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

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

> 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).

The "standard" Amiga has two display modes called "Halfbrite" and HAM
("Hold And Modify") which use 6 bit planes. Though the HAM-mode was
very awkward to program it allowed for displaying 4096 colors on screen
and much more than 16 on the same line without special interrupts.
It was mostly unfit for action games (though there are some) but very
nice for still/digitized pictures. Its a shame that there were no
graphics adventures that really used this but you absolutely had to
program in assembly to have halfway decent speed. I wrote a sprite
routine once that preserved most of the colors to the left and right of
the sprite - so I should know ;-).

The Halfbrite-mode used 64 colors, was easy to use and has been
utilized in several games. Not in any ports, though, IIRC.

> 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.

You are right on the mark but one should add that the Amiga had
hassle-free stereo output (no extra hardware needed) and there were
sound tracker/mixing programs very early available to break the 4
channel barrier.
So the difference to the IIgs is, at least in my ears, not that big.

bye
Marcus