RetroX

A follow up was released for the 16 bit computers. http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-paradroid-90_10189.html

The big problem of both Atari Jaguar and Commodores Amiga CD32 was... That both consoles was their last attempt to keep their heads over the surface. Atari didn't had the money for developing games or market Jaguar properly. All Atari's money was spent on developing the hardware. Commodore bragged about the worlds first 32 bit games console using old technology. In fact, CD32 was just an repacked Amiga 1200 as a games console and a long was from true 32 bit gaming. Commodore made fun of Sega in their adverts and less then a year later Commodore went bankrupt and CD32 was practically crushed when both Sony and Sega released brand new technology in Playstation and Sega Saturn. A bit later Nintendo released Nintendo 64. Jaguar was perhaps not in the same legaue as the new japanese consoles but at least Atari tried to present something new.

Even Amiga was from the beginning a computer that Commodore advertised as a all-purpose business machine, but soon Amiga became something else as we all know. In fact, the only computer that actually kept the serious business side and at the same time were a demo and games computer, was Atari ST. If we take a look at Atari ST in the whole, it was a very competent allround computer for it's time that was supposed to rival MAC. ST was about "Power without the price" and what you got was a computer that could handle a high resolution display, in fact Atari ST hooked up to the SM 124 monochrome monitor was even better then the MAC display itself. Yet you could switch to a colour display any time and play games. To understand how good Atari ST really was... ST is still the tightest midi computer ever built, no modern PC or MAC even comes close to the performance of Atari ST. Check this. http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/03/10/atari-ste/

I have been Atari ST owner for many years, i have owned Amiga too. Many people seems to have missunderstand what Atari ST was about. I have seen so many clips on YouTube or threads in forums where people compare Amiga to Atari ST. Then they say, look, Amiga has better graphics, Amiga has better sound. Those people don't seems to have understand what Atari ST was about. From the beginning Atari ST was built to battle MAC as a "serious computer", that's why ST used a similar GUI (GEM), so similar that Apple actually sued Atari for using it. ST also used a monochrome monitor for high resolution (no scanlines) and 70 Hz refresh rate that made Atari ST perfect for serious use. Besides that ST contained everything in ROM. Just boot the computer and everything is ready to run. For gaming ST was considerably more limited then Amiga. While ST just used a simple frame buffer and software generated sprites Amiga contained Jay Miner's custom chips. The only area ST could battle Amiga in gaming was in pure vector games where ST had a bit faster processor, else Amiga was THE computer for gaming. MAC was the computer for serious use while Amiga was the computer for games, graphics and demos while Atari ST was something in between. The serious computer that could be used for playing games as well. Not to say that demos and games couldn't be good on ST too off course but when Amiga capabilities was used to the full, ST didn't stand a chance. So, when people just compare the computers for graphics and sound, it isn't a fair comparison because ST was the allround computer made to battle MAC from the beginning. Many people who bought Atari ST was kind of surprised, including me. Atari was supposed to be about gaming, but not this time. In fact Amiga was way more similar to Atari 8bit then ST ever was thanks to one person, Jay Miner. This is Atari ST when showing it's real strength. In this comparison, Amiga don't stand a chance.