Comment by cmrdporcupine
7 hours ago
yeah, substantially agree. But I also think if only Atari and Commodore teams could have just been one company... it would have been glorious. Somehow. The market couldn't afford to be split like that, the pie wasn't big enough.
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
> And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.