Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Commodore 64 designers ripped off the Atari's lower case font... Atari and C64 lower case text is identical... There's a little piece of Atari in every C64... The C64 font is just the PET font with double width pixels. They had to have two of the same pixels next to each other to avoid hires color artifacts. You can even write a little program which doubles the pixel width of the PET font and you will get most C64 characters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atariksi Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 ...Concerning 320x200: On A8 there is a circuit which forces monochrome in that mode (however, with PMs you can circumvent that). ... Hey, you said something positive regarding A8 although in parentheses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfram Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 The result looked similar to the Atari font which is why some people believe that the C64 font is a copied and modified version of the Atari font, but since the PET font can be converted to the C64 font with a small program, this theory is out of question. I read the same article before writing my post Trollfram... Now, if the PET font can be converted to the C64 font with a small program, therefore nullifying what I'm saying... Does that mean the PET font can be redefined as the C64 font? Or the C64 font can be redefined with the PET font? Either or, if case 1 then the PET is redefined with Atari lower case text. If case 2 then the C64 has the PET's lower case which is different than the A8's... SUCKA!!!! "the PET font can be converted to the C64 font with a small program, therefore nullifying what I'm saying..." correct. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwhyte Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) "the PET font can be converted to the C64 font with a small program, therefore nullifying what I'm saying..." Where's this program so that I can compare... If the PET's lower case font with double pixel width is identical to the A8's after running said program then I'll leave it be... Though... It'll be interesting to see this program double the width of the PET's lower case T and have it look the same as an A8 or C64 lower case T... Edited April 18, 2009 by dwhyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Where's this program so that I can compare... If the PET font with double pixel width is identical to the A8's then I'll leave it be... What you ask for is impossible because the C64 font is not identical to the A8 font so a generated double pixel width PET font cannot be identical to the A8 font either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwhyte Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) Where's this program so that I can compare... If the PET font with double pixel width is identical to the A8's then I'll leave it be... What you ask for is impossible because the C64 font is not identical to the A8 font so a generated double pixel width PET font cannot be identical to the A8 font either. Before I originally posted my thoughts and before I even read that article on PETSCII tonight, I had EnvisionPC and the character editor of C64PrgGen up on the screen... The lower case font data between the A8 and C64 are identical... 100% identical... All 26 lower case characters Like I said before... There's a little bit of Atari in every C64... Edited April 18, 2009 by dwhyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carmel_andrews Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 This thread is wrong starting from topic's title. The original interesting question was: Does anybody have any views on where any titles were launched on both Atari and Commodore - and the Atari version is the better of the two? Yeah, we kind of got overrun by trolls. In all fairness, I blame the original poster's poor choice of title. I did learn a lot from this thread: - fanboi threads work best when you set the filter to ignore posts form the craziest nuts, (at the expense of some humor) - the c64 guys are mostly from Europe, and their insults ("You're a communist!") are so culturally irrelevant that its genuinely funny. - The scene talk is annoying as hell since half the users here are from the US/Canada which does not have a demo "scene" but instead has retro gaming. - A8 does appear to be the equal in most ways to the C64, and the better in many more ways. Honestly I was never a fanboi (rich enough to afford a C64, 1200XL, Vic-20, TI99/4A, Northstar Horizon as a kid) so I never paid attention to this discussion before. I'm surprised the A8 is so solid against the competition despite being older than many other 8-bits. - Nothing posted earlier in the thread is ever internalized, so this thread is now infinite as new fanbois coming in with the same straw-man rants. Fastrob..... You also forgot to mention that most of the A8 (and c64) cracking/hacking was going on in Mainland europe (after all, when did you ever hear of an A8 or c64 cracking party taking place somewhere in the UK...try hardly ever)...that's not to say that there wasn't any pirating going on in the UK (the c64 had things like action replay and similar devices and all the A8 had was Rob C, a human version of Action replay)...can't remember any more prominant A8 crackers/hackers as i didn't realy follow the scene Also I guess when you say 'europe' fastrob...in that context, i am guessing you mean continental or mainland europe (i.e the other side of the north sea/english channel) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kr0tki Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) Commodore 64 designers ripped off the Atari's lower case font... Atari and C64 lower case text is identical... There's a little piece of Atari in every C64... The C64 font is just the PET font with double width pixels. They had to have two of the same pixels next to each other to avoid hires color artifacts. You can even write a little program which doubles the pixel width of the PET font and you will get most C64 characters. Then please provide this program, because despite it probably is true for upper-case characters, I don't believe you can convert a PET letter into a by "simply doubling the pixel width". The mentioned Wikipedia sentence has just been marked as uncited. It'll probably be removed from there in a couple of weeks. Source for the PET font used: here Edited April 18, 2009 by Kr0tki Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfram Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) Where's this program so that I can compare... If the PET font with double pixel width is identical to the A8's then I'll leave it be... What you ask for is impossible because the C64 font is not identical to the A8 font so a generated double pixel width PET font cannot be identical to the A8 font either. Before I originally posted my thoughts and before I even read that article on PETSCII tonight, I had EnvisionPC and the character editor of C64PrgGen up on the screen... The lower case font data between the A8 and C64 are identical... 100% identical... All 26 lower case characters Like I said before... There's a little bit of Atari in every C64... Indeed. looks like commodore copied the a8 font. the pet differs bigger then a simple program could turn it into the c64 font. even stuff like ()$@*;: looks the same. Edited April 18, 2009 by Wolfram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barnacle boy Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) The c64's lowercase letters are identical to the Atari's, no doubt about it. hehheh... nicking the Atari's font. That's kinda funny. Edited April 18, 2009 by Barnacle boy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwhyte Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) ...that's not to say that there wasn't any pirating going on in the UK (the c64 had things like action replay and similar devices and all the A8 had was Rob C, a human version of Action replay)...can't remember any more prominant A8 crackers/hackers as i didn't realy follow the scene... Huh? I never even heard of Rob.C until I seen the Holmes archive last year... All the cracking that was going on where I lived was done locally, by most of the guys that were working for the Atari retailer in town... I remember watching a lot of games being cracked with a combination of Allen Macroware's DiskWiz-II, Mac/65 and DDT... I only ever did a 1/2 dozen or so myself from the ages of 12 to 14... None of my cracks made it onto the intersurf though... Edited April 18, 2009 by dwhyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 what???? are we now talking about ripping fonts? Jesus... and Atari never got C to court? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) The c64's lowercase letters are identical to the Atari's, no doubt about it. hehheh... nicking the Atari's font. That's kinda funny. You forgot the rest of the characters: Top to bottom: PET, C64 uppercase, C64 lowercase, Atari Edited April 18, 2009 by Fröhn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfram Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 The c64's lowercase letters are identical to the Atari's, no doubt about it. hehheh... nicking the Atari's font. That's kinda funny. You forgot the rest of the characters: Top to bottom: PET, C64 uppercase, C64 lowercase, Atari Top to bottom: PET, C64 uppercase, Atari, C64 lowercase, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barnacle boy Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 You forgot the rest of the characters Didn't 'forget.' Dwhyte specified the lowercase letters from a-z, so that's what I compared. No one was trying to claim the entire character set was identical. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwhyte Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) The c64's lowercase letters are identical to the Atari's, no doubt about it. hehheh... nicking the Atari's font. That's kinda funny. You forgot the rest of the characters: Top to bottom: PET, C64 uppercase, C64 lowercase, Atari No... We didn't forget the rest of the characters. We're talking about the 26 lower case characters that are the same. You've tried debating the fact that the PET can double the width of it's font data and have it look like the C64. Us Atarians have proved you wrong. I see Wolfram has run away without anything to say in regards to this. He thought he had me there. You can't deny it Fröhn. The lower case font data is identical. And I find it funny--as I assume everyone else here does too--that the C64 designers just happened to come up with lower case font data that is 100% identical to the A8's... THERE'S A LITTLE PIECE OF ATARI IN EVERY COMMODORE 64 Edited April 18, 2009 by dwhyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 You forgot the rest of the characters Didn't 'forget.' Dwhyte specified the lowercase letters from a-z, so that's what I compared. No one was trying to claim the entire character set was identical. Sorry I misread his sentence. But from other A8 people I often heard that the entire font is ripped so I kinda expected that from him too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfram Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 I see Wolfram has run away without anything to say in regards to this. wrong. Indeed. looks like commodore copied the a8 font. the pet differs bigger then a simple program could turn it into the c64 font. even stuff like ()$@*;: looks the same. so, stop insulting me. I have not attacked you personally either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barnacle boy Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Sorry I misread his sentence. But from other A8 people I often heard that the entire font is ripped so I kinda expected that from him too Ah right, I hadn't heard that claim before. Normally I avoid A8 people...* *I kid! I kid! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwhyte Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 (edited) I see Wolfram has run away without anything to say in regards to this. wrong. Indeed. looks like commodore copied the a8 font. the pet differs bigger then a simple program could turn it into the c64 font. even stuff like ()$@*;: looks the same. so, stop insulting me. I have not attacked you personally either. lol... Your antics here have roused my evil twin that lives under the bridge... Nothing to say about the font debate? EDIT: I retract my jibe towards you and sent the evil troll back under his bridge; it's funny he only comes out when there's beer in my house... Indeed. looks like commodore copied the a8 font. the pet differs bigger then a simple program could turn it into the c64 font. even stuff like ()$@*;: looks the same. I thought this was Frohn's post and not yours... Edited April 18, 2009 by dwhyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atariksi Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Clear advantage? More like achilles heel, for sure. Doesn't the 1541 run like 300 characters per second, or 2400 baud? Maybe that's the slowest (std) speed, but SUPER slow. I think it's about 4-5000 baud including disk access (not pure bus transfer speed). But that's just the original firmware. So they used some tricks with special loaders (etc) to speed it up. Guess what? That doesn't make it fast. I have to disagree. Good fastload routines achieve up to 10 kB/sec including disk access. Pure bus speed would be 30 kB/sec there. SIO is quite slow compared to that. So it was a disadvantage 30 years ago (relative to A8) and it's a disadvantage now (relative to A8 peripheral emulation). So now, just exactly what is that "clear advantage?" There is no "clear" advantage but it can easily be faster than SIO and you got a 2nd CPU + RAM which you might use for other stuff too. Given small length of games in early 1980s, by the time your fastloader loads and kicks in, the game on Atari will already have been loaded. Oh, and SIO is fast also; the default is 19,200 bps. I am driving it at 59659bps w/o problems. That rate is not upper limit as it just happens to be evenly divisible into both PC and Atari timers (1789790/30 = 1193180/20 = 59659bps). External clocked SIO easily gets >300,000 bps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atariksi Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 ...Concerning 320x200: On A8 there is a circuit which forces monochrome in that mode (however, with PMs you can circumvent that). ... Hey, you said something positive regarding A8 although in parentheses. I can't find any circuit on Atari-8bit that FORCES monochrome in 320*200 even if not using PMs. So without PMs, color is do-able in 320*200 on Atari. For experiment, I see that the color of the text/pixel is the chroma portion of the background color (upper 4-bits) and luminance is what you set via POKE 709,value. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Nothing to say about the font debate? There isn't much more to say, you convinced us in that matter. Those 26 lower case chars look the same, the rest is a descendant from the PET font. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 I can't find any circuit on Atari-8bit that FORCES monochrome in 320*200 even if not using PMs. So without PMs, color is do-able in 320*200 on Atari. You can select two different lumas but only one chroma in hires modes. That's pretty much enforcing monochrome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atariksi Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 what???? are we now talking about ripping fonts? Jesus... and Atari never got C to court? Copyright/patent laws are not as strict on fixed font types as they are with TrueType fonts and other scalable fonts. I think certain fixed shapes cannot even be copyrighted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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