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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

I always dislike it when the Amiga 1200 is mentioned as a forerunner to modern computing and the wonderful, albeit buggy, Atari 1040ST, released in 1985, is totally forgotten about

Using the Motorola 680000 with 32 bit internal/16 bit external buses and color bit-mapped graphics, my ST, hardware wise, totally blew away all other PCs from a technical POV and it just annoys me when the Amiga gets all this love the and the ST gets none whatsoever.

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The ST was not as good as the Amiga, that's why. The only advantage it had over the Amiga was the slightly higher CPU speed, because the Amiga's was reduced to keep in sync with the hardware it had. The hardware being what it needed to trounce the ST. You only have to look at the range and quality of games for each to see what I mean. ST ports always had that muddy look to them.

Ah, the nostalgia. I haven't heard a good AtariST vs Amiga fight in years.

I still own and love both :) I mentioned the A1200 because it was basically the apex of that line of computers (and indeed that entire approach to computing).

There's some great videos on Youtube (particularly the Computerphile ones) on the Tramiel era Atari computers. They are a great little machine to help learn computer organization on. They were powerful yet still relatively simple machines that you could fit in your head.

E.g. I love this one on linked lists where they write some 68k assembly and run it on a STE and Falcon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyG9S9nAlUM

The Amiga had a hardware blitter - this made the difference in games. If you play the same game on both systems, the Atari port seems like a slideshow in comparison.

It's certainly not forgotten in the music world. It's still a fantastic midi sequencer. I've definitely used mine within the last fortnight.

Wow...that's amazingly interesting!

I am a musician as well and I do remember its MIDI-specs were top-of-the-line. I never really got the chance to use it in that way but thinking about that almost makes me want to pick one up and give it a go...

Can you tell me more about your setup?

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