Author: Shalroth (cpc10-seac20-2-0-cust470.7-2.cable.virginmedia.com)
Date: 08-24-2013 10:51
"lesser machines like the Amigas... "
I thought we were beyond such comparisons in the 21st century...
I don't consider the Amiga to be a lesser machine. It's DOS was very advanced and it had pre-emotive multitasking built into the kernel, back in '85. It had custom chips that were spiritually similar to the 800 chipset. It didn't have a sound chip as such, but the Paula chip did a good job of PCM playback.
It was far easier to upgrade the RAM in any Amiga than it was in an ST until the STE introduced SIMMs. AmigaOS had features we'd later come to see in GDOS such as system wide printer drivers and fonts. Hard drive support was far better in AmigaOS, and the display was far richer - more colours, and higher resolutions compared to the STs fixed 32KB frame buffer.
Bear in mind, the Amiga Lorraine chipset was designed by the same people that made the A8 chipset... And when you look at the capabilities of the ST, remember it's doing most of the work in software on the 68K, rather than in hardware. That's no small achievement.
The Falcon030 was way better than anything CBM had on the market, except for the A4000/040 of course, but the DSP and VIDEL made it a very powerful little system.
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