When I first bought my Atari STE in 1990, I was looking forward to the machine that many said would rival the Amiga when it came 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 the ST’s sixteen. Well, we got hardware scrolling and the colors looked good, but they were still limited to sixteen colors at a time. We were also treated to the new STE DMA sound chip and the awesome STE-exclusive game Obsession, which beat previous ST games. Unfortunately, aside from some impressive demos, STE only saw a small selection of software that would show off the new features, so it never became a true competitor for the Amiga. Thus, the Amiga continued to enjoy its victory with many titles slated to use its best color palette and sound chip.
Amiga and Atari users had an ongoing rivalry on the “my computer is better than yours” argument. Often the Atari ST community labeled the Amiga as just a “game machine”, which caused 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 with a vengeance along with many Amiga users who hated ST users due to the constant insults towards their beloved machines. I remember once writing an article for ST Diskzine about transferring mod files from Amiga to ST and getting 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 Amiga, he was concerned that the magazine was going in a dangerous direction by engaging Amiga 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, gaming is its forte, 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 let the Amiga down are 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, you’ll find Workbench quite slow to work with. Opening a directory meant listening to a few seconds of disk shaking before showing a disorganized group of files and drawers (folders). Sometimes no files would show up and I had to select the Show All option to show them. The Workbench ran from a floppy disk and needed to run from a hard drive installation to get the most out of it. Atari’s Gem OS appears as soon as the ST is powered on, as it is stored in the ST’s ROM chips and is considerably easier and faster.
In general, I would recommend the Amiga as a good computer and not just a gaming machine, since I got a lot of benefits from it.