by mrandish | 2025-06-03 19:30:23+00:00
> excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor

While that was an advantage for the Atari ST, the Amiga standard desktop was in a non-interlaced 640 x 200 4-color mode that could do 80 x 24 text for productivity apps (word processing, spreadsheets) as well as decent graphical interfaces for creative tools like video editing, 3D rendering and music sequencing. Of course, having 200 more vertical lines would enable some increased detail assuming the app GUI supported it but it wasn't a huge difference (and on the Amiga the colors could also be useful for GUIs).

All the Atari owners I knew opted for the color monitor (which had the same limit of 640 x 200 res and 4 colors (from a smaller palette than the Amiga)) but I didn't know anyone solely dedicated to music production. Given the vast majority of ST systems had color monitors, I assume the Atari's music software interfaces were designed to work with 640 x 200 as well as 640 x 400. Not having used those tools on the Atari I don't know if the publishers went to the trouble of creating separate GUI screens that significantly utilized the extra 200 vertical lines for 640 x 400 monochrome monitor owners to fit more information into fewer different screens or if the increased vertical res just made the text edges look nicer.

On the Amiga virtually no software ever ran GUIs in interlaced mode because high-contrast single pixel horizontal lines would flicker. The Amiga interlaced modes were used for displaying organic content like photos and video, which didn't have any elements that flickered (or, at least, not any more than organic imagery on a high-quality TV). Some software used the Amiga's hardware support for switching resolution modes mid-screen to show interlaced 640 x 400 content on the top with 640 x 200 GUI on the bottom. With the Amiga 3000 and 4000 Commodore added support for 31.5 Khz non-interlaced 400 line monitors. Commodore did release the A2024, a non-interlaced super high-res monochrome monitor for all Amigas in 1988 in 15-inch and 19-inch sizes. It displayed 1024 x 800 in 8 grayscale tones, however it wasn't very popular and little software other than the Amiga OS, desktop publishing and word processing ever redesigned GUIs specifically to exploit the A2024's increased resolution.

My two points being: 1. I agree having the option of the monochrome non-interlaced monitor was a definite advantage for the Atari ST vs the Amiga but it wasn't an advantage for most Atari ST users because most chose the Atari color monitor (except for some dedicated music or DTP installations). 2. Interlaced mode on the Amiga wasn't a disadvantage vs the Atari, it was a feature imaging, animation and video software could optionally use to display organic image content. I bring this up because I once saw an Atari ST fan put the Amiga into interlace mode and show the desktop windowing GUI (which flickered) as an "Aha, gotcha!" example, which was silly because interlace mode was never meant to display interfaces nor did Amiga users use it that way (in fact, the Amiga desktop GUI looked vertically squished in interlace modes until the OS was redesigned to support higher vertical resolutions with the release of the A2024 monitor, A3000 & A4000).

Anyway, my goal isn't to rehash an ancient 'platform war' no one cares about anymore because I don't even care about it anymore. I currently still own three different models of Amiga AND three different models of Atari ST and I love them all. There were a few scenarios where the ST had real advantages over the Amiga but they were limited to a smaller subset of users primarily in music and DTP. The overwhelming advantage of the ST over the Amiga was price. And dollar for dollar, the ST was a remarkably capable system at a tremendous value. However, the Amiga simply had better hardware (at a much higher price until the A500). The Atari was designed over a period of 5 months out of off-the-shelf components to be a low-cost leader, while the Amiga was designed over three years with highly sophisticated custom chips and the A1000 sold (initially) at almost twice the price. Of course the Amiga was better at more of the things most of the target users cared about. Arguably, the most favorable Atari ST + monochrome monitor comparison in 1985 is with the Mac for dedicated desktop publishing use cases. It was 1/3 the price ($800 vs $2500), had more memory, higher resolution and a large monitor. There was no DTP-relevant spec the Mac was better at although, arguably, the ST's keyboard was a notable weakness in all use cases.