CaSTaway/PSP 003 released!

[Mr.Modem]

It's not a debate, I'm not one of those Atari haters. The Amiga was a more advanced computer than the ST. End of discussion.

[wraggster]

i never owned an atari st but i did own an amiga and i have to say it was the worst buy of probaly all i had.

But anyway this is a great port to out beloved PSP

[laxer3a]

Ahahaha... Did I started a war again ? :-P

So. to calm down everybody, I would like to close the discussion. Hope this will close the subject.

No I have no doubt about the Amiga superiority against the ST.
As I said, it was a technically superior machine.

1/ Hardware blit where in standard (it was put in the STE but was too late to compete with Amiga on the game market)
2/ Copper was a simple but really helping coprocessor !!!
3/ Agnes (if my memory is correct the name of the graphic chip) was simply super powerfull, 32 color, 64 half color is special mode, ability to change the rendering mode between scanline, hardware scroll were possible..etc...etc...
4/ Audio chip allowed 4 channel up to 22khz if I am correct.
5/ The OS of the amiga IS A REAL OS : multithreading, ability to create driver, plug and play... ST was a childplay stupid OS compare to the Amiga.

Now on the ST side, the standard ST machine where really poor on the graphic side, hardware scroll were possible only every 8 lines.
The only benefit is that the cpu was running a +0.5 Mhz compare to the Amiga. Which was giving roughly about a 10% increase in performance I believe (talking about cpu power here)
ST was very used in music, because it has MIDI port in standard, so it became very popular in the music world as a cheap machine compare to the Apple Macintosh.

Amiga had nice video output (and ability to synchronize with a Genlock) and because of its open architecture, was actually a choice for a cheap video processing/editing station.

As I said before, I was just talking about the demo scene...
When you look at the stuff like TEX did in their "big demo" like beeing able to play AUDIO SAMPLE without digital channel, able to tweak the graphic chip to remove the low border... In 1988 if I am correct !!!

The demo scene on ST was able to "create" the hardware scroll by tweaking again the graphic chip, able to do overscan, play amiga mod file using a merely 10% of the cpu. I mean... Technically these coders were gods !
To find that level of tuning of the hardware on amiga... It took until the 1200 was released. Basically, when the ST died, the amiga demo scene was doing really great productions ! And the Amiga demo scene is still alive while the ST is not.

So basically I am not saying : my ST was better than my Amiga (yes I had both !). I am saying that the programmers on ST stretched their mind for a while until it happened on the Amiga.

I must agree also that game company where probably quite stupid to devellop directly Amiga game from ST port. But probably cost saving and market issue where limiting the development of games. (especially it was all made in assembly)

[Mr.Modem]

Well said laxer3a, you covered almost everything! Correction: The graphics chip was called Denise not Agnes. You're talking about wonderful demos on the ST and since I'm not so familiar with the ST scene, I would like to see some of the best ST demos. Any suggestions?

[laxer3a]

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?pa...ST&order=views

Try Saint as an ST emu. It tries to be the most accurate emu.
(the author is an ex-demomaker on ST)

Look at the production dates, it is important because new techniques and trick were found each year by coders. They learn how to "trash" the graphic chipset video counter by switching from 50 / 60 / 70 Hz for a given number of cycle to **** up the internal register.

My favorites are (not in order):
cuddly demos
virtual escape
ooh crickey wot a scorcher
the union-demo
eat my bollocks
syntax terror
the b.i.g demo
sowatt demo

Dont forget : no hardware sprite, no digital audio chipset, no copper, no hardware scroll were officially available. :-)

Cant resist now... I am going to watch some.

[parabolee]

i never owned an atari st but i did own an amiga and i have to say it was the worst buy of probaly all i had.

But anyway this is a great port to out beloved PSP

I'm sorry to hear that wraggster as my Amiga was probably my best buy ever. I loved that machine more than any machine after. I got more gaming out of it and more years (played it as my number one machine for about 8 years). It is the home of at least 5 of my all time favorite games to this day. There has never been a year passed since it's release that I havn't played It Came from The Desert, Sensible World of Soccer, Kick Off 2/Player Manager not to mention all the great adventures that I come back to refinish from time to time.

Sure now a days I play those classic LucasArts games (Monkey Island 2 being another of my all time favorite games) on SCUMM (and now the PSP version) but all those were first experienced on the Amiga 500. That machine will always be the sole reason I am a big fan of video games today and thew reason I got into IT as a career (I a web designer and animator/artist).

I have owned ever single games machine that came out since the Spectrum (my first games machine) with a few exceptions (NeoGeo, Jaguar, PC Engine) and not one of them besides the ill fated Dreamcast came close to the love I felt for the Amiga 500. The Atari ST was always a close second to the Amiga and that is why I love this Emu so much. I would rather have a Amiga Emu runnign as well as this but beggers can't be choosers and the Atrai St is much easier to emulate and only slightly inferior.

Amiga 4 life yo!

[Mr.Modem]

If have to say my Amiga was my best by ever too (allthough it was my dad that bought it ). It started my interest for computers and I still dust it off sometimes to play some old classics, although I play most games using WinUAE. I remeber the first I played Turrican 2. The smooth animation and music by Chris Hülsbeck was just amazing. So I recommend you to dust of your old Amiga (you haven't sold it have you?) load some nice games like SWOS, Silkworm, Turrican, Rodland, Lotus Turbo Challange 2, Supercars etc. or a nice demo like Enigma, Desert Dreams or Hardwired and then maybe you don't regret you bought one.

[laxer3a]

The only regret I had with my Amiga, is that you need a floopy to have the workbench !!!
You also needed to be fluent like a Unix user to start to write boot script.
That was really a pain.
Atari ST was just plain stupid, but at least on that side, it was easier.
I had to ask to friends to make my "programming disk" on Amiga.

Also, I never felt comfortable on using GFA Basic on Amiga... And it was my favorite programming language at that time.

Well, most of the people I knew, they were just sticking their floppy and wait for the game to boot. No real difference between a ST or an Amiga.
At this point, I believe that the Amiga has been a better machine for gamers, but Atari came sooner into the market... As these little babies were pretty expensive for youngster like us. The Amiga / ST war for me was just about demomaker, I never got into my machine was better than... etc...etc...

I remember having paid like 1000 euro for my first ST. (including the monitor)
It was a lot of money for a 13/14 years old kid. With the increase in life cost, it would be like paying 1500 euro now for this.

When I think about this, and that kid now can buy a PC for 1/3 of this price, have huge cpu power, graphic chipset... And they dont code !
The demo scene on PC is huge, but one of my friend is saying that it is slightly dying... You don't have anymore kiddy of 14 or 15 years old trying to make demos. So anyway, younger people should enjoy that "older" guy like me (I am 31) are still coding and working on emus and should be gratefull that we were demomakers... else those emus would not run that damn fast !

Anyway, Skeezix keep up the good work !!!

[skeezix]

Sensi Soccor was ob the sT; SWOS .. not sure if thats different or not? SS isn't working in CaSTaway yet though, but we'll see.

/me just got back from a short trip, brain off

jeff

[skeezix]

Oh man, catching up a bit.. I almost need to get heavy into this ST/Amiga war, but I will resist, since I'm about to run out the door again

It was simple.. as an ST lover a tthe time, even I knew the ST hardware was inferior; but hardware isn't relevent half the time.. the ST software fo awhile was The Stuff.. but of course the ST started to die out in what, 1990-1991 or so, and the Akmiga managed to keep going a little while longer while the PC cleaned up. Course, it was more divided earlier.. with the Amiga owning the graphcis department (genlock, video toaster, nice full colour raster editors) while the ST owned the networking (midi :P), music (midi :P), and graphics-arts zones (desktop publishing). Game-wise, the ST was better earlier, but the Amiga rather cleaned its clock later (better versions after a few years of the same games, and then lots of original games later.)

To sum -- they were important both, for eing different and competitive.. ST was cheapre by far, Amiga beefoier and pricier.. both fighting for the same target audience. Competition drove both to exciting levels.

Nowadays, we don't have so much competition, but at least we have competition within the platform due to the interchangable components market..

Laxer is very right about the ST limit sin hardware.. the lack of hardware scrolling used to drive me nuts, but theres a few DM coders who destroyed our minds with the tricks they pulled. There was a demo that turne dinto a game.. Enchanted ...something... that just destroyed what was previously possible, with some new overscan colour effects and such.. ahh, those were the days.

I wasn't able to keep up with the real demo coders back then, but I tried a few times :P

jeff