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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga (I think an Amiga with a stock MIDI port would have been a homerun).

I saw Atari ST in music studios well into the late 90s/early 2000s because back then quiet beige PCs weren't a thing yet: PCs virtually all came with super noisy fans, which was a big no-no for music studios.

A buddy would bring his Korg synth to my neighbour's house and hook it to their Atari ST. Another dude I remember would play drums from Dire Straits song from his Atari ST hooked to some MIDI gear and then he'd take his guitar and play Dire Straits songs.

These were the days.

I'm not surprised some musicians still use them. If I'm not mistaken Kavinsky (who became famous after the movie Drive came out but recently had renewed interest for he performed at the Olympics games' ceremony) started doing music at a late age, on an Atari ST a friend of his game him.

As an anecdote PCs were so noisy that I asked my neighbour (an electrical engineer) if it was possible to come up with a system where the fan would slow down when the CPU wasn't too hot: and sure enough we were then modding our PSUs with "thermistors" and we'd be calibrating our tiny hack, no shit, with boiling water in the kitchen (ah clueless teenagers). Funnily enough about 10 years later every single PSU had variable fan speed.

That's the thing: we were used to quiet 8-bit and then 16-bit computers and when we had to move to these piece-of-shit PCs (but with fast CPUs / FPUs and that were upgradeable), we had to endure these painful ultra noisy CPU/PSU fans (and HDDs).

So the Atari ST just made sense. You could have these super fast (compared to Atari ST) PCs but they were noisy, fugly, piece of unbearable shits that the cool guys in music studios simply wouldn't tolerate back then.

Now of course at some point PCs became just too good and several brands started focusing on quietness and it was then possible to have a totally silent PC, both looking cool and being literally cool (big heatsink, quiet fans, etc.).

But yeah the Atari ST was and still is certainly for some a thing for creating music.

Lots of respect to the Atari ST for his MIDI port (and that comes from a Commodore Amiga owner and fan).

View on HN

And, just to add a third point, the Atari runs stable! I just tried to sequence with a SoundBlaster AWE32 and Voyetra MIDI Orchestra MIDI Sequencer under Windows 95b. For fun. I already recorded some MIDI tracks, then suddenly after 60 minutes Windows presented me with the famous bluescreen. Everything I've just recorded and didn't autosave lost. Haha.

Absolutely, when I first tried Windows Cubase in the 90s, it wasn't long before it ate all my data. Even today's DAWs still haven't caught up with the original ST Cubase in terms of stability.

> The Atari ST had a MIDI port: that notoriously lacked on the Commodore Amiga

I never really understood why people thought this was a big deal. I had my Amiga hooked to a DX7 synth with a serial to MIDI cable that had a couple active parts in it. MIDI is a serial protocol and the Amigas had full RS232 ports with hardware interrupts, +12v, -12v, as well as audio in and out on unused pins. The serial to MIDI In/Out cable cost around $15 more than two MIDI cables. You can still buy them today: https://retroready.one/products/ka12-serial-port-midi-interf....

The big deal was latency and jitter the Amiga could not provide that good as the Atari this way with the serial interface. I remember such discussion back in the days. Also the multitasking capabilities of the AmigaOS were to good! Yes, this hindered precise jitter. That is why Steinberg and other sequencer software producers bet on the built in and rock solid Atari Midi implementation. Which meant also a lack of good software for the Amiga then on top of it.

While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing.

While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second.

So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.

Yeah, thanks for the good write-up, maybe you're right and there's also some Atari marketing FUD. The Amiga was/is definitely an impressive machine too. That is given. :-)

The other story with the ST and music studios and productivity software generally was the excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor, which was far better than dealing with interlace on the Amiga. And was cheaper than an Amiga colour monitor.

There were ways to do non-interlaced video on the Amiga, but just like having to buy external MIDI adapter ... more $$, more hassle.

That and floppy format compatibility with MS-DOS made it easier to move data around.

That reminds me of using Twister, that optimized the position of sectors on the floppy disk to minimize seek times and speed loading dramatically (and I think they squeezed a few more sectors onto the disk so that it could hold more -- maybe more sectors on the outer rings of the disk?).

normal 720 K floppies were very generous with the sectors on a track. It was easy to format a floppy with 10 sectors per track even without reducing the gap between sectors. On Atari it was almost standard praxis which made that floppies had generally 800K capacity. It was even possible to squeeze 11 sectors per track by reducing the inter-sector gapto a minimum. Furthermore, most floppies allowed to write on track 81 and 82 (sometime even 83). So it was possible to have floppies with up to 902K capacity (not a good idea in the long run, I recently tested such a floppy I had made 30 years ago and it had a lot of read errors athing that 720K and 800K do not).

> excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor

While that was an advantage for the Atari ST, the Amiga standard desktop was in a non-interlaced 640 x 200 4-color mode that could do 80 x 24 text for productivity apps (word processing, spreadsheets) as well as decent graphical interfaces for creative tools like video editing, 3D rendering and music sequencing. Of course, having 200 more vertical lines would enable some increased detail assuming the app GUI supported it but it wasn't a huge difference (and on the Amiga the colors could also be useful for GUIs).

All the Atari owners I knew opted for the color monitor (which had the same limit of 640 x 200 res and 4 colors (from a smaller palette than the Amiga)) but I didn't know anyone solely dedicated to music production. Given the vast majority of ST systems had color monitors, I assume the Atari's music software interfaces were designed to work with 640 x 200 as well as 640 x 400. Not having used those tools on the Atari I don't know if the publishers went to the trouble of creating separate GUI screens that significantly utilized the extra 200 vertical lines for 640 x 400 monochrome monitor owners to fit more information into fewer different screens or if the increased vertical res just made the text edges look nicer.

On the Amiga virtually no software ever ran GUIs in interlaced mode because high-contrast single pixel horizontal lines would flicker. The Amiga interlaced modes were used for displaying organic content like photos and video, which didn't have any elements that flickered (or, at least, not any more than organic imagery on a high-quality TV). Some software used the Amiga's hardware support for switching resolution modes mid-screen to show interlaced 640 x 400 content on the top with 640 x 200 GUI on the bottom. With the Amiga 3000 and 4000 Commodore added support for 31.5 Khz non-interlaced 400 line monitors. Commodore did release the A2024, a non-interlaced super high-res monochrome monitor for all Amigas in 1988 in 15-inch and 19-inch sizes. It displayed 1024 x 800 in 8 grayscale tones, however it wasn't very popular and little software other than the Amiga OS, desktop publishing and word processing ever redesigned GUIs specifically to exploit the A2024's increased resolution.

My two points being: 1. I agree having the option of the monochrome non-interlaced monitor was a definite advantage for the Atari ST vs the Amiga but it wasn't an advantage for most Atari ST users because most chose the Atari color monitor (except for some dedicated music or DTP installations). 2. Interlaced mode on the Amiga wasn't a disadvantage vs the Atari, it was a feature imaging, animation and video software could optionally use to display organic image content. I bring this up because I once saw an Atari ST fan put the Amiga into interlace mode and show the desktop windowing GUI (which flickered) as an "Aha, gotcha!" example, which was silly because interlace mode was never meant to display interfaces nor did Amiga users use it that way (in fact, the Amiga desktop GUI looked vertically squished in interlace modes until the OS was redesigned to support higher vertical resolutions with the release of the A2024 monitor, A3000 & A4000).

Anyway, my goal isn't to rehash an ancient 'platform war' no one cares about anymore because I don't even care about it anymore. I currently still own three different models of Amiga AND three different models of Atari ST and I love them all. There were a few scenarios where the ST had real advantages over the Amiga but they were limited to a smaller subset of users primarily in music and DTP. The overwhelming advantage of the ST over the Amiga was price. And dollar for dollar, the ST was a remarkably capable system at a tremendous value. However, the Amiga simply had better hardware (at a much higher price until the A500). The Atari was designed over a period of 5 months out of off-the-shelf components to be a low-cost leader, while the Amiga was designed over three years with highly sophisticated custom chips and the A1000 sold (initially) at almost twice the price. Of course the Amiga was better at more of the things most of the target users cared about. Arguably, the most favorable Atari ST + monochrome monitor comparison in 1985 is with the Mac for dedicated desktop publishing use cases. It was 1/3 the price ($800 vs $2500), had more memory, higher resolution and a large monitor. There was no DTP-relevant spec the Mac was better at although, arguably, the ST's keyboard was a notable weakness in all use cases.

To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked.

DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS.

Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible.

They were shit for games

They were bulky

They were slow

They crashed all the time.

They were ugly

They were noisy.

They were hard to manage (autoexec.bat, no OS in ROM, stupidly tricky partitioning tools, incompatible drivers for the same hardware but in different applications, etc)

But IBM lost control of the hardware market so they became cheap, ubiquitous crap.

And that’s literally the only reason we got stuck with PCs.

The PC industry of the late 80s was a disaster.

We had affordable windowing and GUIs on the Atari and the Amiga, with instant boot from ROM and tons of RAM. The Amiga had the beginnings of multitasking and hardware acceleration for graphics and sound.

Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, with insanely unaffordable prices, crippled specs, bizarre semi-manual memory management, ugly hardware, and a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good.

Infuriating.

My cousin had an Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. As a kid, I was so incredibly jelous. Everything was better, sound, graphics, the OS, the hardware itself. Even well into halfway the nineties we were messing with tire fires like VESA Local Bus on the PC side.

> Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing,

Just like today's GUIs. They all look like Windows 1.0

Not just Atari and Amiga. Apple and Acorn had excellent machines too.

It was basically just the old 8-bit micros that kept IBM compatibles looking good.

> a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good.

I hate to go to bat for MS-DOS, but it had at least one real advantage over CP/M: a single disk format. As doomed to failure as the various non-PC DOS machines (e.g. Tandy 2000 and DEC Rainbow) were, they could at least share disks.

I just remembered that the Rainbow only supported single sided disks. While a PC could format and use those, people normally used double sided disks. So, kind of technically compatible but not completely.

You could have a GUI on a PC as well. I developed GEM applications on an Olivetti M24 before I got my first Atari ST.

The Olivetti had a B&W 640x400 monitor and a Logitech mouse that plugged into the back of the keyboard. You could replace the 8086 CPU with an NEC V30 for a bit more speed.

> with instant boot from ROM

This was a mistake. It slowed upgrades. The several second's worth of speed increase was irrelevant when to upgrade an Amiga you had to ship out 2x 40-pin DIPs and floppy disks as opposed to just floppies.

And due to incompatibilities it was common to install a ROM switcher in your system, especially in Amigaland when kickstart 2.0 came out and you wanted to keep 1.3 so your games would still run. So you had to buy and install a switcher like a MultiStart AND buy and install new ROMs and manage two sets of floppies. This led to a schism in the market where normal people were stuck with an A500 running 1.2/1.3 and its 1980s featureset and power users who wanted space-age luxuries like IDE hard drives were running 2.0.

Practically every word uttered or printed by Commodore about compatibility between the two was an outright lie.

Microsoft had an obsessive focus on backwards compatibility so MS-DOS 5.0 was adopted by practically everybody: just insert the disk, switch to a:, type "install". Done. There were compatibility issues, but they were on a scale that was irrelevant compared to the Kickstart disaster.

Could you imagine in 1992 having a PC and having to install a PCB in the BIOS sockets so you could have both versions 3.02.111 and 4.84.1932 of your BIOS and keep DOS 3.3 and 5.0 boot disks on hand so that you could run Commander Keen and use the newest version of WordPerfect?

I did all of that on the non-PC side of the house, and many others did too. I had (and still have) an A2000 with hard card, flicker fixer, accelerator, ram expansion, rom switcher, and other upgrades. I spent thousands of hours tinkering and having fun with the system.

Tinkerers don't make for successful ecosystems.

Fun, yes.

Sustainable, no.

I hope someone will write an entertaining satire about the sometimes almost PTSD-like bitterness and bizarre selective perceptions of the "anti-PC" crowd, especially in the Amiga space. :D

Please don't take it too harshly, but your list of grievances is almost radically different to my experiences of personal computing in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties... to me somewhat of a faszinosum all on its own. In my litle corner of the world the Amiga was virtually nonexistant [1], largely undesireable, and prophesized to be a corpse already as early as 1991.

I'll give you one thing, tho: A mostly non-plastic, compact keyboard computer case (Amiga 600-like) for a suitably powerful IBM compatible would've been awfully nice. Still would be, for a vintage bird that is. We only got "Schneiderplastik", the Euro-PC to be more precise [2], and that one wasn't updated in a satisfying fashion.

1. The only people I knew that had Commodores were two of my best friends, one with a Commodore 64, the other with a 128. The demosceners I grew up with were Atari ST guys, all of them (becoming) musicians.

2. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC]

Sure, there is clearly some "rose-colored memory" effect going on - how could there not be? As someone who used Amigas, Atari STs, Macs and PCs back in the day - and who still owns over a hundred unique models of vintage 80s and 90s computers, they ALL suck in many annoying ways AND most had some unique strengths. We all learned to live with what we had and how to make it do what we needed done.

People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0 CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST never really had and only the "professional" series Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000).

Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.

I don't think we negotiate the same phenomenon. You seem to describe the harmless, almost romantic indulgences of nostalgics. I talk about the bizarre, often enough toxic distorsions of a certain breed of user, who still fights, after all these years, their Platform War. The sort of fan who blames "the PC" for the "ills of the industry".

Anyway, off to some specifics:

> "The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards [...]".

A standardized general-purpose computing platform "for the future". Exactly what spoke to me, as disseminated in the publications I read as a kid in 1991.

> "Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac."

"Power balance"? I didn't think in such abstracts when I made my choice, and conducted the long and merciless attrition-lobbying campaign for financial support, to buy a PC. The Amigas and the Ataris were simply not a factor for a variety of different, but very tangible and practical reasons:

Atari ST? I was not (on my way to become) a musician with the need for a precise and affordable backpack-portable computer instrument.

Amigas? The big birds were seen, outside of some specialist-niches, as uneconomical compared to their IBM-compatible brethren.

The vanilla home computers were seen as affordable, but extremely limited, racking-up (hidden) secondary costs to make them more usable. Often enough they carried a certain cultural stigma as well, being perceived by our financiers as gaming toys and therefore time wasters. And most importantly? No one I personally knew had an Amiga. Who to swap software with, where to find a mentor? Yeah...

The Atari guys I befriended used their machines almost exclusively for dabbling in electronic music, later as part of the emerging East German EBM and hard techno scene.

Games? The titles I was interested in either didn't exist on M68k platforms (flight simulations à la Aces of the Pacific, wargames such as the Harpoon series, or adventures like The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes), were practically unplayable (e. g. Red Baron), considered inferior (e. g. Wing Commander)... or just came out too late.

By listening to stories of some Britons of my age, it only recently came to my attention how privileged I have actually been. Some of these people told me stories of buying their first A600s or A1200s only in 1993! At that time it was hard to separate me from my trusty, second-hand PC... a machine with a CPU-type nearing its eighth (!) birthday (386DX-25).

Your point totally stands.

But in the late 1980s, oh my. An Amiga 500 in 1987 was really a lot better than a PC of the time for many things. It was also a lot cheaper. Maybe half the price. The Amiga and the Atari ST didn't improve enough by 1991. By then a PC was better.

But by 1988 the PC was so far outselling everything else that the writing was on the wall.

This article has a graph of market share by year.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/

People who had Amigas and Atari STs couldn't quite understand how their machines, that they perceived as so much better, were being outclassed by PCs running MS-DOS. On an Amiga 500 in 1987 you had a decent GUI. Until Windows 3 PCs didn't.

For example, Pro-Write on the Amiga having real time spell checking and being WYSIWYG in the late 1980s. It wasn't until Word 6 in 1993 that Word was really much better.

Exactly.

If youve only used a PC in the 90s then it’s easy to see the Atari and Amiga crowd as rose-tinted fanboys. But they’re comparing 90s IBM PCs with 80s competitors.

Really, that says more about how IBM PCs were 10 years behind the competition than about how great IBM-compatibles were.

> An Amiga 500 in 1987 was really a lot better than a PC of the time for many things. It was also a lot cheaper.

Yes, the "bang for the buck" made all the difference. For a while.

The big advantage we had on Atari and Amiga was that the 68000 could address more than 640K without a sweat. PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.). In 87 when I was student at University, I managed to write all my sofware on the Mega ST2 and print my papers with Signum! on my 9 pin matrix printer in a quality that my PC colleagues were absolutely jealous of. As said, the advantage was then quickly lost even if I still could use my 1991 acquiered TT up until the mid 90. But by then, the PC was indeed already in another category (CD-ROM, SVGA, Soundcards, Win95 and/or NT or OS/2, beginning of Linux etc.). Our poor niches computer couldn't follow against the sheer mass of the market.

> PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.).

Competent enough people on both ends, end-users and programmers alike, simply worked around that. In the end, it still allowed for a platform of industry-leading applications and games, many of them not available on Amigas or Ataris.

Not until the 90s. Again, you’re talking about 90s hardware and we are talking about 80s hardware.

EDIT:

Integrated from above:

> I’m not talking about personal preference.

You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.

> If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry.

You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?

See, in Central Europe, the Amiga 500 came out only in May '87. In October, the US and UK followed suit. The first reliable Amiga for the pro market, the A2000, made its debut in March 1987. What does that mean? First comparison timepoints: Christmas sales 1987 as well as 1988 (these two numbers are part of what we call "the Eighties"). With the A1000 and the STs, as well as all the 8-bitters, one needs to dial back to Christmas '85 (520) and '86 (1040), not accounting for more affluent early adopters buying systems closer to the release date.

So! What is really possible at these timepoints in the PC world (e. g. 386DX, VGA, Adlib, MT-32, ...), what in the Atari- and Amiga-eco systems? What would be economically sound for what type of customer, in what markets? What software was available?

Nah, I think my point stands. As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.

> You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.

I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.

I said 3D games were the tipping point where the envy flipped from PC->Amiga to Amiga->PC.

And that has nothing to do with personal preference.

> You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?

I got your point the first time. However you keep conflating personal experience with technology.

Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. It just means your experience isn’t inclusive. Literally just that and nothing technical.

this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.

> As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.

You’re making a strawman argument here.

We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition. In general and against many common benchmarks and UX metrics.

We aren’t talking about $10,000 top of the line workstations against “pro” STs, we’re talking about a like-for-like in terms of home computers and price points.

PCs were much more upgradable. But then you could upgrade Amigas and STs too if you wanted. However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec. Albeit this still wasn’t a common a thing until the late 80s. But I do agree that if you wanted the latest bleeding edge hardware then PCs were the way to go. However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)

———

Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.

So perhaps we should quit here before the conversation degrades.

> I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.

Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").

> Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. [...] this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.

As I wrote, I got to experience Atari STs back in the day, albeit in a limited fashion. And this might come as a terrible shock to you, but people are also able to experience technology decades later and extrapolate accordingly. It's what historians (of science and technology for example) do all the time. Good lorde!

> We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition.

Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.

The big deal about these home computers was indeed the "bang for the buck" mantra. This is, at least as far as I'm concerned, completely indisputable. But when evaluating whole eco systems against each other, a 386 workstation from 1987 is as much part of that equation as an Amiga 2000 workstation as XT-grade Europlastik from Schneider as an Amiga 500 or an Atari ST. That's not hard to comprehend.

> However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)

Well, the first Amiga I ever saw was an A2000 in a yearbook. And "in the flesh"? 2007, at a demoscene thing. PCs, incl. graphics workstations (such as the used one I bought from my mentor who got himself a 486 replacement)? All around me. Even at my grandma's workplace (chemical engineering) which I was often allowed to terrorize as a kidlet, already shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The STs were only an outlier, computers as music instruments; their users (households) also owning/sharing PCs. Video game consoles were much more popular when it came to arcade-style gaming. But that's just in my neck of the woods; I'm well aware that the Amigas were some of the most popular, and capable, machines here in Europe, especially Germany.

> However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec.

Precisely. The openness of the eco system was and is, generally speaking, both strength and weakness.

> Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.

My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p

G'day.

> Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").

That’s the literal opposite of my point. I don’t think you’re actually reading my comments properly. Or if you are, you’re just reading the words and assuming I’m wrong so not really listening to the points im making.

> Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.

That’s not an unreasonable estimation. The date isn’t going to be exact and I’d probably nudge it a little later, but I don’t think you’re being unfair with that figure either.

> My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p

I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)

> That’s the literal opposite of my point.

In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D

> I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)

No, I haven't. Thank you for your service! O7

You’re replying to peoples comments but you’re not even trying to understand what people have said in those comments.

Take below for example. You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement. And in fact repeatedly try to steer the conversation back to the 80s and before 3D games were the norm on any platform.

What you’re missing is we are talking about hardware technology and you are talking about preference of games. You’re the one who’s arguing about preferences. Not us.

> In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D

I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.

When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.

The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because Carmak (I forget how his name is spelt) found a hack to produce Super Mario quality graphics on commodity IBM-compatible hardware. Something previously considered impossible to do.

The point I’m making about 2.5D games isn’t pretence either. It’s showing where PCs grew beyond the capabilities of their contemporaries. You couldn’t do ray tracing on 16 bit consoles. Frankly, it even performed like shit on most 32bit consoles too. Yet it worked really well on PCs.

What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.

And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to about this has disagreed with your analysis and echoed my statements must surely demonstrate that you’re attempting to rewrite history around your own preferences for PCs.

It’s fine to like prefer PCs. Nobody would criticise you for having that preference. The comments being made here wasn’t that you can’t have a good time with PCs. It was that the technology behind the PCs was shit compared to the other 80s alternatives. And that’s something that you can easily, and everyone already has, clearly demonstrated in our posts.

I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible. Unfortunately, in this specific instance, the body of evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against you.

Added comment, as I've missed this before:

> You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement.

How absurd, I made no such claim. I simply referred to something you brought up: the visual aesthetics of 2.5D raytraced games from ca. '91/'92, which was your yardstick to judge the (graphics) capabilities of competing eco systems, i. e. to determine when PC games began to "look better than their counterparts" from the homecomputer world. Which, to me, is just a generalization; a fallacy.

You either didn't read my posts properly, or are deliberately putting words in my mouth. So unless you offer up some serious numbers, detailed use cases, cultural insights, war stories, et cetera... this conversation has run its course for me. For the record, the rest of my reply is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273046].

From below...

> I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.

The "bang for the buck"-deal relevant home computers had going for 'em was something I already acknowledged... more than once... a while ago.

> When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.

Once again, the Amiga 500 home computer came to the market only in 1987, a machine already outperformed by top-of-the-line PCs from the same year, strictly in technological terms of course. For an economical comparison one would need specific use cases and numbers, i. e. prices, accessability, and so on. The rest falls into the area of coders and users adapting to these very platforms and eco systems, and their associated culture and politics, et cetera.

> The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because [...] Something previously considered impossible to do.

Yeah, negotiating, and overcoming, specific limitations every platform had in one form or another. Also already addressed when I replied to the other chap trying to make a huge deal out of PC memory segmentation...

> What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.

Yeah, when I mention the superior technical capabilities of PCs from, say, '87/'88 onwards several times (VGA, MT-32, expandability, etc.), it's "just games I like to play"; when you talk about some 2.5D titles just "looking better than some nebulous counterparts" it's of course hardware capability. :D

As I've said, somebody needs to write a piece of satire. A sort of two-hander the likes of The Sunset Limited or My Dinner with Andre. Just for us nerdlingers.

> And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to [...].

For every Atari etc. fan with an application edge-case or preference (e. g. Signum!), I can easily forward one myself.

> I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible.

As mentioned several times already as well, I saw the sign, bro, I have seen the difference. I got hands-on experience with C64s, C128s and PCs (including XT- and AT-class machines) from '89 onwards, the Atari ST from '90 onwards, and the Amiga eco-system by only reading all the relevant glossies, including back-issues, in a very dedicated fashion from '90/'91 onwards. In the latter case, hands-on experience came only much later (mostly in the form of A600s and A1200s, the faves of the retro/vintage gaming circuit), from 2007 onwards.

And that's just computers. Consoles are another matter.

You’re talking about the 90s though. Thats actually several generations of PC later.

PCs in the 80s were so bad that most homes still ran 8-bit micros with a BASIC ROM.

Windows 3.0 wasn’t even released until 1990.

And let’s be honest, the problems with autoexec.bat, config.sys and different incompatible DOS drivers for games existed throughout. It was only really the uptake of DirectX that fixed that (and to an extent, Rage / OpenGL, but you could technically get DOS drivers for them too).

But that was a whole generation of computers away from the 3.x era of PCs, and another generation again from the 80s.

But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself. It was so bad that best practice advice was to reformat and reinstalling Windows every 6 months (I did it much less regularly than that though). And this was a common idiom throughout the entire life of the 9x era of Windows too. But to be fair, that was also a common idiom with pre-OSX Macs too. Apple had become painfully shit at the point too.

If The ST and Amiga were still evolving like PCs were, then by the late 90s I’m sure Amigas might have suffered from the same longevity problems too. But in the 80s, they (and STs, Macintoshes, and Acorn Archimedes) were stood head and shoulders above what PCs could do at that point in almost every regard.

> You’re talking about the 90s though. Thats actually several generations of PC later.

I'm East German; you people got a headstart. My relevant hands-on experience is centered around a 386DX system, technology introduced in the mid-Eighties. 1987 brought VGA, AdLib, and MT-32s to the table, with games support gearing up in '89, the year the Sound Blaster was released. Fall 1990 saw the release of Wing Commander. Of course that's just technology, economical realities tell a different story.

> Windows 3.0 wasn’t even released until 1990.

Windows was as relevant to me as an Amiga. GUIs didn't do much for me until much later. Still prefer CLIs, TUIs (and minimal GUIs that come as close to the latter as possible).

> And let’s be honest, the problems with autoexec.bat, config.sys and different incompatible DOS drivers for games existed throughout.

I never experienced serious troubles in DOS. The first two, and only, games I could not get to work were two infamously bug-ridden Windows titles of the late 90s: Falcon 4.0 and Privateer: The Darkening. By the time they fixed 'em with a litany of patches I was busy with other things.

> But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself.

News to me. How bizarre!

> But in the 80s, they (and STs, Macintoshes, and Acorn Archimedes) were stood head and shoulders above what PCs could do at that point in almost every regard.

Hardware? Until '87. Games? Until late '90 I'd say, at the earliest, accounting for a strong genre bias. [1] Then, outside of niches (Video Toaster, cheap DTP, music production) and certain "creature comforts", it was over; the eco system began to atrophy.

1. The first two DOS-platformers that wowed me visually were Prince of Persia 2 ('93) and Aladdin ('93/'94); all my other genre preferences were, to put it diplomatically, underserved on 16-bit home computers.

> I'm East German; you people got a headstart

That doesn’t mean PCs were somehow more capable in the 80s though ;)

> Windows was as relevant to me as an Amiga.

Same point as above.

> I never experienced serious troubles in DOS.

I think that’s probably rose tinted glasses on your part then. The pain was real. Games seldom “just worked” and you often had to be really knowledgeable in your system to get stuff working.

To this day, I’ve never heard the music in Transport Tycoon because that game refused to work with whatever midi drivers I threw at it.

> > But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself.

> News to me. How bizarre!

I’d be amazed if you’ve never once heard about the old problem of computers getting slower or buggier over time and a reinstall fixing things.

> Hardware? Until '87.

You’re comparing theoretical top of the line PC hardware (which nobody actually owned and no one had written software for yet) with commodity Amigas and STs.

And even those top of the line PCs still missed a few tricks that made some genres of games better on Amigas and Atari STs, like fast blitters.

It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts. And then things really accelerated (no pun intended) with 3D hardware graphics acceleration. Which, to be fair, was available for Amigas too, but the only software that targeted them were 3D rendering farms.

> That doesn’t mean PCs were somehow more capable in the 80s though ;)

It clarifies specifics relating to my personal experiences with the discussion matter, addressing (perceived) realities of a local market. How people use computers is of the utmost relevance; a fact which you, given your lamentations here, certainly must have internalized.

> I think that’s probably rose tinted glasses on your part then. The pain was real. Games seldom “just worked” and you often had to be really knowledgeable in your system to get stuff working.

No rose-tinted glasses here. And I believe you that your and others' pain was real. Many people could not work their heads around a PC; many of 'em fell for cheap SX clunkers with other substandard components, ffs. That's obviously an inherent problem of such an open platform: PCs are highly individual in many subtle ways; a trade-off one had, and still has, to negotiate in one fashion or another.

> You’re comparing theoretical top of the line PC hardware (which nobody actually owned and no one had written software for yet) with commodity Amigas and STs.

I'm comparing hardware available on the market (with key system components coming together in 1987/88, and games supporting such top-of-the-line hardware showing up in numbers from '88 onwards). I also spoke to economical realities in nearly every post in this disc; I am well aware that 16-bit home birds had a technical lead for a short while, and were an even better value proposition for many people a while longer. For some, just as valid, this still holds true.

> And even those top of the line PCs still missed a few tricks that made some genres of games better on Amigas and Atari STs, like fast blitters.

Yes, already addressed by referring to Prince of Persia 2 and Aladdin (1993/94!).

> It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts.

So, your stylistic (genre) preference maps it into the time between 1991 (with Hovertank 3D in April as well as Catacomb 3-D in November) and Wolfenstein 3D (May 1992). Okay.

With mine it begins earlier, largely because of proper 3D-titles: Deathtrack (1989, PC-exclusive), LHX: Attack Chopper (1990, no Amiga/Atari port), and Red Baron (1990, got the Amiga slideshow in 1992), as well as the odd non-3D action title here and there, e. g. Silpheed (1989, no Amiga/Atari port).

One can probably go even back to 1988, for at least parity in certain markets and their segments, if one compares the technological edge in an intellectually honest fashion, i. e. what the platform, hardware and software, was really technically capable of.

And productivity software, part of the deal, is of course its very own world.

I’m not talking about personal preference. I’m talking about the wider industry.

As I said before, I had a PC back then. I used to write software for them. I know how the hardware and software compared with other systems out there at the same time.

If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry. You would have had your own brands of things because it wasn’t as easy (or even possible) to import western products. And by the time the wall fell and the borders had opened up, PCs had reached parity with their contemporaries. So of course Atari STs and Amigas weren’t common items and PCs seemed like better devices from your perspective. But surely you have to also understand that your experiences aren’t a typical snapshot of the computer industry in the 80s. In fact they’re about as atypical as it gets.

You’d have been better off saying something like “things were a lot different in Soviet Germany” and we could have had a more interesting and productive insight into what life was like for yourself. Instead you’ve been talking about your own experiences like it was a fact of how those products compared to each other (which is where you’re wrong) rather than what devices made it to your borders (which you were correct on). You do understand how they’re different arguments?

There were others too. At least the Olivetti Prodest PC1 [1], which I had, and the Sinclair PC200 [2], which a close friend had. Other friends had the EuroPC, some had the Amstrad 1512 and other different PC compatible boxes.

I remember my PC1 fondly. Well, I still have it. I learned to code in GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal and C (in that order) with it. I was using it for a long time, until 1997, for serious work (coding and university assignments), when I finally had the money to upgrade to a Pentium PC.

As much as my world was PC-centric, the first time I saw an Atari ST and what it could do, my jaw dropped. I knew of the Amiga from magazines, but the first time I actually saw one was several years later, after I acquired my Pentium PC and I admit it wasn't that impressive then. But still I couldn't help but think: "wow, you had that in 1989?". There was no comparison with the PCs of its time.

[1] https://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/prodestpc1.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_PC200

Thank you; interesting machines. A modern, compact industrial-grade metal keyboard case PC with an external PSU, and some quality of life goodies, built around a Pentium MMX or Pentium II CPU, is really something I would fork over money for. Essentially something along the lines of C64EVOs planned MODLR case. [1]

> But still I couldn't help but think: "wow, you had that in 1989?". There was no comparison with the PCs of its time.

This speaks more of local market realities, e. g. "demo software" on hardware in an actual computer shop or, as in your example, at a friend's home, especially in the form of 2D arcade action games, then at its peak of popularity on 8- and 16-bit home computers... and yet to shine on PCs (and as opposed to glossies and the like, where the first 486 machines stepped onto the stage turn of the year 89/90).

But at that time I wasn't thinking about computers that much, still digesting the beginning of the end of the GDR.

1. [https://xcancel.com/C64EVO/status/1893158033917669785]

I was predominantly a PC user. In fact I had a side hustle repairing PCs in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t fun but it was tax free pocket money.

Every time I got to play on non-PC home computers I’d be blown away by how much better those machines were.

These days I collect retro hardware and the Atari STs and Amigas are still easier to maintain.

So my opinions aren’t that of a Amiga fanboy. PCs in the 80s were really that shit.

I do think a lot of the problem was Microsoft though. I never liked any of Microsoft’s software even back then. And that was long before they gained the reputation that so many older timers like myself still remind people about. I actually wrote my own windowing system in Pascal because I was fed up with early Windows. It wasn’t a patch on GEM but back then I didn’t know you could run GEM on a PC.

Fair enough. I never had serious problems with my PCs... or Microsoft's OS offerings. And all that maintenance song and dance around these machines, before Plug & Play became reliable, came almost naturally to us. No surprise here, we were insatiably curious, able to read the manuals, and not afraid to ask.

OP's grievances are spot on for the period 1985 to 1990. After that, PC's did indeed gain enough power (386 were mass and 486 just came out), also VGA started to become. This means that your perception built especially after 1990 is right but doesn't contradict OP's list as Atari's and Amiga's were indeed much much more advanced and useful than XP's and 286 under MS-DOS/CGA.

Cheap and ubiquitous is what people want, and if PCs became successful because people other than IBM started producing the same hardware, then perhaps Commodore should have done that too. Software seems to have proven itself the better moat, and so maybe AmigaOS could have been the thing that would tie this hypothetical Amiga-compatible market together, keeping Commodore alive.

They'd have to have been a bit more careful about it than IBM were.

I am confident it would still feel like everything is terrible.

The thing that really drove the PC era was that the commodity desktop spec was rapidly gaining capability, compilers for them were getting good enough to depend on high-level languages, and the most affordable way to meet the market where it was, was not to build custom(as had been the case in the 80's when looking at stuff like video editing systems, CGI, digital audio, etc.) but to use Microsoft as a go-between. All the heralded architectures of the 80's were doing things more custom, but it amounted to a few years of advantage before that convergence machinery came along and stripped away both customers and developers.

Apple did survive in that era, though not unassisted, and the differentiation they landed on(particularly after Jobs came back) was to market a premium experience as an entry point. I think that is probably going to be the exit from today's slop.

In this era, spec is not a barrier - and you can make <$100 integrated boards that are competent small computers, albeit light on I/O - and that means that there's a lot more leeway to return to the kinds of specialty, task-specific boxes that the PC had converged. There's demand for them, at least at a hobbyist level.

For example, instead of an ST and outboard synths for music, you could now get an open-source device like the Shorepine Tulip - an ESP32 touchscreen board set up with Micropython and some polished DSP code for synths and effects. It's not powerful enough to compete with a DAW for recording, but as an instrument for live use, it smashes the PC and its nefarious complexities.

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