2 New Gems Are Worth the Hunt

Two powerful new computers featuring excellent color graphics are beginning to reach dealers’ showrooms as summer draws to a close. They are Commodore’s long-awaited Amiga and Atari’s 520ST. Both may be thought of as color Macintoshes, but that doesn’t really do either one justice.

The Atari 520ST, with a base price of $799, costs less than the $1,295 basic Amiga, but is less sophisticated and less powerful, even though the cheapest Atari comes with 520 kilobytes of random access memory compared to 256K in the cheapest Amiga. (The reason is that Atari’s operating system fills up nearly half its available memory, whereas Amiga’s operating system does not infringe on its RAM.)

The Amiga is designed as a serious business computer as well as an entertainment computer without peer. The new Atari is designed like typical home computers with the computer circuitry stuffed into the keyboard unit and wires leading out the back to power transformers and external disk drives. It performs much better than previous home computers, however.

Both utilize Motorola’s powerful 68000 microprocessor chip, as does the Macintosh, and both have several options of screen resolution ranging from a low of 320 by 200 pixels (picture dots) to 640 by 400.

The number of pixels doesn’t tell the whole story, however. The IBM PC offers the same screen resolutions in its standard color display, with four colors shown simultaneously in the low-resolution mode and two in the high-resolution mode. Those familiar with low-resolution IBM color graphics know how crude they look.

The Atari, on the other hand, can display 16 colors at once, from a palette of 512 colors, in low resolution, while the Amiga shows 32 colors out of a choice of 4,096. In high resolution, the Atari can show only two colors, while the more powerful Amiga displays 16. On each machine, the colors are easily selected using the “mouse” pointing device. The result is impressive on the Atari and sensational on the Amiga. The Macintosh, of course, is limited to a monochrome display of 512 by 342 black dots on its small white screen.

Like the Macintosh, both the Amiga and Atari allow you to point with a mouse to graphic symbols, called icons, to choose the tasks you want to perform. They also have 3 1/2-inch disk drives that use rugged, plastic-encased disks. The Amiga disks will store 720 kilobytes of information on a disk, which is equivalent to a thick novel and twice what the IBM PC stores on its floppy disks. Initially, the Atari will store 360K on a disk, but double-sided drives with twice the storage supposedly are forthcoming.

Hard Disk Drives

Hard disk drives will be available soon for both computers. The 10-million-byte unit for Atari will cost $699, while a 20-million-byte drive for Atari is tentatively priced at less than $1,000.

In what has to be the smartest move Commodore could make, it has written prototype software that allows the Amiga to run off-the-shelf IBM software, giving the machine an instant library of thousands of programs and eliminating objections to it on the basis of incompatibility with existing computer equipment.

Optional 5-inch disk drives utilizing standard IBM formatted disks are available for $395, to go along with the IBM PC emulation program, which is tentatively priced at $100. Wise prospective purchasers who require IBM compatibility will first insist on demonstrations that the Amiga will, indeed, run the PC software they own.

While Amiga will run IBM software, it won’t run Atari 520ST programs, nor will Atari run Amiga software. And neither Amiga nor Atari will run Macintosh software, even though all three computers use the same microprocessor and same size disks.

The weakness of both machines is the limited amount of software available, a problem that plagued the Macintosh in its early days. However, an array of programs for games, graphics, home management, text editing, spreadsheets, database and telecommunications are ready now or are being developed. Amiga has the edge in the number of programs now available and in the sophistication of programs and programming languages.

‘Open’ Systems

Unlike the Macintosh, both the Amiga and Atari 520ST are “open” systems, meaning that details of their inner workings have been made available to programmers to encourage software development. Amiga even makes it possible for other manufacturers’ hardware to tie directly into its microprocessor, which means that plenty of add-on equipment should be forthcoming to enhance its capabilities.

There are several features that really set the Amiga apart from the Atari, or any other microcomputer on the market. For one, its operating memory can be expanded to 8 million bytes. IBM allows expansion only to 3 million bytes for its top-of-the-line PC AT.

For another, the Amiga has custom microprocessors to handle graphics and sound. The result is a graphic animation ability that must be seen to be believed and a stereo sound-generation system that rivals professional music synthesizers.

The sound chip also allows voice synthesis with a choice of male, female or robot voices and even control over speed and inflection of speech. This feature is accessible through Amiga’s “AbasiC” programming language so that a simple six-line program that anyone could learn causes the computer to say whatever you type onto its screen, even entire paragraphs of text. The Amiga may allow blind persons to do things they never dreamed of.

After seeing how both IBM and Apple (Macintosh) botched the critical job of building a decent computer keyboard, it’s a pleasure to use the Amiga and the Atari. Both will find favor among touch typists. My favorite is the Amiga, which is smaller and stores nicely under the computer console. Both have separate cursor keys and numeric keys, with Atari’s layout being the best for entering spreadsheet formulas.

Bargain Machines

There seem to be a lot of skeptics out there predicting that either or both of these new computers will fail. I think they’re wrong because I think the computer-buying public is smart enough to perceive value when they see it. These machines are bargains for what they do. It is the same public, after all, that rightly perceived that IBM’s defunct PCjr wasn’t a bargain and that hasn’t fully embraced the Macintosh because it’s too expensive.

At the base price of $799, Atari offers the computer, keyboard, mouse, one drive and a monochrome monitor. An additional $200 gets you a color monitor instead (you have to use Atari’s monitor), and $199 buys a second drive ($299 for double-sided drives when available).

The $1,295 Amiga includes computer, keyboard and one built-in drive. It will hook to your television (displaying 60-column-wide text instead of the 40 columns typical of other computers) or to existing color monitors. Commodore’s color monitor is $495, an additional double-sided drive is $295, and an upgrade to 512K of memory is $195.

The Amiga and the Atari 520ST will be available only in computer stores. You may have to hunt a bit to find them while the companies try to persuade some of the larger computer store chains to carry them.