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

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

On 28 Mar 2006 06:28:55 -0800, heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:

>> 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.

    Halfbrite allowed for 64 colors, however artists and programmers had no 
control over the secondary palette. From what I recall, it would mirror the
main palette (32 colors) with a duplicate palette, only each color was half
the lumance of each original color. Nice for shadowing effects but not
really practical. I think there were pixel placement restrictions as well?

    The Apple IIGS's multi-palette mode at least allowed 256 colors
(arbitrarily selectable) on screen at once. You were restricted to no
more than 16 colors per scanline, however it worked well for games
where you could easily split sections of the screen.

>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.

    HAM was somewhat similar to the GS's 3200 color mode; also in the
sense of not being practical for game software. Incidentally, did the ST
have any trickery to purpose more than 16 colors per screen?

    Overall, the Apple IIGS and Amiga were fairly similar for graphics when
it came to gaming software.

>> 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.

    It's worth pointing out stereo output was built-in (8 channels, meaning
you could theorically it could support today's 7.1 speakers) but Apple,
oddly, wired them all into one mono channel.

    Problem was so few developers knew how to really tap into the
capabilities of the Ensoniq (or just didn't want to be bothered, going
back again to cutting corners when porting games).  

>So the difference to the IIgs is, at least in my ears, not that big.

    There was a mind-blowingly huge difference. Go compare Zany Golf,
The Immortal, Rocket Ranger, Thexder or Winter Games as some of 
the more stand out examples. If you're curious, I'll put up MP3's to listen
on a website.

    The Amiga really paled for music abilities in games, and MOD music
didn't cut it (listen to Tass Times in Tone Town on both machines and
you'll see what I mean). And forget about something like MIDIsynth on
the Amiga.

Mitchell Spector