Yeah-- the Atari roots (and Jay Miner's influence) clearly show in the Amiga.
An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).
Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.
Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.
yeah, substantially agree. But I also think if only Atari and Commodore teams could have just been one company... it would have been glorious. Somehow. The market couldn't afford to be split like that, the pie wasn't big enough.
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
> And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
The Amiga also struggles with frame rates, with most games running at 30hz/25hz. There are quite a few games that have better gameplay on the Commodore 64 port than the Amiga port.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.
I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Compare the scrolling of <a href="https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969 or <a href="https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553 with <a href="https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114 or <a href="https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862 -- it's purely the programmer's fault.
> Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
> So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
68020 and onwards could also get substantially more work done in a cycle than a 68000. So Amiga 1200 or Atari Falcon not only had substantially higher bus speeds they were just ... better... at the CPU level in terms of how much work could be done.
LastTrain · · focus · HN ↗
EvanAnderson · · focus · HN ↗
An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).
Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.
Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
amiga386 · · focus · HN ↗
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Compare the scrolling of <a href="https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969 or <a href="https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553 with <a href="https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114 or <a href="https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862 -- it's purely the programmer's fault.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
amiga386 · · focus · HN ↗
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗