Atari Vs C64 --- 80s Computer scene etc chat...

[atarian63]

It's just that POS o/s that commodore hung on it. I have had several as a dealer for myself and always return the amiga to my store in short order, what a crappy awful o/s! Crash happy etc. I just hated them. The hardware is great, too bad it wasn't an Atari as was intended.

 

The AMIGAOS was a 32 Bit and real multitasking OS. Being a pioneer there, it was hard to prevent all possible errors, and faulty software did the rest.... Seeing afterwards, how easy the AMIGAOS was to handle and to upgrade, The OS did very few mistakes compared to others.

But seeing a standard single task DOS (named TOS) with some graphical interface going down once a day proves what?

 

And, actually, If ATARI had the rights on the AMIGA, I bet, history would have repeated. The "AMIGA" was sold sparely and Commodore had some 16 Bit "C64" available at the half price (at the start) .

Maybe so but it took awhile(years) the release machine A1000 would guru if you looked at it wrong. The Icons etc looked like a kid did them and the interlace mode.. ugh! Sound was great. It didn't sell well for us until the A500, and only as a games machine.We sold very few A2000/A2500 and nearly no A3000. The A1200/A600 did somewhat better but compatibility issues held it back. We did do ALOT of service on Amiga mainly A500.

Customers who were more work oriented bought the ST, For ease of use, easier OS,Great DTP, Mac and PC capability with add ons.

There also were many customer who bought both, St for work, and Amiga for games.

 

I doubt it on the marketing. Commodore had tons of trouble with Tramiel, Had he stayed and not been forced out the problems would have continued. It would have taken some effort and commitment from Warner to do it but after all it was thier baby, they had paid for the hardware development.

[atarian63]

It's just that POS o/s that commodore hung on it. I have had several as a dealer for myself and always return the amiga to my store in short order, what a crappy awful o/s! Crash happy etc. I just hated them. The hardware is great, too bad it wasn't an Atari as was intended.

 

The AMIGAOS was a 32 Bit and real multitasking OS. Being a pioneer there, it was hard to prevent all possible errors, and faulty software did the rest.... Seeing afterwards, how easy the AMIGAOS was to handle and to upgrade, The OS did very few mistakes compared to others.

But seeing a standard single task DOS (named TOS) with some graphical interface going down once a day proves what?

 

And, actually, If ATARI had the rights on the AMIGA, I bet, history would have repeated. The "AMIGA" was sold sparely and Commodore had some 16 Bit "C64" available at the half price (at the start) .

The ST OS was rock solid stable. We used one for point of sale for many years, 12 hrs a day 7 days a week,no errors.

[Oswald]

One thing I notice especially in C-64 pictures - they rely heavily on dithering.

So, you're effectively halving your resolution mixing 2 colours to get a perceived third. Of course, the same happens on the Atari if it's using APAC or CIN.

 

another spectrum fan argument.

 

dithering is not a c64 specialty, its everywhere used where there's lack of colors and people want to better that.

for example at the a8bit graph2font gallery, its hard to find a picture which doesnt uses it:

 

http://g2f.atari8.info/gallery.html

 

you should maybe ask yourself why is it so since you have all those colors, still dithering everywhere, just like on the c64.

 

 

 

 

does this below look like 80x200 like the above one? no. ofcourse you will disagree

 

 

 

 

Atari BASIC slowness comes down to the slow FP ROM, and the fact that it is optimised towards efficient use of program space, and cramming in lots of commands into 8K.

 

c64 basic is in the same situation. but its 4k only. there goes the missing userfriendlyness.

 

BCD is in no way a slowdown - many computers store constants as ASCII strings and they have to get converted to BCD before being used in calculations.

 

why is bcd not a slowdown? your reasoning doesnt explains it. while in a previous post an atarian wrote a crystal clear explanation why it is a slowdown.

 

the c64 integer stuff is interesting, I have made a little test, and probably you are right, because a floating point variable went through faster on the test code as the integer this extra time probably indicates the conversions between fp-integer.

 

on the goto I can not comment I dont know how does it work. all I know is that the basic lines are stored as a onedir chained list so line number doesnt matter, you can make them all the same and everything will still work

Edited April 26, 2008 by Oswald

[DracIsBack]

The NES has some distinct disadvantages:

- only 256 pixels across

- inferior sound system

- being a Nintendo. Their systems have always struck me as "kiddies games".

 

Inferior sound? How do you figure that?

[kenfused]

Atari Basic Slowness:

 

Just having 6 bytes vs. 4 bytes is going to make the routines slower. Many of the routines can be optimized, ala the fast-chip back in the 800 days. Also one of the developer of Basic A++/XL/XE has mentioned something about the FP to ascii (or maybe the other way) being really slow and that was only routine rewritten for the new BASIC (forget which magazine I remember seeing it) Might have been a Bill Wilkinson column in Compute.

 

GOTOs and GOSUBS first have to convert the floating point value to integer and then search from the top of the program. I think some of the enhanced BASIC at least do a comparison on the current line. I think the FAST command in OSS BASICXL/XE maybe can also improve this?

 

RETURN's pop the line number from the stack (2 byte integer) and then search the entire program for the line.

 

There was an ANTIC or ANALOG program I thought that would improve the last two problems.

 

Atari Basic other issues.

 

No string arrays (useful for porting programs from other systems)

128 variable limit. Ok for most programs. No way to get of unused variables other than using LIST/ENTER to free up entries).

 

 

Atari Basic Advantages:

 

More than first two characters significant on a variable name. That one can really cause hard to detect errors on the commodore (and some other microsoft basics)

Strings longer than 255 characters.

No garbage collection issues with strings.

Built in graphics commands.

Instant syntax checking (maybe a personal preference)

ESC key use in editor. No editor quote and insert mode behavior crap (OS issue)

We can have three lines instead of two in editor. (ok maybe a disadvantage if people use it a lot in BASIC)

Can save a program to disk without having to go get a bite to eat.

 

 

Problem can be solved on both systems by using another BASIC.

 

 

Graphics comparisons:

 

While I think the one soccer ball pic for the commodore looks sharp, using colors as substitutes of gray just doesn't look right to me, but that is a personal preference.

I think the Atari soccer pic, could probably be done in a 160 mode using PM for adding some colors that would look sharper but just as colorful as the GTIA mode one. In any case I think some pics are designed with the hardware in mind and it is easy to make a pic for either than will be more difficult or impossible to do on the other.

[Fröhn]

We were a dealer for both back in the day, I can tell you for a fact as we had a semi load of Atari and C64 per month, C64 defects were very high. Not like Xbox 360 now, but very high, sometimes as high as 20-25% . Atari defect rates were maybe 3% . Customers would really be pissed back then, cant blame them.

Only at the very beginning, which is probably true for A8 too, every new computer had it's starting problems. When the C64 became REALLY big (1986+) there was no quality problems anymore.

 

And, actually, If ATARI had the rights on the AMIGA, I bet, history would have repeated. The "AMIGA" was sold sparely and Commodore had some 16 Bit "C64" available at the half price (at the start) .

IF Atari had wanted Amiga... Jay Miner left Atari because his Amiga project was not wanted at Atari (until Jack Tramiel joined later on, but thats another story)

 

You people can bitch about this all you want, but its the damn truth.. Trameil was extemely overconfident in his grasp of the nature of the market/industry when he took on atari, and he made some piss poor decisions.. The absolute WORST of which was cancellation of the development contract with AMIGA technlogies, and he deserved what he got... The ST was, at best, a reasonable attempt at removing his foot from his own arse...

Tramiels decisions were the right ones, Atari was ready to die when he joined it. And it was Tramiel himself while he was in Commodore who killed Atari, not Tramiel at Atari who tried to save it.

 

And... BCD is crap. I would rather have a ADD command in 6502 asm instead of BCD. BCD is a disease caused by Cobol, and it's 99% useless.

[supercat]

here is a reason for you: 1985. Preemptive -Multitasking 32 bit OOP Operating System with GUI, libraries, datatypes, command line, plug n play, multimedia. it was unmatched for 10 years.

 

Multifinder 6.1b9 on the Macintosh was wonderful and stable, and I used it in around 1990-1991. The Macintosh II's in the lab could show 640x480x256, and the prof's Macintosh IIfx (IIRC) could do 640x480x16M. The Macintosh of 1991 blew away the Amiga of 1991 (which, IIRC, was pretty much the same as the Amiga of 1986; I forget if the 3000 was out by then, but even that machine IIRC still had the 7.16MHz 16-bit chipset.

[atarian63]

We were a dealer for both back in the day, I can tell you for a fact as we had a semi load of Atari and C64 per month, C64 defects were very high. Not like Xbox 360 now, but very high, sometimes as high as 20-25% . Atari defect rates were maybe 3% . Customers would really be pissed back then, cant blame them.

Only at the very beginning, which is probably true for A8 too, every new computer had it's starting problems. When the C64 became REALLY big (1986+) there was no quality problems anymore.

 

And, actually, If ATARI had the rights on the AMIGA, I bet, history would have repeated. The "AMIGA" was sold sparely and Commodore had some 16 Bit "C64" available at the half price (at the start) .

IF Atari had wanted Amiga... Jay Miner left Atari because his Amiga project was not wanted at Atari (until Jack Tramiel joined later on, but thats another story)

 

You people can bitch about this all you want, but its the damn truth.. Trameil was extemely overconfident in his grasp of the nature of the market/industry when he took on atari, and he made some piss poor decisions.. The absolute WORST of which was cancellation of the development contract with AMIGA technlogies, and he deserved what he got... The ST was, at best, a reasonable attempt at removing his foot from his own arse...

Tramiels decisions were the right ones, Atari was ready to die when he joined it. And it was Tramiel himself while he was in Commodore who killed Atari, not Tramiel at Atari who tried to save it.

 

And... BCD is crap. I would rather have a ADD command in 6502 asm instead of BCD. BCD is a disease caused by Cobol, and it's 99% useless.

1986 is the time period I am talking about. I have no idea where you get your info but we were a large dealer and the C64 defect rate was awful. Ton's of returns.

 

Atari lost the 1600XL ( aka Amiga) during the transition. Warner should have hung in there. The St was great and we sold the crap out of them. We would have done better with Amiga except people either saw it as a games machine (which is how we sold it) or they just hated the O/S and returned it.

[+wood_jl]

What an enjoyable thread!!!!

 

This reminds me of back in the days when I'd read similar rants....AT 300 BAUD (!!!!) on the old BBS's.

 

I grew up with (and have) 8-bit Atari. Used C64 a little. Of course I'm biased towards the Atari, but this has been a very informative thread. The step back in time has been really cool. I'm actually pleasantly surprised to see people still so adamant in the advocacy of their choices from the 8-bit generation - when computers started to really come home. Who knew it would all lead to Windows Vista (barf).

 

After reading from you Commodore fans, (Oswald, etc), I read about the VIC II and SID chips on Wikipedia and I am somewhat impressed. I had heard SID sound back in the day and was impressed then.

 

I have no regrets about choosing A8 however. What I do have regrets about is that my Atari bias (at the time, and evidently just towards a name) automatically steered me to the ST when I likely would have enjoyed an Amiga more. Instead, I stuck with ST until 1991 when I was finally wowed away by VGA on the PC. It was only then that I experienced - for the first time - expandability and flexibility that was old hat to "Amiga people."

[supercat]

And... BCD is crap. I would rather have a ADD command in 6502 asm instead of BCD. BCD is a disease caused by Cobol, and it's 99% useless.

 

BCD is useful in some situations. The vast majority of 2600 games use BCD for score calculations. As for having add-without-carry, that would require reworking the opcode map. I'm more puzzled at why $CA and $EA aren't used for "INC A" and "DEC A". There are plenty of other places to stick "INX" and "NOP".

[supercat]

Again, this doesn't make any sense at all. The whole architecture of the SID is straightforward based on 70's classic analogue synthesizer architectures, with a waveform generator, an envelope generator, ring modulation and a multimode filter. Sounds like this had been used before more than 15 years earlier, just listen to Walter/Wendy Carlos "Switched on Bach". The only difference here is that no one implemented it on one single chip before.

 

I do wish Commodore had included more 'interesting' wave generation options at the front end. Much of the envelope circuitry is more of a hindrance then a help; I wish they'd simplified that and used the saved silicon to allow a few more wave shapes. Heck, just simplify the envelope circuitry period. What I'd like to have seen, would be two 8-bit registers: Rate and Level. When the current level is not equal to the programmed level, step it up or down by Rate; if Rate is zero, force the current level to equal Level.

 

Such a scheme would have made it easy to do everything that the SID's ADSR system can do, and a lot that it can't.

 

The filter is a wonderful and unique feature of the SID; it allows the SID to do things other instruments can't, but unfortunately it's just about the only really good thing about that device.

[Allas]

Well, the balloon c64 image is 255 colors indexed, so is a interlaced screen.

 

 

Maybe, we can refine the Atari image with interlaced mode to show more shades and better resolution.

 

 

It's possible to create on Atari a 160x200x32 no interlaced screen that just can be used for this special screen, and the results should be great. Of course, take a lot of time and effort to do.

[Rybags]

Re BCD - it's a necessary evil with 6502. The downfall of the Atari is that a novice took slow generic routines and used them.

 

Dithering - well, another necessary evil I suppose, but it's way more prevelant in the '64 scene.

 

Also - someone said C-64 BASIC was 4K - no, it's 8K. But having said that, you could effectively call the Atari BASIC 10K since the FP routines are in the OS, and few other computers AFAIK in the day even bothered to include them in the OS. You might even expand that further and include the graphics plot and line draw routines, since other machines also often include that within BASIC (in such cases they even have such abilities built in).

 

But, the Atari is a way more user-friendly machine. The OS is modular and extensible to a much larger degree of most 6502 machines of the era.

[peteym5]

I think the problems with Atari is that they were not well managed even before Jack Tremial took over and caused the 1983 video game crash. Look at the 5200 disaster, they made incompatible with the 8-bit or the 2600. If they were smart, they would have just made a game system with the 8-bit hardware and able to play the 8-bit cartridge. There already was a large game library available at that time. Atari also scrapped some projects that would have improved the 8-bit system before the XL series was release and could have made it better. One thing was a single video chip (CGIA) instead of the GTIA/Antic. Using a single chip probably free up the bus without loosing compatibility. Would have been made the systems cheaper in the long run.

 

Now I have said it before Commodore under Jack Tremial did not always make the best decisions. My big peeve is having all those different models that were totally incompatible with each other. That frustrated developers and consumers and no way to upgrade from one to another. You had to buy a whole new system. They should have made the Commodore 64 the standard. The 16 and 4+ would be the same system with less memory or had the programs built in. Commodore did wise up with the 128, but like someone else said, it cost almost the same as an Amiga.

 

At least Atari kept closer to a standard from the 400 to the XEGS. I know somethings were changed going from the 800 to 800XL, but the XL still could be made to run older software with a selectable OS or translator disk. Software can be easily be modified to run on the newer systems with a few changes in the source. I cannot say the same for the Commodore 64 where it cannot run software from the Vic-20, Pet, CBM, 16, 4+, etc.

 

I still say you can argue which is better forever on here, the 800xl and C64 both has advantages and disadvantages and it really comes down to the programmers knowledge of these system. I have seen good and bad games on both systems.

 

Now we are seeing those PC vs Mac commercials on TV, but I find those ridiculous because the modern MAC is using the same Intel processors and you can install the same software on either now. I think its more Apple vs Microsoft and MS blundered with that Vista P.O.S. I am sticking with XP.

[Rybags]

True - the 5200 would have been way better if it was done in the same way as the XEGS.

 

CGIA - well, it would have saved real-estate, made boards cheaper. But from a programming or performance standpoint would have been no different.

 

Atari management. Well, the problem there was throughout their history they went full-hearted with one product at the expense of others.

The A8 computer suffered because the 2600 was still successful into the mid 80's. Then under Tramiel, everything else suffered at the expense of the ST.

 

But, you can say similar of Commodore, even after Tramiel. The +4/16 were underdone, ie- comparatively poor sound and no sprites. I doubt it was a tradeoff in order to get more colours, more like a case of not killing the 64.

 

And, at the end of it all, didn't Atari fold after Commodore? Even if it was only months apart.

[atariksi]

I havent came here to hear everyone saying that. I came to defend the c64, against statements like this:

 

QUOTE (atariksi @ Sun Apr 20, 2008 10:42 AM) *

For some reason Commodore 64/128 spread better than Atari 8-bits although most people would agree that the Ataris are and were better machines than C64/128

 

 

That's what I meant with "cringeworthy statements"...

 

So reality for you is cringeworthy statements as long as it does not support your opinions. Everything I stated in Post #6 is a FACT except I gave more credit to the C64 for being able to do 80 columns. Perhaps, you did not read the entire post. Just repeatedly stating "hires" and posting "hires" pictures does not take away all the advantages of Atari that I mentioned. If someone really wanted HIRES during the time the C64 was popular they would buy a CGA-based IBM PC with 640*200 and 320*200 with 4 colors from 16 color palette and 80-column text mode with not only 16 color foreground text characters but also 16 background color for each character. You can also mix half-characters and quarter characters and change scan-line size of the characters to produce graphics modes. But like the C64, no shading although much sharper looking text. Atari can also set background color of characters in text mode using a sprite backdrop.

 

I am speaking from experience not just giving my opinion like you are doing. The CIA chip is less accurate timer frequency than POKEY timers. PIA is faster doing I/O transfers from joystick ports. PIA can read a full BYTE with one LDA whereas C64 has to first read $DC00 then $DC01 and then combine bytes. CPU speed of Atari is faster. Switching modes to lower resolution does speed up the graphics updating. What exactly are you denying?

 

Even for the more sprites that your system supports, you need to first find games that were un-doable on the Atari due to lack of sprites and make a probability distribution to see how many were un-doable due to lack of sprites. Just having more software/users does not make the hardware better. Amiga is a good example which sold less than the PC although it's graphics/sound were superior. And it's a FACT that Atari was years before the C64 and even after they tried to beat it out, they did not succeed. You got be good if someone after years of research trying to excel you fails in many aspects.

 

C64 also does not auto-boot but I did not even mention that there since you could always just rewrite your own ROM and make it boot-able. I was only looking at the capability of the computer not its popularity or software base.

[peteym5]

Atari and Commodore like folded in the mid 1990s probably because the Windows based PC has been increasing in strength and everyone wanted one. Like I said Atari and Commodore never tried to conform to a standard and did not make their rarely systems backward compatible. What if the ST were directly backward compatible with the XL/XE systems and able to run the old stuff? Yes, the ST and Amiga lines kept to a standard into their later models.

 

As for the CGIA thing, I think I remember reading in a PDF something about it stealing less cycles when accessing the bus, but would not change much. Maybe had a few more clock cycles available during VBIs and DLIs. Have to admit, they ignored some further opportunities with doing that and could have added some function to the video also. Could have had 16 luminescences always available instead of 8 (outside of GTIA modes)

[Allas]

... like "16 colours are not 16 colours". 2+2=5. Room 101.

 

 

I think Emkay try to say: Atari 160x200x(+5)/128 could be better than C64 160x200x16/16

[Cybergoth]

Games as Crownland, Space Harrier or Yoomp (for saying some of last productions) show some details that can't be filled with a C64.

 

I agree on Space Harrier and Yoomp, but meanwhile I tried Crownland and I fail too see anything particular special in it? Don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't show anything awesome. Probably I'm too distracted from the flicker? Even an outdated 1986 C64 title like Ghosts'n'Goblins get's a lot more going onto the screen. At best it reminds me a bit of all those low-budget C64 scenerish looking jump'n'runs that Codemasters, Magic Disk and others where throwing on the market by the dozen in the 90's. Of course they have bigger and better looking sprites and don't flicker when there's more than two on the screen at once.

 

It generally seems that sprites are the major limiting factor on the A8 machines regarding 2D action games, unless only microscopic stuff is required like for Dropzone.

 

How many sprites do you need to 1:1 recreate this one on the A8 (I assume 6?):

[Cybergoth]

The NES has some distinct disadvantages:

- only 256 pixels across

- inferior sound system

- being a Nintendo. Their systems have always struck me as "kiddies games".

 

Inferior sound? How do you figure that?

 

He's been comparing it to the SID, not Pokey

[Fröhn]

And... BCD is crap. I would rather have a ADD command in 6502 asm instead of BCD. BCD is a disease caused by Cobol, and it's 99% useless.

BCD is useful in some situations. The vast majority of 2600 games use BCD for score calculations. As for having add-without-carry, that would require reworking the opcode map. I'm more puzzled at why $CA and $EA aren't used for "INC A" and "DEC A". There are plenty of other places to stick "INX" and "NOP".

BCD is just needed for "score display"... could have been solved with a "divide-by-10" subroutine which is approx 10 bytes long. And I doubt ADD would require much work. CMP is basically a SBC without carry, so why should an ADD be more complicated?

 

Well, the balloon c64 image is 255 colors indexed, so is a interlaced screen.

 

(...)

 

Maybe, we can refine the Atari image with interlaced mode to show more shades and better resolution.

 

(...)

 

It's possible to create on Atari a 160x200x32 no interlaced screen that just can be used for this special screen, and the results should be great. Of course, take a lot of time and effort to do.

Flickering interlace vs no flicker...

 

Now I have said it before Commodore under Jack Tremial did not always make the best decisions. My big peeve is having all those different models that were totally incompatible with each other. That frustrated developers and consumers and no way to upgrade from one to another. You had to buy a whole new system. They should have made the Commodore 64 the standard. The 16 and 4+ would be the same system with less memory or had the programs built in. Commodore did wise up with the 128, but like someone else said, it cost almost the same as an Amiga.

The Tramiel decisions on +4 wasnt all that bad. He wanted it to be priced in the ZX Spectrum region to compete with the Speccy. Later management decided to sell it for more money (so it competed with the C64 and not with the Speccy) and with that crappy software onboard. Commodore fell down the moment Tramiel left, he might have been a kill-em-all capitalist, but the management following him was more busy with filling their own pockets instead of getting Commodore forward.

 

I am speaking from experience not just giving my opinion like you are doing. The CIA chip is less accurate timer frequency than POKEY timers. PIA is faster doing I/O transfers from joystick ports. PIA can read a full BYTE with one LDA whereas C64 has to first read $DC00 then $DC01 and then combine bytes.

How exactly are the CIA timers more inaccurate than POKEY timers? And more important: How do you use POKEY timers while playing music

 

Even for the more sprites that your system supports, you need to first find games that were un-doable on the Atari due to lack of sprites and make a probability distribution to see how many were un-doable due to lack of sprites.

There are many examples which are already mentioned. C64 is all about sprites, A8 is not.

 

And it's a FACT that Atari was years before the C64 and even after they tried to beat it out, they did not succeed.

Erm? 22 million C64/C128 sales vs 4 million A8 sales is no "success"?

 

Atari and Commodore like folded in the mid 1990s probably because the Windows based PC has been increasing in strength and everyone wanted one.

Commodore folded because they had no more innovative hardware to sell. When Tramiel left, the management was only doing counting money instead of issuing new promising projects. In the computer market you cannot sleep, if you sleep, others take the crown from you.

[MEtalGuy66]

here is a reason for you: 1985. Preemptive -Multitasking 32 bit OOP Operating System with GUI, libraries, datatypes, command line, plug n play, multimedia. it was unmatched for 10 years.

 

Multifinder 6.1b9 on the Macintosh was wonderful and stable, and I used it in around 1990-1991. The Macintosh II's in the lab could show 640x480x256, and the prof's Macintosh IIfx (IIRC) could do 640x480x16M. The Macintosh of 1991 blew away the Amiga of 1991 (which, IIRC, was pretty much the same as the Amiga of 1986; I forget if the 3000 was out by then, but even that machine IIRC still had the 7.16MHz 16-bit chipset.

 

Hmm welp, the Mac centris 610 that I had in 1994 crashed its ass off all the time if you ran more than one app at once. It was not a true multitasking environment like the amiga. There were whole lot of limitations to its "OS".. (I believe that was Mac os 9.x) It had the "castrated" 68EC040 in it @ 40mhz. The A3000T I had (circa 1990) on the other hand came from the factory with a 68RC040 in it at 25mhz and absolutely smoked the living dogshit out of that mac. Its OS ran in less than a meg of ram, the machine had 80megs of ram (could have put a gig on it if I had been rich with regular available plug-in cards) and it never crashed. And it multitasked better than any machine Ive owned to this day..

 

Unfortunately, there is merit to the argument that the AMIGA software market was lacking in business applications. Proobably due to the fact that it was absolutely Flooded with professional video, 3d-rendering, animation, digital sound editing/tracking, etc. software from day 1, and the market got kind of engrained towards those directions.

 

But to take another note, the Amiga 3000 was so far beyond the scale of other home systems in 1990, it was touted by most computer mags of the day as a "beast" and it was sold in various packages with unix instaled, ethernet installed, and test marketed by Sun microsystems as a low-cost client for some of their sparc-based system suites. The "stock" processor was an on-board 68030/68881 @ 25mhz, it was 32-bit bussed from stem-to stern, and had a processor upgrade slot that let you upgrade it quite substantially. Commodore and many third party vendors made both zoro-III (standard 32-bit expansion bus) cards for it, as well as a wide range of processor upgrades that went into the CPU upgrade slot. These ranged from a 40mhz68040 to a dual processor 68060@50mhz/604e@233mhz with 128megs of 32bit fastram, ultrawide SCSI3, etc. etc. And Im not even talking about the products that are avialble today. This stuff was available in the early-mid 90s...

 

As far as business applications went, I can remember being quite productive on a 10mhz 286 running word perfect, lotus, etc... Most business applications are hardly a test of a machines capabilities when compared to the full range of software available for that given machine.. performance in 3d and animationn related stuff, howver, has often been used as a benchmark to gauge raw performance capabilities of machines, even still today.

 

Yeah the stock commodore icon set looked like ass.. If you were too much of a retard to take advantage of any of the free replacement icons or endless flexibility in customization of the workbench environment, then you deserved to sit and look at that 4-color blocky assed crap. heh. One thing I will say. The ST and the MAC had a "keep it simple, stupid" GUI, and it really worked for alot of people who would have otherwise been lost. Its funny, the people I hear talking about amigas crashing are also the peple I hear talking about how crappy workbench looked. Leads me to believe that hey.. If you let a monkey loose in a missile silo control room for long enough, your probably gonna launch a nuke...

 

 

hahah. Oh well.

[atariksi]

...

I am speaking from experience not just giving my opinion like you are doing. The CIA chip is less accurate timer frequency than POKEY timers. PIA is faster doing I/O transfers from joystick ports. PIA can read a full BYTE with one LDA whereas C64 has to first read $DC00 then $DC01 and then combine bytes.

>How exactly are the CIA timers more inaccurate than POKEY timers? And more important: How do you use POKEY timers while playing music

...

>There are many examples which are already mentioned. C64 is all about sprites, A8 is not.

 

And it's a FACT that Atari was years before the C64 and even after they tried to beat it out, they did not succeed.

>Erm? 22 million C64/C128 sales vs 4 million A8 sales is no "success"?

 

You are quoting out of context. I am talking about beating out the hardware. Re-read post please. I already admitted in post #6 that C64 spread more-- meaning more sales and also from post #6:

"It seems POKEY using the 1.7897Mhz timing not only topped the C64 timers at 1.022Mhz, but the Amiga CIA timers at 715.909Khz and the PC timer at 1.19318Mhz. " How to make it musical or for timing stuff is up to the creativity of the coder. I get up to 20Khz 4-bit samples with Atari screen off and 14Khz w/screen on.

I asked what % of games were un-doable due to lack of sprites on A8?

[Allas]

Games as Crownland, Space Harrier or Yoomp (for saying some of last productions) show some details that can't be filled with a C64.

 

I agree on Space Harrier and Yoomp, but meanwhile I tried Crownland and I fail too see anything particular special in it? Don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't show anything awesome. Probably I'm too distracted from the flicker? Even an outdated 1986 C64 title like Ghosts'n'Goblins get's a lot more going onto the screen. At best it reminds me a bit of all those low-budget C64 scenerish looking jump'n'runs that Codemasters, Magic Disk and others where throwing on the market by the dozen in the 90's. Of course they have bigger and better looking sprites and don't flicker when there's more than two on the screen at once.

 

It generally seems that sprites are the major limiting factor on the A8 machines regarding 2D action games, unless only microscopic stuff is required like for Dropzone.

 

How many sprites do you need to 1:1 recreate this one on the A8 (I assume 6?):

 

Crownland (still in development) is a very colorful game. Every individual screen manage between 12-20 colors (not fixed of course), every level you can appreciate changes on colors. Maybe at the last of game you have seen all the 128 colors of the palette. Always programmers know Atari can do it, but really this is a solid example about this feature. Maybe, you can take much interest on that, but finally is a feature that C64 can't reach.

 

Nice sprite! Atari needs 2 players and 2 missiles to do that, as you have on mind. However not all the key on games are sprites. Helps a lot, but there are other ways. Imagine for a moment machines as Spectrum, Amstrad, BBC what will doing about.

 

But, Atari can do this simple type of sprites (one player per shape):

 

Edited April 26, 2008 by Allas

[miker]

How many sprites do you need to 1:1 recreate this one on the A8 (I assume 6?):

IMO 3 should be enough...

Edited April 26, 2008 by miker