Re: Games: Apple IIgs vs. Atari ST vs. Amiga

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

"Tempest" <tempest@atariprotos.com> wrote:

>Here's a question that I'm sure has come up before, but I've got to ask
>anyway.  When it came to games, which system had the best ports: The
>Apple IIgs, Atari ST, or Amiga?  I'm not talking about the largest
>number of games, or which system got the best variety of games, I'm
>talking about when it came to games that were ported to all three
>systems (and there were several), which system got the best port? 

    It really depended on how much effort (or lack of, in many cases) went
into porting each particular game. There were cases where in order to cut
corners and save time, graphics and animation routines were directly ripped
from an 8-bit or inferior at-the-time IBM PC version (EGA graphics). While on
the flip side, some developers made every possible effort to squeeze the
fullest from the machine's capabilities by starting from the ground up.

    It's a mixed bag really, no one machine was the clear winner. It's a
popular _myth_ that the Amiga had the best game ports by default, although,
of the three machines (excluding sound) it was technically the most capable.
Having compared many games (recently, out of curiosity) I can think of a
handful of Apple IIGS ports that were superior to the Amiga and Atari ST:

- Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh
- Out of This World
- Rastan
- Zany Golf
- The Immortal
- World Games
- Winter Games
- Rocket Ranger [music]
- Three Stooges [music]
- Thexder [music]
- Tass Times in Tone Town [music]
- Bard's Tale I and II [music]
- Skate or Die [music]
- Any Sierra adventure games [music]
...and probably several others I'm forgetting

    There were plenty of rotten ones too to be fair. Undoubtedly the worst
ports ever were Mindscape's Gauntlet and Paperboy, the graphics were 
directly borrowed from the Commodore 64 version (pixel for pixel) and the
programming code and sound effects taken from the Apple IIe ports--it used
1-bit speaker toggling and if you looked through the code you could still see
the"Flip disk over" message even though it shipped on a 3.5 floppy!

    I found early IIGS games took advantage of the machine since it was 
new and unexplored and late in it's life developers were getting lazy
(probably due to the smaller market size; less time and money went into
development) and were borrowing graphics from the IBM PC, Atari ST 
and even C64.

>All three systems had similar graphical and sound capabilities (although
>the IIgs ran slower than the Amiga or ST), so they should have been
>able to pull off near identcal ports.

    Well to be fair, not THAT similar. The Amiga and Atari ST had dedicated
video co-processors (and a more powerful 16/32-bit processor) for moving
graphics and sprites around. In order to do even reasonable animation on
a IIgs (let alone comparable) required trickery and specialized on-the-metal
coding. It's incredible that games like Out of This World, Rastan, Wolf 3D,
Task Force (clone of William's N.A.R.C.) or Bomberman were pulled off so
well.

    Graphic-wise, the Atari ST was at the bottom with a palette of 512 colors
while the Amiga and Apple IIGS had 4,096 colors--made a fair difference.
The ST also could only produce 16 colors per screen, while the Apple IIGS
was could do 16 to 256 colors per screen and the Amiga 32 colors (all three
machines could do trickery to produce more colors than that, but they tied
down normal operation so it wasn't seen in games).

    As for sound and music capabilities, the Apple IIGS was by far the most
superior with a 32-voice Ensoniq wavetable synthesizer. The Amiga only 
had a 4-voice DAC, not really much better than a Macintosh Plus for sound
(I believe more could be done, such as music MODs, as its sound chip was
not CPU dependent). The Atari ST was once again on the bottom since it
used essentially the AY-3810 found in the Intellivision or Mockingboard--only
3 voices (e.g. square-wave) and a white noise generator with no DAC
present for digitized sound. Even the Commodore 64 was superior.

>I'm really curious as to what most people's experience has been.  To me
>it really doesn't matter since I have all three systems hooked up.  I
>tend to play the game on which ever system I'm 'taken with' at the
>time.  I do tend to favor the IIgs, but that's just because I'm a long
>time Apple user. :)

    I have a couple of Amiga's lingering about (still need an internal 3.5
drive to have a working A500, anyone have a spare? :) and an Atari ST 
520, though the only one I have connected is an Apple IIGS. Partly 
because I'm missing either software or parts to get the others running,
though mainly because like you, I'm a long time Apple II user. :)

Mitchell Spector