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[yurinka]

Amiga.

Spoiler

 

[RAIDEN1]

No contest, the Amiga wiped the floor with the Atari ST...

 

[Kharnivore2099]

Both the Atari ST and the Amiga were phenomenal machines, but I think most would agree the Amiga just inches ahead.

 

[Havoc2049]

Here are some screenshots that I just snapped of the excellent Llamatron 2112 on Atari ST. This comes from the Hatari emulator running on my 2017 iMac. If you're a fan of Robotron, then you'll love Jeff Minter's take, which is ferocious, always challenging and loaded with humor. I feel like sending him a couple dollars just out of thanks.

It's fascinating to see the improvements when you move from the standard 1040ST setting to a more powerful STe or Mega STe with blitter chip, 16 MHz speed and 4 MB RAM. The game runs fast and silky smooth and controls are very responsive.

Llamatron was also released on Amiga and I'm sure it's equally good. It was also released a few years back on iOS as part of Minter's Project Minotaur series, which is now unavailable thanks to Apple's constant OS updates. I enjoyed the ST version more thanks to its faster speed and ability to strafe when firing (a nice solution to a single-joystick control).

I'm still trying to work out the Hatari emulator, and it doesn't seem to want to load a lot of software. I've also been tinkering around with the "serious" business software like the 1st Word Plus, a respectable word processor that I used to write part of the introduction to one of my art/photo ebooks. The lack of selectable font types was a notable omission, but it worked very well and looked nice running on the ST's 640x400 monochrome mode.

Back to the main topic on this thread, I do wish the PC and Mac were also included, if only so that we could have all the major players at once. I kinda want to play around with a classic Macintosh now. I really miss that b/w look, especially with the word processors and art programs. Isn't that crazy? Probably just nostalgia talking. I'm not about to dump my 2017 iMac for a Mac Classic or Mega STe. But let's be honest, computers used to be a lot more fun than they are today.

I'll second STEEM. Nice emulator with tons of features.

Jeff Minter always had interesting control schemes. I would have never thought it, but Minter got Defender II to play really tight with a keyboard and mouse!!

Old computers are fun. I actually still have my 1040STE, expanded to 4MB, with a 60MB Supra hard drive. I just moved, so I still need to hook everything back up. I also just acquired an Atari SC 1435 monitor, the top end of the Atari color monitors, with a 14" screen and stereo sound. It also had a green screen button on it, for ultra old school word processing...lol. It'll be interesting to see how that works.

 

[Memorabilia]

It takes talent to fuck up an Amiga/ST thread. Lol Sheesh. Proof of the impending video game collapse/apocalypse?

I was just a kid. But Amiga more than any other computer or game machine since was pure magic... at a time when this industry was still dominated by nerds who just wanted to create fun games they'd like to play themselves. Compare those memories to now... where it seems most devs are are owned/operated by greedy assholes and/or whipped into submission by even bigger greedy asshole publishers. This hobby has been betrayed and corrupted by Wall Street vampires. Simple as that. But the Amiga represents a special time in the evolution of gaming.

 

[nkarafo]

It's not even close. The Amiga was much more capable than the ST. It was even good enough to be comparable with early 16bit console games while the ST would struggle even against some Master System ports.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

I thought I'd post my high scores from Llamatron 2112 in case anyone out there is playing. It takes a bit of practice, but once you get rolling, it's very easy to break 100K.

Llamatron was released in a 512K and 1MB version. The 1-Meg is the superior version, featuring smoother gameplay and better audio, including a lot of digital audio samples. I've also found that the game plays best with the CPU set to 16MHz. At 8MHz, the game runs more slowly and suffers from a lot of frame skipping and slowdown. At 32MHz, everything just rushes by far too fast, so I would avoid that setting.

Mind you, I'm playing on the Hatari emulator, but after experimenting with all the variations and Atari computer models, I found the best setting is Mega STe, 16MHz and 4MB RAM. The game doesn't run well in TT or Falcon mode, very choppy and unplayable.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

Finally, since I was on an Atari ST kick today, here are some screenshots of some games to check out. We have Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Grid Runner, two more fiery classics from Jeff "Yak" Minter and Llamasoft. We have the 2015 homebrew conversion of Pac-Mania, a vast improvement over the old 1980s commercial release. And we have Domark's F1, an excellent racer with smooth scrolling and solid sense of speed. I don't care much for the "press up to accelerate" controls, however.

 

[hariseldon]

Finally, since I was on an Atari ST kick today, here are some screenshots of some games to check out. We have Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Grid Runner, two more fiery classics from Jeff "Yak" Minter and Llamasoft. We have the 2015 homebrew conversion of Pac-Mania, a vast improvement over the old 1980s commercial release. And we have Domark's F1, an excellent racer with smooth scrolling and solid sense of speed. I don't care much for the "press up to accelerate" controls, however.

Never played Mutant Camels, I probably should. The F1 game reminds me of the Nigel Mansell game which I played the shit out of the ST Format coverdisk demo of. I had the version of pacmania that came with the power pack (I had a 520STFM - Christmas 1989 was a great year, one that set the path of my life going forward without me knowing it - seriously that little computer saved my life). I presume the new one is STE only?

 

[Meccs]

Never head either one since I was a C64 kid but I always was jealous of all the great looking Amiga games.

 

[bad guy]

Not this shit again. In a few decades it will be the longest lasting war in history.

 

[Cato]

Well, No Second Prize is better on the ST there (although the sound effects sound better on the Amiga to me). But ...

WTF happened to Shadow of the Beast on the ST?!!

Not fucking funny man. That is not Atari ST, that is footage from Amstrad CPC 464, and it sucked.

Truthfully, for you younguns that dont remember.
Atari ST had so so few games ported to it that the main catalogue was basically all Amstrad CPC games running under a (slow) emulator.

 

[scalman]

Its all started with zx spectrum 48k

 

[Traianvs]

As far as I remember from reading the Italian edition of "The Games Machine", the atariST was the inferior choice. I never knew someone with the Atari computer because Italy in the early 90's was full on commodore.
I clearly remember that some Amiga games received low scores because they were just lazy AtariST ports

 

[hariseldon]

Traianvs - As an Atari ST guy I'd agree that technologically it was inferior - just the Motorola 68000 without much in the way of enhancement from additional chips, where the Amiga had a bit more additional hardware behind it. For 3D games the ST was faster as its 68000 was clocked at 8mhz vs the 7mhz of the Amiga, but for most games the Amiga's better scrolling and sprite handling (due to its blitter), better sound chip, better colour pallette was a winner, though the STE improved things somewhat after the STFM, by matching the palette and the addition of the blitter, but with so many STFMs in the wild and no way to upgrade them short of buying a new machine (and in those days making games use the features of one machine and retain compatibility with the older variant was harder because you didn't have the dev tools we have today, most games were programmed in Assembler) the STE didn't get quite the support it should have. This wasn't helped by the STE not being compatible with a chunk of the STFM's library.

That said, it was a fantastic little machine and for me the desktop GUI was far superior, yes I know the Amiga had multi-tasking but the OS is horrible to use. The ST was an amazing music machine, I remember hooking up a yamaha synth to it via the midi ports and using Sequencer One (free with ST Format) to compose some tunage. That machine saw me through tough times, starting game programming in the horribly-inappropriate-for-the-job GFA Basic before graduating to STOS. On that machine games were a gateway drug to what ended up being my career. If I'd had a console I'd have never had those experiences.

 

[scalman]

Question was which had better games not better specs

 

[hariseldon]

Question was which had better games not better specs

Much of the library was shared, and the specs are part of the difference in quality between versions on the respective machines, so specs matter in the context of this thread.

 

[Traianvs]

Traianvs - As an Atari ST guy I'd agree that technologically it was inferior - just the Motorola 68000 without much in the way of enhancement from additional chips, where the Amiga had a bit more additional hardware behind it. For 3D games the ST was faster as its 68000 was clocked at 8mhz vs the 7mhz of the Amiga, but for most games the Amiga's better scrolling and sprite handling (due to its blitter), better sound chip, better colour pallette was a winner, though the STE improved things somewhat after the STFM, by matching the palette and the addition of the blitter, but with so many STFMs in the wild and no way to upgrade them short of buying a new machine (and in those days making games use the features of one machine and retain compatibility with the older variant was harder because you didn't have the dev tools we have today, most games were programmed in Assembler) the STE didn't get quite the support it should have. This wasn't helped by the STE not being compatible with a chunk of the STFM's library.

That said, it was a fantastic little machine and for me the desktop GUI was far superior, yes I know the Amiga had multi-tasking but the OS is horrible to use. The ST was an amazing music machine, I remember hooking up a yamaha synth to it via the midi ports and using Sequencer One (free with ST Format) to compose some tunage. That machine saw me through tough times, starting game programming in the horribly-inappropriate-for-the-job GFA Basic before graduating to STOS. On that machine games were a gateway drug to what ended up being my career. If I'd had a console I'd have never had those experiences.

Thanks for your answer. As I said the atariST was uncommon in my country so I know very little about it. Magazines from those years covered mostly amiga games but I love to learn something new about retrogaming. I'll check some atariST games on an emulator

 

[hariseldon]

Thanks for your answer. As I said the atariST was uncommon in my country so I know very little about it. Magazines from those years covered mostly amiga games but I love to learn something new about retrogaming. I'll check some atariST games on an emulator

You'll find many of the same games on the ST as the Amiga - in the early days I think up to 89-ish the ST gets stuff that the Amiga doesn't and porting was from ST to Amiga so quality wasn't really improved on the Amiga, but then it starts to flip around with development on the Amiga and then porting to the ST with the ST's reduced features, and the Amiga kept going for quite a bit longer than the ST as a viable game platform.

Personal recommendations:
Dungeon Crawlers
Dungeon Master (and Chaos Strikes Back)
Castle Master

Open World
Damocles (and Mercenary 3)
Midwinter 1+2

Sims
F-19 Stealth Fighter
Battlehawks 1942
Little Computer People

Platformers
Nebulus (the Dark Souls of platformers)
Mad Professor Mariarti (see my avatar)
Rick Dangerous 1+2
Entombed (free with ST format magazine)
Zool
Rainbow Islands
9 Lives
The Toyottes
Flood
Magic Pockets
James Pond
Shadow Of The Beast 1-3
Wrath Of The Demon
Gods
Chuck Rock
Fire & Ice

Shooter
Turrican 1+2 (more a platform-shooter)
Xenon 2
Chaos Engine

Beat Em Up
Double Dragon (shit but brilliant)
Golden Axe

Sports
Kick Off 2
Sensible Soccer
Player Manager
Championship Manager
Speedball 2
Stormball
Winter Olympiad
Tournament Golf
Goal (better on the Amiga tbh)
Pro Tennis Tour
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker/Archer MacLean's Pool

God/Strategy
Sim City
Populous 1/2
Powermonger
Mega-Lo-Mania
Dragon's Breath
Cannon Fodder

Arcade
Pacmania
Space Harrier
Dragon's Lair/Space Ace

Adventure
Operation Stealth
Monkey Island 1
Cruise For A Corpse
Future Wars
Colonel's Bequest
Murder
BSS Jane Seymour
Mean Streets
Murders In Space
Maupiti Island
Goblins 1-3

Racing
Overlander
Moonshine Racers
Super Hang-on
Outrun
Lotus Turbo Challenge games
Toyota Celica GT Rally
Chase HQ 1/2
Microprose F1GP - proper sim by the standards of the day

Puzzle
Lemmings
Jumping Jack Son
Bubble Bobble
Pipemania
Antago
Brat
Pushover
Frostbyte

Weird shit
Captain Blood
Wizball/Wizkid
Starblade
Back To The Future 2
Crime Does Not Pay

 

[Starlight Lotice]

The OP does a Poll and then just insults the Amiga without much praise other than "It does 2D with no animation well".

Seriously you should argue why the ST is better other than "Shovelware" and "Compatability Issues" and then claiming the ST has a 24% aggregate...it is a fanboy rant at this rate.

From my limited knowledge the Amiga was overall better but the ST had a few exclusives worth owning. I would say Amiga but both are very close in content and amazing games.

 

[Voost Kain]

Not fucking funny man. That is not Atari ST, that is footage from Amstrad CPC 464, and it sucked.

Truthfully, for you younguns that dont remember.
Atari ST had so so few games ported to it that the main catalogue was basically all Amstrad CPC games running under a (slow) emulator.

But if you enhance that 464 with the unsourced enhancements stated in the OP that may or may not exist, your ram triples and you have 40% more CPU power destroying the Commodore and even the Neo-Geo.

lol.

 

[CyberChulo]

I still got my A1200 in the basement!