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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Ouch, Amiga with its flickering interlaced screen was never a good 'productivity' machine because it was painful to look at higher resolution documents. Its competitor, the Atari ST, had a high quality paper white monochrome monitor at 640x400 that was much better for those type of applications. And it was cheaper.

Amiga was definitely by far the better games and graphics machine tho.

EDIT: Had written 640x480, meant to write 640x400

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640x400 - since 640*400/8=32000. The ST always had 32,000 bytes of display memory. (edit: I dawdled over my reply while doing multiple nostalgic google searches, and my correction is now redundant)

I don't know what they did to make the mono monitor look so nice. It was only 70Hz, and it only did black OR white, but it was completely flicker-free, like an LCD. But unlike an LCD - at least an LCD in the 1990s - there was no blur; unlike the then-popular passive-matrix LCDs, there were no crosstalk streaks; and unlike your average 1990 colour CRT, assuming you could find one that ran at 70Hz, there was no visible flicker even to my teenager's eyes.

Focus round the edges was pretty bad though, at least on the model I had. The options appeared to be "pin-sharp stamp-sized display with a massive border" or "nice big screen with blurred edges".

It doesn't really compare very well to anything modern, but you're right that it was streets ahead of 640x512 interlaced on the Amiga, and I don't care how many colours that would have been.

Not that I ever saw one, but there was the Amiga 2024 monitor. Supposedly it had less flicker and also higher resolution. http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=...

I still have one. It does 1024x1024 in 50Hz or 1024x800 in 60Hz. 4 greyscale tones.

Very good monitor for the time.

I loved my SM125 monitor with those rare properly designed GEM applications that showed off the potential of the GUI.

A shame GDOS didn't ship with the original distribution of the OS and a shame that Atari wasn't better at getting developers to produce quality GEM applications.

It could have been a Mac killer.

Indivision ECS will correct the flicker for OCS and ECS Amigas. I have one and it works flawlessly:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php...

Of course, you could connect an Amiga (1200, though) to a VGA monitor with a simple modified cable. I did it with a nice old VGA mono monitor and it was great.

The article said 'classic amiga' :-)

ECS chipset Amigas could output VGA too.

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