| Hello...
Most of your questions are addressed elsewhere in the conference,
but I will try to quickly answer as many as I can. If I am in error
on any points, others will correct me.
First, the Amiga has handily outsold the ST in the USA according
to available data. The Amiga was only released in Europe in June
of '86, hence the greater number of STs. As of September '86, there
were 60,000 STs in the USA and 90,000 in Europe, versus 100,000-125,000
Amigas in the USA. Undoubtedly, both numbers are higher now, since
both machines did extremely well this Christmas. I predict that
if the Amiga is being sold at the same price as the 520 ST in Germany,
it will do very well, since the Amiga prices were almost double
the 520 ST in the USA, and it still managed to survive.
1. The Amiga's strong points are graphics. Right out of the box, the
Amiga has 20 different graphics modes, which are...
320 x 200 w/32 colors out of 4,096, non-interlaced
640 x 400 w/16 colors out of 4,096, non-interlaced
640 x 400 w/16 colors out of 4,096, interlaced
Hold and Modify mode on all of the above modes, which
allows all 4,096 colors to be displayed on the screen
In addition, the user or programmer may specify up to six bit
planes or as little as one. This makes a very flexible system,
in that as little as 8K or as much as 128K may be dedicated to video
ram.
Please note that the 640 x 400 16 color mode will function on any
monitor, but a medium or long-persistance monitor should be used
to eliminate flicker caused by the interlace. I use a Sony KV1311
with very good results, and CBM has announced a long-persistance
model 2080 Color RGB monitor. For text work, you can buy a low-cost
long-persistance monochrome monitor and display 48 rows of text
on the screen.
The interlace mode is provided to make the Amiga totally NTSC
compatible. This means that any standard NTSC frame may be superimposed
over an Amiga 320 x 400 interlace screen. In fact, I am told that
the reason the Amiga clock speed is 7.14MHz is that it is twice
the NTSC color burst frequency, whatever that means.
Because of this, the Amiga gives up 10-15% speed advantage to the ST.
Don't be fooled by the slower clock speed, though. Since both machines
use graphics-bit mapped displays, and only the Amiga uses a real
hardware bit-blitter, the Amiga seems like greased lightning compared
to the ST when it comes to moving large amounts of screen data, or for
scrolling text screens (which are just bit-maps, anyway).
for example, on the Amiga, the mouse cursor is a hardware sprite,
The Amiga also provides hardware for Bobs (blitter-objects), Sprites,
collision detection, etc.
In comparison, the ST has only three screen modes...
320 x 200 w/16 colors out of 512, non-interlaced
640 x 200 w/4 colors out of 512, non-interlaced
640 x 400, monochrome only, non-interlaced.
Currwnt STs have no Blitter, though the new Mega STs do. It
is not clear tha all current ST software will benefit from the blitter.
To it's credit, the ST monochrome is the best I have ever seen
on any PC, much better than the MAC. However, it requires the
use of Atari's special monitor, and most software runs only
on Color OR monochrome, but not both. Most software seems to
be written for the Color system, where the ST has no advantage
over the Amiga.
Most of the ST business stuff is available for Monochrome, which
makes long hours at the keyboard bearable.
2. The real time clock, on both machines, is as accurate as your
60 Hz line frequency, I believe. There are numerous sources
for battery-backed clocks for the ST and Amiga.
3. Memory for the Amiga can be had from a dozen or so different
vendors. Prices vary, but I just got a 2-meg board with zero
wait states, autoconfiguring, and passes the buss through, for
$525.00. Several internal memory boards are coming soon for
much less money, since they need not supply a housing.
At present, the Amiga custom Blitter and Sound chips can only
address the lower 512K of memory. This does not seem to be a
limitation, since data can be moved into and out of chip ram at
extremely high speed. For example, I can run DeluxePaint, and
create a brush the size of the screen. I can move the brush
off of the screen, and by monitoring my chip memory, I see that
the chip memory is intantly made available to the system.
4. There is a full documentation kit of the ROM Kernal, Intuition,
hardware, etc. available.
5. The best database seems to be Superbase, which has gotten rave
reviews.
6. The Amiga is currently weak in word-processing, with Scribble!
and Textcraft being the only widely available choices at this
time. Scribble is my choice, since it supports multiple documents
being open, has a spell checker, and runs faster.
ProWrite seems like a winner, with the ability to change
fonts within a document, merge text and graphics, support multitasking,
etc. ProWrite should be available by this spring. Batteries
Included is doing a version of PaperClip Elite.
7. Audio digitizers are available from FutureSound and someone
else, whose name slips my memory. You can sample at higher rates
at the expense of memory.
8. The Amiga has real stereo output, and built-in sound capabilites
that are unbelievable. The ST has a very boring 3-voice sound
chip, and a built in MIDI port. MIDI ports are available for
the Amiga from a half dozen different vendors, from $40 to $80.
9. The Amiga Transformer has been around for about 9 monts, and
will run almos all non-graphics software at 50-75% the speed of
a stock PC. The Sidecar has been available in Canada and Europe,
but is still awaiting FCC paperwork for the states. It is a PC
add on that will sell for around $699.00.
Well, I am getting really tired now. But, the Amiga is a fantastic,
fully expandable machine with more built-in goodies than anything
else available. The new Mega ST from Atari is more Amiga-like,
with detachable keyboard, blitter, but still has the ST meager set
of graphics modes, and cheap sound chip.
Hope this helped.
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| More on monitors...
I originally bought a 1080 with my Amiga in October '85. At the
time, it seemed like a good buy. Text is OK, much better than,
say, an IBM with CGA (640 x 200). At the time, I felt that the
Atari ST had a really great 80-column RGB text display, good
definition, and no visible scan lines. I think part of the trick
is that the smaller display shows more pixels/in^2. Unfortunately, I
hated the Atari's slow graphics and I loathe GEM. Plus, I swore
that as long as I live, I would never muck around with having to
create custom printer drivers for every program. (The Amiga has
global printer support, something that GEM was supposed to have,
but got 'left out' of the ST)
So, I was stuck with the 1080. The 1080 has some color bleeding, and
the characters look kinda washed out. Also, the screen image is not
square, but sorta bows at the top and bottom. The new 1080 displays
are much better, as I understand CBM has changed suppliers.
The colors on the Sony are breathtaking, and the display is
rectangular, and curved in only one plane to reduce distortion and
glare. To really appreciate the Sony, you should run it in interlace
mode. (I do this by installing the 'SETLACE' command in my
startup-file). This essentially causes the 200 horizontal
scan lines to be sent out twice per frame, rather than once. What
this does is completely eliminate any visible dark bands between
scan lines, which I consider a flaw in the Sony. When run in this
mode, 80 column text is as good as any I have ever seen, even better
that the old ST RGB monitors. Atari has now substituted a cheap Korean
monitor for the original Hitachi, so ST 80-column RGB is no longer
anything to write home about.
Anyway, the 1080 certainly hasn't helped to sell Amigas. The screen
just doesn't show enough contrast under bright store conditions.
The Sony uses a black matrix design, whatever that is, and is really
a delight to look at. I would personally recommend a 1201, since
the 12" screen will increase the pixel density. But, the 1311 has
a tuner in it, so you automatically get a nice Trinitron TV to boot!
On monochrome, I do not know anyone who has hooked one up, but I
imagine it's just a matter or finding the Amiga RGB pinouts, getting
the proper cable, and sending it in. There are several companies
who can connect an Amiga to anything, and if you're interested,
I'll post their phone numbers here. They can probably recommend
a good monitor/cable combo. If you could find a monochrome
composite monitor, I think you just need to send the Lumna signal
from the Amiga composite port into the monitor. Composite usually
sucks compared to RGB, though.
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