AmigavsAtari ST

Two machines, one year

They arrived within weeks of each other in 1985, built on the same beating heart and aimed at the same desk, and then spent the next decade dividing playgrounds down the middle. Atari showed its 520ST at the January 1985 CES and got it into buyers' hands around the middle of the year; Commodore's Amiga 1000 followed on 23 July 1985. Both ran the Motorola 68000, the same 16/32-bit processor that beat inside the Mega Drive, but that is where the family resemblance ended.

The difference in philosophy was there from day one. Atari's Jack Tramiel, fresh from Commodore, built the ST to a price: get a capable 68000 machine into shops fast and cheap, leaning on the CPU to do most of the work. Commodore, meanwhile, shipped the Amiga with a trio of custom chips that took graphics and sound off the processor's hands entirely. The ST was the pragmatist; the Amiga was the showman. In Britain the ST landed first and cheaper, which handed it an early lead, but the story of the rivalry is the Amiga slowly reeling it in.

If you want the wider frame, these two are the home-computer half of the jump we cover in 8-bit vs 16-bit: while Nintendo and Sega fought the console version of that war, the ST and the Amiga fought the computer version of it in British front rooms.

The spec face-off

Put the two machines side by side and the rivalry stops being a slogan and becomes a column of numbers. The figures below are for the classic configurations most people owned, the Amiga 500 and the Atari 520STFM, which shared their guts with the launch models.

Two lines in that table decide the whole argument. The first is custom chips. The Amiga's blitter shifted blocks of graphics around at speed, its Copper coprocessor could change the display mid-screen for parallax skies and colour gradients, and Paula played four channels of sampled sound while the processor got on with the game. The ST had none of that; it asked its 68000 to do the lot. The second is that 8 MHz on the ST versus roughly 7 MHz on the Amiga, a genuine edge on paper that, in practice, mattered far less than the hardware the Amiga carried around it.

Where each one won

The honest answer to "which was better" is that they won different rooms of the house. The Amiga owned the living room and the bedroom. Games, graphics, video work and the demoscene were all territory its custom chips were built for, and nothing the ST did on screen could quite catch it when a game was written to exploit the Amiga properly.

The ST owned the studio and the wallet. It was cheaper to buy, which mattered enormously to a British teenager saving up, and its built-in MIDI ports made it the obvious choice for anyone making music. It also found a steady second life in small businesses and desktop work, where its crisp high-resolution monochrome mode and low price were exactly what a spreadsheet needed. Same processor, two completely different customers.

The MIDI studio and the demoscene

The ST's greatest legacy is not a game at all: it is a generation of records made on it. Because MIDI was wired straight into the machine, you could plug in a synthesiser and start sequencing with no add-on hardware, and the ST's timing was famously rock-steady. Software like Steinberg's Cubase and C-Lab's Notator, the direct ancestor of today's Logic, turned the ST into the default studio computer of the late 1980s. Fatboy Slim, 808 State and countless bedroom producers ran on Atari long after the games had dried up.

The Amiga's answer was the demoscene: a whole underground art form of coders squeezing impossible effects out of the hardware, precisely because the Copper and blitter gave them so much to play with. The ST had its own demo scene, often prouder of its achievements for having no blitter to lean on, but the Amiga's is the one that became legend. On the games side the same split showed up: because so many titles shipped on both, the ST version was frequently a straight port that left the Amiga's hardware unused, so the machine that a game was designed for tended to win. You can watch both computers arrive, peak and fade on our interactive timeline.

Collecting them today (UK £)

Both machines are firmly collectable now, and prices have climbed as the people who grew up with them reach the age of buying their childhood back. These are ballparks at the time of writing, and condition dominates everything: a machine that boots, with a working power supply and mouse, is worth far more than a cosmetically tidy one that does not.

A tested, working Amiga 500 reportedly rarely changes hands for under about £100, with boxed and complete examples running higher; the earlier Amiga 1000 and the big-box A1200 and A4000 machines command more again. The Atari 520STFM and 1040STF sit in broadly similar territory (seldom seen working for under roughly £150) with boxed condition, bundled software and a healthy floppy drive making the difference. If you are weighing up what an old machine or a boxed game is actually worth, our guide to retro game values walks through how to price this era sensibly.

Amiga vs Atari ST: FAQ

Was the Amiga better than the Atari ST?

For games and graphics, mostly yes, but it depends what you wanted. The Amiga carried custom chips the ST lacked: a blitter and a video coprocessor (the Copper) for smooth scrolling and effects, and Paula, which played four channels of sampled sound. That is why the best Amiga games and the demoscene look and sound the way they do. The ST answered with a slightly faster processor, built-in MIDI ports and a lower price. If your world was music or you were counting the pennies, the ST was arguably the better buy.

Which sold more in the UK, the Amiga or the Atari ST?

The ST reached British shops first and cheaper, and led early, but the Amiga overhauled it as the price of the Amiga 500 fell. Across the whole life of both machines the Amiga is generally reckoned to have outsold the ST by roughly three to two, and in Britain especially, the Amiga became the dominant games computer of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ST held on longest in mainland Europe, where it was a huge seller in West Germany.

Why did musicians use the Atari ST?

Because it had MIDI ports built straight into the machine, no add-on card needed, so you could plug a synthesiser in and start sequencing out of the box. Paired with software like Steinberg's Cubase and C-Lab's Notator (the ancestor of Logic), that made the ST the default studio computer for a whole generation of musicians. Its rock-steady MIDI timing kept it in professional and bedroom studios long after it had faded as a games machine.

Are old Amigas worth money today?

They hold steady collector value rather than fortune-money. At the time of writing a working, tested Amiga 500 rarely changes hands for under about £100, with boxed and complete examples in good order running higher, and the earlier Amiga 1000 and later big-box models commanding more again. Condition, whether it boots, and a working power supply and mouse matter far more than the badge. The same is broadly true of the Atari ST.

Which had better games, the Amiga or the ST?

The Amiga, for most people. Because the two machines shared the same 68000 processor, a great many games were released on both, but ST versions were frequently ports that did not use hardware the ST did not have. Titles built around the Amiga's blitter, Copper and sound chip (the scrolling shooters, the lush platformers, the sampled soundtracks) simply had no equal on the ST. The ST's strongest showings tended to be in genres where raw graphics mattered less.

Did the Amiga and Atari ST come out in the same year?

Yes, both arrived in 1985. Atari's 520ST was shown at the January 1985 CES and reached buyers around the middle of that year, beating Commodore's Amiga 1000, which launched in July 1985, to market by a short head. The machines most British households actually bought came a little later: the affordable Atari 520STFM and, from October 1987, the Amiga 500.