When I first bought my Atari STE in 1990, I was eager to see the machine that many said would rival the Amiga when it comes to gaming. After all, the Amiga had the advantage of hardware scrolling and the ability to display thirty-two colors on the screen compared to sixteen for the ST. Well, we got the hardware to scroll and the colors looked good, but still limited to sixteen colors at a time. We were also gifted with the new STE DMA sound chip and the awesome STE exclusive Obsession game that took previous ST games by storm. Sadly, aside from some impressive demos, STE only saw a small selection of software that would showcase the new features, so it never became a true competitor to the Amiga. Thus, the Amiga continued to enjoy its victory with many titles programmed to use its best color palette and sound chip.

Amiga and Atari users had a constant rivalry on the grounds of “my computer is better than yours.” The Atari ST community often labeled the Amiga as a “gaming machine”, causing many conflicts between users of both machines. I found the whole thing stupid and childish and refused to take sides. However, there were people in the ST world who hated Amigas strongly along with many Amiga users with hatred towards ST users due to constant insults towards their beloved machines. I remember once writing an article for an ST Diskzine about transferring mod files from Amiga to ST and received an email from a friend telling me that he no longer wanted to be associated with the magazine because of the article. Although the friend did not hate the Amigas, he was concerned that the magazine was going in a dangerous direction by engaging the Amigas in a positive way for a change.

So the Amiga was a gaming machine? I used to have an Amiga 500 and then a 1200 and my honest opinion is that it is NOT just a gaming machine. Yes, games are its strong suit, but it can run other software quite well. I used it to program games using Amos Professional and I can honestly say that Amos is much better than STOS Basic which is the ST version of this popular programming language. The Amiga also had Blitz Basic, which was also a great language.

I think two things that disappointed the Amiga are the ease of use and its workbench operating system. Workbench tried to be a multitasking operating system like PC windows, but unless you have one of the faster Amigas like the 1200 or 4000 then you will find that Workbench is quite slow and slow to work. Opening a directory meant listening to a few seconds of disk shaking before displaying a disorganized group of files and drawers (folders). Sometimes files would not appear and you would have to select the Show all option to display them. Workbench ran from a floppy disk and needed to be run from a hard drive installation to get the most out of it. The Atari Gem OS appears as soon as the ST is powered up, as it is stored on the ST’s ROM chips and is considerably easier and faster.

Overall, I would recommend the Amiga as a good computer and not just a gaming machine as I got a lot of benefits out of it.