16) What do/did you think of the Atari ST in general, compared to other machines? Well, this has caused me a couple of issues here and there. The Atari ST is no Amiga. And, no huffing and puffing could ever make the ST anywhere close to the capabilities that the Amiga had. Mind you, I loved the simplicity of the ST. It was a hard challenge to make it perform even close to the level at which the Amiga could perform. Lemmings was an interesting test. The Amiga was blessed, from the start, with a blitter. It was an excellent little piece of hardware. The ST got one at a later stage. However, the ST did have the advantage of being about 10% faster than an Amiga, processor wise. Lemmings involved up to 120 small 8x8 sprites. The amount of time it took to set up the BLITs on the Amiga was significant, so the cost of rending a sprite was somewhat similar. In the end, the Amiga could render about 120 lemmings before dropping from 25fps. The ST, hit that limit at round 90. Not that bad at all if you ask me. Compared to the other machines that were available at the time, the Atari ST was quite powerful. The PC had crappy CGA style graphics, if you were lucky. The biggest threat to the ST was the Amiga. Mind you, both of them got side-swiped by the Mac. If either had gotten in to the Educational market, we may still be talking about Atari (the REAL Atari) or Amiga today. Unfortunately, both of them got scuppered by bad marketing. Today, of course, we�re dominated by the PC. Unfortunately, of all the machine designs that were around at that formative time, the PC was definitely the most clumsy and ugly. The choice of that damn 8086 processor has haunted us since. DAMN YOU IBM!
