I loved this game. Played it on a fully upgraded cd 32, keyboard, hard drive and memory expansion and a lot of other stuff. I still get goosebumps watching that ship and hearing the awesome score.
ST Format Cover Disk? (Jan 1994 I believe)I had that too. Still do, in fact. Shame it didn't make use of the STe's enhanced hardware as was starting to happen at the time.
Dm TD I‘m an Amiga guy, bought the game for Amiga when it came out, but it‘s true: The ST frame rate was slightly higher. In most parts it’s barely noticeable, but in some it‘s easy to see. This is to be expected, as the ST has a slightly higher CPU clock.
@@dmtd2388 Jens is right, the Atari does have a faster CPU which does produce a slightly faster frame rate. Frontier was well made and has proper timing so the game plays at the same speed, just slightly more frames on the Atari. Other 3D games that do not include accurate timing but rather rely on the frame updates to govern the game world speed really show the difference. An intro sequence on those games would complete faster on the Atari. And one other game I used to play and have both versions on emulators is Federation Of Free Traders. That game takes advantage of the Atari's faster CPU by using the extra cycles to calculate colour dithering making the game look better! I have compared both side by side running both Amiga and Atari emulators at the same time (modern computers are such wonderful things!) and the Atari version not only looks better with dithering but has no errors in the rendering. The Amiga version uses all flat colours, no dithering, and the polygons often are not drawn properly leaving black sections where there should be colour! Very poor lol
My dear sweet summer child... you have no idea how much I needed to see this. I played this game to death on my ST back in the day. I lost many months to it when I probably should have been studying for my GCSEs. I always assumed that it would look and play better on the Amiga than the ST because, well, every Amiga has a Blitter and it was only certain ST models that had one (my STe, the Mega and Mega STe, and the Falcon). I always assumed the Amiga version had better frame-rates because it would use the Blitter to fill the triangles. It would appear not - watching your video, the ST and Amiga appear to have very similar frame-rates. I also have to say, without bias, that I think the audio is a bit nicer on the ST. the Paula PCM instruments on the Amiga soundtrack sound a bit harsh to me, and although the YM-2149 version of the ST music isn't as sophisticated, I think it's easier on the ear. Of course, later on, I played Frontier on an Atari TT (32MHz clock) and Falcon030 (16MHz clock) and because the game is de-coupled from real-time, I got much better frame-rates than the Amiga 1200 (12MHz clock). But this video has given me a huge boost, that my A500 / A500+ / A600 owning friends back in high school weren't getting a fundamentally better experience than I was. That means a lot to me. Thank you!
From what I've seen, as I've not actually bothered to test it, it ran quite a bit better on the Amiga. I don't know why it's so choppy here. I guess I can pull out an old UAE emulator and find out. I've promised to setup an Amiga simulator for somebody anyhow. Took me a year and a day, literally, to get the correct Kickstart and Workbench, now I have to figure out which goes with which flavor of the machine, 1000, 500, 600, 1200, 2000, 2500, 3000.. fun.
@@fuzzywzhe no it wasnt, In fact my friend who owned A500 often went to my place to play vector based games like Frontier, Hunter or F1 GP, since it was barely playable on ST, but unplayable on A500. The difference is not day and night, but that 10-20% higher computing power of ST made it still playable to some degree in taxing scenes, while Amiga was a slideshow beyond any fun. Im not telling all the time, but its not fun if you cant hit the enemy space ship every time a planet or space station is in background, or if you cant negotiate a turn if there are more then 2 cars in picture...
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Not to argue too much, but compare Giana Sisters on the Amiga and the Atari ST. Frontier I've seen, but I think it was on an A2000 or 3000, not a 500. I don't think Frontier was playable on anything. It was extremely ahead of its time. I have no idea what system that was programmed for that it worked well on. I don't have much comparison. I knew in college people I knew with an ST would knock it a bit, but Test Drive II looked great on my computer, compared to the PC version. It's all old hat now
@@fuzzywzhe Giana Sisters, you kidding no one played that children junk, OK maybe children did. Go and compare the STE version to Amiga... no difference. The regular ST port was just another lazy port from Amiga. Just compare GODS, much better then Giana Sisters. But all these platform games were on the way out in 1993. Use of fast bit block transfers for scrolling does not make the computer have higher computing power, blitter does not help you with polygonal 3d, just raw computing power and fast RAM access does. And ST has 10-20% more computing power then A500. Frontier was actually developed and programed for ST in 1992 and ported by Dave Braben to Amiga, the PC version was Chris Sawyer, and all was released together in late 1993. The PC version despite having texture mapping, was fluid on i486DX2@66MHz and you have to keep in mind that the game came out in Pentium 66 time. PCs didnt have to work with planar graphics so the engine was much less taxing and intel CPUs much much more powerful.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 You are kidding right? EVERYBODY played Giana Sisters, it was the Super Mario Brother's clone. The ST couldn't do side scrolling. I don't want to re-ignite a USENet flamewar over which computer was superior, but the Amiga's versions of Giana Sisters was CLEARLY superior to the ST version. No idea what "GODS" is. All this crap is ancient history to me. I became an electrical engineer, all the "cutting edge technology" of that time, is old hat to me. The concept of sprites is now a software layer, they don't even bother to implement it in hardware now. People have no idea where we are. In 2000, it was ILLEGAL to export a PlayStation 2 to Iran, because it could be used to make a Beowulf Cluster which could POTENTIALLY be used to do nuclear bomb simulation. You can do this on a $150 phone now. I have more storage on a $20 SD Card than I did on an advanced, super expensive workstation in 2000. That SD Card can contain more information in text form than any human being LITERALLY can learn in a lifetime. I can lose that in my couch cushions. The 1990's, 1980's? Today, it's like tubes in radios in 1980's. "Yeah, I remember that..." You can produce a literal cartoon now on a personal computer, I can render The Incredibles on my personal machine, that took an ARMY of machines in 2004. What is left to do in technology? I can store a MONTH'S worth, 24x7 of films on a $20 SD Card which is perfectly viewable in a cineplex. What's left to do? We are SO FAR beyond where we were 40 years ago. It's astounding. And people cannot appreciate where we are. But we will continue to give you more and more power and information. You do what you will with it. Endless avenues. This is a real inflection point in our time. Even colleagues of mine cannot appreciate where we are. EVERYTHING you can learn in an entire lifetime, can be stored on an SD Card so small, it's smaller than a fingernail.
i had a DX2 66 processor with a dual speed CD-ROM Mega fast lol and Soundblaster still have the Elite II Cd Rom form back in the 90's but windows will not run it now. It was MS DOS run was'nt it ?
i stuck the mega midget racer in mine - made my amiga really fast at rendering lightsource graphics . I spent forever rendering crystal balls and checkerboard backgrounds ...
If you had a compatible TV or monitor you could force a European PAL Amiga to run its display at NTSC frame rates and gain a 20% speed boost. I ran Frontier like that for years and had forgotten how slow it was on stock hardware.
But the CPU in the 68000-based Amigas ran at almost the same speed on both PAL and NTSC anyway (*) and the only reason many games ran slower under PAL was because they used the frame rate and inter-frame Vertical Blank Interrupt for timing and sync. That's clearly not the case here since the frame rate isn't anywhere near 50 *or* 60 fps, and varies according to the level of detail. So I'd assume- well, the only reason I can think of- is that possibly the main window was the same on-screen size under NTSC, but with fewer lines (rather than the alternative of the same number of lines being vertically stretched) so you were effectively trading off resolution for frame rate? Anyway, while do I remember Frontier sometimes being a bit jerky on my stock A500 Plus when there was a lot going on, I don't recall ever remember it getting to the point where it was an issue or I had a problem with it. I think it comes down to expectations- full, solid 3D was impressive (I'd played the wireframe Mercenary on 8-bit), and if Frontier was a bit jerkier than Mercenary III at times, that's because it was more detailed and you *expected* that anyway. I'm genuinely impressed that it ran as well as it did! (*) And apparently a PAL machine in "NTSC" mode didn't change clock speed at all- it couldn't because it only had one timing crystal- so technically the "NTSC" output was marginally out-of-spec.
@@NotATube Sort of. The NTSC window wasn't the same physical size, it was letterboxed in the centre of the screen (or at least it was on the Hitachi TV I was using back in the day; I guess it's possible more expensive TVs could have stretched the image vertically). But yes, the display had roughly 20% fewer lines to draw and so the screen refresh was faster. I think this was using S-Video via SCART, but it could have been RGB. Thanks to the Amiga doing everything through custom chips and dedicated circuitry, this gave a speed boost to the whole game while the CPU clock speed remained the same. Not all games could use this trick because of assumptions in their code about CPU and display timings, but _Frontier_ was very well behaved in this regard. I can't recall whether the intro music also sped up, or lagged behind the visuals. I'm fairly sure it was the latter, but wouldn't want to put money on it. The video mode was selectable from the two-button early boot menu present on ECS and AGA Amigas. There was also a utility that could do this in software when booting from floppy, but I don't recall the details other than I used it to make a _"Fast Frontier"_ disk that booted straight into NTSC. I remember lending a friend this disk, and his disappointment that it didn't work because his TV wasn't compatible with the non-standard signal. I'm still fuzzy on some of this. It's seven years since I wrote the original comment, and thirty since I last used that setup!
Yes, when you decide from the start to not utilize the blitter, naturally an Atari game runs as fast on Atari ST as on Amiga 500 - both have the same CPU at basically the same speed. The Blitter is *much* faster than the CPU at drawing lines and filling polygons, but if you have a lot of small polygons this advantage decreases. If you used the full screen, the polygons would be bigger. Frontier, like most other 3D games, use a small screen (in the case of Frontier, a little more than half the screen area), and don't use the Blitter for polygons. Just because the Blitter chip is much faster doesn't mean game developers had time to use its potential in the few years of the 16-bit home computer games explosion, and the few games that did had a quite naive Blitter implementation.
ScoopexUs The Amiga version didn't take advantage of the blitter? I was praising the ST porters for getting the frame rate so high compared to the Amiga version, but I guess I should have been berating the Amiga programmers for not taking advantage of the hardware instead. The blitter did get quite heavily used on Amiga games and especially demos if I remember correctly. For 2D games it would allow you to have pretty huge sprites that could still draw at 50FPS (the gold standard for PAL amiga systems) so why would you not use it? Try looking at the VS video for Fire and Ice, I'm pretty sure the reason the Amiga version has a far smoother frame rate than the ST is down to the Amiga's blitter.
PassiveSmoking Yes, except programming teams were small and they should have paid for a proper port by an Amiga programmer instead, like they did for all other platforms for each game. But here was a chance to get two for one, and the result was that Amiga users got mostly ST games that didn't take advantage of the Amiga hardware. So, you have the direction wrong. ST games -> quick and dirty Amiga versions. The games that were made to take advantage of the Amiga hardware did end up as bleaker counterparts on ST. Loggins1969 Not really, with the accepted small screen size common to vector games and selected acceptable framerate. Vector games were rarely made to be action games. Also, I didn't criticize Frontier for having too few colors, nor do I think it would benefit from more colors apart from fewer occasional palette remap discolorings..
@ScoopexUS, If the amiga version had been released for a1200 so as to not only take some advantage of (A) the "blitter" but also to use 4meg trapdoor expansions with say (B) a 68030 of 40MHz and (C) an FPU (e.g. 33MHz 68882), What would have been the best way to use those 3 things all in conjunction, assuming a special version (maybe free on its CD) was written just for amigas which had all that? e.g Use its FPU for "filling" polygons? Blitter?
Played this on the A1200 and it was nowhere NEAR this slow. BUT, playing the music through MIDI was a real joy, provided you had something decent hooked up to it! :D
I was going to say that I remember it being smooth, but now I think back I think I acquired it after I bought an A1200. I put so much time into this one!
The big trick was to go into the early startup menu and switch from PAL to NTSC. The Amiga ran the game with much improved FPS that way. The best thing was to have an A3000 or A4000 with a 25Mhz 030 or 040 - it would run the game completely fluent.
What game are you talking about? Frontier is one of the very best games on the ST/Amiga. If you're playing it on a 68000 machine, it's your own fault. I played it on the Falcon and it's outstanding. Or would you play the newest Doom on a 486 PC and then write "Booh, lame game!"...?
@@Rauschgenerator Relax, chum. I was around for this era of gaming and I know they had limitations. Just poking some gentle fun at it... three years ago.
The A1000 was released in 1985 and that is the base hardware this game will run on (the A500 is a compact A1000). So 8 years later this game comes out and it doesn't run well and everyone is complaining "but it runs good on the PC" and yes it does on an 8 year newer system which is what every review showed it on. It was released to run on the base Amiga just for sales not for it running reasonably. It should have been released as a base 68020 which would have shown the Amiga was still very capable and maybe pushed for people to bring there systems more up to date.
I played this as a kid on Amiga 500 I think. Incredible this animation and the whole game with an entire galaxy fitted on one floppy was it? Mine had a write error one day and it broke :( played it on PCs for few weeks or so every few years until recently.
Was possible to set the detail in the game (not in the intro), i remember, to keep things a bit smoother: you did the test on maximum detail on purpose?
I'm an Atari ST fanboy having spent much of my childhood/teenage years with one, but I have to admit, the music for games was headache inducing! I really liked the Amiga but simply couldn't afford one, as the ST equivalent spec was three times the price!
Yes, the Amiga was way more expensive when it first came out and (unlike the 520ST) there was no "low-end" model at first. It wasn't until the Amiga 500 (more akin to the 520STFM than the original Amiga 1000) came out and *then* fell in price a bit that the Amiga got affordable enough to outcompete the ST.
You must have bought one of the early ST's. The Amiga 500 I'm pretty certain was cheaper than the ST, you dodged a bullet by not getting an Amiga 1000. The 500 had more memory, and most games were written for it.
@@fuzzywzhe Amiga was most of the time double or close to double the price of comparable ST. The situation changed with STE, which got comparable price to A500.
@@NotATube Amiga never outcompete ATARI ST, it traded blows and whistles, but never outcompete it. ST was most of the time notably cheaper and was a faster computer. Its amazing that such a small company as Atari Corp. could compete against behemoth Commodore once was.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I don't recall that being the case. I didn't know much about the ST at the time, but I seem to remember its cost being on par with the Amiga. The Mac was drastically over-priced. That company sucks, but they have great marketing. Really, great marketing. I should point out the Amiga 1000 and the original ST - both were pie in the sky unaffordable to me at the time, I don't know the prices. I knew them in the late 1980s. The price of the Mac was always CRAZY to me, black and white screen, single button mouse, all the peripherals super expensive.. The two WORST systems survived. Acorn was better than the Mac and I would argue the ST - but I don't think the Amiga, however, I owned an Amiga, so I might be biased. It was an impressive machine. You can run AcornOS on a modern Rasbperry PI, it's pretty alien for me to use, but it's usable - Aros is NOT. Windows made hardware cheap, Mac, it's all form over function, but it was a better system than a PC was up until about 2005 if you wanted to pay the price.
"No, I first saw this on my 32MHz A3000, and it was liquid smooth." Yeah, I have played Frontier on 3.2Ghz PC. It doesn't speed up the actual gameplay. It's only badly coded games that actually do that, it's very rare on professional games.
The rendering engine is identical, the PC version looks exactly the same too. I suppose you could say the music is better on the Amiga version but other than that it's all processor speed and the stock ST beats the stock Amiga on that front.
I had an A1200 with a 50mhz 68050 and 68882 & 8mb expansion RAM, it was pretty good on that - don't think I would have wanted to play it without those though.
Yes neither the Amiga nor the ST were much good at 3d as neither of them supported a non-planar graphics mode in hardware so moving all those separate bit planes around was just too taxing, though both excelled in other areas... the ST not so much for sound apparently though! :-)
@@10p6 lol. At that time (1993 !) ST sound was condidered rubbish. Amiga was and still is way ahead. Only some hardcore chip sound snobs can find the St sound better. Just ask anybody that isn't a posh geek to listen to both
Had Atari just DIED, the Atari "budget enthusiast" base would have gone to Commodore, and the Amiga would have lived past 1993. If Commodore had let Jack have his sons take over, for example, WHO would have bought Atari and resurrected it?
@@NameCallingIsWeak Erm. Jack Tramiel was part of the problem, sad but true. Both for Commodore and Atari. And if Atari didn't go south, the Amiga would have been an Atari machine anyway. The if-when's to this period of time are rather brainless...
@@Rauschgenerator thanks. We all finally have hardware accelerated multi-tasking multi-media monsters, but it took 10+ years longer than it should have.
@@NameCallingIsWeak True, both for Atari and Commodore because Tramiel didn't know how this market works. You have a good computer: doesn't matter, instantly build the next one.
Developing games such as this on those stock machines is quite impressive really. Sure, Starfox runs better on a Snes, but with custom chips in the cartridge...so, I am quite impressed. Also, back in the day it was slow, but one did not even comment much on it, for that is how the game ran. Similarly, Golden Eye on the N64 had some very slow areas as well, but this game was acclaimed back in the day. We were just happy to experience a decent game, unlike today's hardware and game, where we are far too critical and quick at criticizing a software title's imperfections....sad really.
Starfox run better on a SNES but with custom chips as you said. This video show a game released in stock 1985 machines. On an A1200 or a Falcon, released same year that Starfox, game is much better because of faster CPU
Elite 2 was cancelled on the SNES because the machine didn't have the horsepower to run it without adding an expansive chip. Yet it does work on 1985 computers.
The stock A1200 was about 2-3x faster than this due mainly to the 14Mhz 32bit CPU. I remember getting a 40Mhz card with 4Mb RAM and FPU and it was perfectly smooth 😁
I don't know why this game is presented on the old 7-8MHz 68000 machines here. It was 1993, heck, the Mega STE, TT and Falcon have been out for years back then. I always played it on the Falcon, never got the idiotic idea to try this on the ST. You wouldn't try a 2021 PC game on a 486, don't you?
@@Rauschgenerator I find it odd that so many people will happily compare ST/Amiga vs PC and completely overlook that the PC they are comparing with costs many times more is many years newer. The ST/Amiga hardware shown here was originally from 1985 and it's like there was never any upgrades available for either system which overlooks the facts that there were CPU upgrades available and big box ST/Amiga systems with faster CPUs. If ST/Amiga comparisons only compared to an IBM 5150 nobody would take it seriously, but it seems the other way around is fine.
oh my word - "custom chips". You couldn't be more specific and talk about how it is a smapler, no, you had to say "custom chips means its better". So vague.
No, I prefer the YM music too, and not because I was (and still am) an Atari Person, I've given up the playground battles of Spectrum vs. C64, ST vs. Amiga etc... I've learned to embrace the Amiga, but there's just something about the Chip-tune version of the theme tune that says "effort" while the Paula version just sounds a little bit lazy and harsh.
With games like this it's all about how quick you can draw to screen and the CPU grunt. The Amiga's CPU clock was set as a ratio of the timings required for video. So it was slightly slower than the Atari CPU clock.
So both version just use CPU? Does the ST version make use of the STE's blitter when used on one of those machines? The amiga version doesn't seem to use its blitter (it would be at least slightly faster than the ST version) so I don't think it does.
It does not. Same frame rate on STe (blitter), Mega ST (Blitter) and STm (no blitter) - I've tested this myself. The only way to make it smoother is with a faster CPU clock.
MIDI is capable of a heap, but the ST only came with a midi interface (i.e., a port you could plug instruments or external synthesizers into). MIDI interface by itself doesn't do anything without a device. without an external midi device plugged in, the onboard audio on an ST is crap
The ST does have MIDI built in, but that doesn't mean that much, if you're outputting MIDI commands to a DX-7 compatible sound module you'll get thin 6-operator mono-timbral FM sounds. MIDI just tells the synthesizer what note to play and with which parameters. It's not a guarantee of sound quality.
You shouldn't play this game on an 68000 machine anyway, use a 68020 or 68030 machine at least. After all, the CPU speed doesn't play a role as the Amiga graphics chip has better access to the RAM than the ST has. And one should never forget that the Amiga was WAY more expensive than the ST. I hate it that this is never being mentioned when ST and Amiga are being compared nowadays...
if i could change history, I'd go back and make the Atari ST chunky instead of planar pixels - it would have made for a more interesting contest.. I went with the amiga, but a 68000 on a chunky-pixel display would have been an interesting lower cost alternative.
Yup. Planar can help with fill speed though if you can fill multiple planes/pixels at the same time/same write (can on modeX VGA not sure if Amiga could?) In either case I suspect they were bitplane based to save memory.
As far as I'm aware, planar mode was used- and made sense at that time- because storing all bits together on a single memory chip would have resulted in slower throughput than splitting it across multiple chips that could output simultaneously.
you have to understand that in the time Amiga and ST were engineered, RAM was very very expensive. Hell A1000 was sold with 256KB RAM... The planar graphics are much less RAM intensive then chunky, if you use less colours.
I had a pretty terrible PC (486-SLC-33Mhz) back then with a Soundblaster clone (Vibra 16) and 4MB RAM. Newer games such as Doom 2 ran relatively poorly, but older games like Elite 2, 4D Sports Driving, Test Drive 2, UFO : Enemy Unknown etc all ran amazingly smoothly. About a year after buying the computer I upgraded the CPU to a 486-DX2-80Mhz and it grew wings!
Geof Grammonds Formula F1 game for atari and amiga was of course faster on polygon side, because it was kind of static, so you dont need Z-axis to rotate objects. That causes a LESS of stress for the cpu of course? I think Mr. Braben uses the same 3D core for both amiga and ST, because of the same CPU. So he did not use amiga blitter, because what i've heard, he said that its too slow for 3D calculations. That's why ST version might be little bit faster because of native CPU speed is slighty faster than amigas one. Just for my 50 cents, im not a coder.
Blitters are really only any good for sprites, they can be used to do good "3D" looking effects but not very useful for real 3D work. And many STs had blitters fitted (they were planned but not included the ST, with the STfm it was an official upgrade with an unpopulated slot on the mobo as standard) and they were standard on STe's ...
Mechanical Menace This game is based for pure for 3D, not blittin bitmaps. However, Mr. Braben did not use to amiga's bliltter to calculate 3D mathematics, just pure CPU based calculations. So when running this game that is based on the CPU, the ST version is faster based on the faster CPU clockrate.
killimolli "This game is based for pure for 3D, not blittin bitmaps" Sort of my point. "However, Mr. Braben did not use to amiga's bliltter to calculate 3D mathematics, just pure CPU based calculations." Because blitters don't help with those types of calculations at all. Like I said if the graphics were pseudo 3d then blitters can help with the effect but writing into the framebuffer doesn't really allow for the sort of maths needed for real 3d. You won't be doing trig or vector manipulation on one. If a blitter would have helped he'd have defo added support for the ST BLiTTER, Braben was an ST fanboy and the ST BlTTER though underutilised can piss all over the Amiga OCS one.
Mechanical Menace That's right, the (Amiga) blitter would help with things like polygon filling, line drawing, rectangle copying. It knew nothing about 3d.
I don't think Elite II used any special Amiga chips (Blitter/Copper) which was a bit bad for the Amiga 68000 vs Atari 68000 as Atari's is clocked a little bit higher... I think it could have been a wee bit faster with a bit of Amiga specific code (use of Blitter/Copper and so on). But then again it would have been limited if you got a 68030 or better I guess as the Blitter would have been the hog...
@@OpenGL4ever I disagree it would have made a small difference on the A500 (not a lot, but a small difference). Standard A1200 maybe a small difference, but in 93 sure most of us had 030/040 processors anyway. Copper could have been used for different effects (as far as I know it is not used). Probably because of portability to Atari. I would never in a million years trade my Amiga back in 93 for Win3.11/DOS box to play a game...
@@alexanderwingeskog758 It depends on the type of game you want to play. If 3d simulations and games like this were your favourite genre then a PC was the best gaming machine at that time.
@@OpenGL4ever I did not do much playing on my Amiga back then. I did music, pixelart, programming, raytracing/modelling/animation and lots of other fun stuff.
@@alexanderwingeskog758 Fine.For ray tracing, the PC would have been a better choice because it was much faster. At that time, VGA and even SVGA could already be used for pixel art. And WinNT or OS / 2 would have been a good and stable OS for programming at that time.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I know exactly what a PiStorm is which is why I bought one for my A500. Your description is also innacurate. My PiStorm is being used as a 68xxx emulator and storage device. All other Amiga hardware is in use. Not sure why the fanboy comment was dropped in.
@@Daz5Daz since a PiStorm is a full fledged parasitic computer, it can actually run Frontier without your Amiga and yes it will fly... Sorry for the Fanboy remark, but usually die hard Amiga fans aka fanboys do not understand hardware and think that the Amiga is greatest computer that got some MoJo due to "accelerator", where the reality is that it is another computer doing the work and passing processed data to Amiga chipset, so yes your Amiga is just a graphical (to video and audio shifting degree) terminal for the Raspi, nothing special and any other computer can do it. Maybe you just happy that you can run the Frontier at fluid frame rates, but you dont need Amiga for that at all, since you actually do not use it... You maybe consider to either use you slow Amiga as is, or do not even bother to stress the old computer and play it on emulator at fluid frame rates...Hope you get my point now.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 good reply. I have always just liked having my hands on original hardware. Somehow playing Lemmings on my Pi 400 just isn't quite the same as using my A500. It's pure nostalgia.
Why are people giving the atari st so much hate for the quality of its music, yes it does use an outdated soundchip, but that's not really an excuse to pick on it, I think the music in frontier sounds amazing for the atari st, yes I think the amiga version kicks all asses, but the atari st version is amazing in its own way, it's just a shame frontier wasn't much fun to play, merely a tech demo that you had to pay for :/
I liked the st's sound chip music on this game however at stock 8mhz this game was hard to play combat not worth it until you got something like a tiger trader with a turret this game got sweet with a 28mhz 68000 accelerator board on my then Atari ste i got to deadly elite rating in this orignal elite zx speccy, ste, dangerous
There is a Dave Lowe Uncle Art Kickstarter up now for an Orchestral version of this, and various reproductions of Dave Lowe tunes over the years. Starglider, Carrier Command etc. I've already backed it. This tune done by a full Orchestra would be amazing! www.kickstarter.com/projects/124468523/uncle-art-a-temporal-shift. Panthers are cool. So is this Kickstarter :) (I'm not knocking the powers of the ST's AY chip - I had a Spectrum 128 back in the day, and I love it still - but the Amiga soundtrack just beats the ST silly sound wise, at the cost of a handful of FPS)
the game was not optimized on 68030/20, so a overclocked 68000 with some L2 cache does the same trick. MegaSTE is running Frontier about same fast as stock Falcon (it has L1 cache too, so slightly faster).
Credit where it's due, the ST team did a hell of a job getting the system to get an FPS that close to the Amiga version without the benefit of the Amiga's blitter and other hardware. But as usual, the sound kills it. The ST sound chip could probably qualify as a war crime. I remember this being one of the games that really took advantage of faster systems. On the 1200 it ran smoother with a higher FPS but maintained the same realtime characteristics. Saw it running on a machine with an 060 accelerator once, it was unbelievably smooth for the time (EDIT: Apparently the Amiga team didn't take advantage of the blitter and other custom hardware, so it really should be boo to the Amiga team instead)
PassiveSmoking The blitter and other Amiga stuff doesn't really help much when doing vector and polygon games. Hence why the CD32 had a chunky to planar chip.
+PassiveSmoking As Amiga's HW is mostly useless for general 3D polygon rendering, no special effort is required to make ST version work with the same speed. And with same graphics routines, ST's CPU runs a little faster, due to, I believe, smaller amount of memory bus congestion on ST. Basically, ST is faster when specialized Amiga graphics hardware is out of the equation.
+Adam Klobukowski But for textures planar graphics is horrible, and this game does have textures in a few places. Also, advantages of planar polygon filling quickly disappear when polygons become smaller.
Frontier does not have textures on Amiga or ST, only on PC. I wrote previously, that planar polygons have some corner cases, small polygons being one of them, but Frontier looks very well optimized anyway - I think the bottleneck is geometry calculations here.
It's when you see stuff like this you realise how fast a modern PC is, even running something like GTA at 30fps feels sweet compared to the 3 to 5 frames a second this offered for the most part.
the ST had crappy on board sound. It was used in studios a lot because it had a built in midi interface (it was basically the cheapest machine you could buy with MIDI) and was used as a controller for externally connected audio hardware - NOT because of its built in audio capabilities. The built in audio was pretty crap.
Jethro Rose Many games have the option to use the midi out of the ST.Try this game with a yamaha tg500 or better a roland synth with the standard GM and listen:-)
There are a few instruction sequences that actually run faster on the Amiga due to more flexible memory access rules. It's not enough to make up for the difference in clock rate generally, but it closes the gap a bit.
combcomclrlsr True, there are major differences between the way you get from code in memory to moving 3D polys in screen memory but I only really noticed it in the tunnel sections of Starglider II. Maybe it's most noticeable in very large individual manipulation
MadCommodore Maybe the game is vsync'd so you get 50, 25, 16.6, 12.5 fps and nothing in-between. Something running at 12.5fps (1 rendered frame for 4 tv frames), you'll need to render 25% faster to reach 3 frames rendering threshold (50/3 = ~16.6fps)
FM sound can sound good, but this is not one of those times. The ST music was a derivative of the Amiga tune and it just doesn't pull it off. When music is written for FM it can sound good, but FM sucks at emulating real instruments.
@@jensdroessler3575 well it is simple, people that want the retro feeling of long lost era of computing prefer the chiptune sound over sampled. Its same as if you take some 1960s muscle car, but you would have electric motor in it... and then you compare it to current modern car with V8 Hemi, which sound/car would you prefer? Also Paula has very limited range where the chiptune YM can hit the tones Amiga can just dream about. Basically people with good ears (musically) simply like the higher more open range of YM over muffled dull samples of Paula. And the tune in Frontier is actually not very much the pinnacle of the chiptunes either, it servers it purpose, but the priority was the 3d speed, where ST shines over Amiga. If you are willing to change your mind about chiptunes check out the work of Ultrasyd here in youtube.
They're both pretty unplayable at that framerate, so it's hardly a win to be proud of. It was about playable on the A1200, and really needed a 68030 to be nice. I'm sure an '030 ST would be as smooth too, though without the extra graphical details and the decent sound of the Amiga's version.
Oh yes! 5 fps against 4 fps. That makes Atari version better, shitty music like from 8 bit computers but better framerate (and you are only one uberhuman on earth which can tell the difference since both wersions framerate sucks incredibly. And stop copy and paste it on every Amiga vs ST video :D
In 1993 a low-end 486SX @ 25MHz would set would set you back ~$1400 and a high-end PC ~$3500+ Amiga A600 (comparative to the Amiga used in the comparison) $299. But here's the real kicker, many PC's back then didn't have sound cards and had lousy graphics cards not capable of running this, it was only the newest PC's that had that. And let's not forget PC's were still stuck running DOS :-(
@@daishi5571 Not true. Frontier Elite 2 was designed to run on a 286 with 2MB of RAM, a 486 would have been major overkill. You are right about the sound card thing though, it was only around 1993 when the concept of a ''multimedia PC'' just started to gain traction. Graphics cards did not matter much as most games used software rendering, anyway this game was not able to run in higher resolutions. Amiga was ahead of its time for sure, but the PC was snapping at its heels and would overtake in a few years.
@@sl9sl9 Elite 2 wasn't designed for the PC (Which BTW has a minimum requirement of a 386 I'm guessing if it runs on a 286 it runs like in this video) it was written by David Braben himself for ST/Amiga and then converted to PC afterward. With the base model ST/Amiga running a 68000 7-8MHz he made sure it would run on that (abet not optimally) with the design for faster processors (68020+). It took a much faster MHz 286 (probably 12-16 MHz) to compare to the original ST/Amiga which by 93 were replaced with higher spec systems (68020, 030 and 040 which is overkill) Elite 2 on an original Amiga was not a good experience (probably the same on a 286) with frame drops so low as to make it unplayable at times but played even on a base spec A1200 played quite well, but add even 1MB of RAM made it real smooth. So I took a look again at what was going on in 1993 (I'm English so I have a TARDIS) In Jan 1993 I couldn't find a single 286 system advertised, the 386 was just about dead and even the 486SX was being squashed by 486DX (and rightly so as it was vastly better designed than previous models). That is what I was looking at, not that you couldn't possibly have played this on an older system but what ppl were buying at the time. Also the game supported MCGA & VGA so the video card was very important, as which everyone who remembers were a crapshoot on compatibility (IBM may have said what the MCGA & VGA "standard" was but some cards did there own thing with it) it was only when SVGA came out that a real standard appeared, VESA made it much better for everyone (it may not have been a big issue with this game, but others suffered), but it took a good while for it to become the "standard". I checked and most 286 systems had CGA or EGA so VGA would have been an upgrade requiring an even more powerful processor (higher MHz) to run well. Where the PC won was ppl's willingness to upgrade (kind of a requirement really). Whereas most Amiga owners just didn't feel the need as it was a complete package from the go. That I think is where it really went wrong for the Amiga. Just for addition the A1200 was $599 in 1992.
@@daishi5571 Yeah, we had this on a 386 in 1993 and it got much better framerate than this with texture mapping. It was £1000 compared to a £300 A600 or STE. A £3500 PC in 1993 would have been cutting edge overkill. A 486 DX4 100, probably. Which feels abo0ut right for the change in performance, if not space on your desk. Alternatively, you could compromise with £500 for a A1200 or £700 for a Falcon for a better frame rate still not matching the 386 and no texture mapping. Before PCI, the PC sucked at games. there was no justification for paying double/triple for inferior games - the only ting it had was memory. PCI changed everything, basically. Once it could move graphics quickly it left the ST and Amiga - upgrades or not - in the dust.
Run this on 1200+ and its fine PCs and Apple where back at there stone ages back then compared to High end Amiga workstations 3000+ 4000+ that was used even tv series or for Holywood movies example first CGI best in history Jurassic Park 1992 for pre render and then render and final render on Silicon Graphics Farms
It does and it worked great. However vectors are done in math, and the blitter doesn't help with that. When your CPU can only mathematically render single digit frame rates even the best blitter not going to save you.
no, the blitter doesn't hinder anything, it's just a lot of the slowdown is because of the calculation of 3d points which the blitter can't help with. the amiga and ST were made in a time before 3d graphics were common, and the 3d calculations require maths that none of the processors in either machine are good at. For fast 3d you really want a maths co processor
no, the amiga simply has no hardware that can handle 3d calculations very well. the PCs of the day had higher clock rate and 486 onwards had a built in math co processor. the Amiga and ST did not.
Not true - Calculation yes - no great acceleration there. Still Blitter is able to draw lines and fill shapes while the processor is doing something else. It does take some preparation to use and may not be good for small shapes. A good use of blitter would have increased the frame rate on Amiga quite a bit. In this game there is no blitter used and the Amiga code is nearly identical to Atari one.
@@JethroRose - math co-processor is basically useless in gaming until well over a decade later. Most games of this era eschewed floating point calculations and used fixed point instead - which is done with integer instructions on the integer registers. That's why when Intel released the MMX SIMD instructions, they were integer-ONLY. Heck, SSE itself (all the way up to the most current implementations) still support integer mode to this day. I got involved with the AMD K6-2 line, which had much better floating point capabilities than the Intel equivalents, but it turned out to not matter at all as the K6-2 had crap integer performance and all 3D games were integer(fixed-point)-only. By the time floating point mattered, the K6-2 was long gone, and the 486 only remembered by tales told by ancient grognards. 80486 higher clock rate was necessary for it to keep up with the 68030, and until the DX4 designs, there was no match for the integer-handling power of a 68030 @50mhz. Plus, y'know, pure 32-bit design over the 486's "I LIAK SEGMANTZ AND BOTING IN REEL MODE IS KEWEL" window-licking idiocy. Bonus: I still use integer-heavy designs in my own code and they actually pull ahead of pure-floating point designs even today. Why? The modern CPU still has more integer execution ports than FP, and my code uses both, not _just_ the FP ports.
@@JethroRose - Well, Quake is a bit of an outlier (and very advanced for it's time..and not super playable until the glQuake versions), and F:E2 is from '93. If you want crazy outliers, I was working on a 3D engine for the C64 in floating point in like '86 or thereabouts. It didn't work out too well though, for obvious reasons (just having something MOVING in 3D space without ANY drawing took forever). Keep in mind with stuff like MMX floating around, FPU usage was problematic in those days (also **cough** consoles). Plus the P5 had some asinine restrictions on what could and could not be executed and when, to the point where advanced integer and (all) FPU instructions clash. That's why the 68060 was able to tear both P5s and P6s new ones even though the '060 had abysmal FPU performance in comparison.
thats awesome, i always thought the amiga looked better but in truth they just had fancier sound chips! i actually prefer the atari version of the music! maybe just because thats the version i played all those years ago lol
GamleErik100 Yeah I actually hated the texture mapping. I think it looked awful.. better to have the smooth clean lines than have an Cobra that looked like it was wearing a cat skin coat..
Think it runs crap on both systems. Whether one has better music or the other has slightly better frame rate both them systems were toys. It was probably written on the Archie system like most of Davids other games. Acorn which was a powerhouse at the time for 3D. It was never released on the Archie. But a release of Elite was. Its the best version by far. Hope that helps.
I'm going to be controversial here and say that time has been kinder to the ST's chip music than to the Amiga's fuzzy samples. Sometimes stylization wins out.
I'd never heard the ST version until now. I suppose that's what you get when you have the same sound chip as the Spectrum 128 machines. Bloody awful. :) Blimey! I've just noticed your name. I'm a MacKenzie too, but with the Mac instead of the McK!
The STs sounds just like a chip time should in a computer game of that era. The Amigas low frequency samples just sounds poor in comparison..like trying to listen to a orchestral performance through the hissiest poor quality Walkman you can find
The amiga could do chip just as well if not better than the ST but had the option of 4 channel digital samples built in. The on-board amiga sound hardware was miles ahead of the ST no question. It didn't have an onboard midi port but most people never used the midi on the ST anyway unless they were a pro musician because MIDI gear was expensive.
When the pictures look the same the ST does indeed look a tad smoother, but this isn't true all the time. The Amiga version draws more stuff sometimes. Just look at this: i.imgur.com/ZyeIPP4.png
That's a bug apparently. The ST is drawing those clouds but they are not displayed for some reason iirc, when this (ST version) was converted to the Jaguar the clouds were switched back on.
@@welliben - OCS/ECS Amigas selected the colors for their CLUT from a 4096-color palette, whereas the ST could only draw from a 512-color palette. It's likely those clouds or whatever in the background were too close to the background color and thus were either skipped, or aren't visible as a result. AGA Amigas enhanced that to full 24-bit palettes (as opposed to 18-bit for competing designs like the Falcon or VGA), although I don't think there's an AGA-specific Frontier: Elite 2. The Jaguar likely didn't have the same limitations as the ST and could thus show those clouds too.
@@LordRenegrade Maybe, although I don't think it is that, I believe the ST is already palette switching to get more than 16 colours on screen, which is more likely the problem). With the Jag version (I'm not in anyway involved with the process), the chap who converted from the ST did find the bug and fixed it, and when I asked him the question what was going on he confirmed it was a render bug in the code (the thread was on atariage but seems to have gone walkies, perhaps for legal reasons, the jag version isn't official). I suspect it was the result of a rush job as the ST version was converted several months after the PC/ Amiga versions were released and the ST was dying on its arse at the time (although Braben was on record in ST Format suggesting there was less bugs in the Atari version...)
@@welliben - oh, okay. I wasn't aware the ST version came out much later - given the similarities (planar graphics, 68000), you'd think that the ST and Amiga ports would be done at roughly the same time. What prompted the delay? (and yeah, F:E2 has quite a few bugs, heh. you can see a bit of glitching on the Amiga side, which I vaguely recall from playing it)
@@LordRenegrade Probably just the end of the ST games market, think it has to be in the last group of big commercial games to make it along with Civilisation. After that it was a wasteland being an ST gamer ;)
Sadly as an Atari person I have to give this one to the Amiga. Normally I prefer the ST's retro sound compared to the corny Amiga mod tunes, but in this case it's a bad ST chip tune, the Amiga music is better. Also, the framerate is hardly any different (in some places the ST is a few fps higher), which is unusual. Lots of other 3d games where the ST has a noticably higher framerate, sometimes even higher than the 8% clockspeed would predict (why? I don't know. Amiga doing 32 colours? Music hardware, copper, blitter etc is using too many interrupts and slowing CPU down?)..... so anyway, the ST doesn't have a clear FPS advantage here either. You'd probably choose to play this on the Amiga if you had the choice.
Common guys support this Kickstarter project if you have fond memories of Frontier - www.kickstarter.com/projects/278860000/uncle-art-amiga-atari-st-etcgame-music-original-an/description
lol....... back in the days i was a member of the antiatari crew. =) nowadays i have 2 say both systems had her style...... (^_^) cheers G. 8-bit 4 the win! cheers
Yup - I was never a fan of the Amiga back then - but these days it's so much easier to be a fan, emulation has leveled the playing field. Back in the day, we backed the machine we had, whether it was out of date, the underdog, or an obvious winner - was the same with the 8-bits. These days that playground rivalry is between the consoles, and sometimes with ill-informed console gamers and PC gamers - but it's all good - we should be loyal to the systems and games that we like, facts about specification and user base etc were always secondary to our system loyalty... which often changed at Christmas when we got a new machine :D
An A1200 was a big improvement even stock, but add some extra RAM and it made the system ~2x faster than that. I have played it on an A500 with an 68020 @16MHz and it ran great.
The graphics muscles of the amiga were not applicable. The amiga has a bunch of custom hardware to do raster tricks and high speed blitting of 2d graphics. It has zero features for helping 3d calculations, that all falls back to the CPU and the CPU in the ST is 1 mhz faster than the amiga 500, as above due to the a500 CPU being the speed it is to access memory every other cycle that the custom chips do (and they are clocked to a speed appropriate for being in sync with TV signals). 3d games like Frontier, etc. are the wost case for both ST and amiga. All the hardware in them was built around 2d graphics and is mostly useless for polygons. Sure a blitter can help with polygon filling, but the big slowdown is calculating the points (and boundaries of the polygon to be filled) and the CPU in either machine just isn't enough.
I'm pretty sure the framerate issues could be resolved by running the game on a faster amiga like the a4000 or a1200, I kinda feel elite was designed with the 68030 cpu in mind
Kevin Jones You could turn the detail down for higher framerate, alternatively you could install some fast RAM (CPU-Only RAM that doesn't tie up the processor bus when the custom chips are accessing memory) for a small performance boost. If you ran it on an A1200 you could get a decent frame rate with high detail settings and on a machine with an 040 or 060 it was silky smooth at maximum detail.
Kevin Jones i played it, in the beginning on OCS Amiga with 32 Bit FASTRAM and 68020 CPU @ 14 MHz. It was playable. Late it run much smoother on my A1200 with 68030 @ 28 MHz
As a PC user i can say, both versions suck. The PC was superior in every aspect because of its raw power, VGA and Soundblaster support. The PC version had even first small steps of software texturing. And the later version Frontier: First Encounters looked even better.
ST noticable smoother. Still choppy, but moments on ST where it is almost Fluid, are still choppy on Amiga. You can clearely see that in 5:10 for exmple. Ship is rotating fluid on Atari, but still choppy on Amiga. Sound better on Amiga.
ST hardcore nutjobs. I love my ST and I often prefer the tighter sound of the chip music but these fans are deluded quite often. There's something to be said for the simply pure sound of music or sound effects running on an ST but its certainly not always the case. I rather like aspects of this particular tune on the ST perhaps even more than the Amiga but certain aspects are clearly awful compared to a much more consistent standard on Amiga. An ST nutjob will try to convince you that this machine is simply much better for sounding the way it does but the truth is both produced some amazing music versions when utilizing stengths. Xenon 1 for example just sounds more correct than the rather harsh Amiga version and Wanderer 3d for ST is simply brilliant in comparison the Amiga's probably ported using samples approach. Shadow of the Beast for the Amiga is rich in a way the ST just can't manage and Utopia demonstrates this also. G.n.i.us another example of something that just wouldn't sound so remarkble if written to chip. ST fans of this nature are full of shit
now imagine if Atari had offered a MIDI box (basically a keyboardless unit) to plug into MIDI out, leaving the ST soundchip to just handle FX. it could have been like, effectively, the soundcard of its time. Would've blown Amiga out of the water.
"if Atari had offered a MIDI box " Would Atari need to provide it? Could it not be any MIDI box with MIDI in and audio out? Kinda the "Ad Lib" card for the PC? Also, how much extra programming effort would it have been?
It seems everyone remembers how wonderful MIDI was but doesn't remember the price. The much spoke about Roland MT-32 (keyboardless unit) in 1988 cost $550 which is more than the cost of the ST! In comparison to the cost of a MIDI interface ~$30 that you could add to the Amiga it would not be a considerable cost difference.
Elite II is crap on Amiga/Atari ST with 68000/8Mhz, no discussion you need at least an Atari STE with 68000/16 Mhz or Amiga 1200/CD32 with 68EC020, of course best results on are on Atari TT, Falcon and Amiga 3000/4000. i wonder how Elite II would run an 68010 system, back in the days the 68010 was a cheap way to tune the system because it was about 95% backwards compatible to the 68000.
You can use the 68010 as a drop-in replacement for the 68000 in many cases, but it probably won't help, because the clock rate is the limiting factor here. Can confirm, on an Atari TT030, it's silky-smooth. On a Falcon, it's worth playing, but the gains aren't that impressive because the 68030 is on a 16-bit bus.
Commodore vs Atari Intel vs AMD Cybergraphics vs Picasso96 Nvidia vs Ati Sega vs Nintendon't Apple... oh boy are they trying to patent,sue and conquer the whole fucking market Sony vs Micosoft Adolf Hitler vs Darth Vader good vs evil I mean what is it about, all that fanboy crap? Make love not war. ;-)
Atari ST is an frame buffer without any custom co-prosessors like an amiga has. Therefore some ST games and demos shows some increbile effects on the CPU side, Do you know that its takes appox 40 % of CPU displayin 512 colors on FULL SCREEN? An amiga does it on harware.
@@shalroth Correct. You're reminding me that Atari and Commodore should have merged, instead of fighting over the budget enthusiast market, and sold an Amiga, with MIDI ports, with the option of a monochrome monitor, and GEM sitting on Amiga OS. ... sad
@@NameCallingIsWeak Oh, I wouldn't have said GEM was the way to go... WorkBench 2.0+ was much prettier than the GEM desktop and much more functional up until TOS 2.06, and even then it was fancier app launcher and slightly nicer file manager. Anyone that has experienced the pain that was GDOS will be able to relate... installable bitmap fonts and printer drivers? Eventually we had NVDI which used the same API hooks and gave us TTF fonts and proper printer drivers...
I loved this game. Played it on a fully upgraded cd 32, keyboard, hard drive and memory expansion and a lot of other stuff. I still get goosebumps watching that ship and hearing the awesome score.
We had this as a rolling demo for our 1040STE. It might not be much to look at now, but back in the day it blew my mind.
ST Format Cover Disk? (Jan 1994 I believe)I had that too. Still do, in fact. Shame it didn't make use of the STe's enhanced hardware as was starting to happen at the time.
@@shalroth Yeah, it was probably ST Format, as that was the mag my father was buying at the time.
Frame rate of ST was slightly faster, but Amiga's sound was much better.
STwas exactly same frame rates and sounds like crap was alot fraster on amigas 1200+ and on workstations 3000+ its just smooth
Dm TD I‘m an Amiga guy, bought the game for Amiga when it came out, but it‘s true: The ST frame rate was slightly higher. In most parts it’s barely noticeable, but in some it‘s easy to see. This is to be expected, as the ST has a slightly higher CPU clock.
@@dmtd2388 Exact !
@@dmtd2388 Jens is right, the Atari does have a faster CPU which does produce a slightly faster frame rate. Frontier was well made and has proper timing so the game plays at the same speed, just slightly more frames on the Atari. Other 3D games that do not include accurate timing but rather rely on the frame updates to govern the game world speed really show the difference. An intro sequence on those games would complete faster on the Atari. And one other game I used to play and have both versions on emulators is Federation Of Free Traders. That game takes advantage of the Atari's faster CPU by using the extra cycles to calculate colour dithering making the game look better! I have compared both side by side running both Amiga and Atari emulators at the same time (modern computers are such wonderful things!) and the Atari version not only looks better with dithering but has no errors in the rendering. The Amiga version uses all flat colours, no dithering, and the polygons often are not drawn properly leaving black sections where there should be colour! Very poor lol
I maybe 7 years after you but I was going to say the same lol
My dear sweet summer child... you have no idea how much I needed to see this. I played this game to death on my ST back in the day. I lost many months to it when I probably should have been studying for my GCSEs. I always assumed that it would look and play better on the Amiga than the ST because, well, every Amiga has a Blitter and it was only certain ST models that had one (my STe, the Mega and Mega STe, and the Falcon). I always assumed the Amiga version had better frame-rates because it would use the Blitter to fill the triangles. It would appear not - watching your video, the ST and Amiga appear to have very similar frame-rates.
I also have to say, without bias, that I think the audio is a bit nicer on the ST. the Paula PCM instruments on the Amiga soundtrack sound a bit harsh to me, and although the YM-2149 version of the ST music isn't as sophisticated, I think it's easier on the ear.
Of course, later on, I played Frontier on an Atari TT (32MHz clock) and Falcon030 (16MHz clock) and because the game is de-coupled from real-time, I got much better frame-rates than the Amiga 1200 (12MHz clock). But this video has given me a huge boost, that my A500 / A500+ / A600 owning friends back in high school weren't getting a fundamentally better experience than I was. That means a lot to me. Thank you!
From what I've seen, as I've not actually bothered to test it, it ran quite a bit better on the Amiga. I don't know why it's so choppy here. I guess I can pull out an old UAE emulator and find out. I've promised to setup an Amiga simulator for somebody anyhow. Took me a year and a day, literally, to get the correct Kickstart and Workbench, now I have to figure out which goes with which flavor of the machine, 1000, 500, 600, 1200, 2000, 2500, 3000.. fun.
@@fuzzywzhe no it wasnt, In fact my friend who owned A500 often went to my place to play vector based games like Frontier, Hunter or F1 GP, since it was barely playable on ST, but unplayable on A500. The difference is not day and night, but that 10-20% higher computing power of ST made it still playable to some degree in taxing scenes, while Amiga was a slideshow beyond any fun. Im not telling all the time, but its not fun if you cant hit the enemy space ship every time a planet or space station is in background, or if you cant negotiate a turn if there are more then 2 cars in picture...
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Not to argue too much, but compare Giana Sisters on the Amiga and the Atari ST.
Frontier I've seen, but I think it was on an A2000 or 3000, not a 500. I don't think Frontier was playable on anything. It was extremely ahead of its time. I have no idea what system that was programmed for that it worked well on.
I don't have much comparison. I knew in college people I knew with an ST would knock it a bit, but Test Drive II looked great on my computer, compared to the PC version.
It's all old hat now
@@fuzzywzhe Giana Sisters, you kidding no one played that children junk, OK maybe children did. Go and compare the STE version to Amiga... no difference. The regular ST port was just another lazy port from Amiga. Just compare GODS, much better then Giana Sisters. But all these platform games were on the way out in 1993. Use of fast bit block transfers for scrolling does not make the computer have higher computing power, blitter does not help you with polygonal 3d, just raw computing power and fast RAM access does. And ST has 10-20% more computing power then A500.
Frontier was actually developed and programed for ST in 1992 and ported by Dave Braben to Amiga, the PC version was Chris Sawyer, and all was released together in late 1993.
The PC version despite having texture mapping, was fluid on i486DX2@66MHz and you have to keep in mind that the game came out in Pentium 66 time. PCs didnt have to work with planar graphics so the engine was much less taxing and intel CPUs much much more powerful.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 You are kidding right? EVERYBODY played Giana Sisters, it was the Super Mario Brother's clone. The ST couldn't do side scrolling.
I don't want to re-ignite a USENet flamewar over which computer was superior, but the Amiga's versions of Giana Sisters was CLEARLY superior to the ST version.
No idea what "GODS" is.
All this crap is ancient history to me. I became an electrical engineer, all the "cutting edge technology" of that time, is old hat to me. The concept of sprites is now a software layer, they don't even bother to implement it in hardware now.
People have no idea where we are. In 2000, it was ILLEGAL to export a PlayStation 2 to Iran, because it could be used to make a Beowulf Cluster which could POTENTIALLY be used to do nuclear bomb simulation. You can do this on a $150 phone now.
I have more storage on a $20 SD Card than I did on an advanced, super expensive workstation in 2000. That SD Card can contain more information in text form than any human being LITERALLY can learn in a lifetime. I can lose that in my couch cushions.
The 1990's, 1980's? Today, it's like tubes in radios in 1980's. "Yeah, I remember that..." You can produce a literal cartoon now on a personal computer, I can render The Incredibles on my personal machine, that took an ARMY of machines in 2004.
What is left to do in technology? I can store a MONTH'S worth, 24x7 of films on a $20 SD Card which is perfectly viewable in a cineplex. What's left to do? We are SO FAR beyond where we were 40 years ago. It's astounding.
And people cannot appreciate where we are.
But we will continue to give you more and more power and information. You do what you will with it. Endless avenues. This is a real inflection point in our time. Even colleagues of mine cannot appreciate where we are. EVERYTHING you can learn in an entire lifetime, can be stored on an SD Card so small, it's smaller than a fingernail.
Ran awesome on my 386 DX40 with math co-processor and SoundBlaster! Ahhh, those were the crappy days...!
+GamleErik100
Yeah, but I had a math co-pro. Your argument is invalid. It was good for zipping stuff. :)
i had a DX2 66 processor with a dual speed CD-ROM Mega fast lol and Soundblaster still have the Elite II Cd Rom form back in the 90's but windows will not run it now. It was MS DOS run was'nt it ?
i stuck the mega midget racer in mine - made my amiga really fast at rendering lightsource graphics . I spent forever rendering crystal balls and checkerboard backgrounds ...
Mark Chancellor
Now you're just showing off. My mate had one of those, and it was an excellent Doom box.
Have you tried DOS Box?
If you had a compatible TV or monitor you could force a European PAL Amiga to run its display at NTSC frame rates and gain a 20% speed boost. I ran Frontier like that for years and had forgotten how slow it was on stock hardware.
But the CPU in the 68000-based Amigas ran at almost the same speed on both PAL and NTSC anyway (*) and the only reason many games ran slower under PAL was because they used the frame rate and inter-frame Vertical Blank Interrupt for timing and sync.
That's clearly not the case here since the frame rate isn't anywhere near 50 *or* 60 fps, and varies according to the level of detail.
So I'd assume- well, the only reason I can think of- is that possibly the main window was the same on-screen size under NTSC, but with fewer lines (rather than the alternative of the same number of lines being vertically stretched) so you were effectively trading off resolution for frame rate?
Anyway, while do I remember Frontier sometimes being a bit jerky on my stock A500 Plus when there was a lot going on, I don't recall ever remember it getting to the point where it was an issue or I had a problem with it. I think it comes down to expectations- full, solid 3D was impressive (I'd played the wireframe Mercenary on 8-bit), and if Frontier was a bit jerkier than Mercenary III at times, that's because it was more detailed and you *expected* that anyway.
I'm genuinely impressed that it ran as well as it did!
(*) And apparently a PAL machine in "NTSC" mode didn't change clock speed at all- it couldn't because it only had one timing crystal- so technically the "NTSC" output was marginally out-of-spec.
@@NotATube Sort of. The NTSC window wasn't the same physical size, it was letterboxed in the centre of the screen (or at least it was on the Hitachi TV I was using back in the day; I guess it's possible more expensive TVs could have stretched the image vertically). But yes, the display had roughly 20% fewer lines to draw and so the screen refresh was faster. I think this was using S-Video via SCART, but it could have been RGB.
Thanks to the Amiga doing everything through custom chips and dedicated circuitry, this gave a speed boost to the whole game while the CPU clock speed remained the same. Not all games could use this trick because of assumptions in their code about CPU and display timings, but _Frontier_ was very well behaved in this regard.
I can't recall whether the intro music also sped up, or lagged behind the visuals. I'm fairly sure it was the latter, but wouldn't want to put money on it.
The video mode was selectable from the two-button early boot menu present on ECS and AGA Amigas. There was also a utility that could do this in software when booting from floppy, but I don't recall the details other than I used it to make a _"Fast Frontier"_ disk that booted straight into NTSC. I remember lending a friend this disk, and his disappointment that it didn't work because his TV wasn't compatible with the non-standard signal.
I'm still fuzzy on some of this. It's seven years since I wrote the original comment, and thirty since I last used that setup!
Yes, when you decide from the start to not utilize the blitter, naturally an Atari game runs as fast on Atari ST as on Amiga 500 - both have the same CPU at basically the same speed. The Blitter is *much* faster than the CPU at drawing lines and filling polygons, but if you have a lot of small polygons this advantage decreases. If you used the full screen, the polygons would be bigger. Frontier, like most other 3D games, use a small screen (in the case of Frontier, a little more than half the screen area), and don't use the Blitter for polygons. Just because the Blitter chip is much faster doesn't mean game developers had time to use its potential in the few years of the 16-bit home computer games explosion, and the few games that did had a quite naive Blitter implementation.
I agree. I was talking about the computer that had a proper Blitter chip.
ScoopexUs The Amiga version didn't take advantage of the blitter? I was praising the ST porters for getting the frame rate so high compared to the Amiga version, but I guess I should have been berating the Amiga programmers for not taking advantage of the hardware instead.
The blitter did get quite heavily used on Amiga games and especially demos if I remember correctly. For 2D games it would allow you to have pretty huge sprites that could still draw at 50FPS (the gold standard for PAL amiga systems) so why would you not use it? Try looking at the VS video for Fire and Ice, I'm pretty sure the reason the Amiga version has a far smoother frame rate than the ST is down to the Amiga's blitter.
+ScoopexUs Imagine if you added 16 colours to the Amiga version -- 32 in all .. The amiga would kneel.
PassiveSmoking Yes, except programming teams were small and they should have paid for a proper port by an Amiga programmer instead, like they did for all other platforms for each game. But here was a chance to get two for one, and the result was that Amiga users got mostly ST games that didn't take advantage of the Amiga hardware. So, you have the direction wrong. ST games -> quick and dirty Amiga versions.
The games that were made to take advantage of the Amiga hardware did end up as bleaker counterparts on ST.
Loggins1969 Not really, with the accepted small screen size common to vector games and selected acceptable framerate. Vector games were rarely made to be action games. Also, I didn't criticize Frontier for having too few colors, nor do I think it would benefit from more colors apart from fewer occasional palette remap discolorings..
@ScoopexUS, If the amiga version had been released for a1200 so as to not only take some advantage of (A) the "blitter" but also to use 4meg trapdoor expansions with say (B) a 68030 of 40MHz and (C) an FPU (e.g. 33MHz 68882), What would have been the best way to use those 3 things all in conjunction, assuming a special version (maybe free on its CD) was written just for amigas which had all that? e.g Use its FPU for "filling" polygons? Blitter?
Played this on the A1200 and it was nowhere NEAR this slow. BUT, playing the music through MIDI was a real joy, provided you had something decent hooked up to it! :D
I was going to say that I remember it being smooth, but now I think back I think I acquired it after I bought an A1200. I put so much time into this one!
The big trick was to go into the early startup menu and switch from PAL to NTSC. The Amiga ran the game with much improved FPS that way. The best thing was to have an A3000 or A4000 with a 25Mhz 030 or 040 - it would run the game completely fluent.
The best thing was to play this game on a fast PC with 80486 processor, a VGA videocard and a soundblaster soundcard.
The verdict is in: They're both psychedelic nightmares.
Yet people still played it.
What game are you talking about?
Frontier is one of the very best games on the ST/Amiga.
If you're playing it on a 68000 machine, it's your own fault. I played it on the Falcon and it's outstanding.
Or would you play the newest Doom on a 486 PC and then write "Booh, lame game!"...?
@@Rauschgenerator Relax, chum. I was around for this era of gaming and I know they had limitations. Just poking some gentle fun at it... three years ago.
@@Rauschgenerator I played it on the A1200... it work well. On the A4000 it was AWESOME.
The A1000 was released in 1985 and that is the base hardware this game will run on (the A500 is a compact A1000). So 8 years later this game comes out and it doesn't run well and everyone is complaining "but it runs good on the PC" and yes it does on an 8 year newer system which is what every review showed it on.
It was released to run on the base Amiga just for sales not for it running reasonably. It should have been released as a base 68020 which would have shown the Amiga was still very capable and maybe pushed for people to bring there systems more up to date.
The game that taught me the hard way to back up my Amiga Save Game discs. love the tune though, so uplifting.
The ST music has no "punch"
The Amiga sound is outdated as hell while Blip Blop remains Blip Blop.
I played this as a kid on Amiga 500 I think. Incredible this animation and the whole game with an entire galaxy fitted on one floppy was it? Mine had a write error one day and it broke :( played it on PCs for few weeks or so every few years until recently.
How a galaxy fit in 880 Kb disk, this why i start programming in my childhood!
Was lucky enough to own both these awesome machines..
Was possible to set the detail in the game (not in the intro), i remember, to keep things a bit smoother: you did the test on maximum detail on purpose?
I'm an Atari ST fanboy having spent much of my childhood/teenage years with one, but I have to admit, the music for games was headache inducing! I really liked the Amiga but simply couldn't afford one, as the ST equivalent spec was three times the price!
Yes, the Amiga was way more expensive when it first came out and (unlike the 520ST) there was no "low-end" model at first. It wasn't until the Amiga 500 (more akin to the 520STFM than the original Amiga 1000) came out and *then* fell in price a bit that the Amiga got affordable enough to outcompete the ST.
You must have bought one of the early ST's. The Amiga 500 I'm pretty certain was cheaper than the ST, you dodged a bullet by not getting an Amiga 1000. The 500 had more memory, and most games were written for it.
@@fuzzywzhe Amiga was most of the time double or close to double the price of comparable ST. The situation changed with STE, which got comparable price to A500.
@@NotATube Amiga never outcompete ATARI ST, it traded blows and whistles, but never outcompete it. ST was most of the time notably cheaper and was a faster computer. Its amazing that such a small company as Atari Corp. could compete against behemoth Commodore once was.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I don't recall that being the case. I didn't know much about the ST at the time, but I seem to remember its cost being on par with the Amiga.
The Mac was drastically over-priced. That company sucks, but they have great marketing. Really, great marketing.
I should point out the Amiga 1000 and the original ST - both were pie in the sky unaffordable to me at the time, I don't know the prices. I knew them in the late 1980s.
The price of the Mac was always CRAZY to me, black and white screen, single button mouse, all the peripherals super expensive.. The two WORST systems survived. Acorn was better than the Mac and I would argue the ST - but I don't think the Amiga, however, I owned an Amiga, so I might be biased. It was an impressive machine. You can run AcornOS on a modern Rasbperry PI, it's pretty alien for me to use, but it's usable - Aros is NOT.
Windows made hardware cheap, Mac, it's all form over function, but it was a better system than a PC was up until about 2005 if you wanted to pay the price.
Cool. I played the Atari ST version on my 32mhz Falcon back in the day. Gorgeous it was! :)
I thought the faster CPUS would make it too fast in space, thus make it impossible to battle pirates etc?
No, just permits more frames to be drawn per second.
"I thought the faster CPUS" No, I first saw this on my 32MHz A3000, and it was liquid smooth.
"No, I first saw this on my 32MHz A3000, and it was liquid smooth."
Yeah, I have played Frontier on 3.2Ghz PC. It doesn't speed up the actual gameplay. It's only badly coded games that actually do that, it's very rare on professional games.
@@mmestari that's cause it's being emulated.
And the winner is..... the Acorn Archimedes
The rendering engine is identical, the PC version looks exactly the same too. I suppose you could say the music is better on the Amiga version but other than that it's all processor speed and the stock ST beats the stock Amiga on that front.
No. The PC version had a first glimpse of software texturing. And this was even improved in the later "Frontier: First Encounters".
I had it on A1200 and it was great. ST sound is terrible.
Same... Spent hundreds of hours on it on my 1200
I had an A1200 with a 50mhz 68050 and 68882 & 8mb expansion RAM, it was pretty good on that - don't think I would have wanted to play it without those though.
Yes neither the Amiga nor the ST were much good at 3d as neither of them supported a non-planar graphics mode in hardware so moving all those separate bit planes around was just too taxing, though both excelled in other areas... the ST not so much for sound apparently though! :-)
The ST sound is not terrible, it is different. For the time it fits better than the Amiga Tracker music which sounds dull.
@@10p6 lol. At that time (1993 !) ST sound was condidered rubbish. Amiga was and still is way ahead. Only some hardcore chip sound snobs can find the St sound better. Just ask anybody that isn't a posh geek to listen to both
Rofl these comments. And the war rages on to this very day.
Had Atari just DIED, the Atari "budget enthusiast" base would have gone to Commodore, and the Amiga would have lived past 1993.
If Commodore had let Jack have his sons take over, for example, WHO would have bought Atari and resurrected it?
I guess it's a hard habit to break!
@@NameCallingIsWeak Erm. Jack Tramiel was part of the problem, sad but true. Both for Commodore and Atari. And if Atari didn't go south, the Amiga would have been an Atari machine anyway. The if-when's to this period of time are rather brainless...
@@Rauschgenerator thanks. We all finally have hardware accelerated multi-tasking multi-media monsters, but it took 10+ years longer than it should have.
@@NameCallingIsWeak True, both for Atari and Commodore because Tramiel didn't know how this market works. You have a good computer: doesn't matter, instantly build the next one.
Developing games such as this on those stock machines is quite impressive really. Sure, Starfox runs better on a Snes, but with custom chips in the cartridge...so, I am quite impressed. Also, back in the day it was slow, but one did not even comment much on it, for that is how the game ran. Similarly, Golden Eye on the N64 had some very slow areas as well, but this game was acclaimed back in the day. We were just happy to experience a decent game, unlike today's hardware and game, where we are far too critical and quick at criticizing a software title's imperfections....sad really.
Starfox run better on a SNES but with custom chips as you said. This video show a game released in stock 1985 machines. On an A1200 or a Falcon, released same year that Starfox, game is much better because of faster CPU
Elite 2 was cancelled on the SNES because the machine didn't have the horsepower to run it without adding an expansive chip. Yet it does work on 1985 computers.
I remember it running beautifully on an A1200, although I may be remembering through rose tinted glasses...
The stock A1200 was about 2-3x faster than this due mainly to the 14Mhz 32bit CPU. I remember getting a 40Mhz card with 4Mb RAM and FPU and it was perfectly smooth 😁
The game wants the A4000 and Falcon.
+xyz12345 Agreed! It almost BEGS for them!
The game runs perfectly fine on any Amiga if it has fast enough CPU. A500, A600, A1200 or A4000... It does not matter. ;)
FYI, Frontier runs fine on A3000/030 at 25 Mhz with the 32-bit fast ram.
On a Falcon it's a bit meh... it runs a 68030 on a 16-bit bus. Best way to play on TOS is with an accelerator, or a TT030.
A graphical slideshow on both.
I don't know why this game is presented on the old 7-8MHz 68000 machines here. It was 1993, heck, the Mega STE, TT and Falcon have been out for years back then. I always played it on the Falcon, never got the idiotic idea to try this on the ST. You wouldn't try a 2021 PC game on a 486, don't you?
@@Rauschgenerator I find it odd that so many people will happily compare ST/Amiga vs PC and completely overlook that the PC they are comparing with costs many times more is many years newer. The ST/Amiga hardware shown here was originally from 1985 and it's like there was never any upgrades available for either system which overlooks the facts that there were CPU upgrades available and big box ST/Amiga systems with faster CPUs. If ST/Amiga comparisons only compared to an IBM 5150 nobody would take it seriously, but it seems the other way around is fine.
The Amiga's custom chips meant its sounds were far superior - RIP Jay Miner
That said, Elite II didn't really make good use of them.
oh my word - "custom chips". You couldn't be more specific and talk about how it is a smapler, no, you had to say "custom chips means its better". So vague.
funny fact, Atari ST had one custom chip more then Amiga, the Mega ST had two more custom chips then Amiga... now what?
Am I the only one who prefers St sound
Well I must admit, it does a certain rustic charm :D
No, I prefer the YM music too, and not because I was (and still am) an Atari Person, I've given up the playground battles of Spectrum vs. C64, ST vs. Amiga etc... I've learned to embrace the Amiga, but there's just something about the Chip-tune version of the theme tune that says "effort" while the Paula version just sounds a little bit lazy and harsh.
With games like this it's all about how quick you can draw to screen and the CPU grunt. The Amiga's CPU clock was set as a ratio of the timings required for video. So it was slightly slower than the Atari CPU clock.
So both version just use CPU? Does the ST version make use of the STE's blitter when used on one of those machines? The amiga version doesn't seem to use its blitter (it would be at least slightly faster than the ST version) so I don't think it does.
It does not. Same frame rate on STe (blitter), Mega ST (Blitter) and STm (no blitter) - I've tested this myself. The only way to make it smoother is with a faster CPU clock.
@@shalroth Ok. Thanks for the clarification.
ATARIIIIIIIIIIIII
oh i see the music is from both but the frame rate is identical?
They are not identical. When Amiga is 1fps, the st can go as high as about 1,06fps
Ran perfectly smooth even with 25 police vessels around on my ATARI Falcon + Afterburner040. :-)
Still with that crap audio?
@@pauldickhoff3594 It would be, the only enhancement from running it on a Falcon0x0 would be the frame rate.
Only 25?? Getting old??
Atari St sounds 8 bit. Thought it had midi music built in
MIDI is capable of a heap, but the ST only came with a midi interface (i.e., a port you could plug instruments or external synthesizers into). MIDI interface by itself doesn't do anything without a device. without an external midi device plugged in, the onboard audio on an ST is crap
The ST does have MIDI built in, but that doesn't mean that much, if you're outputting MIDI commands to a DX-7 compatible sound module you'll get thin 6-operator mono-timbral FM sounds. MIDI just tells the synthesizer what note to play and with which parameters. It's not a guarantee of sound quality.
No co processor?
The PC (DOS) version (with ROLAND MT-32 sound module) : th-cam.com/video/ncTopbi0dLo/w-d-xo.html
What's funny is that to create that sound with an MT32 cost around as much as an A500.
Love it! Video as well as audio comparison...
I would expect the Atari ST version to be slightly smoother, given it has an 8MHz 68000 and the Amiga has a 7.14MHz version of the same chip.
You shouldn't play this game on an 68000 machine anyway, use a 68020 or 68030 machine at least.
After all, the CPU speed doesn't play a role as the Amiga graphics chip has better access to the RAM than the ST has.
And one should never forget that the Amiga was WAY more expensive than the ST. I hate it that this is never being mentioned when ST and Amiga are being compared nowadays...
@@Rauschgenerator It's the same when comparing the PC, no-one mentions how much extra that PC cost compared to the ST and Amiga.
if i could change history, I'd go back and make the Atari ST chunky instead of planar pixels - it would have made for a more interesting contest..
I went with the amiga, but a 68000 on a chunky-pixel display would have been an interesting lower cost alternative.
Yup. Planar can help with fill speed though if you can fill multiple planes/pixels at the same time/same write (can on modeX VGA not sure if Amiga could?)
In either case I suspect they were bitplane based to save memory.
As far as I'm aware, planar mode was used- and made sense at that time- because storing all bits together on a single memory chip would have resulted in slower throughput than splitting it across multiple chips that could output simultaneously.
you have to understand that in the time Amiga and ST were engineered, RAM was very very expensive. Hell A1000 was sold with 256KB RAM... The planar graphics are much less RAM intensive then chunky, if you use less colours.
分厚いピクセル構成はSharpのX68000(68000 10Mhz)のグラフィックになります。
ぜひX68000にもコンテストに参加してもらいたかったのですが、日本では似たようなゲームがあったため、海外みたいに売れなかったと思います。
ただし、分厚いピクセル構成は描画速度の点では不利になるため、早い描画には向かなかったと思います。
音楽に関しては、サウンドブラスターより高性能なFM音源かMIDI出力が選べるため、80486PC並みに良いと思います。
What Amiga compared to the ST ? The 500 ?
Both systems appear toe to toe on graphics but a Amigas audio knocks it out of the park, far superior. I’m saying this as an Atari guy.
ST version is about 10-20% faster, big difference in space combat.
I had a pretty terrible PC (486-SLC-33Mhz) back then with a Soundblaster clone (Vibra 16) and 4MB RAM. Newer games such as Doom 2 ran relatively poorly, but older games like Elite 2, 4D Sports Driving, Test Drive 2, UFO : Enemy Unknown etc all ran amazingly smoothly.
About a year after buying the computer I upgraded the CPU to a 486-DX2-80Mhz and it grew wings!
suffice to say.. it runs as smooth as silk on my A4000T/060.. none of this slow jerky framerate rubbish..
Geof Grammonds Formula F1 game for atari and amiga was of course faster on polygon side, because it was kind of static, so you dont need Z-axis to rotate objects. That causes a LESS of stress for the cpu of course? I think Mr. Braben uses the same 3D core for both amiga and ST, because of the same CPU. So he did not use amiga blitter, because what i've heard, he said that its too slow for 3D calculations. That's why ST version might be little bit faster because of native CPU speed is slighty faster than amigas one. Just for my 50 cents, im not a coder.
Blitters are really only any good for sprites, they can be used to do good "3D" looking effects but not very useful for real 3D work. And many STs had blitters fitted (they were planned but not included the ST, with the STfm it was an official upgrade with an unpopulated slot on the mobo as standard) and they were standard on STe's ...
Mechanical Menace This game is based for pure for 3D, not blittin bitmaps. However, Mr. Braben did not use to amiga's bliltter to calculate 3D mathematics, just pure CPU based calculations. So when running this game that is based on the CPU, the ST version is faster based on the faster CPU clockrate.
killimolli "This game is based for pure for 3D, not blittin bitmaps"
Sort of my point.
"However, Mr. Braben did not use to amiga's bliltter to calculate 3D mathematics, just pure CPU based calculations."
Because blitters don't help with those types of calculations at all. Like I said if the graphics were pseudo 3d then blitters can help with the effect but writing into the framebuffer doesn't really allow for the sort of maths needed for real 3d. You won't be doing trig or vector manipulation on one. If a blitter would have helped he'd have defo added support for the ST BLiTTER, Braben was an ST fanboy and the ST BlTTER though underutilised can piss all over the Amiga OCS one.
Mechanical Menace That's right, the (Amiga) blitter would help with things like polygon filling, line drawing, rectangle copying. It knew nothing about 3d.
not a lot of hardware optimisation
+judgewest2000 No they just too slow, the game wants better hardware.
+xyz12345 i meant in terms of amiga vs atari, looked exactly the same just about
but totally agree, better hardware would be very complimentary
I don't think Elite II used any special Amiga chips (Blitter/Copper) which was a bit bad for the Amiga 68000 vs Atari 68000 as Atari's is clocked a little bit higher...
I think it could have been a wee bit faster with a bit of Amiga specific code (use of Blitter/Copper and so on). But then again it would have been limited if you got a 68030 or better I guess as the Blitter would have been the hog...
I would say the Blitter/Copper was of no use in these kind of 3d games.
For such 3d games you better bought a PC.
@@OpenGL4ever I disagree it would have made a small difference on the A500 (not a lot, but a small difference). Standard A1200 maybe a small difference, but in 93 sure most of us had 030/040 processors anyway.
Copper could have been used for different effects (as far as I know it is not used). Probably because of portability to Atari.
I would never in a million years trade my Amiga back in 93 for Win3.11/DOS box to play a game...
@@alexanderwingeskog758 It depends on the type of game you want to play.
If 3d simulations and games like this were your favourite genre then a PC was the best gaming machine at that time.
@@OpenGL4ever I did not do much playing on my Amiga back then. I did music, pixelart, programming, raytracing/modelling/animation and lots of other fun stuff.
@@alexanderwingeskog758 Fine.For ray tracing, the PC would have been a better choice because it was much faster.
At that time, VGA and even SVGA could already be used for pixel art.
And WinNT or OS / 2 would have been a good and stable OS for programming at that time.
Anyone seen it run on a Big Box Amiga with Cards in ?
Nice...
I ran it on my A3000 32MHz and it was smoooooth...
As usual. A port that doesn't use the Amiga's GPU to do poly fills.
Amiga GPU is not so fast (only ~2X the cpu in Amiga 500) and in case you have an accellerator card, it would make the game slower than it could be...
Amiga GPU? Nope... there is no such thing as Amiga GPU. And if you meant Blitter, it would make Frontier look uglier and slower.
This absolutely flies on my A500 with PiStorm.
LOL Waiting on the release date for that PiStorm was a killer (~20 years)
ROFL, it is running on modern computer that is using your Amiga as graphical terminal. Amiga fanboys are really something.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I know exactly what a PiStorm is which is why I bought one for my A500. Your description is also innacurate. My PiStorm is being used as a 68xxx emulator and storage device. All other Amiga hardware is in use. Not sure why the fanboy comment was dropped in.
@@Daz5Daz since a PiStorm is a full fledged parasitic computer, it can actually run Frontier without your Amiga and yes it will fly...
Sorry for the Fanboy remark, but usually die hard Amiga fans aka fanboys do not understand hardware and think that the Amiga is greatest computer that got some MoJo due to "accelerator", where the reality is that it is another computer doing the work and passing processed data to Amiga chipset, so yes your Amiga is just a graphical (to video and audio shifting degree) terminal for the Raspi, nothing special and any other computer can do it.
Maybe you just happy that you can run the Frontier at fluid frame rates, but you dont need Amiga for that at all, since you actually do not use it...
You maybe consider to either use you slow Amiga as is, or do not even bother to stress the old computer and play it on emulator at fluid frame rates...Hope you get my point now.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 good reply. I have always just liked having my hands on original hardware. Somehow playing Lemmings on my Pi 400 just isn't quite the same as using my A500. It's pure nostalgia.
i've played this game so long
Why are people giving the atari st so much hate for the quality of its music, yes it does use an outdated soundchip, but that's not really an excuse to pick on it, I think the music in frontier sounds amazing for the atari st, yes I think the amiga version kicks all asses, but the atari st version is amazing in its own way, it's just a shame frontier wasn't much fun to play, merely a tech demo that you had to pay for :/
I liked the st's sound chip music on this game however at stock 8mhz this game was hard to play combat not worth it until you got something like a tiger trader with a turret this game got sweet with a 28mhz 68000 accelerator board on my then Atari ste i got to deadly elite rating in this orignal elite zx speccy, ste, dangerous
There is a Dave Lowe Uncle Art Kickstarter up now for an Orchestral version of this, and various reproductions of Dave Lowe tunes over the years. Starglider, Carrier Command etc. I've already backed it. This tune done by a full Orchestra would be amazing!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/124468523/uncle-art-a-temporal-shift.
Panthers are cool. So is this Kickstarter :)
(I'm not knocking the powers of the ST's AY chip - I had a Spectrum 128 back in the day, and I love it still - but the Amiga soundtrack just beats the ST silly sound wise, at the cost of a handful of FPS)
It got done...and it's AMAZING! They even did a version of the video with Elite Dangerous.
i used to play this on pc back in the day, but just the opening intro has my nostalgia juices flowing...
At least a 68030 on both of the computers and some extra ram. That made the game so much better...
the game was not optimized on 68030/20, so a overclocked 68000 with some L2 cache does the same trick. MegaSTE is running Frontier about same fast as stock Falcon (it has L1 cache too, so slightly faster).
Credit where it's due, the ST team did a hell of a job getting the system to get an FPS that close to the Amiga version without the benefit of the Amiga's blitter and other hardware. But as usual, the sound kills it. The ST sound chip could probably qualify as a war crime.
I remember this being one of the games that really took advantage of faster systems. On the 1200 it ran smoother with a higher FPS but maintained the same realtime characteristics. Saw it running on a machine with an 060 accelerator once, it was unbelievably smooth for the time
(EDIT: Apparently the Amiga team didn't take advantage of the blitter and other custom hardware, so it really should be boo to the Amiga team instead)
PassiveSmoking The blitter and other Amiga stuff doesn't really help much when doing vector and polygon games. Hence why the CD32 had a chunky to planar chip.
6581 punk vector&polygon do not need C2P. Planar graphic is often even better (with some worse corner cases) for solid polygons then chunky gfx.
+PassiveSmoking As Amiga's HW is mostly useless for general 3D polygon rendering, no special effort is required to make ST version work with the same speed. And with same graphics routines, ST's CPU runs a little faster, due to, I believe, smaller amount of memory bus congestion on ST. Basically, ST is faster when specialized Amiga graphics hardware is out of the equation.
+Adam Klobukowski But for textures planar graphics is horrible, and this game does have textures in a few places. Also, advantages of planar polygon filling quickly disappear when polygons become smaller.
Frontier does not have textures on Amiga or ST, only on PC. I wrote previously, that planar polygons have some corner cases, small polygons being one of them, but Frontier looks very well optimized anyway - I think the bottleneck is geometry calculations here.
It's when you see stuff like this you realise how fast a modern PC is, even running something like GTA at 30fps feels sweet compared to the 3 to 5 frames a second this offered for the most part.
ST Wins. Has a faster frame rate, and the sound seems more fitting than the Amiga on this one.
Yeah faster, but still painful.. Upgraded models FTW! :D
@@GuruMediator Later on, even on my over clocked Falcon it was still Blah.
@@10p6 I saw this on my Amiga 3000-25, it ran and sounded amazing.
I played this game on my Amiga 3000 (030/882 at 25Mhz) with 32bit 4 MB fast ram and 2MB chip ram in the early 1990s.
The music on the ST could have been done better.
Sam The Multimedia Man Much better.You can find Atari St in multimilion studio recording
the ST had crappy on board sound. It was used in studios a lot because it had a built in midi interface (it was basically the cheapest machine you could buy with MIDI) and was used as a controller for externally connected audio hardware - NOT because of its built in audio capabilities. The built in audio was pretty crap.
Jethro Rose i know,i have a studio.;-)
Jethro Rose Many games have the option to use the midi out of the ST.Try this game with a yamaha tg500 or better a roland synth with the standard GM and listen:-)
sure. the ST didn't ship with any of those devices though.
i've run it with MT32 on PC
The CPU is about 12% faster on ST but it doesn't look 12% faster frame rate
There are a few instruction sequences that actually run faster on the Amiga due to more flexible memory access rules. It's not enough to make up for the difference in clock rate generally, but it closes the gap a bit.
combcomclrlsr True, there are major differences between the way you get from code in memory to moving 3D polys in screen memory but I only really noticed it in the tunnel sections of Starglider II. Maybe it's most noticeable in very large individual manipulation
MadCommodore Maybe the game is vsync'd so you get 50, 25, 16.6, 12.5 fps and nothing in-between. Something running at 12.5fps (1 rendered frame for 4 tv frames), you'll need to render 25% faster to reach 3 frames rendering threshold (50/3 = ~16.6fps)
The Amiga music just sounds naff, you can't beat 8bit sound for pure nostalgia
FM sound can sound good, but this is not one of those times. The ST music was a derivative of the Amiga tune and it just doesn't pull it off. When music is written for FM it can sound good, but FM sucks at emulating real instruments.
Daishi5571 FM can sound good, but the Atari ST doesn‘t have FM sound.
Also, this is no 8bit game. Why should 8bit sound be appropriate for it?
@@jensdroessler3575 the game is not 8bit, but the sound is. Even Amiga has 8bit sound.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I know the Amiga sound is 8bit PCM. That doesn‘t change the fact that people think of chiptunes when they hear „8bit sound“-
@@jensdroessler3575 well it is simple, people that want the retro feeling of long lost era of computing prefer the chiptune sound over sampled.
Its same as if you take some 1960s muscle car, but you would have electric motor in it... and then you compare it to current modern car with V8 Hemi, which sound/car would you prefer?
Also Paula has very limited range where the chiptune YM can hit the tones Amiga can just dream about. Basically people with good ears (musically) simply like the higher more open range of YM over muffled dull samples of Paula.
And the tune in Frontier is actually not very much the pinnacle of the chiptunes either, it servers it purpose, but the priority was the 3d speed, where ST shines over Amiga.
If you are willing to change your mind about chiptunes check out the work of Ultrasyd here in youtube.
And the battle continues!... :-)
1:0 for Atari for better framerate
+Arkadiusz Florczyk Framerate is same tbh, a CPU overclock might have helped.
They're both pretty unplayable at that framerate, so it's hardly a win to be proud of. It was about playable on the A1200, and really needed a 68030 to be nice. I'm sure an '030 ST would be as smooth too, though without the extra graphical details and the decent sound of the Amiga's version.
*Arkadiusz Florczyk* How many frames ? Is it 2 ? Both versions are stuttering .
Yes, but atari mc6800 have 8mhz and amiga mx6800 have 7.16mhz - so atari st will be a little bit faster ;)
Oh yes! 5 fps against 4 fps. That makes Atari version better, shitty music like from 8 bit computers but better framerate (and you are only one uberhuman on earth which can tell the difference since both wersions framerate sucks incredibly. And stop copy and paste it on every Amiga vs ST video :D
on my old a500 with viper 530 it runs flawlessly, legendary game !
The PC wins this one...
In 1993 a low-end 486SX @ 25MHz would set would set you back ~$1400 and a high-end PC ~$3500+ Amiga A600 (comparative to the Amiga used in the comparison) $299. But here's the real kicker, many PC's back then didn't have sound cards and had lousy graphics cards not capable of running this, it was only the newest PC's that had that. And let's not forget PC's were still stuck running DOS :-(
@@daishi5571 Not true. Frontier Elite 2 was designed to run on a 286 with 2MB of RAM, a 486 would have been major overkill. You are right about the sound card thing though, it was only around 1993 when the concept of a ''multimedia PC'' just started to gain traction. Graphics cards did not matter much as most games used software rendering, anyway this game was not able to run in higher resolutions. Amiga was ahead of its time for sure, but the PC was snapping at its heels and would overtake in a few years.
@@sl9sl9 Elite 2 wasn't designed for the PC (Which BTW has a minimum requirement of a 386 I'm guessing if it runs on a 286 it runs like in this video) it was written by David Braben himself for ST/Amiga and then converted to PC afterward. With the base model ST/Amiga running a 68000 7-8MHz he made sure it would run on that (abet not optimally) with the design for faster processors (68020+). It took a much faster MHz 286 (probably 12-16 MHz) to compare to the original ST/Amiga which by 93 were replaced with higher spec systems (68020, 030 and 040 which is overkill) Elite 2 on an original Amiga was not a good experience (probably the same on a 286) with frame drops so low as to make it unplayable at times but played even on a base spec A1200 played quite well, but add even 1MB of RAM made it real smooth.
So I took a look again at what was going on in 1993 (I'm English so I have a TARDIS) In Jan 1993 I couldn't find a single 286 system advertised, the 386 was just about dead and even the 486SX was being squashed by 486DX (and rightly so as it was vastly better designed than previous models). That is what I was looking at, not that you couldn't possibly have played this on an older system but what ppl were buying at the time. Also the game supported MCGA & VGA so the video card was very important, as which everyone who remembers were a crapshoot on compatibility (IBM may have said what the MCGA & VGA "standard" was but some cards did there own thing with it) it was only when SVGA came out that a real standard appeared, VESA made it much better for everyone (it may not have been a big issue with this game, but others suffered), but it took a good while for it to become the "standard". I checked and most 286 systems had CGA or EGA so VGA would have been an upgrade requiring an even more powerful processor (higher MHz) to run well.
Where the PC won was ppl's willingness to upgrade (kind of a requirement really). Whereas most Amiga owners just didn't feel the need as it was a complete package from the go. That I think is where it really went wrong for the Amiga.
Just for addition the A1200 was $599 in 1992.
@@daishi5571 Yeah, we had this on a 386 in 1993 and it got much better framerate than this with texture mapping.
It was £1000 compared to a £300 A600 or STE. A £3500 PC in 1993 would have been cutting edge overkill. A 486 DX4 100, probably. Which feels abo0ut right for the change in performance, if not space on your desk. Alternatively, you could compromise with £500 for a A1200 or £700 for a Falcon for a better frame rate still not matching the 386 and no texture mapping.
Before PCI, the PC sucked at games. there was no justification for paying double/triple for inferior games - the only ting it had was memory. PCI changed everything, basically. Once it could move graphics quickly it left the ST and Amiga - upgrades or not - in the dust.
Run this on 1200+ and its fine PCs and Apple where back at there stone ages back then compared to High end Amiga workstations 3000+ 4000+ that was used even tv series or for Holywood movies example first CGI best in history Jurassic Park 1992 for pre render and then render and final render on Silicon Graphics Farms
I thought the amiga had a blitter?
It does and it worked great. However vectors are done in math, and the blitter doesn't help with that. When your CPU can only mathematically render single digit frame rates even the best blitter not going to save you.
i see so the blitter if anything hinders 3d vectors as the processor w2as slower in the amiga than the st?
is the music from the amiga or the st version?
no, the blitter doesn't hinder anything, it's just a lot of the slowdown is because of the calculation of 3d points which the blitter can't help with. the amiga and ST were made in a time before 3d graphics were common, and the 3d calculations require maths that none of the processors in either machine are good at. For fast 3d you really want a maths co processor
Video has both versions of music. It says "mute" on the Amiga side when ST music starts playing and vice versa.
Must have not used Amiga custom hardware. CPU intensive
no, the amiga simply has no hardware that can handle 3d calculations very well. the PCs of the day had higher clock rate and 486 onwards had a built in math co processor. the Amiga and ST did not.
Not true - Calculation yes - no great acceleration there. Still Blitter is able to draw lines and fill shapes while the processor is doing something else. It does take some preparation to use and may not be good for small shapes. A good use of blitter would have increased the frame rate on Amiga quite a bit. In this game there is no blitter used and the Amiga code is nearly identical to Atari one.
@@JethroRose - math co-processor is basically useless in gaming until well over a decade later. Most games of this era eschewed floating point calculations and used fixed point instead - which is done with integer instructions on the integer registers. That's why when Intel released the MMX SIMD instructions, they were integer-ONLY. Heck, SSE itself (all the way up to the most current implementations) still support integer mode to this day.
I got involved with the AMD K6-2 line, which had much better floating point capabilities than the Intel equivalents, but it turned out to not matter at all as the K6-2 had crap integer performance and all 3D games were integer(fixed-point)-only. By the time floating point mattered, the K6-2 was long gone, and the 486 only remembered by tales told by ancient grognards.
80486 higher clock rate was necessary for it to keep up with the 68030, and until the DX4 designs, there was no match for the integer-handling power of a 68030 @50mhz. Plus, y'know, pure 32-bit design over the 486's "I LIAK SEGMANTZ AND BOTING IN REEL MODE IS KEWEL" window-licking idiocy.
Bonus: I still use integer-heavy designs in my own code and they actually pull ahead of pure-floating point designs even today. Why? The modern CPU still has more integer execution ports than FP, and my code uses both, not _just_ the FP ports.
@@LordRenegrade Quake (which didn't just need an FPU really, it needed a pipelined FPU) came out in 96. Elite 2 came out in 94.
@@JethroRose - Well, Quake is a bit of an outlier (and very advanced for it's time..and not super playable until the glQuake versions), and F:E2 is from '93.
If you want crazy outliers, I was working on a 3D engine for the C64 in floating point in like '86 or thereabouts. It didn't work out too well though, for obvious reasons (just having something MOVING in 3D space without ANY drawing took forever).
Keep in mind with stuff like MMX floating around, FPU usage was problematic in those days (also **cough** consoles). Plus the P5 had some asinine restrictions on what could and could not be executed and when, to the point where advanced integer and (all) FPU instructions clash. That's why the 68060 was able to tear both P5s and P6s new ones even though the '060 had abysmal FPU performance in comparison.
thats awesome, i always thought the amiga looked better but in truth they just had fancier sound chips! i actually prefer the atari version of the music! maybe just because thats the version i played all those years ago lol
Ugh. I'm glad I had an A1200 by then. :S
I am glad i had a 486 with VGA and soundblaster by then when this game was released.
Sounds like a comparison of NES and SNES music
Nobody ever talks about the technically superior DOS version, if you had a good sound card that wasn't half bad.
GamleErik100 Yeah I actually hated the texture mapping. I think it looked awful.. better to have the smooth clean lines than have an Cobra that looked like it was wearing a cat skin coat..
The PC version is much better, except for the music. It's horrible and the autoplay doesn't work correctly.
I was never able to free up enough conventional memory to get the PC version to run... must try DOSbox.
Think it runs crap on both systems. Whether one has better music or the other has slightly better frame rate both them systems were toys. It was probably written on the Archie system like most of Davids other games. Acorn which was a powerhouse at the time for 3D. It was never released on the Archie. But a release of Elite was. Its the best version by far. Hope that helps.
I'm going to be controversial here and say that time has been kinder to the ST's chip music than to the Amiga's fuzzy samples. Sometimes stylization wins out.
Graphics wise, Amiga and Atari ST were virtually identical. I couldn't tell the difference if I tried. :)
I couldn't stop myself from laughing when I heard the music from the ST, hahahahaha It hurts!!! seriously!
I'd never heard the ST version until now. I suppose that's what you get when you have the same sound chip as the Spectrum 128 machines. Bloody awful. :) Blimey! I've just noticed your name. I'm a MacKenzie too, but with the Mac instead of the McK!
+Ian mckenzie I actually like the chiptune music of the ST I don't know why...
The STs sounds just like a chip time should in a computer game of that era. The Amigas low frequency samples just sounds poor in comparison..like trying to listen to a orchestral performance through the hissiest poor quality Walkman you can find
The amiga could do chip just as well if not better than the ST but had the option of 4 channel digital samples built in. The on-board amiga sound hardware was miles ahead of the ST no question. It didn't have an onboard midi port but most people never used the midi on the ST anyway unless they were a pro musician because MIDI gear was expensive.
No. The Amiga's sound hardware, Paula could only play samples.
When the pictures look the same the ST does indeed look a tad smoother, but this isn't true all the time. The Amiga version draws more stuff sometimes. Just look at this: i.imgur.com/ZyeIPP4.png
That's a bug apparently. The ST is drawing those clouds but they are not displayed for some reason iirc, when this (ST version) was converted to the Jaguar the clouds were switched back on.
@@welliben - OCS/ECS Amigas selected the colors for their CLUT from a 4096-color palette, whereas the ST could only draw from a 512-color palette. It's likely those clouds or whatever in the background were too close to the background color and thus were either skipped, or aren't visible as a result. AGA Amigas enhanced that to full 24-bit palettes (as opposed to 18-bit for competing designs like the Falcon or VGA), although I don't think there's an AGA-specific Frontier: Elite 2. The Jaguar likely didn't have the same limitations as the ST and could thus show those clouds too.
@@LordRenegrade Maybe, although I don't think it is that, I believe the ST is already palette switching to get more than 16 colours on screen, which is more likely the problem). With the Jag version (I'm not in anyway involved with the process), the chap who converted from the ST did find the bug and fixed it, and when I asked him the question what was going on he confirmed it was a render bug in the code (the thread was on atariage but seems to have gone walkies, perhaps for legal reasons, the jag version isn't official). I suspect it was the result of a rush job as the ST version was converted several months after the PC/ Amiga versions were released and the ST was dying on its arse at the time (although Braben was on record in ST Format suggesting there was less bugs in the Atari version...)
@@welliben - oh, okay. I wasn't aware the ST version came out much later - given the similarities (planar graphics, 68000), you'd think that the ST and Amiga ports would be done at roughly the same time. What prompted the delay?
(and yeah, F:E2 has quite a few bugs, heh. you can see a bit of glitching on the Amiga side, which I vaguely recall from playing it)
@@LordRenegrade Probably just the end of the ST games market, think it has to be in the last group of big commercial games to make it along with Civilisation. After that it was a wasteland being an ST gamer ;)
ahh.... I see the Amiga did indeed have superior graphics...... thats why I traded in my ST for an Amiga..... no regrets....
Sadly as an Atari person I have to give this one to the Amiga.
Normally I prefer the ST's retro sound compared to the corny Amiga mod tunes, but in this case it's a bad ST chip tune, the Amiga music is better.
Also, the framerate is hardly any different (in some places the ST is a few fps higher), which is unusual. Lots of other 3d games where the ST has a noticably higher framerate, sometimes even higher than the 8% clockspeed would predict (why? I don't know. Amiga doing 32 colours? Music hardware, copper, blitter etc is using too many interrupts and slowing CPU down?)..... so anyway, the ST doesn't have a clear FPS advantage here either.
You'd probably choose to play this on the Amiga if you had the choice.
i hate that low quality 8 bit samples on amiga
Amiga can't play 16-bit samples.
Nice slideshow.
Common guys support this Kickstarter project if you have fond memories of Frontier - www.kickstarter.com/projects/278860000/uncle-art-amiga-atari-st-etcgame-music-original-an/description
Dosbox, eMac G4 and a real MT32 is the way! Sounds, runs and looks better..
lol....... back in the days i was a member of the antiatari crew. =) nowadays i have 2 say both systems had her style...... (^_^) cheers G. 8-bit 4 the win! cheers
Yup - I was never a fan of the Amiga back then - but these days it's so much easier to be a fan, emulation has leveled the playing field. Back in the day, we backed the machine we had, whether it was out of date, the underdog, or an obvious winner - was the same with the 8-bits. These days that playground rivalry is between the consoles, and sometimes with ill-informed console gamers and PC gamers - but it's all good - we should be loyal to the systems and games that we like, facts about specification and user base etc were always secondary to our system loyalty... which often changed at Christmas when we got a new machine :D
stunthumb i agree 100% =)
Agree as well. I am and have always been a 100% Amiga dude, but I can appreciate the ST a lot. It really had its own style.
My version of the Amiga was a lot smoother than this can't remember which version of the Amiga I had
An A1200 was a big improvement even stock, but add some extra RAM and it made the system ~2x faster than that. I have played it on an A500 with an 68020 @16MHz and it ran great.
The Amiga version seems an adoption from ST. The graphic muscles of the Amiga was wasted.
The graphics muscles of the amiga were not applicable. The amiga has a bunch of custom hardware to do raster tricks and high speed blitting of 2d graphics.
It has zero features for helping 3d calculations, that all falls back to the CPU and the CPU in the ST is 1 mhz faster than the amiga 500, as above due to the a500 CPU being the speed it is to access memory every other cycle that the custom chips do (and they are clocked to a speed appropriate for being in sync with TV signals).
3d games like Frontier, etc. are the wost case for both ST and amiga. All the hardware in them was built around 2d graphics and is mostly useless for polygons. Sure a blitter can help with polygon filling, but the big slowdown is calculating the points (and boundaries of the polygon to be filled) and the CPU in either machine just isn't enough.
The ST version was the last version from the PC/ ST/ Amiga produced so that (tired) excuse is not going to wash...
On both machines this game was a jerky slow unplayable mess. Huge in scope, terrible in execution
I'm pretty sure the framerate issues could be resolved by running the game on a faster amiga like the a4000 or a1200, I kinda feel elite was designed with the 68030 cpu in mind
Kevin Jones You could turn the detail down for higher framerate, alternatively you could install some fast RAM (CPU-Only RAM that doesn't tie up the processor bus when the custom chips are accessing memory) for a small performance boost. If you ran it on an A1200 you could get a decent frame rate with high detail settings and on a machine with an 040 or 060 it was silky smooth at maximum detail.
Kevin Jones i played it, in the beginning on OCS Amiga with 32 Bit FASTRAM and 68020 CPU @ 14 MHz. It was playable. Late it run much smoother on my A1200 with 68030 @ 28 MHz
sputnik1969berlin Same for the Falcon. However running it on a stock A1200 is normal, but using accelerators I class as cheating.
+Kevin Jones On 386DX33 way faster with more detail, but for being completely smooth, required fast 486, I think.
Elite 3
As a PC user i can say, both versions suck. The PC was superior in every aspect because of its raw power, VGA and Soundblaster support.
The PC version had even first small steps of software texturing. And the later version Frontier: First Encounters looked even better.
ST noticable smoother. Still choppy, but moments on ST where it is almost Fluid, are still choppy on Amiga.
You can clearely see that in 5:10 for exmple. Ship is rotating fluid on Atari, but still choppy on Amiga.
Sound better on Amiga.
Definitely Amiga...
God, that ST music. That SHITTY ST music. xP
This game was not great on base hardware. It WAS great on cpu accelerated machines!
ST hardcore nutjobs. I love my ST and I often prefer the tighter sound of the chip music but these fans are deluded quite often. There's something to be said for the simply pure sound of music or sound effects running on an ST but its certainly not always the case. I rather like aspects of this particular tune on the ST perhaps even more than the Amiga but certain aspects are clearly awful compared to a much more consistent standard on Amiga. An ST nutjob will try to convince you that this machine is simply much better for sounding the way it does but the truth is both produced some amazing music versions when utilizing stengths. Xenon 1 for example just sounds more correct than the rather harsh Amiga version and Wanderer 3d for ST is simply brilliant in comparison the Amiga's probably ported using samples approach. Shadow of the Beast for the Amiga is rich in a way the ST just can't manage and Utopia demonstrates this also. G.n.i.us another example of something that just wouldn't sound so remarkble if written to chip. ST fans of this nature are full of shit
Atari ST audio was ridicolous, compared to the Amiga one! 😁😁😁
now imagine if Atari had offered a MIDI box (basically a keyboardless unit) to plug into MIDI out, leaving the ST soundchip to just handle FX. it could have been like, effectively, the soundcard of its time. Would've blown Amiga out of the water.
"if Atari had offered a MIDI box " Would Atari need to provide it? Could it not be any MIDI box with MIDI in and audio out? Kinda the "Ad Lib" card for the PC? Also, how much extra programming effort would it have been?
It seems everyone remembers how wonderful MIDI was but doesn't remember the price. The much spoke about Roland MT-32 (keyboardless unit) in 1988 cost $550 which is more than the cost of the ST! In comparison to the cost of a MIDI interface ~$30 that you could add to the Amiga it would not be a considerable cost difference.
The ST "music" is so ridiculous...
Elite II is crap on Amiga/Atari ST with 68000/8Mhz, no discussion
you need at least an Atari STE with 68000/16 Mhz or Amiga 1200/CD32 with 68EC020,
of course best results on are on Atari TT, Falcon and Amiga 3000/4000.
i wonder how Elite II would run an 68010 system,
back in the days the 68010 was a cheap way to tune the system because it was about 95% backwards compatible to the 68000.
You can use the 68010 as a drop-in replacement for the 68000 in many cases, but it probably won't help, because the clock rate is the limiting factor here.
Can confirm, on an Atari TT030, it's silky-smooth. On a Falcon, it's worth playing, but the gains aren't that impressive because the 68030 is on a 16-bit bus.
Commodore vs Atari
Intel vs AMD
Cybergraphics vs Picasso96
Nvidia vs Ati
Sega vs Nintendon't
Apple... oh boy are they trying to patent,sue and conquer the whole fucking market
Sony vs Micosoft
Adolf Hitler vs Darth Vader
good vs evil
I mean what is it about, all that fanboy crap?
Make love not war. ;-)
wow! st sounds like a nes xD
And Amiga like a 1980's telephone connection^^
Atari ST is an frame buffer without any custom co-prosessors like an amiga has. Therefore some ST games and demos shows some increbile effects on the CPU side,
Do you know that its takes appox 40 % of CPU displayin 512 colors on FULL SCREEN? An amiga does it on harware.
Not much in it but the sound on st is terrible
Damn the ST version has bad music - like a PC internal speaker.
3 channel sound, no hardware provision for sampled sound like the Amiga, until the Falcon.
@@NameCallingIsWeak Actually, the STe could do that... four channels of hardware DMA audio at up to 50KHz in stereo, on top of the YM-2149 sound chip.
@@shalroth Correct. You're reminding me that Atari and Commodore should have merged, instead of fighting over the budget enthusiast market, and sold an Amiga, with MIDI ports, with the option of a monochrome monitor, and GEM sitting on Amiga OS. ... sad
@@NameCallingIsWeak Oh, I wouldn't have said GEM was the way to go... WorkBench 2.0+ was much prettier than the GEM desktop and much more functional up until TOS 2.06, and even then it was fancier app launcher and slightly nicer file manager. Anyone that has experienced the pain that was GDOS will be able to relate... installable bitmap fonts and printer drivers? Eventually we had NVDI which used the same API hooks and gave us TTF fonts and proper printer drivers...
@@shalroth Whether TOS 2.06 or Workbench 2.0+, with double the engineering budget, we would have had something much nicer than either. Sad.