I got an Amiga and honestly while it was a great machine, a lot of games were written to support the ST as well so didn't use the Amiga's more advanced capabilities. If you were doing video production and graphics work it paid off but frankly I probably would have been just as happy with an ST.

Also the ST gets dinged for being less powerful, but it was actually significantly faster than the Mac at the time and with an add-on could even run Mac applications.

ST and Amiga looked like competition to each other because of the wider market they were situated in but they really had different focus and points of success. The ST was a better DTP and general productivity machine and really was a "rock bottom price" competitor to the Macintosh; its gaming capabilities were nothing compared to the Amiga, but I am not sure that's where the Tramiels really wanted to focus anyways.

I never even had a colour monitor for my ST. The paperwhite monochrome screen was to die for back then, and sure beat the interlace hi-rez experience on the Amiga.

And the ST was a few hundred bucks cheaper. Price per mhz, it was a great machine.

I had a Mac ROM cartridge for the ST, which basically turned it into a Macintosh. And Atari had a 640x400 monochrome monitor that looked just like a Mac - an awesome hack.

Yep long before there were official Mac clones (remember those?!) the ST was an unofficial one in the form of Magic Sac / Spectre GCR. Never had it myself, but what a glorious hack indeed.

I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this because I'm not sure if I understand what you mean.

My take is that both the Amiga and the Atari had a plethora of expansions and, without having any numbers to show, I think the Amiga won out in the expansion race, from 040 cards for the A500 (AFAIK no 040 was available for any Atari until much later) to the Video Toaster.

Both machines were hard to evolve because both their designs encouraged software that was tightly tied to the hardware. VIDEL and AGA were both desperate and, ultimately, fruitless attempts at having the cake and eating it: sticking to custom chips was needed to keep backwards compatibility, but they made the machines both too expensive and too underpowered to be competitive.

The Amiga was much more closely tied to the hardware than the ST, by dint of it's bus system sharing between the blitter and CPU for chip RAM.

Additionally, having the copper, sprites, scrolling, HAM and planar graphics modes meant that backwards compatibility is harder - just look at the difficulty of emulation for both of them.

The Amiga graphics layout is also (slightly) more difficult to work with, there's a trick for the ST to do quick chunky-to-planar (C2P) conversion, check out the texture mapping in Thunderdome demo (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64503)

All said, yes the Amiga had more expansion cards for it, but the central bus system was a bottleneck as for the majority of Amigas, you had to use the built-in graphics, if you look at the a1200, the AGA chipset was a poor upgrade over the original chipset, hampered by backwards compatibility and the expense to needing to add a separate (fastram) bank to bypass the system bus for speed.

As far as retargetable graphics goes (ie. VGA-style cards), the ST was ahead as GEM allowed this from the start. That combined with the much simpler design allows a newer machine to be much more powerful as it has to worry about backwards compatibility less.

The Atari Falcon bears this out, a stock Falcon can manage to run Quake2 at 10FPS odd, a stock a1200 even with fastram can't get close. The Falcon was actually developed using an ST with a processor socket, bearing out the simpler architecture could be abused more :)

TBH the Falcon could have been much more, but Atari were broke and cheaped out on the 16bit bus, could've had 24bit VIDEL at 800x600 and run Quake2 at 15-20FPS for £500 in 1992. Add a cdrom with multiTos (effectively unix with a GEM frontend) and you'd have a competitive machine even against the PC of the time.

Well, that was the problem. Atari had the MIDI (pro music) and DTP from the start. The mono 640x400 monitor - ultra sharp was a great gig.

Amiga went the road of being console turned computer, and the expansions only created havok with support. Even A500 Plus had issues.

Sadly - it also affects community - the IP rights for Amiga are mess, the recent issue with Terrible Fire extensions - for some reason a lot of bad blood in a very bold and interesting system made by Atari engineers.

The upgrade path for the Amiga chipset ended up being complicated. The 500 and 600 had the ECS chips, that allowed some video modes that were not tied to NTSC, at the cost of a reduced palette. The chipset also competes with the CPU for memory access and this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower ("chip RAM" was slow, "fast RAM" was the RAM outside the reach of the chipset that the CPU has exclusive access to). After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible).

And, of course, there was what seems like a cocaine-fueled endless sequence of management blunders that drove the company into the ground.

> this second generation chipset addressed more memory, making the computer effectively slower

ECS could address more chipmem but wasn't slower than OCS. You couldn't add fastmem in the trapdoor port, but that didn't matter much since those expansions weren't good enough to impact the speed (trapdoor fastmem was usually called slowfast). The problem was rather one of incompatiblity: some programs written in the 512+512 kbyte era simply assumed they could allocate fastmem, which typically wasn't available on the 500+ and 600.

> After ECS came AGA, which pushed the boundary further again (but, at this point, memory constraints were not so terrible).

AGA, like ECS, could address 2 megs of chipmem. However, it had higher bandwidth and was much faster than ECS.

My point is that even though the ST/e was, as you say, a simpler design in many aspects, Atari still had to equip the Falcon with a YM chip and put support for planar 15 kHz video in VIDEL to maintain backwards compatibility. They faced the same problem as Commodore: their machines were mainly home computers used for games and other software that banged the metal and people expected this to work when upgrading. They also shared a lot of the same problems when upgrading the architecture even slightly, such as with the A3000 and TT030: programs that didn't work with newer versions of TOS/DOS and programs that didn't work with 020/030.

Both platforms are expandable with things like RTG graphics cards, sound cards, CPU cards etc. (in fact I'd argue the Amiga architecture with Zorro, video slots and CPU daughterboards was designed to be vastly more expandable than the Atari) but for most users that didn't matter: if the games they wanted to play didn't work, what point was a 24-bit display that cost more than the computer itself?

Besides, even without keeping backwards compatibility, rolling your own silicon was no longer a viable option financially. Tramiel's vertical integration was a good idea in the 1980:s but the hardware market had shifted. Commodore could've made a triple-A machine but it still wouldn't have been competitive, neither in price nor in performance. The niche markets utilizing the unique features of Atari (MIDI) and Amiga (DTV) weren't large enough and a new architecture that would deprecate all or most existing software (and many peripherals) used by hobbyists would probably only serve to push the home user base towards the PC anyway.

The question is also to consider when and at what price. A Amiga 2000 had indeed quite the extension possibilities, but they were expensive. An Amiga 500 was a whole other story. The expandibility was limited and only in later times was it possible to add a lot of RAM and disks, etc. and RAM it needed a lot, much more than than Atari, but the Ataris didn't need as much memory, but they were also less greedy with it.

Indeed. As a student (1987) I had an Amiga 500 and after a few months I sold it and bought an Atari Mega ST2 in its place. The Amiga was so unpleasant to use for programming. To be confortably usable it required at least 2 floppy drives (a 3rd one would even been useful) or a hard drive, expanding beyond 1 MB was also not cheap and the display was horrible. TV resolution 576i (PAL) is inadequate for editing text. On the Atari we had the cheap SM-124 fantastic monochrome 71Hz refresh rate screen which allowed to stay for hours programming. All compilers and editor I needed would fit in one 800K floppy and the 2 mb of RAM would even allow to work from RAM disk. A breeze. Gaming was still possible with the second cable connected to the TV set (later I installed the PC-Speed emulator in my Mega ST which transformed it in a very capable XT PC (8Mhz V30, 704 kB DOS memory, with 640x400 Olivetti graphics). The Amiga was better for gaming, no contest, for serious stuff like porgramming, word processing (pixel perfect Signum!) and stuff, it was so much better in lower budget.

The Amiga's problem was expensive monitor, flickering screen and... with such great video chip - the default color palette was just abnomination. I know it was made for TV, but that was the problem!

I think the Amiga was much more expandable than Atari. Just check out the variety of accelerator boards, RTG graphics cards, serial boards, HD controllers, etc. available. The Atari OS (TOS) was also very simple compared to Amiga OS.

I think that's oversimplified. TOS was single tasking but two things a) unlike the Amiga a proper 68000 syscall TRAP mechanism was used meaning the OS etc ran using proper supervisor / user separation and b) the application toolkit (AES) built overtop supported message passing and multiple application semantics and c) the graphics subsystem (VDI) was also in theory abstracted away from the physical. In fact the OS components themselves had originally been developed (by Digital Research) for both x86 and 68000 and the original work was done on the Lisa before it ever got put on a Atari hardware. And DR's GEM had a life of its own on PC hardware (see Ventura Publisher, etc.), though handicapped by the Apple lawsuit and competition from Microsoft.

These things meant that later the Atari community and Atari themselves were able to extend the OS in a proper multitasking almost Unix-like direction (MiNT and MultiGEM) and bring it to new hardware, and new display formats and architectures, etc. Provided the applications being run were cleanly written (well, that's a big caveat...). For example -- we can now run TOS/GEM on an Amiga, that's pretty neat (though totally pointless).

In true Tramiel fashion they shipped the cheapest simplest thing they could. But it was something they were able to iterate on -- unfortunately they just did this too slowly. As others have pointed out, the Amiga had amazing hardware from the go, but its architecture became somewhat tied to that original hardware. It was more like a video games console than a workstation. They had a few years headstart on everyone else and then having (then dated) specialized hardware became a liability, not an advantage.

The Atari ST could do the same kind of cooperative multitasking as GEM on a PC.

I built MicroGNUEmacs as a desk accessory so that I could run it at the same time as other programs.

I always found it odd that the GEM environment supported this kind of cooperative multitasking by default only for desk accessories. The API support for doing it more broadly was there, but the desktop and all the applications were written so they would not be. So even when we got proper multitasking support under MiNT there were few/no applications that behaved well in this scenario.

I never saw uemacs compiled as a DA. That would have been a nice trick. The only microemacs I used on my ST was not a windowed application, was console only.

It wasn't a trick to compile mgemacs as a desk accessory, it took a bit of work. I still have the SH204 HD from back then so have the source code, just don't have a ST to read it.

I chose the MicroGNU variant as it did parenthesis matching better than the alternatives. I ran it alongside Franz Lisp that I had also made into a GEM application.

I think AmigaOS felt more sophisticated to an end-user: preemptive multitasking, shared libraries (Atari didn't get these until very late, right?), loadable filesystems, autoconfig / plug-n-play type device drivers, command line / shell. I'm sure TOS could get many of these things with add ons.