Author: amiga_and_atari fan (webcacheh02a.cache.pol.co.uk)
Date: 07-04-2000 15:10
Ok I own two Ataris. A four meg STE and a 14 meg Atari Falcon 030.
I like them both. Cool machines.
I also own six Amigas (I collect them just as I collect Atari machines).
One of my Amigas is reasonably fast with a 40 mhz 68040 accel card.
My Falcon will be getting a Centek turbo card whenever I can afford it.
I dabbled a bit in asm on both machines and I loved coding on them.
I'm a big Atari and Amiga fan. I don't prefer one machine to another as I think they are equally cool :-)
Here's what I liked about the Atari STE.
It was easy to expand thanks to Atari providing simm slots.
You could plug it into a tv or you could use a high res monitor.
The ST had built in midi ports.
It used a 68000 cpu which was fun to code for.
It had hardware scrolling.
Timer B was cool for doing split screen copper like tricks.
The blitter was a great help for shifting graphics (it's actually faster at filling memory or clearing memory than the Amiga one and you can do bigger blits with it :-).
The hardware registers and vector table in the machine were protected from user mode programs by hardware.
The OS was the most user friendly I have ever seen.
The graphics were good (strange palette layour on the STE though :-) and the STE audio was pretty cool.
The machine had class and it was fun to use.
It didn't go tits up when you used TAS either ;-)
Here's what I liked about the Falcon.
Built in hard disk interface.
High density disk drive.
16 bit depth graphic modes.
Overscan support.
68030 processor.
Amazing audio.
Blitter (unfortunatly still slower thgan the Amiga one at ANDing and ORRing bob data) :-(
scsi (I would have loved that on a base level Amiga)
The OS was improved also with Multitos and later Magic (which is damn good btw)
It didn't take a performance hit on a vga monitor which I wish I could say the same for my Amiga :-)
Again a damn cool machine.
Here's what I liked about the Amiga,
Nice graphics chipset. Sprites, playfields, overscan etc unfortunatly no 16 bit high colour gfx support.
Manipulating HAM8 graphics in realtime isn't my idea of fun :-)
Excellent blitter.
The copper rocked too. Very good 2d graphics subsystem.
Excellent operating system.
Good audio but not up to the standard of the Falcon.
I like this machine a lot.
That's some of the things I can think of off the top of my head.
So if you're an Amiga user check out an Atari machine and double the fun and if you're an Atari owner check out the Amiga too as it's quite cool.
Both communities have went through similar ordeals and they are at the fringe of computing.
Most Amiga owners I know say complimentary things about the Atari and are pleasently surprised that we Atari users are still around.
There's no war as far as I'm concerned. Use what you like if its fun. :-)
