The Amiga version SHOULD be miles better than the ST - I think the programmers of the ST version did an amazing job as other than a few more colours, smoother scrolling and better audio, the Amiga version has nothing the ST version does not have. Would be interesting to have seen the ST version of Shadow Of The Beast if these guys programmed it.
Nothing except more colors, smoother scrolling, more parallax elements and better audio. True enough :) Don't get me wrong, ST version is still impressive, for the hardware used
The Amiga version is smoother of course but I have to say this is a very respectable port and as mentioned here the contrast seems to be much more to my liking on the Atari. I guess as it was ported and they were going through adapting to 16 colours they made other adjustments that became improvements.
The ST has a 512 colour palette and the STE 4096 but both could only show 16 colours at a time unless a programmer used palette switching which this game doesn't use. There is a palette 'split' in the horse riding scene I believe that gives 16 colours per half of the screen. It does use the STE's extended 4096 colour palette but still only 16 colours on screen at a time as opposed to the Amiga's 32-64. You can tell at looking at the colour banding on the intro. Despite this the developers did a great job with those 16 colours on screen.
Love David Whittaker's music - especially the opening music for Shadow of the Beast on the ST. Unfortunately with both these games it seemed they were so busy trying to make them look and sound good they forgot about the gameplay!
This was the first Amiga game I ever saw in action, by my mate Stephen. Given that I owned a humble Spectrum at the time, you can imagine how blown away I was. Especially after Stephen showed me Lemmings! When he later showed me Monkey Island, I was sold!
The Amiga version is smoother, but the palette choices seem better and more impressive on the ST. I am also impressed at the multi parallax scrolling on the ST version that is not using a blitter. This game illustrates what a competent developer can create on more limited hardware.
@@basteqss8859 "Atari had better sound quality" ??? 🤣 Even the C64 had largely better sound quality with its sound chip ! As usual, the Amiga uses sampled instruments here, and in addition some of them are those of Shadow of the Beast (it's the same composer, he reused his own samples). In the atari version only a few parts use sampled instruments (where there is no scrolling as at 26:50 because the ST cannot manage everything at the same time), and we can hear that there is much more aliasing noise in the sound than on the Amiga version. In addition, this video does not show the real quality of the sound of this game on the Amiga: just go see this longplay to hear that it is clearer than in this comparison : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fDc086g7MWs.html
At the 2:42 mark you see the Amiga screen is just as bright as the Atari and then dims... looks like someone was purposefully trying to make the Amiga look less in the comparison for some reason... I like how at the end the hero was given the princess to marry... guess mgtow hadn't arrived yet! LOL I'd have asked for money instead!!!
I disagree, that shows how the amiga are proffessional by making the the background more dark to let the user read perfectly. Look at the title how been more bright and contrusted... Nice edit by amiga in my opinion.
Being someone who had an A500 Batman pack back in 89.. lived and breathed the system and loved every moment of it, I have no idea how I missed this game?! I worked for an independent games shop in 92 that stocked loads of Amiga games.. as well as Future Zone not long after, don’t even recall seeing the box. Feels very Shadow of the Beast, thanks to David Whittaker’s amazing soundtrack.. also the game that made me want to get an A500.. good times :) I’m off to fire up the A500 Mini!
Amiga shows smoother parallax scrolling. The left and right side of the screen are blanked to allow this I guess. It's also using Half Brite mode in my opinion. Atari makes good use of it's 16 color palette.
Amiga was at its very best with sprites and multilayer horizontal scrolling, as it has hardware to manipulate graphics suitable for games like this. This and Shadow of the Beast were some of the games that did show off the capabilities Amiga. They did good job with the Atari ST version too.
An expertliy made video, indeed. I remember when I was playing the game on my Atari STe. Never managed to reach the dark tower, though. A shame that the STe features weren't used, nevertheless it's a great game.
Supposedly it uses the 4096 color palette, like other ReadySoft games. But, I'm with you. I would have loved for it to have used the STe features in full.
Hmm better choice of colors on the ST. I bet the ST version was done after the Amiga but the ST limitations was considered when developing on the Amiga.
The Atari ST version is warmer without being softer. Reminds me of the Amiga graphics of Moonstone. The sharper contrast looks great in many ways; but the sound is so superior on the Amiga that it is no contest in that department. The demon in the last battle looks better in the Atari ST version.
They are comparable only on static screens, like boss fights and the dwarf and bat fights. But when the scrolling starts, it's a slaughter. Amiga is so smoother with these 50fps, it's not even funny.
The atmosphere is way better on the ST (Night effect, rain wtih lightning flash/thunderbolt, and flash/reflection effects in the background at final boss demon). About the colors between both versions: On the ST, colors pop more with lot of brightness (especially in outdoors scene) but looks like little bit more saturated in some parts of the game than the Amiga. On the Amiga, colors pop less with faded colors (especially in outdoors scene) but looks like little bit more natural in some parts of the game than the ST. Fun fact i noticed in my childhood on this game and we find here: At boss gargoyle, the music is different between Atari and Amiga, and surprisingly, the quality of the sound and music style sounds better on the ST over the Amiga, and no, no, i'm not an Atari ST fanboy, because i love so much the Amiga, just fun and real facts ;)
I don't know if this is the case, but ST could play amiga mods. However it required a lot of cpu time so it was used only on title screens/non gaming moments
The audio chip on the Amiga, named Paula, works by being set to play a sample at a specific location, and then starting the DMA cycle. Basically very little CPU time is used to play digitised audio. On every other machine of the time you had to “push” the audio samples into the sound chip via the CPU, and that left little time for the rest of the graphics effects. Which, to be honest, are pretty impressive on the ST, looks like they implemented a “copper” emulator, the other Amiga chip that allowed to put stuff into the other chips and in sync with the display with little to none CPU intervention...
In fact the music of both games comes from the same composer (David Whitakker) using the same samples and tools, hence the similarity, and they're not the only ones; he was a good composer but variety was never his stronger point.
Funding for the designing of the Amiga came from Atari. When Jack took over Atari he wasn't interested in releasing an expensive computer so he came up with the Atari ST.
Animation and sound goes to Amiga, but graphics, surprisingly for me, is a tie or is even better sometimes on the ST port. I think the graphician that did the ST port was just better.
I prefer the sharpness and the clearer image of the Atari ST, but overall Amiga 500 wins by far and is by far a lot better in sound and, colours and framerate. Overall I prefer the amiga 500 over the Atari ST.
Amiga: smooth scrolling. Atari ST: juddery scrolling. Amiga: more colours and a subtler, subdued palette. Atari ST: Less colours, a more contrasted palette and bolder colour choice. The person who recoloured the Atari ST version did a great job: in many cases, I think he/she made better colour choices and it gives the Atari ST version a bolder, more arcadey look which in most cases I prefer. I don't think attempting to recreate the parallax scrolling on the Atari ST was a great idea however. I'd prefer no parallax at all if they could keep the scrolling smooth.
In terms of graphics there are no significant differences . But I like better the Amiga version's softer colors . The music and sounds are also better on Amiga . However the ST version is also a very good game on that machine .
STFU Atari ST wrecked the Amiga regularly - Amiga controls usually sluggish and only a handful of games on Amiga demonstrably better than on the ST. I had both when current.;
@@godslayer1415 but if the number of colors was greater on amiga and the sound has always been superior how could it destroy it just don't know in fact you are the only one to say it here
For games yes. For serious work absolutely not. The ST's 71Hz hi-res mono mode was a brilliant move and made the machine not just a graphics and games machine but also a decent serious computer to work with.
It's 2019. Grown middle aged men arguing over two dead platforms.
4 года назад
The Amiga version is meh - the Amiga can do better than this with it's eyes closed. However, it is quite a programming achievement on the ST which had none of the hardware scrolling, sprites, Blitter, Copper etc of the Amiga, yet still produces a version that is quite comparable. Yes, the Amiga version has the edge, but I was quite surprised how far they pushed the ST to compete.
On the Atari ST, Timer B and CPU method can palette swap similar to Amiga's Copper, but it locks the graphics operations between CPU and graphics ASICs on the Atari ST, hence it's harder to design fast CPU accelerators without breaking large scale legacy software support on the Atari ST/STe.
could also be due to the more color on the Amiga version. one extra bitplane (32color) would mean 25% more data to move around and if the had 2 extra bit plane (64 color) then it would be 50% more data.
Horizontal scrolling on the Amiga eats bandwidth for two sprites in Dual PlayField mode. In order to gain them there are two possibilities : shift the screen 32 pixels to the right or decrease the resolution by 32 pixels. They opted for the latter.
@@nekononiaow Thanks for that explanation. I knew the Amiga dropped sprites 7/8 when horizontal scrolling but I thought it was all horizontal scrolling. You're saying that's true only if dual playfield? I assume because DP requires 6 bitplanes instead of 5 or fewer for other modes. But it's good to know that you can get them back if you're willing to sacrifice some resolution.
In this comparison, there is no clear winner in my opinion. However, watching other videos of various other game comparisons, the Amiga is generally slightly better. And I'm an Atari (8 bit) fan. Never owned an Amiga or ST. I did own a c64 and Atari 800xl....
Atari ST: 16 colors from a palette of 512 - No hardware scrolling - 3+1 ch synth audio Amiga 500: 32 colors from a palette of 4096 - Hardware scrolling - 4 ch PCM audio Despite this some games sounded, played and looked better on the Atari.
Not sure why you think that...it's arguably the worst comparison video for making it seem the Atari sucks lol. Game is very well made for the ST. You should show a comparison of Shadow of the Beast.
@@NameCallingIsWeak Atari STE's Blitter is less flexible when compared to the Amiga's Blitter e.g. Dread. Amiga's Dread C2P is processed by the hardware Blitter.
mega drive (genesis) usually has higher resolution, better frame rate and better sprites/animations than snes so this hardly feels like a mega drive vs snes video other than the fact that amiga displays more colors and the chiptunes vs samples battle thing (and now you are going to tell me that this is for these very reasons that you posted that comment but then I will answer that this is very reductive reasoning and I explained why :P)
I am sorry, but this is so far from the reality that I have to speak up. The quality on this "split screen movie" is giving the wrong impression. I have both Atari and Amiga running on real oldschool monitors since the 80s, and trust me the Amiga is the better machine in almost every aspect. One thing I like about the Atari is the mediinterface, and actually I only use the Atari with an old keyboard (and music software) now because the games on the Amiga are better. Anyways, I will recommend that you buy one of each (similar models) and try them out for yourselves - it's really great fun :-)
Aside from the green tint (weird choice) the Amiga version is superior in everything...Actually i like the Amiga colors a lot more,they are more earthly and easier on the eyes.
For a machine that was released a few months before and that cost less than two thirds of the Amiga price at launch, the ST can do some impressive things!
Very competitive. Much better music on the amiga and slightly better graphics - though I like Atari colour choices. Game play about the same. I’ll give this one to the Atari st based on price/value.
The Amiga version has much better sound, but the Atari version is very playable. The Atari was much cheaper than the Amiga so it did an amazing job for the price, also I think whilst the Amiga was a better games machine the Atari was a better computer, I spent many hours typing reports using the Atari ST, Gem was very easy to use and made windows running on a 286 appear seriously slow. Oh and I could take my Atari disk into work and load documents on to the IBM PC and print at work. The Atari was amazing for the price as a computer, not a games system.
The ST creators cheaped out on every aspect, I agree that adding midi was a good move for musicians and the ability to read ms-dos disks out of the box kinda made life easier. The Amiga is a lost opportunity in computing advancement. Its OS can be compared to Windows 95 (but in 85), it can definitely read DOS disks (with an external software that was later part of the OS), and took advantage of co-processors to update the display and have draggable screens with different resolutions and colors never seen again on anything else. Unfortunately Commodore cut R/D and didn’t invest what would’ve been necessary to fix some OS flaws (as the slow file-system). Same with hardware: the original designers had already started working on a version of the chipset with 256 colours support and much faster video RAM (giving a lot more bandwidth), but it was cancelled and eventually took Commodore 7 years to release a little upgrade of the system (AGA chipset, 1992, way too little- too late).
@@emiespo en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset Amiga Ranger chipset has 128 colors (7 bit-planes) with a 4096 color palette in 1987 and a 2 MB chip ram (video ram). Amiga Ranger chipset focused on 1024×1024 resolution with 128 colors, hence the need for VRAM. 32 bit DRAM would have easily handled 128 colors (7 bit-planes) at 320x256 resolution i.e. A3000 should have the Ranger chipset instead of ECS. Jay Miner made sure that the Ranger chipset was completed and fully tested before he left Commodore Amiga Ranger was designed to compete against Sharp's X68000. According to Dave H, AGA chipset was completed in A3000plus in Feb 1991 and management delayed its release to Q4 1992. A3000plus 's design was recycled as A4000.
The Amiga has more colours but at times the Atari version actually appears to use better colours and do more with them. Although, overall the Amiga is still the better looking. And the Amiga version obviously runs better and so on too. The final boss, however, is way more impressive on Atari ST with lots more flashing and animations and stuff.
One of the great ST programming achievements (contrast this with ST Shadow of the Beast!), but still noticeably inferior to the Amiga version (which itself is no match for e.g. Lionheart), especially the music.
Why does only some of the Atari ST music sound like the Amiga, like in the intro and outro, while during gameplay the ST sounds completely different, like 8 bit?
Because the Atari ST doesn't have PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) audio natively like the Amiga has in order to playback samples. It has a basic SSG (Software Sound Generator) soundchip called a YM2149F, that's what you're hearing during gameplay and it takes up little CPU time. In order for the Atari ST to play sample based audio (PCM) it has to exploit the YM2149F and use the CPU to mix the channels, this chews up /some/most/all of the CPU depending on quality. The Amiga plays back samples natively in all 4 channels because each audio channel is PCM and has it's own dedicated DMA (Direct Memory Access) channel bypassing the CPU. Amiga uses less than 1% of the CPU time to play samples thus allowing the CPU to do other tasks like game logic and stuff. It actually uses less CPU time than Atari ST using it's soundchip as intended: A 3 voice sound generator.
This is the best Shadow of the Beast clone I've ever seen. Everyting... the paralax scrolling, the music, the sound effects... What a ripoff... But still looks like I game I would have really enjoyed playing.
Scrolling on the Amiga is much better. Sound is much better but i like the chiptune on the st Sounds a Bit like c64. Graphicly there Both nice in its own way.
Let’s compare the launch prices of both machines and there can be only one conclusion: the Atari ST offered the best for what you paid. I never got used to the YM soumdchip though.....coming from the A8 I have always believed that POKEY was way superior....
Amiga has the better overall performance, but some parts are actually better on the ST. One part I like is the graphics @31:42. The trees in the background has higher contrast and better colors. On the Amiga, the same trees looks greenish and kind of flat.
To be fair the Atari I think it captures the era with the sound more than the Amiga, I had both and the amiga was better obviously but not by much. It was mainly the sound. But when I hear the Atari it transports me back to the 80s where the amiga doesn't.
@@InstantSpokesperson yes dropping the resolution down from the locked 320 line display on the atari to the 288 lines of resolution for many levels on the Amiga would obviously make the graphics more detailed....Amiga Fanboys logic just cant be argued with. 😆
Much of this looks better on the ST and parts sound better on the ST too. It would have been interesting to see a full STE version with Hardware scrolling, Blitter sprites and DMA sound instead of just the extended palette colors which this implements.
STE doesn't have hardware sprites. STE is still limited to 4 bitplanes just like ST. STE's DMA PCM audio is limited to two channels. Amiga OCS has hardware sprites with the multi-instancing feature via the Copper. Amiga DMA PCM audio is limited to four channels.
@@valenrn8657 Really those old fanboy games. The STE can do Bitter sprites. The STE can do more color with programming as done numerous times. The STE has 2 DMA channels that operate at higher frequency than Amiga, and with full LM1992 mixer; if you add the other 3 channels then it has 5 total, and with the noise channel, 6 channels of sound compared the Amigas 4. Should I continue :-)
@@10p6 Prove Atari STE demo or game that can rival Amiga OCS's Lion Heart, Shadow Fighter, and ElfMainia games. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-l5N-W_Et3Hk.html Amiga 500's Metro Siege example
Wrath of the Demon qui fait penser à Shadow of the Beast dans son animation, Gameplay, musique avec ses qualités et défauts 😉 bon en revanche il y a pas photo entre la version Amiga et Atari ST 😁
the has smoother animations, more colors and a better sound... The coder of the atari st version gave their best for sure, they couldn't have done it better. But even all their efforts, sorry, but the amiga wins. you should try to set up the brithgness and the contrast a little higher in the amiga version, because the only thing i see better in the atari st version is the contrast of colours but it's not enough to make it win and i'm sure if you tune a little the monitor of the amiga or winuae you can improve the contrast of the amiga version.
great video, both versions look amazing! could the Amiga out do the ST in graphics and sound? sure, but could the ST with some 68000 machine language, a custom written blitter, (because early ST's didnt have a blitter chip) and a good coder keep up?, you bet, I owned both Machines, programmed both of them and still have my Amiga 500 1 meg, the ST died after a storm, yes I know surge protectors are your friend. And let me tell you, they were and still are my favorite computers from the past, along with my Atari 400 48k, I played a crapload of games and programmed on these machines. Arguing which was best in 2017 seems pointless, lets just be glad we lived in a day and age when these two did battle, and we all came out winners for it. there will probably never be machines like these two, that bring that much excitement again. and in a way that's sad, but videos like this keep them alive. Long live Atari ST and Amiga fans!
The graphics are a close call and will likely come down to color preference, but I'm baffled you would say that the ST version's sound is "pretty good." The ST's sound is terrible compared to the Amiga's sound.
Like Turrican,graphic and quality of sound are better on Amiga but sorry guys music sounds is much more melodious on the St version!And i think the choice of colors trames is more wise on the St even they are little more colors on the Amiga version!But i love the two version!The game is great!
As a ST Fan boy, I hate to admit this but the Amiga completely owns the SFX and MUSIC, but the Atari Music grows on you after a while. I prefer the colours on the ST, there too dark and drab on the Amiga, and I get why they did it, the game has a dark setting, but its just horrible to look at. The SFX is inferior on the ST, there's no denying it, but that won't stop Atari fans like myself loving the ST, quirks and all. Its just a pity the ST-FX chip was fitted so late into production otherwise it may have been a harder decision between the two. I think you have to say that the ST is great considering its running inferior sound hardware compared to the Amiga but does a great job nonetheless.
Camaro Cougar as an Amiga fan, I have no problem admitting that the ST version is a programming masterpiece, while the biggest ability in the Amiga world for a programmer was to think in terms of creating a huge copper program to move stuff, colours and sprites around the horizontal lines. For this kind of games in particular, have a look at what they did to get the smooth scrolling and colours of Shadow of The Beast: codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/
