The Atari ST(e) came with a blitter I believe but not many software companies made use of it because the bulk of the ST’s out there were the ST(fm) models.
Stalvern wrote:the ST can barely scroll a background without coughing and sputtering. Wings of Death is one of the ST's greatest masterpieces of programming just for managing to keep a frame rate that the crappiest teenage homebrew on the Amiga takes for granted
Wings of Death is one of my favourite shooters and I think it’s a console quality title. The Bitmaps always managed to make the ST scroll decent as well, Speedball 2 is a great example but again is not smooth as the Amiga. Ocean France were also very good ST developers with the ST version of Toki (in my opinion) being the best version of the game (oddly the Amiga version has some iffy scolling issues). US Gold never seemed to manage it, all their games had massive sprites the ST just couldn’t throw around at the required speed without tanking the frame rate.
Stalvern wrote:The ST's one graphical advantage over the Amiga is slightly superior 3D performance – both systems handle 3D graphics with the CPU, and the ST's is a bit faster (same model, different clock speed).
Oh yes that was one example we used frequently, that and the fact the ST was the lead platform for a number of years meaning the ST version was usually released first and only minor improvements made to the Amiga version. Most publishers opted for pretty much straight ports due to the shared CPU. ST games usually having a slightly better frame rate due to the faster processor and the ports being straight code conversions meaning all the Amiga scrolling was also being done in software rather than hardware.
Then Shadow of the Beast came along and the tide turned and the ST started getting the naff ports. Interesting times.