Just for fun with all those 360 vs PS3 debates, I thought it would be nice to look what was going on around a similar timespan of availability regarding the period the Amiga and Atari ST launched.
Background:
In 1985, the Amiga and Atari ST computers launched, for games and other software they were very advanced for their time (ST like the monochrome soundless Mac and beeping MSDOS PC competitors were single-tasking solutions, the Amiga on the other hand provided pre-emptive multitasking). The Atari ST had a headstart and cheaper pricing. This resulted in an initially larger userbase. The Amiga offered a far more impressive technical design including many powerful custom chips which took the workload of its CPU allowing for amazing capabilities for its time, but some early cross platform games and software initially ran slightly better on the Atari ST.
Later when the Amiga was cost reduced and exclusive software really started to show off the hardware benefit, the Amiga steadily started to push the Atari ST out of the market. For quite a while some multi-plaform games stayed virtually identical, using only 16 colors from the Atari ST's pallette for both Amiga and ST versions (like Oceans Atari ST to Amiga game ports). With regard to game distinguishing features mainly appeared for those games for which the development was lead on the Amiga platform, like for example, The Shadow of the Beast:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=e5ic3Fy-tVY
First multi-platform differences between games gamers of the 80s noticed were better audio in more and more Amiga games, here a look at some comparisons between some early games and some later games between the two platforms:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EcfEP9OEeSw
But it were still the Amiga exclusives which only really pushed the low end Amigas models to their limits:
Examples:
Elfmania:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zCqLqj3QOEQ
Disposable Hero:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bEJpvUVPCtw
Ruff 'n Tumble:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Kvpm4t4A1o
Lionheart:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eeBVhq1IEqA
Now onto the internet discussions and what they looked like back then:
1985/1986:
"I hate to dampen the Amiga fire, but the Amiga is a doomed machine.
How can I say this before 1 Amiga is sold? Simple, this is history
repeating it self, all over again. Remember the Comodore C-64 and
the Atari 800? It was obvious to anybody, who seriously looked at
BOTH machines, that the 800 was a better computer. But the Atari
cost twice as much. Guess which one, really sold. Want more proof?
Looked what happened last December, Atari sells 1/2 million 800XLs
at 89.95 while C-64 sales down 90%, and most people thought C-64
sales down due to "soft market", how come Atari sold 1/2 million,
price/performance. Enough history here is today"
"the"Amiga does not come close to the true power and useful capabilities of the ST.Inside the ST, you will find MORE custom IC's than the Amiga and MORE powerful chips 'off the shelf' than the Amiga. This adds up to a real optimized, fast and versatile computer. The memory controller prefetches 16-bit data directly for the 68000 and also places
screen data onto a separate bus for the screen refresh chip. This
operation only steals 8-18% of the available true CPU time.
As a programmer, I found the 520ST documentation to be
very well written and complete. And, if something was unclear, Atari was
very open and very helpful."
"I haven't done a market survey, but at the local high volume retailer,
(Bit Bucket, Newton MA,) the Amigas are stacked up to the ceiling, and
they don't have an inventory of STs. (They report that the STs sell as
fast as they come in, the Amiga business is slow and steady.) They
also say that lack of Amiga software while the ST software is quite
impressive, has had a severe impact on Amiga sales. "
"So far, the main differences appear to be:
(a) the ST is half the price of the AMIGA.
(b) the AMIGA has better special-purpose graphics capabilities than the
ST, but at the expense of main CPU speed. "
"I would still like to know why the Amiga even with a 68020 and fast memory
still is *significantly* slower than the ST. Is their a hardware type out their
who can look at the memory cycles and see why the current claims of "no cpu
slowing due to graphics chips" seems to not be proved by the real world."
"After reading a lot of articles about this years Comdex it is
becoming more obvious that Atari has already won in the ST vs.
Amiga wars."
"seems that the ST is very close technically and indeed for a lot of people better technically and at less than half the cost."
"This could be reasonably intelligent behavior if you aren't looking for some
extraas that the Amiga has. I do not believe the majority of people really
care about amimation and fancy built-in sound, or Bus-oriented expandability. "
"On a REALLY PURE technological level, the Amiga and the ST are the same computer.
Think about it. On an OS level, superiority is debatable and based on
opinion."
"I feel a sense of jealousy here. It seems that people here have to justify
why they believe the Amiga is a better machine, because they can't
believe that a machine like the 520ST exists. "
Is there something to be learned here?
