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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Even enjoying a Commodore Amiga as a teenager we cannot forget Atari 1040ST competitor which included MIDI and was also innovative. Just read that was popular in some locations for CAD.

It is difficult to talk about failed business, business many many times are successful for reasons beyond the technology involved. Just look nowadays how organizations are using Microsoft Teams, they could be locked, have a high cost for migration, bad management, and the core business working seamlessly beyond this.

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Built-in MIDI and the excellent 100Hz monochrome screen were very strong selling points for the ST back then, for different niches of the market. Especially given the strong audio capabilities of the Amiga, including a MIDI interface should have been a no-brainer for Commodore to position it in the music production industry. On the other end of the market, the always slightly flickering 1081/1084 color monitor made the Amiga not very suitable for an 8 hour office job.

Something I always thought odd; why would just _having_ MIDI ports make the ST popular with musicians? Getting an Amiga MIDI adapter was super cheap and easy... although most early Amiga MIDI and stave-notation software (Sonix, Music-X, DMCS) fell out of favour as trackers stormed on the scene; most Amiga musicians preferred to use the Amiga as a sample sequencer than as the controller of other MIDI devices.

Is it really just default ports? If the Amiga had had a line in port rather than required an external sampler, would it have been known as "the sampling machine"?

The Amiga did famously form the backbone of 1990s NTSC broadcast television production as the Video Toaster, but that was because the Amiga chipset was able to genlock with an external video signal, i.e. it was an inherent feature of the machine rather than the default ports and peripherals it came with.

Put yourself in the shoes of the developer of a midi sequencer in the 80s. You could target the Atari, where midi ports are standard and everyone with an interest in music is a potential customer. Or you can target the Amiga where there’s no standard, effectively forcing you to source or develop a midi dongle yourself to sell with the software, increasing the price by at least $20 or $30, and adding complexity and development costs up front.

That's a good point. Something being a noted feature of the device would encourage people to develop software for it. The DSP in the Atari Falcon was a big draw as well.

Commodore did eventually promote a standard library for MIDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Amiga_MIDI_Driver) in 1990, perhaps too late to take anything from the lead the 520ST had gained

640x400@70Hz monitor (not 100Hz as OP claimed) was the second part of the puzzle. You want as much readable non headache inducing (interlaced Amiga) text on the screen for music sequencing. Not to mention Atari ST _with_ that monitor was still substantially cheaper than naked Amiga 1000.

Whoa, I was very sure that the SM124 did 100Hz, but you're right. I stand corrected! And I agree that the combination of the great monochrome monitor and the built-in MIDI made the ST much better suited as a music production machine.

Wow, I had no idea that the ST had 100hz modes. That's so cool.

Folks who grew up in the post-CRT era might not realize what a difference 100hz vs. 60hz could make with CRT monitors when you were staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day.

Not sure what the graphics controller was capable of, but the 'paperwhite' monochrome monitor which was offered then supported 72Hz refresh rate. That was a lot then and most people won't notice the remaining flicker, but it's not 100Hz. Op might be misremembering.

(I'm a bit sensitive -- around that time, I removed a connection on the MB of my Schneider, nee Amstrad, CPC 464 so that it would think it's the NTSC version and would output the screen's content @60Hz and adjusted my monitor accordingly. 60Hz was just about bearable, 50Hz (PAL) only with dark background)

This is true, the monochrome monitor only did a bit over 70Hz. I was corrected in another comment in this thread.

The ST in mono was alas only around 71hz. Still very nice. Sadly my family could not afford a mono monitor and and I used my ST through the family TV but I used a friend's mono monitor a few times and it was very nice.

Commodore had an extremely expensive, weird 15Hz flicker free and very high resolution monitor. If I recall correctly, i̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶4̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶t̶a̶n̶g̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶i̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶e̶a̶c̶h̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶t̶a̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶i̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶,̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶a̶f̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶l̶i̶c̶k̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶,̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶s̶p̶h̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶g̶l̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶ Edit: wrong, see comment below.

That would be the A2024 which is emulated by WinUAE. It did not flicker or have long persistence phosphor. What it did have was frame buffer RAM on-board. The video signal output by the Amiga determined which 1/4 or 1/6 of the screen was refreshed. The driver code had a feature where the pane containing the mouse pointer could be refreshed more frequently.

Whoa! That's a rudimentary compression scheme to decrease latency.

If you want to know the details of how it works, see US patent 4851826: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4851826A/en

BBoAH has a pic of an actual A2024: https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863

There was also a separate video card containing the framebuffer hardware, that could be connected to a "normal" high-res mono monitor: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/moniterm

There are brilliant hacks and terrible kludges. This is the latter.

Yikes!

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