboard patch management, and a lot of patch/preset banks for those softwares available on the internet too. Basically the most difficult to get today are floppy drives, and floppy disks, still required to bring those files from you windows PC computer, to the old ST ;-) The St had an edge for professional-commercial applications, as it was very capable of communicating with other devices from many constructor, using standard interfaces, and communication protocols. The Amiga had an edge in his own hardware capabilities, but aside for video production (with "the Toaster") it wasn't that much used professionally.

It's interesting looking back at things from a worldwide perspective, because the ST was the more popular machine in the United States.

I've long been a firm believer that what finally killed the Amiga and the ST in the market, was the CD-ROM. You can point the finger at Doom, but that problem was solvable by not expecting to run Doom on a computer designed nearly ten years before Doom came out (I'm sure the Falcon could have handled it quite acceptably). Obviously, CD-ROM drives existed for both the Amiga and the Atari, but they weren't strongly supported. Even when Commodore released the CD-32, it was so poorly managed and marketed that the most common use for those discs was holding a couple of floppies' worth of data for a game release. No, what really got the IBM compatible running Windows into every home was Encarta 95. Parents buying a computer for the kids to do their schoolwork were very well sold on Encarta, and education departments in schools were given a strong enough marketing blitz that, just from Encarta being in schools, the schools were doing the selling to the parents! Acorn never knew what hit them, I'm sure. By 1992, Atari and Commodore should have both been putting out first party CD drive accessories for their existing computers, and supporting developers in making use of them appropriately. By 1995, it should have just been expected that most users had a CD drive, even if all they used it for was magazine cover discs. In 95, a desktop PC still weighed in at a couple of thousand bucks, plus monitor, plus keyboard and mouse, and you'd be lucky if you had a CD drive in that as standard, while the STe and A1200 would probably have just nosed over a grand with a CD drive in the box. 93's Falcon would have been a bit more expensive, but the Falcon still crapped all over the IBM compatibles in some regards, so much so that any shortfall could have been explained by it not costing you the price of a small car. I think, with a high quality and easy to use encyclopedia like Encarta on the ST, coupled with its low price, it might have been a more compelling package for parents to buy. Hindsight is 20/20, though, and I bet if I burst into a boardroom in 1990 and tried to tell Jack Tramiel what was coming, I'd have been laughed out of the room.

loved my Atari ST

The Amiga and ST weren't really competitors, they were in completely different price brackets. A better analogy than ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 would be Spectrum vs BBC B.. Having used and supported a load of them it's biggest weakness was it's power supply

i had back time both Atari St and Amiga , the Atari St IS with no doubt far better than the Amiga if you wanted a real computer , but if you wanted a video console with a disk drive the Amiga was at the end of its commercial life better. At start there were mainly only Atari St port on the Amiga , it started to change after 1989. .. To really appreciete the Atari ST has a computer you need to have the Hires monochrome monitor. These monitors were amazing.

In 3d games the Atari ST was quite superior to the basic Amiga because of the faster 68000. But more at the end of the 16 bit era when most Amiga owners already upgraded to a PC and a smaller group to the Amiga 1200. There is another disavantage to being the cheaper computer : The people who had more money bought an Amiga and they could sell more other crap to them too. The users with less financial room had an Atari ST. So the market for software was smaller for it also.

yes the amiga was better, but the atari was a bit cheaper and i don't think anybody who bought the atari regretted it, the machine still got most of the same games and a lot of fun times were to be had.

I loved my STE for music and spent huge amounts of time making tunes on it in the 90s. The Amiga was definitely better overall and I’m guessing you could have bought a midi add-on at the time but for very little money I had a nice music set-up and made some good stuff with the aid of a simple keyboard borrowed from school and a cheap sampler.

The Atari ST is the reference design from Motorola, with an awfull ay3-8910 audio chip. In an alternative world were IBM chose the 68000 over the 8086, the PC AT is an Atari ST and the Atari ST does not exist

I use Amiga and STs I love the Amiga but the ST has its charm, they are far from horrible machines

The original ST would have completely killed the Amiga before the 500 ever appeared, if not for the penny pinching lack of a blitter chip (that even had a marked out space on the motherboard, it just wasnt fitted!), and the godawful Spectrum tier sound chip. The STE got it right, but by that point it was too late, and the damage was done. For $5-$10 more, Tramiel and team could have won the war before Commodore knew they had started fighting - and having a single dominant low cost 16/32 bit micro taking on the Mac and early IBM PC's, rather than splitting the market might and expending so much energy fighting each other - history might have turned out very different... Alas! Similarly, if Tramiels Atari had actually inherited the Amiga tech rather than it going to Commodore, the same may have happened, but built on the Amiga tech rather than Atari's variation on the theme.

I would like to add a few things.... First and foremost, excellent video! With that said, I am from the US, and I have never seen either the Atari ST or Amiga 500 for sale here, ever. Now, that doesn't mean they were not for sale but that they were so obscure that I only knew one person with an Amiga. From 1985 until the 16-bit revolution, the Nes was the top of the heap. Obviously, that's ridiculous as an Atari ST or Amiga would run circles around it, but that's the way it was back then. Further, while the Amiga and ST were about 500 dollars more than the best Nes package....Nintendo's games were $50 to $65 a pop, making it far more expensive in the long run. I really wish the ST and Amiga caught on here because a lot of their games were incredible. Look at 13:53 and compare that with the best Nes or Master System games, and you will see what I mean....just wow! Note- I started gaming back in 1986 with the Nes and Master System. Finally, I noticed you mentioned the 68K in the Sega Genesis. While that is true, one thing you should note is the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive technically came out 3 years after the Amiga/ST. That in itself is also pretty wild.

Are we ready for the discussion over which fan base (Amiga or Atari ST) had more reason to be bitter?

Development of the ST was much longer than you suggest. Ex Commodore engineers joined Atari and brought with them work done on a Z8000 16 bit cpm based computer done at Commodore. Commodore counter sued Atari because of this

actually a little info the atari started with 256MB not 512 and so did amiga.. i know because i owned them lol

hystreah :D

Technically it is the Amiga Technically the Amiga is the Atari st

The entire history given here is incorrect. Among the most salacious untrue claims made here is that the Atari ST was created as a response to losing the Amiga. Atari Corp did not lend money to Amiga and Jack Tramiel already already been trying to get a 68000-based computer created at Commodore and started designing that computer (the future Atari ST) after leaving Commodore and founding a company and getting handpicked Commodore staff to join it.

Amiga ftw

The Amiga (then Hi-Toro and not Commodore) was carefully developed as the ultimate games system over a few years, and because of the 1983 Videogame Crash was turned into a full-blown computer. Jay Miner and his development team took their time over the Amiga project. The Atari ST was concocted IN A RUSH by Jack Tramiel once he lost the Amiga to Commodore and so it is a random hodge-podge of off-the-shelf components and it's a wonder they were able to get it out to market ahead of Commodore at all. But Amiga is the FAR, FAR SUPERIOR machine. That is all.

Let's address the design elephant in the room, shall we? The embarrassing diagonal function keys!! In hindsight, what were Atari thinking with those fiddly non-standard and hard-to-replace keys?? Even the XE 8-bit models were saddled with them, AND the TT and Falcon! Did Jack Tramiel think they were "cool" or something? At least the Amiga keyboards looked like IBM PC ones!

Ugh. These were absolutely terrible machines. Crappy build, HORRIBLE OS. And I loved Atari until then, had an 800. If not for the built in MIDI port this thing would never have got a fraction of the traction it got in the market. To this day it's the one machine that isn't, nor will it ever be, in my retro collection :)