[Coco] [CoCo] Atari and Amiga comparison

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 14 March 2007, RJRTTY at aol.com wrote:
>People
>
>In the course of adapting my  converter to these machines I have
>had to acquire them for testing  purposes.    Because of this I have
> been able to compare them  personally with the coco3.  I have always
> wanted one of these machines  because of all the "hoopla" in the press
> about them when they came  out.   A number of things discouraged me
> from owning one at the  time.   Price, the fact that I already had the
> coco3 and a limited  amount of time available to become familiar with
> another machine.   Little things like that and the biggy "I just never
> got around to  it".
>
>Well I have them now and I have to tell you I am  not all that
> impressed. Don't get me wrong.   The 68000 was a great  processor in
> its day and these machines were great advancements to personal 
> computing but I think the coco3 compares favorably with them.    They
> didn't display more simultaneous colors than the coco tho they had 
> bigger palettes. The Amiga had the "HAM" mode but it was convoluted and
>  inconvenient to use.  Sock's enhanced display modes for the coco3 are
> as  useful and show more colors.   Great for still images like the 
> Amiga HAM  mode.
>
>I guess they just don't live up to the  mystique that surrounded them
> for me at the time.   In my opinion,  the 6809 ( and 6309 now) was
> still a viable alternative during the 68000's  prime.  The only thing
> missing in the coco3 was 8 bit task registers  that could allow it to
> access 2 meg ram natively and 8 bit palette registers  for a 256 color
> palette.   But even without these the coco3 held it  own with these
> machines and seemed more appropriate for the experimenters  among us to
> use for special purposes.
>
>The one thing I  like the most about the Amiga is the internal disk
> drive and the external  power supply.    I think my next personal
> project will be to put  a
>1.44 M drive into a coco3 enclosure and modify it for use with an 
> external 12V "brick" type power supply.   The same thing Bob did on 
> his website.
>
>What I am saying is I don't think I  missed much.  Looking back on it
> now I am glad I was a coco  person.  No regrets.  See you all at the
> fest.
>
>Roy

I wish I was coming.

As for the amiga, the later (1200-4000's) ones did do a lot more colors 
and we used them for generating broadcast video for several years, 
including live during the news.  However, none of them really came into 
their own visually like one of the original 2000's, with an accelerator 
card such as a 68040 based one, with 32 to 64 megs of main dram available 
to that 68040 cpu, and with a Picasso-II video card.  That was an old 
cirrus logic video chipset, with only 2 megs of video ram, running at vga 
scan rates, but it was so much better than stock you would never guess 
you were looking at an amiga screen.  For broadcast video, the 'toaster's 
video was plenty good enough for NTSC video as we normally ran that at 
720x440.

The last cocofest I was at, I bought an ST of some sort, but the tube in 
its little 12" monitor was gone, so I may see if I can make an adapter 
for your converter and use it on that, someday when I'm plumb out of 
honeydo's & all caught up on the linux mailing lists.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Route flapping at the NAP.