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classic battle atari 8bit vs commodore 64


phuzaxeman

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Yes, the mini-DIN joystick and cassette ports supposedly were installed to save space and to make it electrically more safe. Less space for you to put your finger onto the pins and short something. Though if the DE9 joystick port was considered unsafe, it is a miracle so many other manufacturers used it and Commodore themselves moved back to it for the C128 and later on Amiga models.

As an original c64 owner I recall my frustration as many others have of the perpetual swapping of joysticks

between port 1 and port 2. Despite the warnings in the manuals most software developers did not facilitate

an option to swap the controls. This encouraged users to swap joysticks with the machine powered on,

eventually results in a blown CIA as your fingers tend to come in direct contact.

 

This probably would have been less likely if the port was designed to be on the front of the machine like in the

Atari 800.

 

Not sure if this also lead to a blown 6520 in the Atari. But I dinstinctly remember blowing an 8520 in my Amiga 3000 after plugging in a mouse with the machine powered on.

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One very simple improvement of the C64 was if they had relabeled the joystick ports on the outside so the one furthest back, closest to the power switch was port #1 and the one closest to the front was port #2. That is how they're mapped in the hardware, and would require zero changes to the firmware or PCB, just the case. I think many game developers thought that a one player game ought to be controlled by the joystick port labeled as #1, even though #2 has fewer conflicts with the keyboard.

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Could have put more thought into some of its features but they were in such haste to get the machine done. The culture was cut throat, they had engineers working almost 20 hours a day then sleeping under their desks for the remainder with many casualties a long the way. This working culture carried on even after Jack left.

 

The basic really sucked and I struggled to write any useful programs on it in the beginning. I always found it easier on other computers even though I wasn’t even an owner of those machines!

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That's better ;)

Now I get what you meant with hires and those strange numbers of texels sampled from texture (I was right to assume it's something about applied-perspective shape of texture).

 

So how do you combine pixels from such texture ?

shifting texture in place looks wrong to me ?

asl texture1
rol
asl texture2
rol
..
.

How do you avoid that texture screw-up if not with lda ? And if you do lda - you just f'ed up acc ?

 

If it's not top secret please just copy-paste your inner loop. Or if it's a secret send me a pm. Or just leave me hanging, dying from curiosity ;)

 

ps. I love your detailed posts :)

Of course, it's not top secret - that's why I shared so much technical detail with you - after all - this is an 8-bit section, not a selectively semi-moderated Jaguar section (where sharing such information would inevitably lead to an all-out war, but I'm a quick learner, so now I know better than to waste my breath on such foolish endeavor over there :lol: )

 

I'm literally in the middle of moving between two apartments (damn, I spent almost seven months in a previous apartment, I rarely stay that excruciatingly long at one place :lol: , it's my 3rd move in last 14 months), so I can't access the code now, but just a rough reiteration of the inner loop:

fetch Texel 1
2x ASL A

ORA Texel 2
2x ASL A

ORA Texel 3
2x ASL A
 
ORA Texel 4
 
STA FrameBuffer

There's no shifting of texture, it stays untouched, which is what my requirement was, as I wanted the capability of render-to-texture, which is very useful for decals,skidmarks and other effects.

I burnt way too much time on this (should have worked on my jaguar game!!!), but it was a very exciting, surprising (I initially wanted just a moderately fast pre-calc, not a real-time solution) and ultimately rewarding experiment :)

 

This tech would make for a great Dungeon game - say, like, Legend of Grimrock, where you move smoothly, from grid square to another. Extrapolating the current performance per pixel at that resolution and texture size, we'd get to 15 fps with floor+ceiling and about 7 fps, including side walls (though, side walls would definitely need a separate codepath to achieve same performance).

 

Not bad for ~one megahertz. Would love C64 to attempt to do the same :lol:

 

 

I also think it could be used for a sort-of/kind-of/not-quite FPS game, where you could only strafe (not rotate) - you would have smooth movement till you encounter enemies, then the movement would stop, and all CPU POWAH would be unleashed towards moving large sprites over the screen. Of course, 128 KB would be a minimum here due to the enemy sprites, probably 256 KB...

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I'm literally in the middle of moving between two apartments (damn, I spent almost seven months in a previous apartment, I rarely stay that excruciatingly long at one place :lol: , it's my 3rd move in last 14 months), so I can't access the code now, but just a rough reiteration of the inner loop:

fetch Texel 1
2x ASL A
ORA Texel 2
2x ASL A
ORA Texel 3
2x ASL A
ORA Texel 4
STA FrameBuffer

There's no shifting of texture, it stays untouched, which is what my requirement was, as I wanted the capability of render-to-texture, which is very useful for decals,skidmarks and other effects.

Thanks for another detail to the "puzzle" :)

We assumed similar based on your remarks. My only question remains - how does fetch texel look like ?

You said you would rather use index registers for better purpose than preshifting. Does it mean you fetch texels using x,y ? How do you change those texture indices texel to texel ?

 

On topic of texture, when you said pixel per byte I guess it means bitpair per byte is filled ? So texture loooks like %000000xx,%000000xx etc.. ?

 

And yeah, dungeon crawler for Atari is a must soon. If nobody else makes it I sure will in next 10 years or so ;)

ps. Have you seen "Death Mask" on Amiga ? Check it out. far away from doom, but I think it would work on Atari great.

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Heh, Death Mask is cool, haven't seen it. I'm surprised the almighty Amiga is not having floor/ceiling textured, though - so lame :)

 

Fetching texels is happening on a scanline-by-scanline basis. I use a table for this, where I precompute (at load-time) the remapping of screen-space into texel-space. The table was those ~2,600 bytes long (as many bytes as there are unique screen-space pixels), so it's not a big deal and works the same for any texture of same dimensions - so you could , at run-time, render to texture (and create dozen other textures), yet the look-up algorithm would stay the same, as it's merely providing the index to the current texture scanline.

 

Yes, the uncompressed texture only has values 0-3 per byte. This is so that I can instantly merge the texel (via ORA) without any additional shifting.

 

The usage of X,Y indices are the most crucial element of the performance, however. This is why I wrote over 12 different versions, and not all of them were faster than previous one. I don't have the numbers for the 128x40 (the one I mentioned earlier, that now runs at 30fps), as I was initially doing all benchmarking against 160x40 (3,552 unique pixels), but:

- version 1: 411,552 cycles (brute-force, via inlined DrawPixel)

- version 12: 62,713 cycles

 

That's a factor of 6.5x

 

Granted, there's a mirroring there (happened around ver7 or so), which helped, but the purpose of majority of those 12 versions (~3,000 lines of ASM code) was to come up with a memory addressing scheme that would allow :

- reusing index registers for multiple substages of the algorithm

- merging those substages together into same loop

- finally looping via same register

- not destroying the register in the process - that was the biggest issue

 

The final, highly unreadable clusterf*ck of a code has merged these 5 substages into just one:

- quad-pixel processing

- texel look-up

- drawing

- mirroring

- looping

 

There's few additional ways to raise the performance:

- use illegal ops (high in my ToDo List)

- self-modifying code, as that would allow much faster direct addressing instead of indirect via Y

- unrolled inner loop means I can use X register and avoid store/restore into slow-as-mud zero page (costs 3c, FFS !!!)

- finally, a full unroll of all scanlines (current best guess - 24 KB of code) would allow to completely bypass the painfully slow zero page for any storage, and directly access the texture/framebuffer via fastest possible LDA/STA

 

 

Based on my benchmarks - I think (if somebody was crazy enough to implement the fourth option - that's easily a week+ of full-time uninterrupted coding), you could get a 60 fps real-time texturing on 1.79 MHz Atari :)

 

 

I'll rather work on my StunRunner for 6502. Flatshading is much more visually pleasing than shimmering textures. Plus, can't beat the feeling of real , generic, good old-fashioned 3D mesh...

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Heh, Death Mask is cool, haven't seen it. I'm surprised the almighty Amiga is not having floor/ceiling textured, though - so lame :)

It was a "cheap doom clone" in my mind. Sound was rather good and it has two player mode where you run around with shotgun, so was huge fun to play with brother :)

I can imagine something similar on A8 using large gtia pixels and simple unrolled routines similar to what you mentioned earlier.

 

Fetching texels is happening on a scanline-by-scanline basis ... those ~2,600 bytes long (as many bytes as there are unique screen-space pixels)... ... as it's merely providing the index to the current texture scanline.

The usage of X,Y indices are the most crucial element of the performance, however.

That looks like your table is index into texture row for which pixels to draw on screen. Something like 1,3,5,7.... (for texture line scaled down 50% for example).

You mention using (zp),y and that unrolled inner loop would be faster. Does it mean your inner loop is not unrolled ?

How the f... ;) you save registers in that case ?

 

The final, highly unreadable clusterf*ck of a code has merged these 5 substages into just one:

I would love to see that clusterf*ck of code :D

Once again, at this point I'm ready to kill to get that inner loop source code ;)

 

I'll rather work on my StunRunner for 6502. Flatshading is much more visually pleasing than shimmering textures. Plus, can't beat the feeling of real , generic, good old-fashioned 3D mesh...

Sure. If you're aiming for nice 3d world that's probably most practical way. Textures are too slow, wireframe is not much faster than flat-shaded.

Just keep working on it between changing flats/houses and we'll get a nice 3d game in couple years :)

 

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I'm pretty sure the fanboyism (is that even a word?) is running in both directions here.
FWIW, I didn't have either machine as a kid,
I have never owned a C64, I recently owned a 128D for a few years and set it up exactly twice before selling it, but I do play a game on the C64 Joystick once in a while.
Prior to the Amiga I referred to Commodore as Commode odor.
I own an Atari 130XE, I owned an 800 until it burned up in a fire, and I own a Plus/4. But I'm mostly a CoCo guy.

My thoughts on Atari and Commodore machines.
The 400... I've typed on it and unless you just want to play games, it sucked. Worst keyboard next to the TS-1000/ZX-80/ZX-81.
The 800 is really nice, and I wanted one for a while as a kid, but my parents couldn't afford that. It's a nice machine hardware/physically.

I never totally liked the XL line but they they were okay. The 1200XL looked the most interesting to me but it was off the market pretty fast.
The 600XL is certainly better than the 400, but if you want to talk about kiddie looking computers... these look a lot like a game system with a keyboard.
The cartridge port is top center, and the 600XL is tiny. Put wood grain on it and you'd think it was a 2nd gen 2600.
The XE line was too cheap. I don't mind the looks, but the keyboard... ugh.
The VIC-20 is a joke. 22 characters per line! No bitmapped graphics... don't "but you can..." me, it's not bitmapped graphics.
The C64 had nice enough hardware, but I don't like the breadbin case (ugly and keyboard is too high), and the CPU speed isn't anything special.
The BASIC sucks on all of them!
You either have the equivalent of a BASIC from 1976, or a non-standard BASIC dog that brings otherwise good hardware down.

If you get BASC XL or XE with their additional features and speed, the Atari isn't as bad, but it's still slower than it should be for the clock speed..
Once you do that, you have to consider Simon's BASIC or some other C64 BASIC upgrade as well. Simons BASIC is an extended BASIC, but it;s odd.
If Atari BASIC were more like Microsoft BASIC, I probably wouldn't be as harsh towards it, but non-standard + slow = sucks IMHO.
I was lucky to get a computer at all as a kid let alone have to buy a different BASIC or upgrade.
The Atari is more memory efficient thanks to the Antic being able to switch modes, colors, etc... on the fly with the least bits per pixel needed.
Atari's single color player/missile graphics are a serious shortcoming. You have to overlay PMs to get multi-color objects.
Then there's the vertical movement done in software... but players can be larger.
The C64 has multicolor sprites, making nice looking sprites easier, especially from BASIC, and moving/animating sprites is easy.
They would have been better if BASIC had commands for dealing with sprites.
I don't like the color palette of the C64, and I don't like the feel of it's keyboard.
That's an abridged version of my rant on those machines, but I can come up with a similar rant about any 8 bit made.

As for the Plus/4... for what Jack originally wanted, and at the original price point, it's a good machine.
Lots of idiotic mistakes followed his departure.
Some of the recent games look really impressive, and it's good for games like Elite, which the C64 is really too slow for.
For static images, it's clearly better than the C64 or Atari.

If Commodore had produced a C64-II instead of the Plus/4, it would have been what most people wanted instead.

Put a better BASIC on the C64 or Atari and I would have been happy with either one.
With something like BASIC 3.5, the C64 would be a nice machine to program.
With one of the current optimized versions of Atari BASIC, the machine is finally what it always should have been.

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I'm pretty sure the fanboyism (is that even a word?) is running in both directions here.

 

<snap a lot of good observations>

 

I think it is a cool thing that people stand behind their systems, that is part of the hobby I guess. It almost should be, since the 'absolute' capabilities of this equipment is already outdated a lot.

 

It is all about memories and dedication. The Atari is an object that makes me connect with the child in me from the 80's and 90's ... and with every modern software release I am glad it pleases the little child in me to show what the amazing Atari 8bit (still) can do.

 

Now I am on the philosophical track, I think it is the existing software library that decides what system is the best. To me this is a true philosophy. Imagine that there was not a single title for C64 and not a single title for Atari 8bit. Would it matter then which was the best computer? It is the quality of the software that decides (for me).

 

The main reason I keep coming back to my Atari 8bit is because I am so fond of certain games. Even when I had Apple //c, Atari ST and Atari 2600 setup. I was in the circumstance to enjoy all the systems equally. I had some pretty cool stuff on all the 4 systems. But I kept moving back to the 8bit (and slightly too, to the 2600). It is simply fun. Even old games with really outdated GFX can be amazing. I love to play Missile Command on the 2600 and the 800XL. It is so challenging, and after every THE END I want to start another challenge.

 

So, even with GFX like sh*t and almost zero sound effect games can be so challenging, so much fun... that you could ask whether what the best system is, is a useful question?

 

Take the BASIC Game Nerm or Bemer. It looks like nothing, and the sound (music and fx) is extremely limited. But it is such a great game.

I am not so familiar with the C64 to compare it in that way. Like I wrote earlier, back then I was attracted to the games library, but from what I have seen on youtube those games do not look so much fun anymore. So I don't know. I probably will have to experience.

 

What we need is a system to let people express their fun, dedication, and how much they felt challenged by a gametitle. When we can setup a valid system that compares this with A8 and C64, I think you will get a rather trustful outcome to the question which system is the best. It is all about experience, I'm sure about that.

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I was impressed when I saw the Plus/4 version of Mercenary, runs very smooth compared to the c64 and looks almost identical to the Atari version.

 

 

 

If Commodore had produced a C64-II instead of the Plus/4, it would have been what most people wanted instead.

 

The C65 which would have come a little too late in 91 but had they released something like a few years earlier I believe it would have been very successful. C64 compatible, dual sids, improved VICIII graphics and Microsoft basic version 10.

 

post-45355-0-02244600-1547246655_thumb.jpg

Edited by shoestring
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I don't blame people one bit for supporting their favorite machine. Totally get it.
But some of the bashing has nothing to do with facts, and some of the replies are arguing with people's opinions by stating opinions.
Let's face it, different people want different things.
I wanted what I thought was the best BASIC, some people wanted games or a specific game (Star Raiders maybe), some people wanted to run their business, and some simply wanted to type letters.
At least we had lots of different options then.

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I don't blame people one bit for supporting their favorite machine. Totally get it.

But some of the bashing has nothing to do with facts, and some of the replies are arguing with people's opinions by stating opinions.

Let's face it, different people want different things.

I wanted what I thought was the best BASIC, some people wanted games or a specific game (Star Raiders maybe), some people wanted to run their business, and some simply wanted to type letters.

At least we had lots of different options then.

 

Hmm yes. But BASIC is still a software package, like you brought up Basic XL and so on. It does -to me- not prove which system is the best, since you can run another basic distribution. Take Turbo Basic XL 1.5, it is amazing what it can do. I love it. What i love the most is that it let me code in a structural way. (Which I also try to do in Assembler lol).

 

But without Turbo Basic XL 1.5, the Atari 8bit would be less appealing to me.

Talking about business: thank god there is Syncalc. It is powerful. But if there was no such program as Syncalc, I would not think the Atari is a capable machine; i would prefer my Apple //c then with Apple Works (which is excellent too btw)

 

One of my main tasks of my Atari is typing essays and short stories on it. It goes VERY WELL with the most amazing 8bit word processor of the entire universe, called The Last Word. It is really adding something to the Atari 8bit, and it feeds my positive opinion about the Atari. But in fact, it is not the Atari that is that good, it is that brilliant piece of software FJC put together.

 

What I try to prove here, is that it is the software library that means everything. Without any software, a computer is a pretty useless pile of digital crap.

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What all know it is the software that displays what the hardware can do?

Because I like to see amazing graphics demos - I'd like to see the best demos of each system produced to date in a

'Let's Compare.....' video.

Same for their killer games that were made.... of videogames that would have sold 1000s or 10,000s etc. of that particular computer.

Which were never available at their launch or even one year later?

 

Harvey

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Hmm yes. But BASIC is still a software package, like you brought up Basic XL and so on. It does -to me- not prove which system is the best, since you can run another basic distribution. Take Turbo Basic XL 1.5, it is amazing what it can do. I love it. What i love the most is that it let me code in a structural way. (Which I also try to do in Assembler lol).

 

But without Turbo Basic XL 1.5, the Atari 8bit would be less appealing to me.

Talking about business: thank god there is Syncalc. It is powerful. But if there was no such program as Syncalc, I would not think the Atari is a capable machine; i would prefer my Apple //c then with Apple Works (which is excellent too btw)

 

One of my main tasks of my Atari is typing essays and short stories on it. It goes VERY WELL with the most amazing 8bit word processor of the entire universe, called The Last Word. It is really adding something to the Atari 8bit, and it feeds my positive opinion about the Atari. But in fact, it is not the Atari that is that good, it is that brilliant piece of software FJC put together.

 

What I try to prove here, is that it is the software library that means everything. Without any software, a computer is a pretty useless pile of digital crap.

As I said before "I was lucky to get a computer at all as a kid let alone have to buy a different BASIC or upgrade."

Besides, that may fix Atari BASIC's speed issues, but it's several years late to have influenced my computer choice.

Turbo BASIC XL came out only shortly before I switched to the Amiga.

There were also BASIC compilers for most machines including the C64, Plus/4, Apple II, Spectrum, TRS-80, and my Color Computer.

I was also programming in Pascal or C by then, and was pretty much beyond BASIC at that point.

When it comes to native code compilers, the 6502 finishes dead last, and the 6809 is first.

 

Just to point out a little something here... I was criticized for posting FLI pictures of recent origin, but you are touting a new word processor for the Atari.

There is a bit of selective then and now going on in this thread.

I don't mind including all current software, or limiting arguments to what was available back then just as long as things are consistent.

 

There are multiple spreadsheet, word processor, and database programs for the C64.

You may not be aware of them, but there are certainly plenty to choose from.

The GEOS programs proved quite popular among some of my friends, but I've never used any so I wouldn't know what to suggest for comparison.

SuperBase seems to be a database program I remember hearing about a lot.

The Plus/4 has quite a few programs in those categories in addition to the built in software.

The list also includes expanded versions of the built in software.

Here is a recent spreadsheet app: http://plus4world.powweb.com/software/SVS-Calc_2_5

A few programs have been converted to ROMs to replace the built in software. There's a list somewhere.

 

FWIW, I'd never trade my PC to use an 8 bit program now.

 

 

What all know it is the software that displays what the hardware can do?

Because I like to see amazing graphics demos - I'd like to see the best demos of each system produced to date in a

'Let's Compare.....' video.

Same for their killer games that were made.... of videogames that would have sold 1000s or 10,000s etc. of that particular computer.

Which were never available at their launch or even one year later?

 

Harvey

Yeah, I like to see modern demos, ports of games that never made it to the machines back in the day, improved remakes, and totally new games.

The demos look cool but they are my least favorite because they often depend on tricks that couldn't be used in a game for various reasons... but they are still neat to see.

Several games like Elite didn't have official ports for the Plus/4, but thanks to the community, there is an excellent port.

Improved versions of PacMan, Donkey Kong, or whatever are nice to see because the originals were often rushed and were significantly different than the arcade in gameplay.

The modern updates are a labor of love and it shows.

Video playback is another neat thing to see. That's one area the C64 doesn't do so well at.

Some of the recent Plus/4 video demos I've seen is amazing, and surprisingly enough, video playback on the original CoCo can be quite good using one of it's semi-graphics modes.

 

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Serious question for the adults here. Does there exist on the C64, a Sparta DOS X equivalent (and yes - RAM expansions are allowed)? To me, SDX is probably the single most impressive thing I can show any "modern" computer user, as most can still relate to MS-DOS and the PC era. Seeing how closely a 1979 machine can emulate MS-DOS 3.x era stuff definitely has that "wow" factor.

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Serious question for the adults here. Does there exist on the C64, a Sparta DOS X equivalent (and yes - RAM expansions are allowed)? To me, SDX is probably the single most impressive thing I can show any "modern" computer user, as most can still relate to MS-DOS and the PC era. Seeing how closely a 1979 machine can emulate MS-DOS 3.x era stuff definitely has that "wow" factor.

That's one thing I'm not well versed in. I'm not sure about MS-DOS like expansions for the Commodores.

JiffyDOS is the most common upgrade, and it's supported on the SD2iec drives. But it's just a dos wedge that speeds up I/O and makes things a little easier.

There's GEOS, the graphical OS, and there is LUnix, or Little Unix, that is a Unix like OS. I've never used it. It could probably be ported to other 6502 platforms.

I'm not sure what RAM upgrades there are.

*edit* Not sure what RAM upgrades there are for the C64. There are plans for 256K upgrades for the Plus/4.

 

Over in the CoCo world people use FLEX, OS-9, and OS-9 Level II. Flex is sort of like CP/M, and OS-9 is similar to Unix. Level II OS-9 can use more RAM.

OS-9 Level II got replaced with NITROS-09, which has had some recent 'Ease Of Use' upgrades, and people are making speed optimizations to related tools like BASIC-09.

My CoCo 3 has a 2MB Boomerang RAM upgrade, and 6309 CPU.

The machine was recently donated to me by members of the community to replace the one that burned up a few years ago... awesome people!

Not sure what I'm going to do with 2MB yet.

*edit* NITROS-09 can use the 2MB upgrade.

Edited by JamesD
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@JamesD You have not to convince me. I am totally on your side. I was not arguing with anyone but bringing up stand alone reasons why I think one can hardly tell which is the best system.

 

Of course when you go back in time when the systems were the actual machines of the era I think I would have said C64 (because of the same reason: more cool and popular games). I was absolutely not fighting with you but your good response where you compared the two systems inspired me to my philosophy about the available library.

 

@Stephen agreed about SDX. Same with BHS Professional. This system is like a whole IS in it's own. Such a complex and capable system shows us what a8 can do!

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What I try to prove here, is that it is the software library that means everything. Without any software, a computer is a pretty useless pile of digital crap.

Not if you are a programmer, then the hardware means everything for the software you want to produce. You are only thinking from an end-user's perspective.

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I was not arguing with anyone but bringing up stand alone reasons why I think one can hardly tell which is the best system.

 

 

Again, looking at it from an end-user-only perspective. Not a programmer's, or even engineer's.

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Imagine that there was not a single title for C64 and not a single title for Atari 8bit. Would it matter then which was the best computer?

To programmers it matters. If it were up to them alone. But the best system doesn't necessarily get the most or best software, because that is decided by management depending on user base and the most possible sales. So it all depends on which computer the public perceives to be the best due to, most likely, the best marketing, and nothing to do with the strength of the hardware. But a programmer, given the choice, will always want the best hardware (assuming no previous bias because said programmer started out as an end-user with their favorite machine).

 

Nintendo Gameboy is a perfect example of user-base over best tech, due to marketing. It was the least powerful hand-held of all (granted it was the first), but still maintained the most software and most programmed for because programmer's make a living base on sales, but most I am sure would have much preferred programming a Sega Game Gear or Atari Lynx at the time.

 

Also, the more a system is programmed for, the more is learned about the hardware and how to take best advantage of it, so often the best hardware doesn't look the best to the end-user because the best ways to take advantage of the hardware have not been discovered yet due to lack of programming experience with the hardware. The Atari 8-bit vs. C64 is the best example of these two situations. In their case it's a close comparison of power with both having strengths in different areas, but most of the Atari's strengths had not even been seen until more recent years, except for the rare exceptions, as more and more in later viable years the Atari was an afterthought that got bare-bones, qucik and dirty ports from the C64, if it got the software at all.

Edited by Gunstar
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Serious question for the adults here. Does there exist on the C64, a Sparta DOS X equivalent (and yes - RAM expansions are allowed)? To me, SDX is probably the single most impressive thing I can show any "modern" computer user, as most can still relate to MS-DOS and the PC era. Seeing how closely a 1979 machine can emulate MS-DOS 3.x era stuff definitely has that "wow" factor.

I'm coming from "owned commodore" perspective and can say Sio port/protocol is best thing ever imho. Add all different doses like Spartadox with different drivers, devices etc - there's nothing close to it on c64-128 that I know of.

ps.I admit I don't know details about cp/m etc...

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You are only thinking from an end-user's perspective.

 

This is actually a very good comment. I did not realize this. You are right. But then the next question is: isn't that for a homecomputer in the end not the only perspective that matters?

 

With other tools, like a hammer, I can imagine that a Carpenter wants to use the very best hammer there exist, but the end user (the person that lives in the house that the carpenter built) does not really care what hammer he used.

 

But with this debate I am wondering whether it is interesting what a programmer thinks? I mean: It is great that a programmer might have a different opinion about this, but that might be only interestingr for that particular programmer.

What if a programmer thinks it is the best machine, but the software he writes never meets the needs of the end user?

 

Let me take the Atari Jaguar.

I believe the specs were amazing for that time. But the device, if I may believe some of the people I read messages from, was extremely hard to write software for.

So this might be one of the causes there are not so many titles released (I might be wrong here, I did not check it).

 

So what does a very strong and capable system mean when there is no software?

 

Let me repeat that you are right that I have one perspective. But I am not convinced yet that there are any other perspectives that do matter here.

 

With other computers (like the Commodore Amiga or Atari ST debate) I see what you mean. I am a professional musician, and I always would have chosen the Atari ST over the Commodore Amiga, because of the MIDI ports of the ST and also because of the available software like Cubase and Score Perfect. But someone that was more into other tasks, like gaming, would probably say: hey the Amiga is way better then the Atari ST.

 

The reason I prefer Atari 8bit is the same reason I prefer my wife over several other woman ;) Sometimes I even can not explain it, that is probably what people would call love. I prefer atari 8bit, because it is atari 8bit.

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