Atari v Commodore

[Irgendwer]

Wow a real achievement indeed, you have just digitalized a picture and then ported it to atari. Nowadays, with PC tools, even monkey can do this

 

Yes, posting different screen shots from two machines and explain that one look better than the other is of course more sophisticated...

 

BTW: I've built a scanner head for my 1020 plotter and 'digitalized' pictures from newspapers with about the same quality about 25 years ago. A clever monkey don't have to wait until 'nowadays'...

 

If you are so good and cunning try to draw it pixel by pixel, (like STE did it) and then we will talk.

 

Why for the world should I like to talk with you?

 

On every 8bit scene (including Atari)you would be a laughing-stock if you bragged about anything like that

 

Hmm - must have something to do with this 'respect'-thing - correct?

[STE'86]

quote:

 

BTW: I've built a scanner head for my 1020 plotter and 'digitalized' pictures from newspapers with about the same quality about 25 years ago. A clever monkey don't have to wait until 'nowadays'...

 

that mate is a right load of bollocks. a newspaper picture is in NO WAY greyscale. it is what we call in the trade a "halftone" made up of various pattern of black dots arranged closer or further apart to fool the eye into seeing shades of grey.

 

now even today if u scan one of these without "descreen" selected u will get an horrendous mess that looks like tartan called MOIRE (look it up). so now i definitely say u DID NOT get any results 25 years ago that looked ANYWHERE near as good as that damned 64 screen I GUARANTEE IT because 25 years ago a bloody scanner didnt have descreen.

 

i have seen 1985 technology scanning in person. it was crap.

 

Steve

[TMR]

Archer MacLean:

The Atari is the PORSCHE of home computers (ZZAP! C64 magazine)

 

i notice you omitted what Archer said about the C64 being "a respectable BMW316" there, taking the quote out of context really isn't doing your argument any good. And whilst the C64 version is as he says in that interview a larger piece of code than the A8 version, Archer seems to have forgotten (and that wasn't too long after the game was released) that 4K of that extra space was taken up by the "Dropzone monitor" (actually the machine code monitor "borrowed" from Zeus 64 assembler) that he left in memory on the final release... wonder if that technical faux pas draws into question any other claims made in the same interview...

[Irgendwer]

that mate is a right load of bollocks. a newspaper picture is in NO WAY greyscale. it is what we call in the trade a "halftone" made up of various pattern of black dots arranged closer or further apart to fool the eye into seeing shades of grey.

 

Thank you, I like you too.

Did you built the scanner?

If the sampling is rough enough (it was about 25 DPI horizontally) a LDR will not see the halftones but the shades like the human eye.

And you can even 'convince' today's (CIS-)scanners not 'see' the raster: Just put a (plexi-)glas board on the scanner to defocus the unit - very well suited for further grey-scale operation without moiré effects.

 

As much as I appreciate your work Steven, I think it's better not to speculate about someone's abilities or knowledge without knowing him...

Edited September 11, 2009 by Irgendwer

[TMR]

As much as I appreciate your work Steven, I think it's better not to speculate about someone's abilities or knowledge without knowing him...

 

In this thread...? That'd be a first. =-)

[atarian63]

Probably depends on when in time. What time period are you talking about. I am guessing 86-90.

Here in the heyday 79-84 it was Apple then Atari.

I got my first 800xl in 1984 although it was a bit later when I was able to get the 1050 due to the high cost and having the worlds lowest paid paper round

That was a good time to get one, they were being discounted due to the crash. I remember the "official 84 olympics computer" sticker on the box. Also the enclosed ad's for the 1450xld..

[+MrFish]

Sidplay 2.5 does eat a fair amount of CPU power. Actually, compared to the other 8-bit players I'm using (ASAP <Atari>, NSF Play <NES>) SIDPlay2 is also a fairly CPU hungry app. Is SID that tough to emulate compared to these other chips??

...and also to catch all the effects that the processor messing with SID might be having.. It's the best there is with ResidFP, still not 100% perfect, but it's getting there slowly..

 

So, there are some softsynth techniques that are possible to reproduce via SID files?

[andym00]

So, there are some softsynth techniques that are possible to reproduce via SID files?

 

I wouldn't say softsynth in the strictest sense (to avoid the weight of this thread coming crashing down on me), but there's lots of things which are dependent upon the exact cycles they're changed.. Things like using the test bit to restart waveforms, used in things like hard restarts so that the waveform as at known point when the Envelope Generator starts to run to avoid clicks, or even to add the clicks if you desire.. Plus the waveform sample playback techniques, and also all the additional waveforms available through setting multiple bits of the waveform select.. All of the 'mixed' waveforms are available on 6581 but some are very very quiet in comparison to the 8580, and it's something that's being used a lot nowadays and gives SID a very large range of timbres, more so than you might think..

 

But all of the existing techniques that have been used on SID to make sound do work in ResidFP.. Even the latest waveform sample playback stuff works in there now, so anything that will play on a 64 will play in ResidFP correctly..

 

There are many cool things you can do with SID, one of the coolest (imho) is running FM on the voices, then SID just changes its character like you wouldn't believe.. I've been working on a player that provides just this, providing 3 audio rate modulators with a usual Yamaha Carrier Modulator setup with modulation envelopes, depths, scaling etc and the various usual Yamaha modulator waveforms but that's on hold for the time being due to other projects.. Anyway, enough sales pitch..

 

But a majority of the effort goes into emulating SID at a very high rate, essentially 1Mhz, and then downsampling the result to get an accurate version of what you would hear on a real SID, and a lot of that time is spent processing the filters which they've tried to accurately model on various SID chips.. If you look in the player you can see the various filter models you have available, all of which are slightly different, but then again that's what it's like on the real SID.. You've got different options in ResidFP of how the downsampling takes places, but even the cheapest one is still a bit of a CPU hog..

[andym00]

It has more to do with the fact that the C64 broke with the "Computer growth rules".

The Atari was able to have simulations running and to show what's going on.

The C64 was done to have something on the screen going on with less capabilities of doing simulations.

 

No, they designed it so C64 could make pretty graphical interpretations of your simulation data, whilst the 1541(s) did all the simulation work

You're comparing the A8 against the worlds first truly scaleable parallel processing machine.. Just add another 1541 to gain another 6502 processor!! Visionary!!

Just think, RoF using 4 1541s

[emkay]

Ah right i see, so on this machine u insist was and indeed still is so popular, there have never specific artists that are the equivalent of the 6 or so of us on the 64 who achieved any kind of notoriety?

 

and of course in the perverse logic of yourself, this would of course be our fault?

 

not yourselves on here? or the rest of the supposedly massive atari following over the years? but indeed the 64 artists for not working on the atari? right ok guilty as charged. i am glad u pointed that out.

 

i would however like to say in our defence that every other 8 bit machine had its own set of artists specialising on that format. in fact the guy i admired most did spectrum stuff. a chap by the name of Dave Thorpe. who used to do the US gold and ocean loaders. so the question must still arise...what did u do with your artists? and how come in the the retro atari land everyone here seems very big on "talking the talk" about how to do graphics but not actually "walking the walk" and actually getting off their butt and doing some?

 

Steve

 

Hehe...

 

Interesting, to see how you got it. So I may add, that you have the right thoughts, referring to your personal decision, to do Stuff on the C64 and not on the A8.

 

I guess, many people went off from the A8 and settled down on the C64.

Others still "preferred" the C64 due to it's graphics and sound capabilities.

Actually, it was the "better tool" to make graphics & sound stuff, back in those days.

You had less work to do and "everyone loved you with less work involved".

This explains also, why the early Hubbard stuff is doable on the A8.

I'd bet that he did learn to make computer music on the A8 and after the C64 with the SID arrived, he got there to finish his stuff more easily.

 

Well, seeing myself as a customer and not as a producer, back in those days, I encountered everytime people yelling after the C64. Sometimes I was wondering about that. Why do people wine about the C64 and use the A8 ? Just simply to buy a C64 was always the solution.

Artists did it, because they wanted to earn the easy money. And please don't tell me, you have drawn all the pictures and give them away for some warm handshake?

 

The people who stood still on the A8 side tried to compete with the special C64 features, but in that case the A8 lost in both ways. C64 features were not reachable and the A8 features got underdeveloped/missed.

 

Believe it or not, I owned a C128 for 14 days. There simply was nothing really impressive, except the deep sounds and the hires colours. Today all the C64 has, is the deep sound and the hires colours. And it's still all what the C64 scene has to offer.

 

The A8 was a "round" machine with balanced CPU powers, graphics abilities, sound, and a good Disk-speed from scratch. But Atari did all wrong with the presentation and marketing.

Actually, I didn't know about the A8, until a friend mentioned it. Til then I only had known computers like the VIC 20 , TI-99 , C64 , Amstrad before, and I knew about an upcoming Plus 4 from Commodore.

The only point to blame Atari, was the spreaded lie that TV sets just cannot display hires colours.

Well, it was an NTSC truth, but not for the rest of the TV world

After using S-Video, the TV still was "unicolour" in hires. So it was the A8 that was not able to show the colours, not the TV set.

 

 

All together ends in the logic path that people preferred the C64, have not known the A8, and Artist wanted to make the most money out of their work, making the C64 the "winner".

It seems, particular in GB, Sinclair did well to present his computer there. So, even if looking worse, the graphics were low, the sound was .... where sound? .... people knowed about the computer and the low price made it in the UK...

Edited September 11, 2009 by emkay

[emkay]

No, they designed it so C64 could make pretty graphical interpretations of your simulation data, whilst the 1541(s) did all the simulation work

You're comparing the A8 against the worlds first truly scaleable parallel processing machine.. Just add another 1541 to gain another 6502 processor!! Visionary!!

Just think, RoF using 4 1541s

 

Think of a buch of Ataris, connected via the Joystick interface...

[frenchman]

quote:

 

i have seen 1985 technology scanning in person. it was crap.

 

Steve

 

Wow, you never heard of Computer Eyes? From Digital Vision, Inc., an excellent Digitizer for C64 and A8?

 

Or Print Technik Video Digitizer? An excellent German product available on C64 and A8?

[andym00]

No, they designed it so C64 could make pretty graphical interpretations of your simulation data, whilst the 1541(s) did all the simulation work

You're comparing the A8 against the worlds first truly scaleable parallel processing machine.. Just add another 1541 to gain another 6502 processor!! Visionary!!

Just think, RoF using 4 1541s

 

Think of a buch of Ataris, connected via the Joystick interface...

 

Ditto for the C64 With each 64 having 4 1541s attached

Edited September 11, 2009 by andym00

[dwhyte]

LOL MEGA LOL :D :D :D :D MEGA LOL :D LOL MEGA LOL :D LOL MEGA BRILL LOL :D LOL LOL LOL :D :D :D LOL BRILL OVER MEGA LOL :D :D LOL LOL MEGA

hold on, he's got a new one.....MEGA ROTFL ROTFL :D :D ROTFL LOL MEGA MEGA :D :D :D :D :D :D :D ROTFL ROTFL BRILL LOL :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D ROTFL OVER LOL MEGA :D

 

Edited September 11, 2009 by dwhyte

[STE'86]

Interesting, to see how you got it. So I may add, that you have the right thoughts, referring to your personal decision, to do Stuff on the C64 and not on the A8.

 

Mate there was no concious decision. it was simply the A8 was gone in europe in 86 when i started the only concious decision was c64 Amstrad or speccy. even then later it was all of them but still no a8.

 

I guess, many people went off from the A8 and settled down on the C64.

Others still "preferred" the C64 due to it's graphics and sound capabilities.

Actually, it was the "better tool" to make graphics & sound stuff, back in those days.

You had less work to do and "everyone loved you with less work involved".

This explains also, why the early Hubbard stuff is doable on the A8.

I'd bet that he did learn to make computer music on the A8 and after the C64 with the SID arrived, he got there to finish his stuff more easily.

 

everyone loved u for less work involved. well for a customer rather than a producer (see below), how the hell would you know how much work it involved? show me something u have done to illustrate to me u know how much work you know actually goes into anything? (walk the walk instead of just talking the talk for once in here)

 

Well, seeing myself as a customer and not as a producer, back in those days, I encountered everytime people yelling after the C64. Sometimes I was wondering about that. Why do people wine about the C64 and use the A8 ? Just simply to buy a C64 was always the solution.

Artists did it, because they wanted to earn the easy money. And please don't tell me, you have drawn all the pictures and give them away for some warm handshake?

 

please arise off your backside and go the c64.com link pete provided and there u will see MANY pics done by me and others which were never paid for. Done for the love of it not cash. indeed none of those pics i posted was done for payment. it was called the compunet demo scene. Its what we did for a laugh.

 

The people who stood still on the A8 side tried to compete with the special C64 features, but in that case the A8 lost in both ways. C64 features were not reachable and the A8 features got underdeveloped/missed.

 

Believe it or not, I owned a C128 for 14 days. There simply was nothing really impressive, except the deep sounds and the hires colours. Today all the C64 has, is the deep sound and the hires colours. And it's still all what the C64 scene has to offer.

 

and games obviously. games u lot REALLY want. oh yeah games are hires colours and sound arent they?

 

The A8 was a "round" machine with balanced CPU powers, graphics abilities, sound, and a good Disk-speed from scratch. But Atari did all wrong with the presentation and marketing.

Actually, I didn't know about the A8, until a friend mentioned it. Til then I only had known computers like the VIC 20 , TI-99 , C64 , Amstrad before, and I knew about an upcoming Plus 4 from Commodore.

The only point to blame Atari, was the spreaded lie that TV sets just cannot display hires colours.

Well, it was an NTSC truth, but not for the rest of the TV world

After using S-Video, the TV still was "unicolour" in hires. So it was the A8 that was not able to show the colours, not the TV set.

 

and NO games. (see sound and hires colours above as U stated)

 

 

All together ends in the logic path that people preferred the C64, have not known the A8, and Artist wanted to make the most money out of their work, making the C64 the "winner".

It seems, particular in GB, Sinclair did well to present his computer there. So, even if looking worse, the graphics were low, the sound was .... where sound? .... people knowed about the computer and the low price made it in the UK...

 

actually in all fairness to the spectrum it does have colour mapping which does make it alot better at actually displaying colours than the a8 is. personally after fcking around with the Fist graphics for a month i can honestly say that i think the a8 is totally hamstrung by its lack of colour mapping (screen colour ram)

 

Steve

[PeteD]

 

As I said before, there are exceptions, e.g. Rampage was a full price game, but it is a piss-poor game on the A8, still this does not mean the A8 is poor, only the programmers who did this game (conversion) were poor !!

 

This only counts for C64ers, it's a bad coder who cannot program the C64 (Dropzone PeteD comment), but when it is on A8 (eg Rampage), the computer is oh so bad (Rocky Mountains).

 

Hey now. No fair misquoting me and also taking it out of context aaaaand not also quoting all the times I actually DID say that it was mostly the fault of the coders that the A8 games weren't better You're tarring us all with the same brush as the rather weird idiom goes.

 

 

Pete

[carmel_andrews]

I think i'll submit this thread to the editors of guiness book of world records for the longest thread on an internet forum....Or should I wait till we get to 10,000

 

A8 rulez

 

C64 rulez

 

Amstrad rulez

 

Sinclair rulez

 

they all rulez

 

all down to personal preferences at the end of the day

[andym00]

I think i'll submit this thread to the editors of guiness book of world records for the longest thread on an internet forum....Or should I wait till we get to 10,000

 

C64 rulez

There's a long way to go:

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=18194

303165 Posts..

20211 Pages..

 

It all depends if Emkay can hold out for another 295122 posts

[Heaven/TQA]

Archer MacLean:

The Atari is the PORSCHE of home computers (ZZAP! C64 magazine)

 

i notice you omitted what Archer said about the C64 being "a respectable BMW316" there, taking the quote out of context really isn't doing your argument any good. And whilst the C64 version is as he says in that interview a larger piece of code than the A8 version, Archer seems to have forgotten (and that wasn't too long after the game was released) that 4K of that extra space was taken up by the "Dropzone monitor" (actually the machine code monitor "borrowed" from Zeus 64 assembler) that he left in memory on the final release... wonder if that technical faux pas draws into question any other claims made in the same interview...

 

Can you explain the "hidden" monitor? is it accessable?

[Irgendwer]

In this thread...? That'd be a first. =-)

 

The name calling, personal attacks and insults are quite annoying - especially when they come out of the blue and are based on wrong facts or estimations.

 

Farewell!

[TMR]

Can you explain the "hidden" monitor? is it accessable?

 

i don't think this works on most of the cracks that are online because the irrelevant parts of the RAM will have been "scrubbed" by the crackers to get the file size down (the garbage that gets left in RAM on commercial games is rather surprising, including source code, graphics from other games, bits of utilities...) but if memory serves, on the original a quick reset and SYS49152 should do it? At one point, my dev tools disk had a copy of the monitor on it's own.

[dwhyte]

Well Pete, seeing as you're learning the intricacies of the A8, you've inspired me to parallel the same efforts. I've never done any C= coding other than on a VIC as a child so I might as well try my hand and see what kind of C64 goodness I come up with...

 

I must admit, the high-level syntax of the Kick Assembler has my interest piqued, as well as the idea of using the processor in the 1541 for some extra grunt...

Edited September 11, 2009 by dwhyte

[Rockford]

@Rockford:

 

Well,

- I think you know the C64 does 160x200 with 16 colours out of the box (standard)

while

-the Atari does 160x192 with 4 colours out of the box (standard).

 

Getting more colours on the Atari requires more efforts, more knowledge, sometimes using tricks, etc. etc.

And err, most games and screenshots you were and still are presenting here (with a few exceptions) are LOW BUDGET GAMES ! Do you really think they would have put more efforts, more time, more money in a low budget production, just to get more colours (and/or higher resolution) in the A8 (con)version ?!? Instead the "low budget programmers" used the standard / out of the box graphics, colours and resolutions. So most of your presentations like Milk Race, BMX Simulator, Grand Prix Sim., Draconus, Zybex, etc. don`t count - they are better on the C64, since they just used the standard there, they could have been better on the A8 (but then they had to use an uncommon or non-standard way, which was and still is unrealistic for commercial low budget productions)...

 

As I said before, there are exceptions, e.g. Rampage was a full price game, but it is a piss-poor game on the A8, still this does not mean the A8 is poor, only the programmers who did this game (conversion) were poor !! Think you have to count for more things than just "hey the C64 version has more colours and/or higher resolution", you also have to count if it was a full price or low-budget release, if it was a conversion or an original game, how much time was put into the original game vs. how much time was spent for the conversion, how long was the computer on the market at the release of the program (was everything already well-known or was everything still a mystery about the machine), was it the programmer`s first (and maybe only) production etc. etc. Of course thats true for both sides C64 and A8, if we show examples like A.R., RoF, Koronis Rift, etc. stating the A8 version is better, we have to take the same things into account (e.g. the C64 wasn`t that long on the market then, etc.)...

 

Only counting one or two facts and then saying "the C64 version is superior in all aspects" simply isn`t enough. Or to say it with the words of your bad WW2 example "We germans have killed the most - we have won the war !" and of course you know, while the first thing seems to be true, the second isn`t for sure !!

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

P.S.: And err, allthough being an A8-owner, I still think, while Amaurote looks quite impressive it has an extremely boring gameplay. The vehicle in the game has bad controls and targeting something with the "spring-bombs" is just a matter of luck. Last not least, the game is extremely repetitive, there isn`t much difference between playing one level or another of the game (play one level if you like and you are bored enough NOT to play another level). Thats why I always choose Amaurote for the top ten of bad/boring A8 games, the gfx alone do not impress me that much...

A very well written and reasonable post. I can agree on most points and I wish there were more atarians like you, really. The problem is that many atarians here bear criticism badly and become increasingly defensive and irrational. Next, they hold to their position until they become fanatical in defending it. I am perfectly aware of all the factors and circumstances that you mentioned here. I also know what both computers are capable of (out of the box). Unfortunately, many atarians seem to ignore that in most (not all of course) cases C64 is a better and more flexible computer. I know it sounds terribly brutal, especially on this site, but that's reality (as history showed). Look Charlie, in this topic Allas showed some games that look better on Atari (nobody complained). All I do is shed some light on the other side of the story. Sadly, often atarians find that "negative", but that's shortsighted naivity and some kind of "double morality". To be brutally honest, I'm not going to stop. Anyway, thanks a lot for your opinion, I really appreciate it. By the way, you have a great site.

Cheers mate

Edited September 11, 2009 by Rockford

[TMR]

Interesting, to see how you got it.

 

He just hasn't got used to you emkay, that's all... the rest of us already know which bits to just ignore. =-)

 

I guess, many people went off from the A8 and settled down on the C64.

 

Not in the UK no, unless you were near one of the Atari specialists the average punter had very little exposure to the A8 or software; i did go from the A8 to the C64 personally, but since i couldn't get many games or anything in the way of development tools for it at the time (even if i'd had a disk drive, nobody in a ten mile radius of me carried stock or even a magazine i could get mail order adverts from) i barely went past messing around with BASIC and playing games despite having spent six months learning 6502 on the VIC before getting the 800XL. Literally the second piece of software i got for my C64 a year after buying the 800XL was Zeus 64.

 

Actually, it was the "better tool" to make graphics & sound stuff, back in those days.

You had less work to do and "everyone loved you with less work involved".

 

It still takes effort, talent and time to do anything that truly stands out because when something is easier to produce for like that, people's expectations move up a few notches; in a community that relied heavily on one-upmanship, it wasn't possible to just phone in stuff and expect to be worshipped.

 

Artists did it, because they wanted to earn the easy money. And please don't tell me, you have drawn all the pictures and give them away for some warm handshake?

 

The earlier pictures like the Lethal Weapon ones he did yes, both Ste and PeteD were well known on the C64-specific online service Compunet and most of the first generation of artists mentioned previously (Bob Stevenson, Hugh Binns, Hugh Riley, Mat Sneape, Paul Docherty and so on) also got their starts drawing pictures and uploading them for others to download.

 

All together ends in the logic path that people preferred the C64, have not known the A8, and Artist wanted to make the most money out of their work, making the C64 the "winner".

 

That's very cynical of you and i'm afraid pretty much wrong; at that point in time, most of the people producing games were teenagers who had little or no exposure to the A8 or indeed other machines apart from the one they'd spent months saving (or nagging parents) for; there weren't many people making a conscious decision between formats based on how much money they'd earn and most people were in it for the sheer hell of it. They made games because they enjoyed the process of writing code, doing graphics, composing music or whatever.

[emkay]

 

 

Mate there was no concious decision. it was simply the A8 was gone in europe in 86 when i started the only concious decision was c64 Amstrad or speccy. even then later it was all of them but still no a8.

 

 

This relates to the fact that people thought, the A8 was dead. As I wrote:Most developers and artist jumped to other systems where they thought they could make better money.

 

 

everyone loved u for less work involved. well for a customer rather than a producer (see below), how the hell would you know how much work it involved? show me something u have done to illustrate to me u know how much work you know actually goes into anything? (walk the walk instead of just talking the talk for once in here)

 

Well, check the forums. I know what work has to be done for a simple game. I created many software in the past (85-91) for the A8, all non-commercial, in my spare time. Just for fun.

 

 

please arise off your backside and go the c64.com link pete provided and there u will see MANY pics done by me and others which were never paid for. Done for the love of it not cash. indeed none of those pics i posted was done for payment. it was called the compunet demo scene. Its what we did for a laugh.

 

Later then, after you got involved in commercial productions on the C64.

 

 

and games obviously. games u lot REALLY want. oh yeah games are hires colours and sound arent they?

 

Well, after the A8 was named dead, I bought an ST and later an AMIGA. So there never was a "need" for C64 stuff. The games that I had with the C128 were all but fun. But, hey, there were 1st thoughts like "why the heck don't they do this for the Atari?". Test drive was nice, but the low framerate sucked.

 

 

 

actually in all fairness to the spectrum it does have colour mapping which does make it alot better at actually displaying colours than the a8 is. personally after fcking around with the Fist graphics for a month i can honestly say that i think the a8 is totally hamstrung by its lack of colour mapping (screen colour ram)

 

 

 

 

Do you see bother me with the C64 style of the "fist" graphics?

 

Except Boulder Dash, no games ever did catch me as games like Encounter, Dimension X, Rescue on Fractalus, The last Starfighter, The Eidolon, Koronis Rift, a.s.o. in the 8 bit era.

All games with an "Ego" perspective. And the Atari everytime did a great job there.

Edited September 11, 2009 by emkay