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Adventure was the first thing that came to my mind-- because of the randomized treasure placement. But it doesn't have permadeath or procedural levels.

I bought this for like $4.99 from a bargain bin, and I still felt the need to return it! I don't even know why, it wasn't that terrible. It just didn't feel like a "proper" game or something

I was talking NES, not SNES. I brought those games up after someone said Amiga/ST represented "backwards 1984" game design. I see no evidence that Populous, Dungeon Master and Railroad Tycoon were one NES. Many of them had SNES ports- but that was a 16-bit system that should be able to handle them.

Even "Pacman 4K" shows that a 4K limit still didn't mean it had to be this awful

10. Superman - I feel like I might like it if I understood what was happening half the time. 9. Custer's Revenge 8. Empire Strikes Back 7. H.E.R.O - seems like it should be fun, but wasn't 6. Pitfall - Yes it was a technical marvel, but I still get bored with it after about 5 screens. I much prefer Pitfall II 5. Entombed 4. Kool-aid Man - I hated it because I wanted the cool-looking Intellivision one. 3. Donkey Kong 2. Swordquest Earthworld 1. Swordquest Fireworld

Because it got almost everything wrong about the original game. Granted we knew the 2600 wasn't going to give us arcade quality visuals. But we knew it could do better than this For a start- 1. get the colors right (easy fix) I know some will say it was Atari policy to not have black backgrounds, but then why did they allow the 5200 version to look like the arcade? 2. Pacman doesn't have an eye! (easy fix) 3. put the passages on the side 4. Make the music at least have the same tune as the arcade, make the other sounds more similar. 5. Pacman should face all four directions, not just two. 6. Put fruits in, not giant power pellets. Atari's MS Pacman does all that right, and proves that 2600 Pacman wasn't hurt by technical limitations. It was either bad design or rushed.

Could be. I always assumed it was just from low sample rates

I don't see this happening. The Switch will post great first month numbers, but then there will be a lull until the next big game arrives. The switch doesn't have a killer app like Wii bowling that will move tons of units to casual gamers.

In theory? It was actually fairly common to find vanilla ST games using sampled sound in this manner. There were even .MOD players that ran on vanilla STs. There was always a slight hiss and tinniness to these samples when compared to STe's DMA sound though, but it was better than nothing.

That next-gen effort happened in 83-84 and was killed by Jack when he bought the company. He came to Atari with the ST design, he didn't need the ones they were working on. Who knows what would have happened otherwise? Atari was on track to receive the Amiga chips. In an alternate timeline, who knows? Maybe they would get them. Yes there was mismanagement at the Warner Atari. But on the other hand, Warner Atari had much better marketing and distribution resources than Tramiel's Atari ever did.

They were the future. But Atari's half-assed them as usual and those efforts went nowhere.

So what? I can count on one hand the number of platformers I even wanted to play. The NES had Civilization? Populous? Dungeon Master? Railroad Tycoon? I've seen Ultima 3 on NES, it's horrendous. Everything is has an overpowering slime green. Totally loses the feel of the originals.

and you saw clock frequencies rise constantly in PC and Mac while ST and Amiga were locked at their original 1985 clock speeds forever. I know clock frequency isn't the end-all be all, but especially back then it was used as a marketing differentiator. But when the average consumer saw 25 and 33mhz PCs available, why would they even consider an 8mhz ST?

When there are like 4 people hanging out, and two dominate the NES because they racked up 25 bonus lives, it is still boring for the other two people. Considering that The NES flagship SMB titles are derived from Donkey Kong (1981) and Mario Brothers (1983), saying the ST and Amiga are stuck in 1984 is hilarious! I was playing lots of RPGs and strategy and god games on the ST. Dungeon Master, Bards Tale, the Ultimas, Phantasie, the SSI AD&D games, Civilization, Populous, Sim City, Railroad Tycoon. Actual 3D games like Starglider II, Many of them 8-bits just could not run. And many of those game concepts did not exist in 1984. Unlike today, the console and computer games market were almost completely separate from each other back then. They'd get almost completely different games. You could be immersed in one and ignorant of what was happening in the other. And it's safe to say there were far more NES gamers than Amiga/ST gamers.

There are some great < $20 games in the current PSN sale

The original 520 did have an external floppy, and it loaded the OS from floppy, so it would be completely useless without it (well unless you had a hard drive, but at 1985 prices? bwahahaha) I thought they only sold that model as a complete system (computer + floppy + monitor) for US$799? (that model would have been useless without an Atari monitor too)

Wasn't the Mac the ST's original target anyway? It's early nickname was the "Jackintosh" after all. I think ST did go after the then young desktop publishing market, and did steal a lot of the MIDI musician business from Apple-- unfortunately that's the only real niche where ST dominated. ​Yes. Jack left Commodore in Jan 84. In Jan 85, he was owner of Atari showing off STs at Winter CES. It was on store shelves within 6 months of that. That's remarkable development time! If they could have released ST upgrades that quickly it would have been amazing. But he slashed R&D at Atari quite a bit. Every project seemed to take forever after about 1986. I think they were definitely too small to be competitive. Yes it was, especially Germany. I had lots of great German language software that I used because there were no English equivalents for them. ​ There's probably a lot of truth to that, but seems like the Megas should have been released alongside the consumer models, instead of years later. It would have made the ST seem more of a professional machine.

yes, you can reuse code. Macro assemblers let you insert blocks of code as macros. Also you can insert assembly into C code for better performance/compactness of certain functions.

The different CPUs have similar concepts in their assembly language, and instructions that are similarly named. But they are different enough you'll want to learn the 6502 specifically. I also don't think you can learn much looking at assembly sources-- unless it's very well documented what it's doing. It's a bunch of statements that look like LDA, STA, MOV, JMP with little context for what its doing. Is it changing colors? printing a string? prompting for input? You won't know from the code alone without knowing the instruction set and memory map.

I'm an American who never saw the appeal of the NES. I thought it was horrible, for several reasons. For one, I was already 16-bit gaming on an ST, and to me NES games looked bad, and had terrible colors by comparison. They all felt like a step backwards Second, Nintendo change the way games were played. Before the NES, if you hung out with friends and played videogames, it would usually be 3 lives and you're out, pass the controller to the next person. The Super Mario games made earning bonus lives so easy that people would often have dozens, and then there was unlimited continues. What this meant is one person ended up dominating the console with super long playtime, while everyone else twiddled their thumbs. I soon began to equate playing NES with friends to sheer boredom, and would start opting to stay home instead. And I used to like to hang out and play games before that. Lastly, it suddenly seemed like every game needed to be a side-scrolling platformer after NES- a play style that overstayed its welcome. IMO I know lots of people look fondly on that system. But I have no fondness for it at all, lol.

Again I'd blame slow R&D post-ST launch. For instance, I remember their blitter chip was in development for what seemed like an eternity. I saw a demo of it at an Atari show in 1987 and it still "wasn't ready" for release at that point. By the time the STe was ready for market, it was too little too late. A 16mhz option would have at least been nice, but that didn't come until the MegaSTe three years later! What they were thinking-- they needed to support the ST line and stay relevant. The Amiga was becoming cost competitive with the ST, so they needed to make the ST feature-competitive with the Amiga Why the STe competed against the STfm? My guess is pure Tramiel, they had STfm stock left so they dumped it on the market Why didn't the STe get much support? This is always a problem when you enhance devices midway into their generation. Developers want to support the least common denominator to guarantee the most sales. You need a large market to be immune to this problem. I also think the Tramiels were blind to the PC threat at first. They thought the 16-bit market would mirror the 8-bit market, and Tramiel could win again by simply being the low cost provider. That only worked for a short while. One problem was 8-bits were cheap, so they could easily sell tons of C64s, but the 16-bits were not cheap. In a sense, people bought C64s instead of game consoles for a few years. But now people were again buying actual game consoles with the NES, and the STs and Amigas were far too expensive for many people to buy as just a game machine, so that market dropped out from under them. The serious computer market increasingly wanted PCs and Macs. When they hit that point, they didn't seem to know what to do, so they did a little bit of everything. They dumped their stock of old 7800 videogame consoles on the market, they created a new console from the 8bit line. They bought a workstation-class computer design (the Transputer) they planned to sell. They created a couple of PC-compatible systems. Bought the handheld Lynx design from Epyx, did the TT, STe, then the Jaguar and Panther. But it seemed to lack focus and weren't gaining traction anywhere. TL;DR- Atari didn't really know what they were doing. Tramiel's "win by selling everything cheaper than the competition" didn't work, and there was no backup plan.

I think I learned with the same books back in the day. I recently saw an website with a 6502 simulator where you could try things out in real time. You might find assembly a bit of a culture shock given the languages you're used to. It isn't hard to understand, just tedious. You often have to write subroutines for routine tasks that other languages do for you. Especially on an 8-bit Atari which doesn't have very many system calls or anything like a C-library

I swear by the "atari800" emulator which works on both Windows and Linux. edit: for development, if you use something like cc65, that runs natively on your PC, so you could use the better PC tools to write the programs, then have your workflow stuff the output into an AUTORUN.SYS on an .ATR image and automatically boot it into an emulator. Can't get much easier than that

That's because you were looking at the situation as a gamer and/or multimedia fan. As many of us did at the time. People wanted PCs because they used them at work. They wanted what they knew. They didn't care about graphics and sound. "that's great that it can bounce a ball, but does it run Lotus 1-2-3?" There were apparently more of these people in the world than gamers. I doubt very few gamers would have picked up a PC in the 80s for the reasons you mentioned.

clearly we went to the same school then