It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was.
I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.
Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo, the total package was extremely good. After the Amiga died I moved on into a Mac running OSX, and later Apple Silicon, when you combine the MacOS with Apple Silicon, it feels very similar to the Commodore Amiga in short, the total package of hardware and software made by one company, provided a level of integration that Microsoft Windows still can’t equal even with all the separate OEM’s making Windows computers across the world.
Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition, if the next computer or the SGI computer was around today with the technology advancements of today I definitely would be in the market for one, back in the day. I couldn’t afford one but today I can.
> The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo [...]
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the sound of 80s-era 'lo-fi' sound chips - I just last week remarked on another forum that I realise that much of my adult-era musical appreciation was likely a product of listening to the loading screens on my Spectrum as the data fed in was interpreted as sound...!
Yeah, my old flame wars with Atari users were all largely based on vibes and spec sheets and screenshots in magazines and how ugly TOS looked, not on actual experience with the Atari... But I've been happy to be vindicated by various videos...
I don't really want to come across as an Atari ST fanboy in this thread (although I do love it, and the Amiga) but while TOS is very bare bones, an ST with 4MB of RAM, an HDD, and an install of Neodesk + Geneva is genuinely a nice experience.
Outside of that I've also set up a dev environment consisting of a copy of the Pure-C compiler suite (basically Borland C for the ST), MicroEMACS for editing, Okami shell[1], and pcmake[2] for a very UNIX like development environment. Most people these days would set up a cross compiler on their PC, which is the sensible thing to do, but it's been great fun to do some retro coding with on period correct hardware.
Screenshots of Neodesk makes me want to rekindle the flame wars ;)
(yes, the default AmigaOS look isn't anything impressive either, but "nobody" kept the default look so we're prone to very unfairly judging other systems against not what the default looks like but whatever we think a system should look like - I'm not claiming this was rational)
I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.
Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!