I never owned an amiga until very recently, I owned an Atari back in the days, 30 years later now I understood one thing: Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks.
> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks.
This. The business folks at Atari weren't shortsighted like the ones at Commodore; adding a MIDI port alone to the ST contributed to place that machine into its own music production niche ("I want a Mac but can't afford it") which prolonged their life for years after Atari ceased production.
Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial, I built and sold several at that time on local BBSes, and the cost was like a few bucks: one 74ls04, one photocoupler, one voltage regulator and a few analog parts; making it internal would have been even cheaper due to not having to add a serial D25 connector and an enclosure, not to mention the parts purchase in the ten of thousands. Unfortunately the business folks at Commodore constantly cut corners by removing what they thought not important for what they still thought of a game console, so one would buy a desktop computer only to find it had no hard disk and real time clock: boot from floppy and set the date/time at each boot? Come on! One would wonder how it could not fail.
> Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial
The Amiga is unsuitable for serious MIDI work because of a hardware design flaw. There are like 4 timers and the timer interrupts were at a higher priority than the serial port interrupt. There was only a 1-byte buffer for the serial port, so it was possible to lose data if one of the higher priority timers fired at the wrong time.[1]
I can't verify that since I sold everything ages ago, but before buying the A4000, first with my A500 and then the A2000 (w/ no acceleration) I could easily sample a complex flam+roll figure I did on my old Roland R8 pads at crazy granularity (software and hardware were capable of recording and playing 1/384 notes), and it didn't miss a single note.
That figure was obtainable by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad; very handy to simulate natural cymbal rolls during song pauses, endings etc. I used it during a song start with the snare, and the only editing necessary was performed afterwards to cut the inevitable leftover notes because I was playing with my fingers.
Software used was Dr T's KCS, which was a lot more optimized and snappy than MusicX, which I remember to be quite buggy too.
Jay Miner, the engineer who created the Amiga's AGNUS/DENISE/PAULA chips, came from Atari where he previously created the TIA in the Atari 2600, and then the ANTIC/CTIA/POKEY chips in the Atari 8-bit computers. The Amiga is the 16-bit successor to the Atari 800 that Jay wanted to create at Atari but was told, "No".
But, yes, Commodore had a lot of great engineers too, some of which followed Jack Tramiel to Atari and created the Atari ST and others who remained at Commodore.
> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks.
It's debatable as it was different in the 8-bit area. A total of ~2 million Atari 8-bit computers [1] were sold as compared to the 12.5 - 17 million figure for the Commodore 64 [2] only. Arguably Atari 800XL was engineered better [3] (faster, better graphics, worse sound).
You're ignoring the Spectrum and MSX on this side of the pond. There were no Atari on sight during the 8 bit days.
UK and Iberian Penisula were all on the Speccy, Netherlands was big into MSX, France and Germany on the C64, no idea about the others, but surely not Atari.
There were tradeoffs. The C64's were eight pixels wider, and could also be pixel-doubled but the Amiga's were 3-colour without losing resolution and were not limited in height.
The biggest limitation was that both systems supported only eight of them.
The AGA chipset supported sprites up to 64 pixels wide, but I dunno if any game took advantage of this.
On the other hand, you had a lot of flexibility and options both with what you did with the available hardware sprites (e.g. some games drew backgrounds using sprite hardware!) and how you could manage without them (using blitter objects instead).
I'd rather have lots of hardware sprites like the Genesis, in addition to the blitter. I think a lot of Amiga games felt like they ran slow, because it's a lot easier to move a sprite, than to move a blitter object.
> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks
While I had an Amiga and thought it was ahead of its time, I think both the Commodore 64 and Atari ST have aged better than the Amiga. The Commodore 64 has the SID chip so it's basically a programmable synth and still used even today, the Atari ST has MIDI ports, so it's a programmable MIDI Controller with timing that is arguably better than anything modern. Of course, the Amiga was Jay Miner's design and the successor to the Atari 800, but was released by Commodore. But I fail to see what has survived from the Amiga, personally I prefer hardware sprites to the blitter/copper and the bitplane graphics. The playback of sound samples was nice at the time, but the SID chip is much more distinctive. HAM was interesting at the time, but not relevant at all today. The pre-emptive multitasking was interesting, but not that useful at the time. I prefer the single tasking of the Atari ST especially for music apps, because the timing is more precise.
