Atari v Commodore

[atarian63]

Word of mouth, that's what sold machines. Person A got a C64, A8 Spectrum or whatever, Person B saw and listened to it and said "ooh, want!" and the cycle perpetuated; Spectrums sold en masse for the UK market because they were cheap, cheerful and backups [ahem] of games on C90s were traded around the playground (i've always said that machines where the games could be pirated usually fared better than when they couldn't back then, very few people could afford a machine and more than one or two games at the same time so being able to get a tape full from a friend was a selling point).

 

After the first selling by good commercials and professional software developers, words of mouth may do well. But, YES , particular pirate copies were the driver of further success of any comptersystem.

Most benefactored system was the C64....

While I bought 100s of games for the A8, everywhere I saw a C64 , you would found 1000s of copied games, but no original there. From the worker's son to the child of a dentist, they owned 1000s of pirated games.

 

I'd bet that the firstly used tapes for spreading games made it easy to copy the games (Just connect two Cassete Recorders). After a good Userbase was there, the spread via Floppy was growing.

 

That's why, later in time, even cheap games didn't bring the richness to the software developers. But, depending on the huge userbase, the progress of dying was longer than with the A8.

You are correct! As a dealer for both back in the day c64 customers would actaully tell me they would not buy software,they were just coming in to get the machine and then get all the software from their buddy. Yes A8 did this too however it was sooo rampant on c64. A8 software sales stayed pretty good long after they should have been dead or at least until the stuff was just poor port jobs. C64 software sales never amounted to much due to the rampant piracy. We could sell hardware add on's just fine. It was disgusting. I talked with many software reps and they knew it too. Ended up with over a 70% stock balance rate. (that was where you sent back software that did not sell for credit) most other platforms were 20-30% monthly. That was where the software writer/companies got screwed on c64. It should have been much more lucrative considering the base of machines.

 

yes the copying was rampant from what i remember, but still huge numbers of us bought software every week. and on the 64 there really was at least ONE thing worth buying each week. but i question your outlook that it caused such a stock imbalance. because mate, if this was true, how the hell did the 64 stay a primary developing machine up til 1990? if your scenario was true then it should have, and damned well would have prevented any viable sales therefore nobody would have written for it.

 

and when i was on the flipside:

there were an awful lot of software writers who made a fair whack of money from 64 games. tbh it was never joe public who u felt ripped off by, when it happened it was always some poxy sw house boss or a distributor. ( the oh so smug middle men)

 

Steve

I am not sure how you can question it, as I was there as a dealer at the time also we are talking about the US not UK. The number are what they were. I sent back more unsold software by far on C64 than any other platform. I suppose the difference could be that you just had so many companies trying to jump on the c64 bandwagon that it didn't make much difference. Also here c64 was dying by mid 87 and was mostly dead by mid 88 due to the ST first,then the amiga and the rise of pc's. I dont think Mac affected it much as it was so much more expensive.

[potatohead]

I thought Atari 2600 was also 160*200.

 

To probably paraphrase John Harris, the 2600 is 160 by however good a coder you are; it can do 160x200 (on sprites only, of course, playfields are a max of 40x200) but actually getting that out of the machine in a decent game isn't so much an uphill struggle as full-on mountaineering!

 

I thought the playfield could go a bit higher than 40 pixels... I'm pretty sure I've seen more than that on a scan line. Not many more, like maybe 48 or 64. Not sure, but more than 40.

 

Either way, talking about the VCS in terms like we use for more advanced machines is just silly. It's got a resolution of 160 pixels per scan line. What you do with that and how it gets done is another discussion. -->and Mountaineering for sure. You get two sprites, playfield bits, two missiles, and a ball to draw those scan lines with, and a timer to keep the whole works in rough sync with the TV. The 160 number is good to describe the detail resolution, but the 200 number is no good at all. How many scan lines are drawn and what is drawn on them is purely a software affair.

 

Edit: Now that I think about it, the 160 number sucks too. Sprites can exist all over the place on a scan line. The pixels are not really addressable as much as the objects are, and the precision available to do that is one color clock. IMHO, the best way to detail the graphics capability is to show some screen shots and talk about what is available to people to make graphics with. Sure isn't a line of addressable pixels totaling 160!

 

BTW: A VCS will do interlaced graphics like the Atari 8 bit computers can. I don't think I've seen it used in games, but with the ever increasing cart capabilities coming to us over the years, I would not be surprised to see that taken advantage of.

 

 

The Atari computers do have 320 addressable pixels. Most projects end up 160, because of the color available, along with a good balance on screen timing / cpu availability, etc... Still, do you want narrow, normal or wide DMA? 256, 320, 384, 128, 192 horizontal pixels?

 

On Ataris, it's all a trade off between the hardware capability of the machine and how hard somebody wants to work for it.

Edited September 16, 2009 by potatohead

[andym00]

BTW: A VCS will do interlaced graphics like the Atari 8 bit computers can. I don't think I've seen it used in games, but with the ever increasing cart capabilities coming to us over the years, I would not be surprised to see that taken advantage of.

 

With the ever increasing cart 'capabilties' I expect we'll be seeing Starfox running on a 2600 this time next year...

[atarian63]

You are correct! As a dealer for both back in the day c64 customers would actaully tell me they would not buy software,they were just coming in to get the machine and then get all the software from their buddy. Yes A8 did this too however it was sooo rampant on c64.

 

So, you're telling me that C64 users are also more honest to their dealers than Atari users.. Interesting. :-)

 

Seriously, I bought lots of C64 software, and copied lots of it.

Most of my the people I knew were the same, regardless of the computer they owned. There were a few people who didn't pirate, but they were the minority. On the same side, there were people who never (well, almost) bought software, but at least around the people we knew, they were also a minority...

 

And I really didn't see that C64 users were more prone to piracy...

I'd be surprised at that, seeing as so many game companies seemed to be making money on C64 software. You'd think if they saw what you saw on a large scale, they'd decide to sell to Atari users specifically.

 

I suppose it could be socio-economic. People who can't afford the Atari's bought 64's, and since they had less disposable income, they spent less on software, and hence more piracy...

But still, it seemed there was an awful lot of money made on C64 software..

Who knows..

 

Well, probably Apple, and I'm sure their users never pirated at all... :-) :-)

 

desiv

I am not questioning honesty at all for either. It was depressing as I made my living back then on selling not only software but hardware. When someone told me they were going to just steal the software I could care less about them then as a customer. It would be a one time sale. Since the margin was so small I would have preferred them to buy it at Kmart really. I felt the same about atari pirates as well, there were just fewer.

At least when a really good title came along for Atari,most of them bought it though they told me they could have pirated it. Not so on C64 but as I have said there were users so they must have been buying enough for software dev to continue. Many great title were stock balanced which should not have been, we were a discounter and has some of the lowest if not the lowest prices in town, and we took trades long,long before modern day gamestop etc.

[atarian63]

There's a difference between DOING THE OPPOSITE OF THE ORIGINAL POSTER and doing things that are technical features of both machines. If someone tells you to get some milk and you go talk about cows and how they generate milk that's not as bad as force feeding him water.

 

If he's thirsty, giving him water is far better than discussing cows.

 

 

 

 

 

That's got to be a world first, a cow that plays (and programs) an atari

 

Perhaps if Atari under warners were as good at marketing the A8 series to software companies as well as the general market in the UK as they were in the US market the A8 would have had better support software wise

 

I think even you have to accept that Atari didn't get that right in the UK at least till tramiel took the reins, unfortunately the battle had already been lost with the 8Bit UK software market already been divvied up between commodore and sinclair because they did sometime atari didn't and courted the software houses, so Atari did the commodore/sinclair trick Hence why the ST got the software support where the 8bit didn't

 

It's amazing that despite all the problems and targetting 16K/CTIA, Atari did have great games better, faster, smoother than C64 games targetted for 64K.

CTIA also was for a fairly short period of time. GTIA was most of the life of the machine.

[atarian63]

 

 

It's amazing that despite all the problems and targetting 16K/CTIA, Atari did have great games better, faster, smoother than C64 games targetted for 64K.

 

And if you're talking about the days when the A8 was still "good" and the C64 was still new then it's hardly surprising as people keep telling us, the A8 had been out a long time by then so coders had learned how to do things. It always takes a couple of years for games on any machine to start to get good.

 

Saying "better" is subjective anyway because it comes down to personal taste in games, but the C64 was released late 1982 and during 1983 Commodore released Star Ranger, there were multiple Scramble and Defender clones from Microdigital, Mogul and Program One amongst others (as well as the official port of the former from Atarisoft, Tony Crowther's Killerwatt was released by Alligata, Spy Hunter from Bally and Sega, Cosmic Convoy was available from Taskset and that's just the genre i follow personally but these titles all ran at a flat out refresh every frame so it's impossible to go any smoother and if by faster we're talking about movement speeds as opposed to frame refreshes, Killerwatt isn't exactly slow.

 

In fact, according to Gamebase64 there were over 1,500 games released in 1983 alone and whilst a good number of them were bound to be rubbish (lets face it, 80% of games for any machine are rubbish so when you have more games...) and others are relatively quick and dirty ports, there's stll quite a few examples of people having found their feet remarkably quickly all things considered.

Herein the US hardly anyplace carried C64 games or machine until 84, it was just some weird thing you occasionally saw (no insult intended) then they started advertising with a cheap price,Atari cashed and Home pc's were the new "in" thing all around the same time. A perfect storm if you will.

[TMR]

Saying "better" is subjective anyway because it comes down to personal taste in games,...

 

WRONG again. You are speculating. Better can be used subjectively and objectively. Rest of rubbish deleted since your original point is invalid.

 

Well the problem here is your ambiguous use of the word "better" really; when talking about factors such as how games play (and most people would take the word "better" without further qualification to refer to that rather than anything else), which is better is always going to be informed by personal opinion and a subjective matter; that doesn't matter if you're a casual gamer or writing reviews. And we've pretty much proven over the last three hundred plus pages that it's not possible to objectively discuss which is the better game at a technical level too, for example there were people who preferred Zybex on the A8 despite it running at half the vertical resolution and at a pure technical level the 160x200 and the half pixel scrolling of the C64 version is better unless we start discussing subjective opinions of which colour schemes work best.

 

Now, about the other points you were trying to avoid...? =-)

 

I left out the "\quote".

 

S'okay, fixed that for you. =-)

[PeteD]

You can mix the sprites with GTIA modes for players and/or for GPRIOR mode 0 stuff. I guess someone else who has big library of games can give better answer as to which ones use GTIA. As far as being chunky-- it depends on image and you also have option to interleave two GR.9/10 screens to get 160 pixels across.

 

I'm interested to see GTIA stuff, especially with PRIOR0

But the GR9/10 thing.. That's the one the flickers and looks like a comb at the edge right ? Not so keen on that, but then again I hated all the flickering 'interlace' rubbish on the 64 anyway..

 

9/10 mode doesn't flicker afaik, not if "interleaving" and not "interlacing" just 10 I think is the one that weirdly draws a 1/2 colour clock off from the rest of the modes so you get offset pixels but then your vertical res goes to pot cuz of having one line of one mode and one line of another. It's also still insanely hard to do anything useful with as in writing a game. I just changed a bit of my code that does the 9/11 256 colour mode to do 9/10 but it's hard to see exactly what it's doing without graphics made for it. It does have that "comb" edge because of the pixels being offset but I suppose you could cover that up with a couple of missiles or just do overscan.

 

*edit* lol, good job I remembered to change that code back just else I'd have been scratching my head for a while tomorrow

 

Pete

Edited September 16, 2009 by PeteD

[snicklin]

My memory of 1987- early 90's as a youngster in the UK amongst me and my friends was that the Spectrum/Amstrad dominated. After that by quite a long way was probably the Commodore 64 and then it was the Atari in popularity. After that you had the BBC and the MSX systems trailing way behind. Does anyone else remember it like this, in the UK at least??

[atarian63]

BTW: A VCS will do interlaced graphics like the Atari 8 bit computers can. I don't think I've seen it used in games, but with the ever increasing cart capabilities coming to us over the years, I would not be surprised to see that taken advantage of.

 

With the ever increasing cart 'capabilties' I expect we'll be seeing Starfox running on a 2600 this time next year...

Why no love for 2600?

[andym00]

9/10 mode doesn't flicker afaik, not if "interleaving" and not "interlacing" just 10 I think is the one that weirdly draws a 1/2 colour clock off from the rest of the modes so you get offset pixels but then your vertical res goes to pot cuz of having one line of one mode and one line of another. It's also still insanely hard to do anything useful with as in writing a game. I just changed a bit of my code that does the 9/11 256 colour mode to do 9/10 but it's hard to see exactly what it's doing without graphics made for it. It does have that "comb" edge because of the pixels being offset but I suppose you could cover that up with a couple of missiles or just do overscan.

 

Ah right.. I could have sworn that mode flickers since it's just like a lower-res but higher colour MCI screen on the 64.. Or so I thought.. Bah, must try that and have a little look myself..

 

And I still keep forgetting about things like being able to use missiles to hide the edges of the screen as my mind is still far too firmly in 64 land for some reason..

[PeteD]

My memory of 1987- early 90's as a youngster in the UK amongst me and my friends was that the Spectrum/Amstrad dominated. After that by quite a long way was probably the Commodore 64 and then it was the Atari in popularity. After that you had the BBC and the MSX systems trailing way behind. Does anyone else remember it like this, in the UK at least??

 

Can't really comment subjectively because as a C64 "scene" guy and also by then full time game coder pretty much everyone I knew was C64. Before I got my C64 though I had a Spectrum and so did a lot of friends, barely anyone with CPCs, some with VIC20s (aww never mind) and I even had a BBC Model B before my speccy and so did a few friends. What I barely saw or heard of was A8 apart from a guy (Carlos Land his name was) whose family moved from US to UK and he was always talking about his A8, but that was like pre 85 while I was still at school.

 

 

Pete

[andym00]

Why no love for 2600?

 

Don't get me wrong, I adore the 2600 (and the 7800) and did program the thing in the late 80s for a bit and came back to it again in the late 90s just for fun.. It took my 6502 to a whole new level, believe me, and I loved programming on that little monkey..

What I meant was that, for me at least, that the bankswitching carts are all well and good, but with Harmony bunging a 72Mhz ARM chip into a 2600 cart kind of ruins the whole game.. I know all the powers not available due to it handling the cart port address and data lines directly in software, to do away with other chips but where does it end ? When the CPU is just being fed a stream of instructions generated on the fly by the cart that do nothing but write into TIA to generate a display ? Or if the cart was even able to drive the address bus directly and write to the hardware (just imagining on that point) ? Would that still be a 2600 game ?

That's my opinion anyway

Edited September 16, 2009 by andym00

[TMR]

I thought the playfield could go a bit higher than 40 pixels... I'm pretty sure I've seen more than that on a scan line. Not many more, like maybe 48 or 64. Not sure, but more than 40.

 

The playfield is generated from twenty bits, each coming out as four colour clocks wide; the bits are either repeated or mirrored on the right half of the screen. Anything you see to the left or right of that that has to be built with sprites.

 

Edit: Now that I think about it, the 160 number sucks too. Sprites can exist all over the place on a scan line. The pixels are not really addressable as much as the objects are, and the precision available to do that is one color clock.

 

In a loose comparative sense it's the best frame of reference we've got, usually we're just differentiating between the size of the pixels in that mode and the higher resolution; we could talk about colour clocks (although that doesn't come naturally to me for example, the first time i heard the phrase was from an Atarian about a decade ago) or refer to 2:1 and 1:1 ratio pixels i s'pose but i'd lay money that someone'll complain that they're not really twice as wide as they are high on one of the machines... =-)

[PeteD]

9/10 mode doesn't flicker afaik, not if "interleaving" and not "interlacing" just 10 I think is the one that weirdly draws a 1/2 colour clock off from the rest of the modes so you get offset pixels but then your vertical res goes to pot cuz of having one line of one mode and one line of another. It's also still insanely hard to do anything useful with as in writing a game. I just changed a bit of my code that does the 9/11 256 colour mode to do 9/10 but it's hard to see exactly what it's doing without graphics made for it. It does have that "comb" edge because of the pixels being offset but I suppose you could cover that up with a couple of missiles or just do overscan.

 

Ah right.. I could have sworn that mode flickers since it's just like a lower-res but higher colour MCI screen on the 64.. Or so I thought.. Bah, must try that and have a little look myself..

 

And I still keep forgetting about things like being able to use missiles to hide the edges of the screen as my mind is still far too firmly in 64 land for some reason..

 

It's quite possible that interlacing the 2 IS what Atariksi meant. I've seen a lot of flickery A8 modes. I just know the 9/11 to get 256 colours doesn't so I'd think it's possible to do the same and have it offset by a pixel, although thinking about it it's not going to make a great deal of perceptual difference to resolution.

 

I keep dreaming of this 256 colour mode with PMGs overlaid in the OR mode but offset 2 pixels to get more res, or something lol, but afaik the ORing PRIOR 0 (low nibble) thing doesn't work in those modes (them not being playfields as such). At least from what I was reading on the Altirra blog it doesn't, I'm just bashing together a bit of code to test it. Even then, what would you do? offset some quad expanded PMGs by 2 pixels over the 4 pixel wide graphics beneath?

 

 

Pete

[Tezz]

My memory of 1987- early 90's as a youngster in the UK amongst me and my friends was that the Spectrum/Amstrad dominated. After that by quite a long way was probably the Commodore 64 and then it was the Atari in popularity. After that you had the BBC and the MSX systems trailing way behind. Does anyone else remember it like this, in the UK at least??

Well, the Spectrum and C64 were the dominant systems here by a long margin and a lot in the press revolved around the two sytems. Pretty much all the other systems had just a small niche following in comparision. The Amstrad's had a reasonable following of users in the uk so it's up there with the other two in many respects with support from software houses and a market for them however in my mind with the Speccy and c64 being so dominant here in the early eighties I still see the Amstrad as one of the lesser systems. By 87 or so the Speccy was dying off.

 

EDIT, early to mid eighties I should say

Edited September 16, 2009 by Tezz

[TMR]

My memory of 1987- early 90's as a youngster in the UK amongst me and my friends was that the Spectrum/Amstrad dominated. After that by quite a long way was probably the Commodore 64 and then it was the Atari in popularity. After that you had the BBC and the MSX systems trailing way behind. Does anyone else remember it like this, in the UK at least??

 

Can't really comment subjectively because as a C64 "scene" guy and also by then full time game coder pretty much everyone I knew was C64. Before I got my C64 though I had a Spectrum and so did a lot of friends, barely anyone with CPCs, some with VIC20s (aww never mind) and I even had a BBC Model B before my speccy and so did a few friends. What I barely saw or heard of was A8 apart from a guy (Carlos Land his name was) whose family moved from US to UK and he was always talking about his A8, but that was like pre 85 while I was still at school.

 

For me (living in Kent in those days for reference) it was pretty much evenly split between Spectrum and C64 people, two A8 owners (one was me for a while), possibly four VIC 20s (again, one was me for some of that time), one Amstrad CPC 464 and i remember two BBC owners (not including the teachers, we had a couple of fairly avid gamers and they were Beeb owners because the machines had been subsidised i think), one of who had an Oric Atmos. We had a smattering of coders, most of the more advanced ones using the C64.

[PeteD]

CPC was another one that was generally too hard to code what you could on C64 and speccy relatively easily. Screen was too big (memory), not enough ram for double buffering (at least on 64k models), funkier palette than the C64 almost hardware scrolling but not quite. Thing is, it DID have the games.

 

I'm quite intrigued by it's poor version of Fist though and may have to sharpen my z80 chops and do a new 128k version once the A8 one is done

 

 

Pete

[andym00]

It's quite possible that interlacing the 2 IS what Atariksi meant. I've seen a lot of flickery A8 modes. I just know the 9/11 to get 256 colours doesn't so I'd think it's possible to do the same and have it offset by a pixel, although thinking about it it's not going to make a great deal of perceptual difference to resolution.

 

I keep dreaming of this 256 colour mode with PMGs overlaid in the OR mode but offset 2 pixels to get more res, or something lol, but afaik the ORing PRIOR 0 (low nibble) thing doesn't work in those modes (them not being playfields as such). At least from what I was reading on the Altirra blog it doesn't, I'm just bashing together a bit of code to test it. Even then, what would you do? offset some quad expanded PMGs by 2 pixels over the 4 pixel wide graphics beneath?

 

I'll wait for Atariksi to surface and provide more detail then

 

I like the idea of the 256 colour mode, but the res is so off-putting.. But even if PRIOR0 did work it'd look dead odd with parts of the screen being in ultra-lo-res and others being in lo-res.. I guess you could do some funky 3D stuff with it, using skewed players to bolt on the polygon edges or such like so it just smooths the edges that meet the actual raw background as opposed to edges onto other polygons..

 

I'm liking this 5th colour mode though.. It's surprising just how much difference that one extra colour makes, and also makes for more colourful software sprites with player underlays.. I thought it was going to be a right pain to work in that mode, but it actually works really well.. Though it's odd that you see so little evidence of it in A8 games out there.. I mean all the horizontal scrolly shooters thrown up in this thread seem to show absolutely no evidence of it at all, and a quick search doesn't seem to turn up much either.. But still, it's a great extension to have, even with only 128 characters..

[TMR]

What I meant was that, for me at least, that the bankswitching carts are all well and good, but with Harmony bunging a 72Mhz ARM chip into a 2600 cart kind of ruins the whole game [...] Would that still be a 2600 game ?

That's my opinion anyway

 

That's the problem with hardware expansions generally within this kind of discussion, where do you "cut off"? Is a C64 or A8 with a RAM expansion still a valid comparison to the other without, or what about accelerators? Atarians are happy to point to games using RAM expansions like Bomb Jack and compare them directly to the unexpanded C64 counterparts but if we're allowed to bring out the big guns on both sides what about Mercenary or Rescue on Fractalus on a C64 with a SuperCPU? i saw Driller being played on a SuperCPU-equipped machine over the weekend (as well as finally getting to play Metal Dust) and it goes like the clappers.

[Tezz]

Yea that was the cpc's downside for sure. There were a good few cpc titles that I recall, Beyond the Ice Palace looked and played impresively at the time. It's predecessor GnG looked quite close the the original at the time too although I never got over the fact you got killed with one touch and don't lose your armour .. other good cpc titles escape me at the moment, it's late

[Tezz]

That's the problem with hardware expansions generally within this kind of discussion, where do you "cut off"? Is a C64 or A8 with a RAM expansion still a valid comparison to the other without, or what about accelerators? Atarians are happy to point to games using RAM expansions like Bomb Jack and compare them directly to the unexpanded C64 counterparts but if we're allowed to bring out the big guns on both sides what about Mercenary or Rescue on Fractalus on a C64 with a SuperCPU? i saw Driller being played on a SuperCPU-equipped machine over the weekend (as well as finally getting to play Metal Dust) and it goes like the clappers.

I take your point about unfair comparisions utilising any type of expansion although there's a big difference in addition ram and a cpu upgrade.

[potatohead]

Fair enough. It's pretty easy to mistake HOW VCS graphics are created.

 

 

I thought the playfield could go a bit higher than 40 pixels... I'm pretty sure I've seen more than that on a scan line. Not many more, like maybe 48 or 64. Not sure, but more than 40.

 

The playfield is generated from twenty bits, each coming out as four colour clocks wide; the bits are either repeated or mirrored on the right half of the screen. Anything you see to the left or right of that that has to be built with sprites.

 

Edit: Now that I think about it, the 160 number sucks too. Sprites can exist all over the place on a scan line. The pixels are not really addressable as much as the objects are, and the precision available to do that is one color clock.

 

In a loose comparative sense it's the best frame of reference we've got, usually we're just differentiating between the size of the pixels in that mode and the higher resolution; we could talk about colour clocks (although that doesn't come naturally to me for example, the first time i heard the phrase was from an Atarian about a decade ago) or refer to 2:1 and 1:1 ratio pixels i s'pose but i'd lay money that someone'll complain that they're not really twice as wide as they are high on one of the machines... =-)

 

Agreed here. It's kind of a mess, mostly because how the images are generated are just a lot different than most other devices.

 

If you take the ordinary Atari 160 pixel / scan line screen @ 40 byte DMA, each pixel is often referred to as one "color clock". On Ataris then, there are x color clocks per line in a positioning sense. Where addressable pixels are concerned, on the computers, it's basically a 1:1 match. On the VCS, it's really positioning and whatever hacks one comes up with

 

I like the term "color clock", even though it's confusing from a signal standpoint, where that term kind of means something different, because it then avoids the whole "size of 160 pixel @ 40 byte DMA" mess that ends up being a paragraph before it's over.

 

Everything about the Atari video is based on this core unit --the 160 mode pixel, or color clock, which makes expressing some things about Atari video easy, at the cost of people going WTF? over it.

 

Re: Harmony.

 

Having a CPU in the cart is just cool. This was done with the Supercharger, Pitfall ][ (well, not a Turing complete thing), and most recently in the Harmony cart project.

 

The thing is, a VCS will always be a VCS. The challenges of programming the machine are not diminished with the addition of some hardware assist, and the overall graphics capabilities don't change either. It's arguably just more available with some assist than not. This was said about large ROM sizes too.

 

What I think is very interesting is the idea of being able to do some frame buffer kinds of things with the machine, while not losing the flavor of it drawing "on the fly". It's not like people have to just hammer on the extra CPU, and I don't think the expectations surrounding VCS games will change significantly. It's more of an addition to what is a very colorful experience. Of all the machines I've watched over the years, the VCS and Atari 8 bit computers provide the most texture in their displays. If you take time to play and watch what others do, lots of interesting stuff gets done!

 

As a home brew platform, Harmony kicks some ass. People can up their game, and they will. This is good. Distribution of games can be completely free too. Just write something and have people play it. That's good too.

 

Publishing games can be done consistently, and those games can use the more advanced memory addressing capability with fewer hassles.

 

If it were possible to just load / store and have the extra chip basically paint out a 160x200 screen with full color, or a lot of colors, I think that would not be so good. But, I don't think we are going there really. I don't even know if that's practical.

 

Where the project is going is just one notch better games, like what has happened fairly consistently over a lot of years. That's all good from where I stand. As the game improvements have occurred, starting with bank select schemes, supercharger and things like SARA, the flavor was not lost. So long as people can point to the finished work and say, "Hey, that's the VCS!" there won't be any significant worries.

 

On a hardware / software technical accomplishment note. Batari has simply kicked some ass. Give him some credit. With Batari Basic and this Harmony deal, he's contributed a ton of both potential and real works for users of a very old and fun machine.

 

Since we are supposed to be talking Atari -v- C 64, I guess I'll come back full circle. So far, the VBXE expansion kind of breaks the rules for me. Technically it's cool, but it's not really something I'm into. Not to slight those guys. Make no mistake, I think it's great they have it going and it will be fun to watch. All good there too. But that's an Atari controlling something, not an enhanced Atari to me.

 

Putting CPU's into 8 bit carts would be cool, if they let more of the great ANTIC / GTIA graphics out. When this is done, the flavor of the machine isn't lost. Claus and his overlay the video through something running on the cart port project is kind of like that. How much like that remains to be seen. The original flavor will still likely be there, and the challenge will too, meaning the product of that will be something that people can point to and say, "Hey, that's an Atari".

 

Sorry to derail. I really only wanted to comment on the 160x200 deal with the VCS. It's just not right. And IMHO, some bending of the "frame of reference" to discuss things isn't all that big of a deal. We have to know a bit about the hardware in order to hack around on it, discuss it, appreciate it, so why not?

[TMR]

I mean all the horizontal scrolly shooters thrown up in this thread seem to show absolutely no evidence of it at all, and a quick search doesn't seem to turn up much either.. But still, it's a great extension to have, even with only 128 characters..

 

It's the 128 characters that become an issue i reckon (i've been thinking about this for a long time now!) For one soft sprite at 8x16 pixels you've got to reserve nine characters so eight sprites is going to leave just 56 - C64-sized sprites would need the entire font for eight! You can split the fonts of course, but that's like recycling C64 sprites with fixed splits and you'd end up with "zones" they can move within.

[andym00]

That's the problem with hardware expansions generally within this kind of discussion, where do you "cut off"? Is a C64 or A8 with a RAM expansion still a valid comparison to the other without, or what about accelerators? Atarians are happy to point to games using RAM expansions like Bomb Jack and compare them directly to the unexpanded C64 counterparts but if we're allowed to bring out the big guns on both sides what about Mercenary or Rescue on Fractalus on a C64 with a SuperCPU? i saw Driller being played on a SuperCPU-equipped machine over the weekend (as well as finally getting to play Metal Dust) and it goes like the clappers.

 

The Ram-Expansion thing I'm torn with.. I'd like to do 64 stuff using it, but you know it's not going to get run on a real 64 with REU in 99.9% of the cases so what's the point.. I might as well write it on a PC.. I think the REU could enable some blindingly good things on the 64, but what's the point if it's just going to be run on emulators.. But yeah, 320K for BombJack and then comparing it against a 64K game written 20 years earlier is kind of taking the biscuit, or more like taking the entire pack of biscuits.. Likewise with Space Harrier which I think Sheddys done a great job with that, but will get compared to a 64K 20 year old version written in a hurry.. I'm sure the 64 with a (normal) RamPack could do just as well if not better, but factor in the REU and it's kind of game over in those stakes..

But anyway...

 

But it's nice to know that driller is finally playable on something