The Amiga MIDI Myth - Atari ST vs Amiga War

[syntonica]

Hmm, maybe it was the A1200 then, 16 million. I just remember being at a pals house watching it being reviewed on TV, and how smug he was when the colour numbers were revealed.

Are you maybe thinking of an Amiga with a Video Toaster? The toaster had a 24-bit palette.

For a few years that combined system *did* blow away competitors for graphics and video production (at least at standard def), but was eventually supplanted by PC video cards.

Weren't they up against SGI at the time? Of course, SGI hardware was so absurdly expensive, only Hollywood types could afford it.

[stoopicus]

Yes and the SGI’s were much more capable, but much much more expensive - I did not count them as competitors of the Amiga. There was really no comparison there.

[legendCNCD]

A1200 and A4000 with the newer chipset (AGA) had 16,7 million palette for colours. Could display 262144 on HAM8 mode.
I've had A500, A1200 and A4000 - should never have sold the A4000, it had 040/25 and 18MB of memory, also had Multisync monitor

Anyway small fun story, in 1992 at the Assembly demoparty held in Finland, me and my friend 'had' to stay up and guard A2000 with 030/25 turbo, tons of memory and SCSI HDD, GVP 24bit framebuffer with a digitizing table and software etc.
It was freaking amazing to render 3D on Real3D and at the same time watch 24bit movies being played back. We also scanned the faces of the coders on it for Future Crew's PC demo ( https://demozoo.org/productions/713/ )
The machine was just performing amazingly, it also had some kind of strange disk drive, not zip, not bernoulli but I cannot remember.

[THE INTRANCER]

Image FX and Photogenics were my favorite graphics programs that I could take advantage of on my stock A1200. Personal Paint was cool but I could never do much with it. It didn't have a layers system like Photoshop. I still have Cinema 4D R2 on floppy for it and remember having to strip back the Workbench programs to run the maximum of fast memory that I could.
Real 3D was the first 3D program I ever used on the Amiga, on the Mega ST I had, it was some basic 3D landscape program, whilst VISTA Pro on the Amiga was my favourite landscaping program. I don't remember there being anything else landscape wise on the Amiga. Still have the Imagine 3D floppies that I never did manage to run.

[stoopicus]

A1200 and A4000 with the newer chipset (AGA) had 16,7 million palette for colours. Could display 262144 on HAM8 mode.

Right, but, unless in HAM mode, couldn't they only display 256 at a time? And HAM wasn't exactly a general purpose display mode.

By the time the 1200 was released, the Macs were shipping with general purpose 16 bit color; 65,536 colors onscreen at once. Amiga could only do that in HAM mode.

The Amiga was still the clear winner at standard def video production though, due to the toaster.

[syntonica]

Yes and the SGI’s were much more capable, but much much more expensive - I did not count them as competitors of the Amiga. There was really no comparison there.

I thought I was right. SGI left a huge market open for poor, but very creative video artists that Amiga fit right into. I think that was the Atari's biggest flaw, that it was not really upgradable, but making it very cheap. And then the A500 came along and began to eat up that niche as well.

[Roman Empire]

My first Amiga was the A500 in 1987 and then a few years later A1200. Started with Soundtracker and then moved on to Octalyzer, that gave me 8 channels to work with. Compromised sound, but 4 channels simply wasn´t enough. I bought a midi-interface in around 89, using Dr T, which was really an awful sequencer, but served me well until 97, when I finally switched to PC and could start working with Cubase, that I had been drooling over for many years.
I know that Amiga had this Bars & Pipes thing, that could do a lot, but I just couldn´t stand looking at it.
The only reason to get an Atari - which would be a good reason if my computer solely was intended for making music - would be for the access to much better sequencers like Cubase and Emagic Logic. But hey, there was so much fun you could do with your Amiga!

[syntonica]

...Dr T, which was really an awful sequencer...

What?!?!?

I guess there truly are different strokes for different folks.

[THE INTRANCER]

Dr T's Tiger Cub sequencer was great at playing MIDI files so you could hear them on your general MIDI keyboard. I was more comfortable using trackers. Octamed Sound Studio was what I eventually settled on and used it as a clever Bulk Dump system for my synths.

The Amiga had the best games for many years, the Atari ST was generally inferior unless they were direct ports.

My favourite platformer on the Amiga

[Roman Empire]

...Dr T, which was really an awful sequencer...

What?!?!?

I guess there truly are different strokes for different folks.

True that. My preference for viewing and editing the recorded data is more graphics oriented rather than something that looked like machine code as in Dr T. I´m talking about this one:



What did you like about Dr. T and is it the same version we´re talking about?

[syntonica]

I have never seen that software before. Only an event list editor? How barbaric!

I used the cut down, no-frills Tiger Cub with 12 (!) tracks and a graphical editor. I guess 12 was all they could cram into a single screen. It was US$99 at the time.

It was the best ever MIDI editor I have ever used. You could select notes or groups of notes and and you could use the arrow keys (with modifier keys) to change the note lengths (the horizontal legs), velocities (the vertical arms) and piston (time and note value), Despite the lack of detail in the displays, it was incredibly fast and efficient for me to grok what I was doing.

When I moved to Logic, the ugly little bars that could be colored by velocity and had little velocity lines inside the bars were an awful way to represent notes.

[legendCNCD]

When I moved to Logic, the ugly little bars that could be colored by velocity and had little velocity lines inside the bars were an awful way to represent notes.

Oh man you have triggered my memory of the horrible nights I spent with it... argh argh arghh

[Roman Empire]

I have never seen that software before. Only an event list editor? How barbaric!

I used the cut down, no-frills Tiger Cub with 12 (!) tracks and a graphical editor. I guess 12 was all they could cram into a single screen. It was US$99 at the time.

It was the best ever MIDI editor I have ever used. You could select notes or groups of notes and and you could use the arrow keys (with modifier keys) to change the note lengths (the horizontal legs), velocities (the vertical arms) and piston (time and note value), Despite the lack of detail in the displays, it was incredibly fast and efficient for me to grok what I was doing.

When I moved to Logic, the ugly little bars that could be colored by velocity and had little velocity lines inside the bars were an awful way to represent notes.

I really cannot remember why I used KCS and not Tigercub. Could have been the limitation of 12 tracks. All being said, this forced me to play everything manually on my (midi-)keyboard, including drums, without making too many mistakes, so I´m pretty sure that I played much better back then than now
Anyway, I´m glad that you now understand my comment on Dr T, which of course should have been "Dr T´s KCS"

[syntonica]

I have never seen that software before. Only an event list editor? How barbaric!

I used the cut down, no-frills Tiger Cub with 12 (!) tracks and a graphical editor. I guess 12 was all they could cram into a single screen. It was US$99 at the time.

It was the best ever MIDI editor I have ever used. You could select notes or groups of notes and and you could use the arrow keys (with modifier keys) to change the note lengths (the horizontal legs), velocities (the vertical arms) and piston (time and note value), Despite the lack of detail in the displays, it was incredibly fast and efficient for me to grok what I was doing.

When I moved to Logic, the ugly little bars that could be colored by velocity and had little velocity lines inside the bars were an awful way to represent notes.

I really cannot remember why I used KCS and not Tigercub. Could have been the limitation of 12 tracks. All being said, this forced me to play everything manually on my (midi-)keyboard, including drums, without making too many mistakes, so I´m pretty sure that I played much better back then than now
Anyway, I´m glad that you now understand my comment on Dr T, which of course should have been "Dr T´s KCS"

I doubt what you used was KCS as it looks like Tiger Cub, but with a ton more features added on. It had a plugin system with memory overlays, IIRC. It was also ridiculously expensive (well, that's what my wallet said at the time. Didn't stop me from dropping hundreds of dollars on Logic 5 and upgrades!)

[THE INTRANCER]

I have never seen that software before. Only an event list editor? How barbaric!

I used the cut down, no-frills Tiger Cub with 12 (!) tracks and a graphical editor. I guess 12 was all they could cram into a single screen. It was US$99 at the time.

It was the best ever MIDI editor I have ever used. You could select notes or groups of notes and and you could use the arrow keys (with modifier keys) to change the note lengths (the horizontal legs), velocities (the vertical arms) and piston (time and note value), Despite the lack of detail in the displays, it was incredibly fast and efficient for me to grok what I was doing.

When I moved to Logic, the ugly little bars that could be colored by velocity and had little velocity lines inside the bars were an awful way to represent notes.

I really cannot remember why I used KCS and not Tigercub. Could have been the limitation of 12 tracks. All being said, this forced me to play everything manually on my (midi-)keyboard, including drums, without making too many mistakes, so I´m pretty sure that I played much better back then than now
Anyway, I´m glad that you now understand my comment on Dr T, which of course should have been "Dr T´s KCS"

I doubt what you used was KCS as it looks like Tiger Cub, but with a ton more features added on. It had a plugin system with memory overlays, IIRC. It was also ridiculously expensive (well, that's what my wallet said at the time. Didn't stop me from dropping hundreds of dollars on Logic 5 and upgrades!)

Not as expensive as ImageFX which was around £400 retail and Lightwave being the defacto flagship 3D program wasn't cheap either.