I used to be a computer salesman back in 1989.  The store had an Amiga 500 and an Atari 1040ST on display.  I have always been an Atarian, but was fascinated by the Amiga.  As I'm sure many of you are aware, in many ways the Amiga was the evolution of the Atari 8-Bit computers.  

Now when I had side by side comparisons I noticed that the Amiga 500 never could do 60fps animations?  We even had Antic software with Cad 3D 2.0 on both computers, but the Amiga was limited to 30fps at best.  I remember having several (albeit slightly downgraded graphicly) Amiga HAM-6 animations such as the juggler, or a Scult 3D demo converted to Spectrum 512 running at 60fps on the ST.  I could never answer the question to customers if the Amiga animation software could match that speed.  

Cyperpaint on the ST was Zoetrope on the Amiga- was the Amiga version capable of 60fps?  My question is does any  Amiga software for the 500,1000, or 2000 allow full screen 320x200 animations at 60fps?  Turbo Silver 3.0, VideoScape 3d, Photon Video Cel Animator, Deluxe Paint III, and Photon Paint II all had animation capabilities on the Amiga.  But none of my magazines mentioned how fast these animations could go.  The reviewers always neglected to mention if it could.  That along with my personal experience suggests the Amiga could not.  Am I wrong?

If not, was it the CHIP RAM in the Amiga preventing 60fps animations?  Was it the slightly slower clock speed (7.1 MHz vs 8.0 MHz) of the 68000?  Was it the more memory intense files of the Amiga- Atari's 4bit versus Amiga's 5bit picture files?  Was it perhaps the Amiga 500 only had 512K?  

Thanks for you help everyone.  

On a side note.  Chip Ram was all that could be used for video correct?  Or could page flipping animations be stored in Fast Ram?

On the ST, each function key represented differn't frame speeds.f9 was 30fps and f10 was 60fps.  So when I had the same demons up, the Amiga was always doing either f8 or f9.  The Software on the ST always claimed 60fps as well.

It was obvious to me.  For example, I could count the frames of an animation.  It wasn't rocket science.  If it was 15 frames, the ST would flip thru all of them 4 times every second at F10 or 2twice at f9.   And it was easy to match the exact speed on the Amiga Demos I had at the time.  Albeit only a few.  I had the machines side by side and the customers loved it.  

Rowbeartoe wrote:
It was obvious to me.  For example, I could count the frames of an animation.  It wasn't rocket science.  If it was 15 frames, the ST would flip thru all of them 4 times every second at F10 or 2twice at f9.   And it was easy to match the exact speed on the Amiga Demos I had at the time.  Albeit only a few.  I had the machines side by side and the customers loved it.  

Ok, I'm not really sure what you are basing this on... Both machines were more than capable of running at the refresh rate of the display device, the Amiga with more colours and at a higher resolution than the ST... simple really.

Ok, so from the bandwidth point of view, the Amiga could in theory.  But what about the software I mentioned?  Why was the Scult 3D, juggler, and Antic Cad-3d 2.0 never page flipping at 60fps? I may never have had a frame counter, but clearly the Amiga demos converted to the ST could run at least twice as fast on the ST, suggesting to me either 24fps or 30fps.  Now, I want to make it clear, I'm not saying the graphics were better on the ST, they were downgraded slightly in Spectrum 512, but I'm just talking about good old fashion page flipping.  The Atari ST used 16MHz RAM, 8 MHZ for Video and 8 MHz for the 68000- it was cheap and effective for this kind of stuff. I'm just curious as to why the demos I saw, and the software reviews never mentioned up to 60fps animations and if in fact the Amiga software allowed it's user to reach such a speed?

 

@ bloodline: notice how I didn't write compressed video replay but raw video (more accurately: animation).

An attemt to make a modern OS display and loop a +16MB raw feed flawlessly in 60fps will in 99.9% of all cases fail miserably. If not at replay then when it "loops" and halt for 0.5 sec to re-loading the whole thing or some similar dumbass behavior.

>Cyperpaint on the ST was Zoetrope on the Amiga- was the Amiga version capable of 60fps? My question is does any Amiga software for the 500,1000, or 2000 allow full screen 320x200 animations at 60fps? Turbo Silver 3.0, VideoScape 3d, Photon Video Cel Animator, Deluxe Paint III, and Photon Paint II all had animation capabilities on the Amiga. But none of my magazines mentioned how fast these animations could go. The reviewers always neglected to mention if it could. That along with my personal experience suggests the Amiga could not. Am I wrong?

There are so many applications written for Amiga, Atari, PC.  Perhaps, you want to define the nature of the data that is being animated.  Obviously, if the data is for a cartoon with large runs of the same color, decompressing a simple RLE stream into a double buffered video memory would be faster than copying data from RAM (unless the processor is slower than the RAM speed.)  Is the original image 320*200 or is it being zoomed/stretched to 320*200?  

On the ST, Cyber software (CAD 3D, Cyper Paint etc) let you page flip 16 color 320x200 pictures up to 60fps (NTSC). Spectrum 512 using unispec allowed 512 color pictures to page flip at 60fps. You could make some nice animations with a MEGA ST4 (4 megabytes of RAM).  But on the Amiga 500, when I demonstrated CAD 3D for it, I was able to only get about 30fps (32 color pictures), and I remember some Scult 3D and the juggler animation (HAM-6) graphics, never being able to surpass 30fps.  So Again, I was just curious if the software available to the consumer for the orginal Amigas (500,1000,2000) could let you do 60fps animations, be it 32 color, 64 color half bright, or
the very impressive 4,096 color HAM-6?    

No doubt, the AGA chipset was more than capable.  But I'm trying to settle somthing that has been bothering me when I was a computer salesman back in 1988/1989-- the time when there was only an Amiga 500,1000,2000 and only an Atari 520ST, 1040ST, and Mega ST2/4 in the States.

Thank you EVERYONE for trying to resolve this for me.  Again- I'm sure (not entirely) it was possible for programers to achieve this goal, but I just wanted to know if the software available by 1989 for the Amiga could.