CompuServe Thread

new computer that will be incompatible with the ST's, and the ST users cannot upgrade to it. On the Amiga, you can add 68020 boards (available NOW) which will be much cheaper as competition increases. You can also add a math coprocessor. 10) If you want to consider IBM compatibility, even the EMULATOR software package that almost the whole Amiga community dislikes can run more IBM software than Atari's promised MS/DOS box! For example, the Atari box cannot run 123. And when you consider the sidecar with its 3 slots, you start being more secure about if C/A goes bankrupt, or if they drop the Amiga for a new product, cause you are still 100% IBM compatible. On the Atari, the likelihood of bankruptcy or of dropping the machine is more than the Amiga, yet you don't have any security of being able to run future software. 11) The Amiga comes with 880K drives standard. On the 1040ST, the software you buy is on 360K floppies, and you have to copy it to DS disks, if the makers allow you to. Another inconvenience of the Atari ST… 12) You were right that preference of the video output is highly subjective. I agree that Amiga monitors display a gap between the scanlines. But the ATARI monitors have a far worse problem: They display very annoying noise bars on the screen! Therefore I prefer the Amiga monitor output. I add the fact that you can attach any monitor to the Amiga and get rid of those GAPS, but on the ST's you are limited to their monitors. Believe me, I could go on and on with this. Oh yea, and the Amiga multitasks OUT OF THE BOX. The ST, even if you add multitasking OS to it, will not do it as good as the Amiga, because of the lack of DMA access to each of the chips. e.g. you need the 6800 to send all the data to be written to floppy to the disk controller of the ST. You need to send music data to the stupid sound chip, also. Etc… On the Amiga, you don't have to do any of these things! As a matter of fact, you can write to both disk drive simultaneously and listen to a musicraft score while the 68000 is running at 100% speed! (No kidding.) Comparing the ST to the Amiga is like comparing the VIC20 to the Apple //e. The VIC20 was cheaper, but had a very short lifetime because of lack of expandability, and wasn't at all usefull for anything but the most simple games. Look at the //e running a 68020 coprocessor, or a 1 meg board and AppleWorks! THe same goes for the Amiga. It is more expensive, but a lot more powerful, fully expandable (it will be even more so on the A2000) and does not sell at Toys-R-Us. (I don't have anything against mass marketing, but NOT TOYS R US!!! You don't sell a serious computer at a toy store. Federated, video stores and the like are O.K) The result is that my ST is sitting in a corner collecting dust, (and taking a lot of space at that because of its stupid component design,) while I enjoy every second of use on the Amiga! And the Amiga is being improved constantly: The ones now in the stores have quieter drives and a better keyborad feel. The ones of the future will have a new version of the os (1.2) which is a vast improvement over 1.1 and has much faster disk directories. (P.S. C/A told me a couple days ago that 1.2B4 is on its way to developers for testing. I will report on it as soon as I receive it. This was a note to interested readers following this thread.) And the Amiga is now selling for $1300 for a full system (monitor, 512K, 2 880K drives) which isn't a lot more than an inferior ST setup but one with the same configuration. One further note: I know as a fact that many people at Atari are busy spreading false rumors about the Amiga, which I don't think is good business practice at all. (Permission is granted for reproduction of this message or any of its components, anywhere the interested reader so pleases to do so. Amiga magazines are encouraged to print this in the pages of futire issues.) Thank you!!!