Sheldon Leemon finally reached the breaking point when he saw the Tramiel clones comments in the MicroTimes article; here's what he's doing about it... ---Steve Plegge --------------------------------------------- Wed Jul 23, 1986 Since I did not want to write this thing in too much haste, I am writing separate responses for each of a number of myths about the Amiga. This is the first part, and I hope to add one each day. Some of the future topics are: MYTH 2: "THE ST DISPLAY IS MUCH BETTER THAN THE AMIGA'S". MYTH 3: "THE AMIGA OPERATING SYSTEM CHANGES SO OFTEN AND IS SUCH A MESS THAT NOBODY CAN PROGRAM THE MACHINE". MYTH 4: "THE ST IS MORE EXPANDABLE THAN THE AMIGA" MYTH 5: "THERE'S A LOT MORE SOFTWARE FOR THE ST THAN THE AMIGA" MYTH 6: "THE AMIGA IS JUST A 'GAME MACHINE' ". MYTH 7: "BECAUSE OF ITS FINANCIAL INSTABILITY, COMMODORE WILL SOON BE OUT OF BUSINESS". If you can think of other irritating half-truths, let me know. So without further ado, I give you "The Myth of ST Superiority." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Myth of ST Superiority by Sheldon Leemon There is a lot of controversy these days over the relative merits of the Atari ST computers and the Amiga. Even when based strictly in fact, the comparisons made during such debates strongly tend to resemble the four year old's "my dad can beat up your dad" type of argument. But the most vocal element on the Atari side is ignoring the facts entirely. Instead, these avid Atarians spout the "party line", an interesting mixture of misconception and deception, no doubt inspired by a strong dose of what we in the industry call "Amiga envy". Nowhere is this line more strongly espoused than at Atari itself, as can be seen by the interviews with Leonard and Sam Tramiel that in Mary Eisenhart's article in MicroTimes. By chanting the same lame half-truths over and over again, Atari advocates have promulgated a number of myths concerning the ST and Amiga cpmputers that are being accepted in some quarters as the gospel truth. I would like to shed the light of reason on these interesting and quaint superstitions. I cannot claim strict impartiality, since I personally prefer the Amiga to the ST. But, I can claim an intimate acquaintance with theworkings of both machines. I am a registered developer for both machines. I have had my ST since June, 1985 and my Amiga since September of the same year, just about as long as anybody else. I have read the developers materials and just about everything else available for both machines. I have written two books about the Amiga, and plan to write at least as many for the ST. I have programmed both computers in C and machine language. I have experienced first hand the advantages and disadvantages of both machines. So the following observations, if not absolutely unbiased, are at least grounded in demonstrable fact. They are not meant to be the definitive comparison of the two machines, but merely to response to the myths and misconceptions about the Amiga that run rampant in the the Atari community. MYTH1: "THE ST IS MUCH FASTER THAN THE AMIGA". The first misconception that needs to be laid to rest once and for all is the preposterous notion that the Amiga's coprocessor chips slow down its operation. I will respond to this absurd contention point by point, since it is so so widely quoted, and so little understood: (1) In some RARE cases, the Amiga coprocessor chips DO steal cycles from the 68000. BUT, it NEVER happens when the Amiga is in any of the graphics modes supported by the ST. In 640x400 mode with 2 colors, 640x200 with 4 colors or 320x200 with 16 colors, the custom chips NEVER slow down the 68000. Period. End of sentence. In fact, even using some modes that are not supported by the Atari, like 320x200 with 32 colors, the custom chips have no effect on processor speed. You can have the music chip doing music and disk I/O and have great graphics going on WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PROCESSOR AT ALL. Sam Tramiel is quoted as saying "None of our modes steal any processing power from the CPU; that's something we weren't going to allow". Of course, the way they accomplished that was to LIMIT their graphics modes to the same choices offered by the PCjr. They simply "left out" any modes that might give them trouble. The Amiga put these modes in, and left the choice up to the user and the programmer. For those situations where graphics power is more important than computation speed, the Amiga can handle a 640x400 display with 16 colors--the ST can't do that under ANY circumstances. And of course, if computation speed is critical, you can cut the Amiga display back to 640x200 or even 320x200 with only 1 bit plane for color (2 color mode). This means that there is only 16K or 8K of display memory to manage, a fraction of that used by the Atari display. The fact is that the Amiga gives the programmer (and the user) the option of using as much as four times as much memory for the screen display as the ST, or as little as one quarter as much. Isn't it strange,then, that the Tramiels always assume in their speed estimates that the Amiga will always use MORE display options than the ST provides? Is that their way of saying that 640x400 with 2 colors or 640x200 with 4 colors just isn't good enough? If so, its too bad for Atari owners, because their display resolution just doesn't get any better than that. (2) Even the slight (and highly overestimated) slowdown that occurs in the VERY RARE cases where you use all of the Amiga's graphics capabilities at once can be ELIMINATED COMPLETELY by adding external memory. The slowdown only occurs when ALL of the graphics are being used AND the custom chips are using the same area of memory that the program code is in. If you add a meg of external memory to the Amiga, the custom chips use the internal memory, and the program is put in the external memory. No conflict. Ever. No slowdown. Ever. You might say that this gives you "Power Without the Price". By the way, adding memory to the Amiga (up to 8 meg) is a simple matter of plugging in a board on the side. Adding memory to the ST involves carefully soldering memory chips on top of the chips on the motherboard, and patching in connections with wire. Dangerous and messy at best. And the Atari OS does not even SUPPORT more than 4 meg of RAM, even though the 68000 can address four times that much directly. (3) The most absurd notion of the lot is that the custom chips SLOW DOWN the computer's throughput, when the whole point behind their design is to FREE UP processor time by performing tasks independently that ordinarily would be done by the 68000. Graphics is the prime example. Atari is quick to point out the RARE instances when the Amiga custom chips steal processor time when drawing graphics. What they fail to mention is that when the ST is drawing graphics, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the processor time is consumed in the process. For example, when you draw a line on the Amiga, the processor tells the blitter where the starting and endpoints of the line are, along with some other stuff, and then goes back to serious computing while the blitter actually manipulates the display memory in order to draw the line. On the Atari, the program has to use the 68000 to calculate each point of the line, and to set every memory location on the path of that line a byte at a time. While it is doing this, the processor cannot do ANYTHING else--in effect ALL of its cycles have been stolen. So even in the RARE cases when the Amiga's custom chips steal cycles (did I mention that this NEVER happens if you stick to the ST's rather meager set of graphics modes?), its 68000 still gets SOME processing time while the drawing is going on, whereas the ST's gets ABSOLUTELY NONE. Just think of that every time you see that ST mouse pointer flickering across the screen. Its 68000 is huffing and puffing just trying to update the pointer display ("hmmm.. I've got to redraw these pixels, save the background display memory, then redraw the background, save the new background and redraw the pointer"). On the Amiga, the pointer is a hardware sprite, so the 68000 just tells it "move there", and goes about its business. The upshot of the above is that in many cases, the Amiga will work MUCH FASTER than the ST. This is particularly true during graphics drawing, when the blitter does all the work and leaves the 68000 alone to do its spreadsheet recalculations, or whatever it is that processors do in their spare time. And in graphics-based systems like GEM and Intuition, drawing goes on ALL THE TIME. Moving the mouse pointer. Moving and sizing windows. Manipulating icons. And most importantly, EVEN DISPLAYING TEXT ON THE SCREEN IS STRICTLY A GRAPHICS OPERATION. Since the ST has a bit- mapped display rather than one that is character-mapped, EACH DOT OF EACH TEXT CHARACTER has to be drawn with BY THE 68000. When you are printing or scrolling text on the ST, the processor has its hands full, and can't do anything else. On the Amiga, the blitter moves the whole block of bits for each text character, leaving the 68000 to do the job of computing, not drawing text. A graphic (excuse the pun) example can be seen by running the BASIC program: FOR I=0 to 255:?CHR$(I):NEXT on the ST. Such slow printing hasn't been seen since the the days of the TI-99/4A (though in fairness to the ST, this is as much a fault of its cheap BASIC interpreter than it is the system design). All of a sudden, the ST doesn't look so powerful, does it? Why do you think that Atari is trying so very hard to incorporate a blitter chip into its ST series (so far without visible result)? They should have thought of that earlier....like Amiga did. In the article, Leonard Tramiel is quoted as saying "If you're going to do a graphics but engineering-intensive program, DEPENDING ON WHAT MODE YOU'RE RUNNING ON, it'll run a factor of three times faster on an ST than on an Amiga (emphasis added). Hopefully, we've already exposed the fraud of that "depending on what mode" business, since the Amiga does not slow down at all in any mode that is comparable to the Atari display. We must conclude, therefore, that the determining factor is clock speed, and as Leonard himself pointed out, the lead of the Atari is at best 15%. So where in the world did he get the "three times faster" figure? Perhaps he meant if the Amiga was running that application and three others at the same time (try that on an ST). Because no known benchmarks bear him out. All of the benchmarks that have been published show at very most a tiny advantage to the ST, consistent with its slightly faster processor speed. Many, in fact, give the edge to the Amiga, showing that often, the benchmark is more a test of the compiler than the computer, and that differences in compiler efficiency can easily compensate for the small difference in processor speed. And while the Atari may compute results slightly faster than the Amiga, heaven help us if it has to print them. Or worse yet, scroll the printing. The upshot of this is that the Atari is not the speed demon that Leonard Tramiel depicts, nor is the Amiga the plodding tortoise. Hands on experience with both machines leads to a very different impression. MYTH 2: "THE ST DISPLAY IS MUCH BETTER THAN THE AMIGA'S". The problem with this assertion is that most often, it is made on the basis of comparing the ST and its color monitor with a smilar picture on the Amiga and its color monitor. This of course proves nothing, since it involves two variables, the computer and the monitor. When comparing the two monitors side by side, it's natural that the Atari display looks sharper and crisper, since it's smaller (the old Mac trick). Try running the Amiga display to a 9" Sony hi-res monitor, though, and your opinion may change. Also, the Atari monitor can be matched very closely to the machine, since it is basically useable only with that machine (it runs only in analog RGB mode, which is still fairly rare, and has a plug that is even wackier than the one used by the Amiga). But the Amiga monitor is designed to function as an analog or digital RGB monitor, as well as a separated composite monitor, so it can be used with an IBM-PC or Atari 800XL. The only reasonable way to compare the video quality of the two machines is on the same color monitor. In all fairness, those who have run both machines on the same display still give a slight edge to the Atari. But this may be partially explained in terms of a design tradeoff on the part of the Amiga. The Atari ST is designed to work with its own monitors, and not much else, while the Amiga is designed to work with every kind of monitor (and TV set) made. From the beginning, the Amiga was designed with video applications in mind. In fact, unless I miss my guess, I'd say that the reason that the clock speed of the Amiga is 7.2 MHz and not 8 MHz like the ST is that the former figure is an even multiple of the 3.59 MHz color burst crystal used in color televisions, so that using that clock speed makes it easier to sync the display to a TV set. Two years ago, when I first saw a prototype Amiga, I was amazed to see that it could display clear 80-column text on an ordinary (and rather cheap) TV set. When I reported that fact, I got E-Mail from broadcast engineers, video physicists, and even some guy who claimed to have won the Nobel Prize for TV Repair, saying that it was flatly impossible. Funny how I never hear from those guys since the Amiga came out, and they can see it for themselves. What difference does full NTSC video compatibility make in a computer? Well, it does make it easier to hook the thing to a projection TV for a demonstra- tion, something that I sorely miss when speaking to Atari groups. It also makes it possible to use those great Amiga graphics for video titling on your home video productions. Or use animation packages like the great Video Construction Set to produce animated promotional videos for advertise- ments and in-store displays (as many people are now doing). And with an inexpensive Genlock interface such as the one Commodore has displayed (and hopefully will soon produce), it will be possible to use the Amiga to replace about $50,000 worth of video equipment for less than a tenth of that cost, something that would be of interest to every cable TV company in the land. So you see, though according to Leonard Tramiel "the ST was designed to be a powerful, flexible machine, in as many directions as possible", Atari seems to have neglected the direction of video production work. By confining the ST to its own nice, crisp, (and somewhat nonstandard) displays, it has ignored an extremely under-developed market segment. The enormous flexibility that the Amiga's video capabilities offer to the user are, in the opinion of many, well worth the very slight advantage in display clarity -that it cedes to the Atari when it comes to analog RGB monitors. The other part of the myth of the ST's video superiority concerns its monochrome display mode. Again, quoting Sam Tramiel from the article cited above: "there's no monochrome mode on the Amiga, you can't run a 640x400 high-resolution monochrome machine. So for serious business applications, terminal applications, you just can't do it". Here we see two misconceptions expressed in as many sentences. The first misconception is that a 640x200 display is not suitable for serious business use such as "terminal applications". For one thing, that is the very display resolution of the IBM Color Graphics Adapter, which is the current STANDARD among business users (since the IBM monochrome adapter cannot display Lotus 1-2-3 graphics). I find it odd that ATARI would argue that IBM's equipment is not suited for business. And those of you reading this article on-line using a 640x200 display would probably agree that it is at least marginally suitable for terminal applications. More troubling is the fact that the vast majority of ST owners have ONLY the color monitor, whose MAXIMUM resolution mode is the exact same as that offered as the default mode of the Amiga Workbench. For you see, in order to make use of all three resolution modes offered by the ST (as compared to about 20 offered by the Amiga), you need to buy TWO SEPARATE MONITORS. In order to switch between medium and high resolution modes on the ST, you have to unplug one monitor, plug in the new one, and reboot the computer -- there is no convenient way to make the switch, though hopefully somebody will invent a switchbox soon. And some of the software written for the ST's color monitor, primarily game software, will not work on the monochrome display (though everything works on the color display). So while the Atari monochrome monitor DOES offer an EXTREMELY nice small text display, very few ST owners use it as their only monitor. In fact, Atari has stockpiled such a quantity of monochrome monitors that they have been giving them away lately - their dealers get one mono- chrome monitor free with every 520 and disk drive that they buy. Therefore, it seems unlikely that we will see any software in the near future that relies on the 640x400 resolution capabilities of the ST, since most ST owners just do not possess this capability. One last point about the ST display. While the color 640x200 4-color mode has become the de facto standard for the ST, in one respect it is the least pleasant to use. Because of space limitations (and cheapness), Atari opted to include only one set of graphics data for its desktop icons. Since the 320x200 mode and the 640x400 mode have the same aspect ratio, they chose graphics that would look good in those two modes. In the 640x200 mode, however, those same icons look rather ridiculous -- they are tall and skinny, half as wide as they should properly be. All in all, they give the impres- sion of an El Greco version of GEM. So it is somewhat ironic that having chosen to use only one set of icon graphics, Atari picked the set that would look the worst in the mode that is used the most on its machines. The other misconception expressed by Mr. Tramiel in the above quote is that the Amiga does not have a useable 640x400 display mode. Nobody will deny that with the current color Amiga monitor, it is not possible to use 640x400 interlaced text because of the the "jitter" of the low-persistance phospor display. Even so, careful color selection and placement can be used to avoid the problem entirely. For example, the Digi-View digitizer can create black and white digitized images in 640x400 resolution with 16 grey levels, and those extremely fine images do not "vibrate" in the least on the current color display. Moreover, the user can always get a separate monochrome monitor that uses a high-persistance phosphor, and enjoy 640x400 resolution without the jitter. Such monitors are fairly inexpensive, and recent changes made by the 1.2 version of the Amiga Operating System enable the use of a 640x400 Workbench environment. The brightest prospect of all, however, is the potential use of analog RGB monitors with high-persistance phosphors. Several such monitors are on the market now, and Commodore-Amiga had them at the Spring Comdex. As one who attended that show, I can tell you that the Amiga color display in 640x400 mode on such a monitor is every bit as good as the 640x200 display on the current Amiga monitor, and the persistance of the phosphor was not high enough to cause "trails" when the screen scrolled. While it is true that these monitors currently sell in the $1000 price range, the same was true two years ago of the kind of monitor now used with the Amiga. There seems to be no reason why the price of such monitors cannot come down to the same level of the present Amiga monitor. And there are newer monitors coming onto the scene that can digitally store and combine the two frames of an inter- laced display, creating a non-interlaced display from them. In short, there is every chance that in the near future we will see an affordable monitor that can be used for ALL of the Amiga graphics modes, including 640x400 in 16 colors. In the meantime, the truly fanatic Amiga user may buy one color monitor for display resolutions of 640x200 and below, and a separate monochrome for 640x400. Just like with the Atari ST. ---------- By Sheldon Leemon MYTH 3: "THE AMIGA OPERATING SYSTEM CHANGES SO OFTEN AND IS SUCH A MESS THAT NOBODY CAN PROGRAM THE MACHINE". This myth is a leftover from the pre-release days of the Amiga. The developers who had to work with the earliest versions of the Amiga had an uphill battle all right, not because the operating system was so buggy, but because half of it hadn't been written yet! Don't forget, according to MetaComCo, it was not until FEBRUARY 1985 that they produced the very first prototype disk operating system for the Amiga. Until that point, you could not even read or write a disk file conveniently. In contrast, the ST was almost ready to ship to developers by then. Considering the amount of catching up the Amiga had to do, and the time its developers had to do it in, its small wonder that the operating system was changing "every week". ST enthusiasts seem to be greatly amused that the internal version number of the Amiga OS is already up to version 33. This amusement reveals nothing so much as a lack of any programming experience. For example, a piece of software for which I am currently writing documentation has gone through 11 beta versions in the past 6 weeks. Since each one represents a number of compiles, the version number depends mostly on how many times you stop to number the program. In no way should it be construed to mean that developers have gotten 33 different versions of the Operating System to work with. Only a handful of developers outside of Amiga ever SAW a version lower than 27. The fact is, the vast majority of developers received the official release version as their first version of the Operating System. They, like the general public, have been faced with exactly one revision of the OS since the machines release (with another one in the works). This record compares quite favorably to machines like the Mac, and even the ST, which has had a similar number OS revisions since its release. The revisions have maintained upward compatibility, so that software that worked under the older versions will still work under the newer versions, something that is not necessarily true of the Atari (there are some programs that do not run under the TOS ROMs that did under TOS in RAM, though of course, you can always load the RAM version if necessary). Though the Amiga Operating System is far from perfect (and will undoubtably be improved in the future, since it is not locked in ROM), it is a system that was designed for maximum flexibility and expandability. There are many design features that support future hardware enhancements, such as OS support for screens as large as 1024x1024 pixels. The Amiga OS even is designed to support the 68020 processor and the 68881 floating-point coprocessor! A third-party maker of 68020 boards, CSA, was able to plug their replacement board into the 68000 socket of the Amiga and get it to run AmigaDOS with no modification. Needless to say, the ST's version of GEM will have to be completely re-written for the 68020, making it highly unlikely that current versions of ST software will ever benefit from the speed of the '020. Some programs may be ported, and present ST owners who upgrade to an '020 box using their current ST as a terminal will still be able run the software on the 68000 side, but you will not be able to just stick an '020 in the box and have the software run like you can do with the Amiga. Ditto for '881 floating-point coprocessor support. The virtues of the Amiga Operating System (and its faults) are too numerous to discuss here in detail, but we cannot move on without mentioning the one feature that the Atari community is most anxious to overlook -- multitasking. This feature alone raises the Amiga OS to entirely different plane than that of the ST. Those who have not had the benefit of this feature may think that since most of us are used to doing one thing at a time, multi-tasking is no more than a flashy gimmick. Those who have had the chance to use this feature, however, think otherwise. For example, an Amiga owner recently told me of his amusement upon reading the complaint of an ST user about a terminal program that would not allow him to format disks while online. With the Amiga, you can run a word processor, format disks, and play a game simultaneously while online! Just think, never to be bored by a slow online conference again. And wouldn't it feel great to just pull down that window to reveal the desktop, and start up another program without closing the current one? Of course, as ST owners would be quick to point out, GEM can multi-task -- sort of. There are always desk accessories that can be launched from your program (though most of the time, you can use either the program OR the accessory, but not both at the same time). And there are Operating System add-ons like the soon-to-be-released Micro RTX that is supposed to add a fair level of concurrency to GEM (providing that all of the programs use the GEM event manager to wait for events like mouse movements and the like). But these are no real match for multitasking built into the lowest level of the Operating System. Such a system allows ANY program to multitask with another, subject only to the limitations of display space and memory. While we are on the subject of Operating Systems bugs, it is only fair to point out that the ST has certain problems in that area itself. In the words of Russ Wetmore, a programmer who has worked with the ST as intimately as anybody, and a man who is one of the leading lights in the Atari program- ming community, "I 'hate GEM. I hate GEM. I hate GEM. Did I tell you that I hate GEM?". Although Russ may have put it too strongly, he does have a point. From a programmer's standpoint, GEM can be cumbersome to work with. But what is far worse than GEM is Atari's implementation of it. Or rather, lack of implementation. Big chunks of it are still missing, and not little things, either. Things like software-loaded fonts. And virtual device drivers. Lack of the latter is quite serious, since it is one of the core elements of GEM. Currently, the ST has global support for its own printers, and the Epson. That's it. As a result, application programs have to kludge together their own support for other printers, the very thing that virtual devices are supposed to prevent. So you have to track down a "First Word printer driver" and a "Degas printer driver". On the Amiga, there is global support for a dozen printers supplied with the system, and third-party and public-domain support for dozens more. And when I say global support, I mean global. Installing just ONE printer driver makes your printer work with ANY program. And that means all of the special features too, such as bold print, italics, underlining, and custom line spacing. Of course, Atari has been promising for months that a GDOS addition to GEM will be available Real Soon Now. This addition is supposed to supply some things like the missing fonts, and graphics support for additional printers. But it will not include the level of global support for special printer features found in the Amiga. Even if the ST version of GEM was as complete (and bug-free) as the IBM PC version, it would still lack some of the nice "extras" found on the Amiga. Like user-definable keymaps. A built-in speech synthesis device and text- to-speech library. Even fundamental things like a built-in command line interpreter. But there is no reason to belabor the point. As we shall see in the next section concerning software, enough fine software has been produced for the Amiga to belie the charge that it is impossible to program the machine because of its OS. ---------- MYTH 4: "THERE'S A LOT MORE SOFTWARE FOR THE ST THAN THE AMIGA" To find out how much software is available for a particular computer, the traditional test is to stack up all of the diskettes one on top of the other to see how high the pile reaches. Remember when IBM did just that to show us how much software there was for the PCjr? By this measure, the contest is very close. If you look at the catalogues of available software put out by Amiga and ST for their dealers, you will find a similar number of listing for each. Likewise, the number of ads in magazines like AmigaWorld, Amazing Computing, Antic and STart are pretty similar (if anything, there appear to be more ads in the Amiga mags). Sheer quantity does not mean much, however. I remember a period when every time I would walk into an Apple dealer's showroom, the salesman would start in on how there were over 20,000 software packages available for the machine. I would look around, and see only two or three dozen of those packages on the shelf. What happened to the other 19,964 I would wonder? Are they storing them in the back room, or are they just too dreadful (or useless) to sell? When you come right down to it, a handful of packages account for most of the software sales. So the best strategy seems to be to compare the most important packages in each category. Word Processing: So far the ST has the numerical advantage over the Amiga, with STwriter, First Word, Regent Word, and Final Word to the Amiga's Textcraft, Scribble, and Write Hand. In terms of quality, however, the call is a bit closer. True, Textcraft is something of a dog (though I've used its replacement, TextCraft Plus, and it is much, much better), and Scribble is not as fully debugged as one could wish. But STwriter is no GEM itself (pun intended, since the package does not take advantage of the user interface), and First Word has its deficiencies too. Let's face it guys, in this department neither machine has much to brag about. The top fifty word processing programs for the IBM PC are all better than anything either can offer. Of course, both machines have some good packages waiting in the wings. Batteries Included is doing Paperclip Elite for the ST, and it will probably show up on the Amiga as well. Atari has just announced an OEM agreement with Microsoft for a stripped-down version of Microsoft Word called Write, and Wordperfect Corp. has announced a version of the highly-acclaimed Wordperfect 4.1 for the Amiga. So if we can all just sit tight until Christmas (hopefully, Christmas 1986), both machines should have software that can be considered of serious use in a business environment. Spreadsheets: Both machines have a pretty fair Lotus clone available. In fact, it's the same one, the VIP Professional. Despite early complaints about the first Atari version, the Amiga version appears to work OK, though the program allocates all unused memory for itself, a definite no-no for multitasking. The unreleased Maxi-Plan for the Amiga looks interesting, in that it takes advantage of the user interface (mouse, windowing, pull-down menus). So far, the software in this category for both machines is just adequate. Close, but no Excel. Database: Again, the most "respectable" product for both computers is the same one, Dbman from Versasoft. And again, an IBM software clone, being Dbase III compatible. Both machines also have databases that use the windowing interface to better advantage, but are less powerful. In general, there are a number of titles for each machine, but nothing to challenge Paradox. We will no doubt soon see packages with more power and a better user interface on both machines in the near future. The final score is that each machine gets a "barely adequate", with a slight nod to the ST since the Amiga version of Dbman is not yet in release. Accounting: Each machine has some accounting software (Rags to Riches and Financial Plus on the Amiga, Sierra Online's One-Write system on the Atari), but again, nothing good enough to dominate the market. Dac Easy, the program that has been a huge hit on the PC at $49.95, has been announced for both machines. Again, I don't think that either side has much to boast about here. CAD-CAM. Let's face it. Neither Aegis Draw on the Amiga side or Easy- Draw on the Atari is AutoCad. CAD 3-D is cute, but not what you call an engineering tool. Dynamic-CAD on the Amiga may turn out to be a bit closer to the industry standard. Neither machine will take over the market on the basis of current software, though. Graphics: The Atari trio of Degas, N-Vision, and Neo are no match for the Amiga's Deluxe Paint, Images, and Graphicraft. Tom Hudson will try again with Degas Elite, which should give the current Amiga crew a run for their money, but you can also expect a new revision to Deluxe Paint (Super Deluxe Paint?) to follow soon afterwards, which may make Tom's reign a short one. One area in which the Amiga clearly has the advantage is in graphics standards. Since Commodore-Amiga took the lead in adopting EA's IFF (or Interchange File Format), all Amiga programs save their graphics files in exactly the same format, which means that every program can use the graphics output of every other program. For example, every drawing program on the Amiga can be used to create new objects for Deluxe Print, EA's superb Print Shop type program [Deluxe Print - JSP] (a category which Amiga also dominates, by virtue of this excellent program). You can also take the output from video digitizers (see below), and read those digitized images into either Paint or Print files. And data base packages that let you use IFF graphics fields on the Amiga are right around the corner as well. The situation on the Atari is very different, as each paint package has its own format. It is interesting to note, though, that Degas Elite is supposed to support the IFF standard as well. Bringing these two computers closer together in any way possible is a great idea, since the real enemy is the boredol machine from Intel and Big Blue. Another area in which the Amiga firmly has a lead is in graphics animation packages, since there are two for that machine and none for the ST. EA's Deluxe Video is of special note, since it is an amazingly powerful tool for putting together animated promotional videos. It allows you to put together animated videos featuring music, digitized sound effects, and a full range of video effects. All of this can be taped on a VCR. There is probably less of a demand for such software on a machine for the ST, which (so far) does not have an RF modulator or any standard composite output. Music: The Music Studio is about it for each machine so far. Users who have tried it on each machine seem to favor the Amiga version. Neither are worth writing home about, though. Electronic Arts has put out Instant Music for the Amiga, but most are betting that its Deluxe Music package will be the one to beat. ST users may be surprised to find that the Amiga version of Music Studio also supports MIDI, through one of several optional adapters that cost under $50. In fact, some say the Amiga version has better MIDI support. In addition, Mimetics is just about to release their Midi Workshop program for the Amiga. In summary, each machine has a fair assortment of software, considering the amount of time that each has been on the market. Neither poses a threat to the IBM or even Macintosh at this point, however. MYTH 5: "THE AMIGA IS JUST A 'GAME MACHINE' " This claim leaves me wondering whether I should laugh or cry. You would think that the words "game machine" would be never be spoken at the new Atari, since no company has suffered more (and undeservedly so) from that image. And yet, in the interview cited above, Sam Tramiel is quoted as saying "The Amiga's a great game machine... It's a great, fast, low-end game machine". It takes almost unbelievable gaul for a man who should know better to dismiss a hardware marvel like the Amiga as nothing more than a toy. If you told a PC user that IBM was going to come out with a true 16-bit computer that ran as fast as the AT, came with a built-in 880K 3.5" disk drive, a half meg of RAM, expandable to 8 1/2 meg, a fast color graphics display, built-in serial and parallel ports, and a true multitasking Operating System he would probably say "What a great business machine!". But apparently Sam Tramiel hears the same specifications, specifications remarkably similar to his own computer, by the by, and thinks "You could play some really BIG game programs with 8 meg of memory. And you could store TONS of games on an 880K floppy or 40 meg hard disk. And that multitasking is really great for playing a WHOLE LOT of games at the SAME TIME". This from a man who sells HIS computers through Toys-R-Us. The whole notion of a "game" computer that is not powerful enough to run "real" software like an accounting package could only be supported by someone who just doesn't know how computers work. Any programmer will tell you that most of the time, a business package sits there loafing, waiting for the user to hit a key, and when he does hit it, the program can take its own sweet time responding. Not so when that user is tugging on a joystick, trying to shoot at alien monsters while dodging laser blasts. A game that features fast-action real time animation requires every ounce of computing power that a computer can muster, because if the speed isn't there, there is no way to fake it. Those space ships aren't going to come screaming down at you in formation, and you won't be able to fire fifty blasts per second while dodging them. Did you ever wonder why you don't see a lot of great arcade games for the PC? Try programming one on a computer that combines a slow processor with slow graphics. Those are the same characteristics that cause the "serious" business user to tear his hair when he tries to get a really big spreadsheet to recalculate, or has to wait for Auto-Cad to redraw a complex object. Anyone who suggests that a computer that has the raw power required to run great fast-action arcade games like "Marble Madness" cannot handle the strain of sitting around for millions of nanoseconds waiting for some bozo to press a key on his wordprocessing program is using his head for a hatrack. That's like saying the Lotus is a nice car for frivolous sports like racing, but that you couldn't possibly use it for "serious" driving chores like going to the store to buy some milk, or delivering pizzas.