Re: Just remember...
ST owner here. My first ever paid development work was a magazine cover-disk game for the ST. A meagre fee, but it's still "for reward"...
The ST is most definitely the newer system. It's a classic story of corporate politics. Before its magnificent implosion, Atari (the Warner subsidiary) had comissioned Jay Miner (developer of the video hardware in both the 2600 and the 400/800 computers) to develop a new chipset for arcade and home use based around a 68000 CPU.
In the mess of the takeover of Atari by Jack Tramiel (recently ousted from Commodore), that contract lapsed, and it seems there was also considerable "anti-Atari" feeling from the new management team too. In fairness, the old Atari had been spectacularly badly run as a business, so this could be justified. In any case, Amiga Inc had lost its customer, so went looking for a new buyer, and Commodore seemed a natural choice, as there were really only a few serious options (Atari, Apple, Commodore - but Apple had just put out their Macintosh, so that just left Commodore)
Anyway, having lost Amiga either through ignorance of its existence, or risk aversion, Atari (the new Tramiel-owned company) then needed a proper 16-bit computer, and fast, so the ST was built in about a year using mostly off-the-shelf components. The Blitter chip was the most complex custom silicon on the ST, but it missed the deadline and got dropped from the launched product, but the underlying graphics library (on the 68000's Line-A trap) in the ST's ROM was clearly designed with this chip in mind.
The ST was a better computer design: it followed through on the 68000's clean architecture to produce a system that was logically arranged and easy to program. The Amiga was far superior as a multimedia machine, but it had some quirks. AmigaOS was a bit too adventurous for a CPU without memory protection (or a way to restart a bus error). I did own an Amiga for a while, but the poor stability of its OS for "work" tasks brought me back to the ST. Amiga, hands down, had the best games.
If you're into the Amiga, it's worth looking into the Atari 2600 and the 400/800. There's a lot of what became Amiga in those two machines (e.g., the 400's ANTIC was the forerunner of the Amiga's Copper display-list processor)
Fun-fact. Amiga's impressive 4096-colour Hold-and-Modify graphics mode was never designed as such: it was instead a relic of abandoned circuitry to directly produce a composite video output, as befitting the product's games console origins. In that mode, you'd hold the chroma signal(s) for two pixel clocks, and modify the luma every pixel clock to produce a full colour display with lower memory requirements, as television video standards all had a higher resolution for the luminance signal than the colour signal. When the video output requirement changed to RGB, the circuitry was repurposed to provide the HAM modes, on the basis that it was already in the chip and might be useful for something..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
