Atari v Commodore

[atariksi]

Re: Expansions and comparisons.

 

I've absolutely no interest in these, other than to see the boundaries of what is 8 bit classic gaming pushed forward.

 

If 320K of RAM gets us some new title that feels Atari like, I'm there for that. If we can put a CPU in a cart and do the same thing, all good.

 

If that beats up on a C64? well... Go expand one of those and we can all game on, and debate how each machine lends itself to these kinds of activities.

 

Well, if the 320K RAM has to be soldered in the system, I wouldn't think that would be using standard Atari features so can't be compared to a standard C64.

[oky2000]

Which brings us back to Ste's question... where were all the A8 artists in the 1980's...? emkay's money thing is just bunk, surely there were some people around?!

 

I think the low cost and rapidly expanding user base of the 64 really starting sucking the energy out of other platforms. There were some people doing neat things on the A8, but when the 64 took off I think it spawned a different kind of coder-gamer.

 

I dunno about that, many 8bit coders were just teens in their bedrooms. And remember the A8 was around for a few years before the C64 so that same group of kids would have been playing with A8 coding too. And the C64 didn't have an easy to use BASIC or simple commands for graphics and sounds...it was almost like machine code manipulating VIC-II & SID

 

Like I say I think the problem is the A8 hardware has too many restrictions to fully utilise even the original 128 colour palette. 160x100 resolution is fine for 2600 games but in the 80s things got a bit more sophisticated.

Another factor is the time period. 79-82 were years where having a "home computer" was not mainstream. by 85 I was seeing housewives buying pc's for the kids. That was a major change in who owned and was attracted to a pc. Therefore you have more people,greater interest and a bigger market. Just my observation.

 

I'd almost forgotten how popular the old PCs were in the USA which that post just reminded me of Here in the EU we spat on PCs as the decision making children of the household, even in the Amiga days I saw no reason to own a PC until around late 90s when internet was readily accessible and CD-ROMs also...Windows/DOS was so archaic to me though coming from superior systems of the previous decade.

 

Being about 10 when the VIC-20 was around in the UK was about as early as I can remember for the home computer years but I did have a VCS for a year before that. What I do remember is that with every magazine trying to tell people in the UK about all the 8bit micros (and there were probably 30+) the Atari got no less publicity. What I can't tell you is how easy it was to buy one though and I doubt my poor dad will remember

 

I know the XL/XE was easier to get later on but apart from the mail order company Silica Shop (RIP) I can't remember seeing a single place to actually buy the 800 or 400. What I do know is the only kid in the class who did have an 800 had a dad with a high paid job. We were good friends and I spent quite a few weekends playing A8 games from his stacks of disks

[andym00]

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

 

 

How about 1984?

 

I'd never come across that before, so I jsut had to go play it after reading in Wiki that:

"It has been considered as one of the worst Atari 2600 games of all time."

Oh boy, it is truly bad

[atariksi]

I haven't played with the 256 color mode (made via PAL mixing) since I don't have any PAL machines, but you do get a resolution increase to 160 pixels (192 overscan) when you interlace the Gr.9 with Gr.10 and end up with 30 shades. You mininimze the flicker by plotting pixels as 5-bit shade values:

 

P(0..159) = 0..31 (clip to 0..29)

P(Gr10) = ((P>>2)<<1);

P(Gr9) = P-P(Gr10);

 

You can make it more complex by averaging consecutive pixels for each of the two buffers.

 

Ah, so it's just PAL blending then.. Totally with you now.. Although I should have twigged that before..

 

Just for the record , here's an example of the C64 and PAL blended colours..

Note that I mean PAL blending.. Where different colours are put on alternating lines, not flicking between 2 screens and inducing a scanner like brain exploding flicker fit..

...

You'll be surprised how good images look if you minimize the delta between shades. Although PAL mixing is at 50Hz, NTSC alternating frames is 30Hz (not 25Hz for PAL) so slightly less flicker already. Due to way palette works in Gr10, the shades are usually put in lower 3 bits so the above formula requires a shift to move as follows:

 

P(0..159) = 0..31 (clip to 0..29)

P(Gr10) = P>>2;

P(Gr9) = P-(P(Gr10)<<1);

 

>And it also nicely demonstrates just how important the line order is when PAL blending, ie: whether odd or even order.. The top row is Blended colour 1, the bottom row is blended colour 2 and the middle 2 rows are those 2 colours blended, but in even/odd order and then odd/even order..

 

>For the record those colours are

  6    2     4    12     5     3     7
  6/9  2/11  4/8  12/14  5/10  3/15  7/13
  9/6  11/2  8/4  14/12  10/5  15/3  13/7
  9    11    8    14     10    15    13

 

Is this generically true and what sort of delta are you getting for odd/even vs. even/odd RGBs (assuming 8-bits/primary)?

[oky2000]

 

yes the copying was rampant from what i remember

 

Ha Ha indeed, I'll never forget my last day of school one year. One the last day of school it was customary to bring in some toys and share. 3 of us brought in computers, I brought my C64 and so did a friend of mine and he had one of those automatic tape copying dongles so we loaded a game and copied it at the same time and played the game for a while then onto the next game haha classic illegal days where the computer science teacher didn't care about the copying.

[oky2000]

 

 

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.

 

Pete

 

Very true, I remember as a kid playing those classic arcade games like SKramble and obviously wanting to play it at home and there was a lot of rubbish out there. It took a lot of trial and error to sort out all the jerky crap looking ports (some with massive lines of BASIC code loaded in) with the truly great rip-offs. It became almost a mythical quest but once you had seen one very good well programmed rip-off you knew it was just a matter of searching and word of mouth in the playground. There was a lot of rubbish in the early days but there were also some real gems.

 

(sure it was the same for A8 owning kids too in the 'dark ages')

[TMR]

There are games that are better on Atari despite the 16K/CTIA restrictions. I did not say ALL games.

 

And i never said you did, merely that the word "better" is subjective in these cases and titles you'd put forward as being "better" on the 16K CTIA machine may not necessarily be considered "better" by other people but since you've not actually listed any titles yet we can't tell which category they fall into, can we? Until you do, even that statement remains a subjective opinion.

 

If a game does hardware-based scrolling, hardware-based collision detection, more colors, faster calculations, and/or overscanning vs. a game that's inferior in those aspects then that game can be said to be better than the other.

 

Better technically than the other, but there is absolutely nothing in what you've just said that implies the technically superior title in your example actually plays better and, since we're talking about games here, that's the most important point by far. For example, the C64 version of R-Type uses hardware scrolling, sprites, the SID for in-game audio and so forth, but the general consensus amongst 8-bit gamers is that the Spectrum version of R-Type is the better game.

Edited September 17, 2009 by TMR

[andym00]

You'll be surprised how good images look if you minimize the delta between shades. Although PAL mixing is at 50Hz, NTSC alternating frames is 30Hz (not 25Hz for PAL) so slightly less flicker already. Due to way palette works in Gr10, the shades are usually put in lower 3 bits so the above formula requires a shift to move as follows:

 

P(0..159) = 0..31 (clip to 0..29)

P(Gr10) = P>>2;

P(Gr9) = P-(P(Gr10)<<1);

 

Okay, you've sold it to me I'll put it on my list of things to play with and investigate on the A8..

I can imagine that it doesn't look so bad, but it's just open to abuse so badly.. I'm very familiar with the 64s interlaced stuff and as long as you flicker only between same Luma levels things rock solid as you'd expect, as you can see in those 64 colour pictures where it's essentially in Luma order, and flickering between any colour in one column (or indeed between one row away if you're lucky) isn't likely to induce a fatal epilepsy incident..

 

Is this generically true and what sort of delta are you getting for odd/even vs. even/odd RGBs (assuming 8-bits/primary)?

 

I mean it's standard on the 64 on real TVs, and I'd imagine it's exactly the same on anything else displaying on a PAL TV, and that it's some 'quirk'[1] of the PAL blending itself..

 

No idea about what deltas and what not.. All I know is the colours are different, and I only want to know these things so I know what's possible and an artist can't pull the wool over my eyes

 

 

[1] AKA, some bit I didn't read properly when I was reading about PAL blending..

[atariksi]

There are games that are better on Atari despite the 16K/CTIA restrictions. I did not say ALL games.

 

And i never said you did, merely that the word "better" is subjective in these cases and titles you'd put forward as being "better" on the 16K CTIA machine may not necessarily be considered "better" by other people but since you've not actually listed any titles yet we can't tell which category they fall into, can we? Until you do, even that statement remains a subjective opinion.

...

My listing those games (i.e. you not knowing about them) has nothing to do with the fact that those games are superior (and not a subjective opinion). They don't become objective by you knowing about them.

 

If a game does hardware-based scrolling, hardware-based collision detection, more colors, faster calculations, and/or overscanning vs. a game that's inferior in those aspects then that game can be said to be better than the other.

 

>Better technically than the other, but there is absolutely nothing in what you've just said that implies the technically superior title in your example actually plays better and, since we're talking about games here, that's the most important point by far. For example, the C64 version of R-Type uses hardware scrolling, sprites, the SID for in-game audio and so forth, but the general consensus amongst 8-bit gamers is that the Spectrum version of R-Type/i] is the better game.

 

I'm not familiar with that game but if both versions of R-Type contain same features, then the technical reasons come in to compare which is superior.

[PeteD]

 

 

sf4.zip

 

Yikes, I missed that earlier and glad I did.

 

 

 

 

Pete

[TMR]

Depending on the used techniques, Space Harrier on the C64 will not get faster with more RAM, but you surely can do more animations on the screen, and the level can get more complex.

 

Sorry, that's your technical inexperience talking again emkay; a normal memory transfer of LDA address1,x / STA address2,x will take nine or ten cycles depending on page boundaries (even if it's unrolled that's still eight) but the DMA in a C64 RAM expansion can do a point A to B transfer in one byte per cycle. Use that right for something like a total re-write of Space Harrier (Sheddy's is done from scratch, why shouldn't a new C64 version have to rely on twenty year old code?) and you've got a way to draw things into the bitmapped screen incredibly quickly, fast enough in fact that if you can find a way of getting the DMA doing the lion's share of the work it'll negate the higher memory overhead.

[andym00]

Sorry, that's your technical inexperience talking again emkay; a normal memory transfer of LDA address1,x / STA address2,x will take nine or ten cycles depending on page boundaries (even if it's unrolled that's still eight) but the DMA in a C64 RAM expansion can do a point A to B transfer in one byte per cycle. Use that right for something like a total re-write of Space Harrier (Sheddy's is done from scratch, why shouldn't a new C64 version have to rely on twenty year old code?) and you've got a way to draw things into the bitmapped screen incredibly quickly, fast enough in fact that if you can find a way of getting the DMA doing the lion's share of the work it'll negate the higher memory overhead.

 

I did actually toy with this, well at least contemplate a Space Harrier engine using the REU, and it works quite well due to VICs mad bitmap layout..

 

Where as on the A8, you'd be taking (lets assume best case possible) 6 cycles per byte to write an 8 byte wide by 8 byte high chunk of imagery to the screen (assuming no masking required[1]) you're going to need 64*6 cycles to do that (and we're not taking into account any overheads).. Using the REU, that's 64 cycles

So 384 for A8, versus 64 for the 64..

Obviously edges of spans need to be dealt with in software where masking is required, but I think Space Harrier on the 64 in bitmap map would be an absolutely fearsome beast with a REU.. And combined with the sprites as well and bearing in mind that you'd have the full 16 colour palette available to you (with blending and stuff in addition) the Atari would be in rather deep doo-doos to compete..

 

Plus the 64 would be running at full res

 

Anyway, coulda, shoulda, woulda.. It doesn't matter really

 

[1] Like the main body of a lots of space harrier sprites..

 

edit: arsed up the quoting, meant to quote Emkay

Edited September 17, 2009 by andym00

[TMR]

I'm not familiar with that game but if both versions of R-Type contain same features, then the technical reasons come in to compare which is superior.

 

They contain the same general features (the R9 itself, the Force, horizontal scrolling with the same general level maps as the coin-op, aliens triggered around the same places give or take) but the Spectrum version is simnply far more playable and indeed more accurate to the source game despite the slower refresh speed; the technical reasons don't get a look in. The reverse is true too, the Spectrum version of Wizball has pixel perfect software collisions and the C64 is using some very loose bounding boxes, but it's the C64 version that is more playable because that loose collision system was deliberately tuned that way. Most casual observers would think that Jet Set Willy on the C64 and Spectrum were the same game because they're visually very similar, but just about any Spectrum gamer would seriously disagree (and quite rightly too, that's why xxl ported the Spectrum and not C64 version of it to the A8) because of how the two versions play.

 

And in the cases of Zybex and Draconus the C64 and A8 games play very similarly indeed so, when the technical reasons come into play, by your logic the C64 should've won those by default with no argument from the A8 camp because it has the higher resolution and more colours...

[TMR]

haha classic illegal days where the computer science teacher didn't care about the copying.

 

Our teachers were worse pirates than we were!!

[oky2000]

Not that it makes any difference to the fact but I would like to point out that BJ isn't actually 320k, it requires a 320k expanded machine to run as it exceeded 256k (or the cart with ram onboard which runs on any stock machine). The loading pic is also included in the executable btw.

 

Yeah, but the C64 version runs from 64K so it's still a major difference... if they'd had the option of a RAM expansion or even a multiload, it would've been able to look significantly better than it does and as Andy says the same goes for Space Harrier.

 

Wasn't Space Harrier written in a matter of weeks by Chris Butler and wasn't it his first 3D Sega style game?

 

I don't think the US version with the raster bar scrolling floor is that bad and that was a simple patch that took him a day or so to implement for the US market but will still run on a PAL machine so no issue with a PAL version not having it except for the fact he was on a severe time limit for the xmas market by Elite.

 

UK C64 Space Harrier and A8 incomplete Space Harrier Youtube

 

The video response also shows the US version of C64 Space Harrier too and with light/dark green raster bars it would have looked even better.

 

Personally I think the color palette on the A8 does the sky/floor better the rest of the graphics look better on the C64 and neither is particularly slow. Don't know why it was light/dark grey on the C64 US release but anyway....

Edited September 17, 2009 by oky2000

[TMR]

Yeah, but the C64 version runs from 64K so it's still a major difference... if they'd had the option of a RAM expansion or even a multiload, it would've been able to look significantly better than it does and as Andy says the same goes for Space Harrier.

 

Wasn't Space Harrier written in a matter of weeks by Chris Butler and wasn't it his first 3D Sega style game?

 

i'm not sure about the matter of weeks (i remember some previews and so forth in Zzap! so presumably it was spread out over a couple of months) but it was certainly Butler's first foray into Sega 3D porting, yes. It should probably be noted that using a bitmapped display wasn't an option because Elite seem to have been insisting on everything being crammed into a single load at that point (look at his other work for them, Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Commando both dropped stages because there wasn't space for them in the memory at once).

Edited September 17, 2009 by TMR

[oky2000]

Re: Expansions and comparisons.

 

I've absolutely no interest in these, other than to see the boundaries of what is 8 bit classic gaming pushed forward.

 

If 320K of RAM gets us some new title that feels Atari like, I'm there for that. If we can put a CPU in a cart and do the same thing, all good.

 

If that beats up on a C64? well... Go expand one of those and we can all game on, and debate how each machine lends itself to these kinds of activities.

 

Well, if the 320K RAM has to be soldered in the system, I wouldn't think that would be using standard Atari features so can't be compared to a standard C64.

 

Yes but you can argue seeing that Commodore made the REU 512k expansions themselves, that it utilises standard C64 pinouts on the port and were on sale during the active life of the C64 it is valid, certainly as valid as things that you can't buy and plug in especially if they didn't exist in the A8 active lifetime.

[oky2000]

haha classic illegal days where the computer science teacher didn't care about the copying.

 

Our teachers were worse pirates than we were!!

 

Ha ha so true, I think my Computer Science teacher had every BBC micro game ever produced in the store room on a huge stack of floppy disks Even got to play Elite with the 2nd processor at school at lunchtimes.

[www.atarimania.com]

Yes but you can argue seeing that Commodore made the REU 512k expansions themselves, that it utilises standard C64 pinouts on the port and were on sale during the active life of the C64 it is valid, certainly as valid as things that you can't buy and plug in especially if they didn't exist in the A8 active lifetime.

While they were very far from widespread, I'm pretty sure a handful of companies made some of these plug-ins. Magna and Canoe Computing - or something like that - are two names that come to mind. You can probably find ads in Antic or ANALOG...

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[STE'86]

Yeah, but the C64 version runs from 64K so it's still a major difference... if they'd had the option of a RAM expansion or even a multiload, it would've been able to look significantly better than it does and as Andy says the same goes for Space Harrier.

 

Wasn't Space Harrier written in a matter of weeks by Chris Butler and wasn't it his first 3D Sega style game?

 

i'm not sure about the matter of weeks (i remember some previews and so forth in Zzap! so presumably it was spread out over a couple of months) but it was certainly Butler's first foray into Sega 3D porting, yes. It should probably be noted that using a bitmapped display wasn't an option because Elite seem to have been insisting on everything being crammed into a single load at that point (look at his other work for them, Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Commando both dropped stages because there wasn't space for them in the memory at once).

 

well at the time space harrier came out, the average game programming techniques were most definitely not up to using bitmap graphics in any shape or form in game, this did not appear really till at least a year later and even then it was static stuff like cybernoid. at the time of space harrier and outrun it was character set and colour map or nothing.

 

commando in all honesty was a travesty of a conversion with only 3 levels. which i assmume were uncompressed and stored as whole maps in memory rather than tiled modular maps. i know the Hubbard music took him by surprise because it was bigger than he expected so he had to lose a level but even so, the backgrounds were only 4 colour with no colour ram, and the speccy version got all 9 levels in.

 

actually so did "who dares wins" from alligata which came out at the same time as commando and which really pissed Elite off at the time. apart from the music, Who Dares Wins drops on Commando from a great height as a Commando clone.

 

Steve

[emkay]

 

 

Sorry, that's your technical inexperience talking again emkay; a normal memory transfer of LDA address1,x / STA address2,x will take nine or ten cycles depending on page boundaries (even if it's unrolled that's still eight) but the DMA in a C64 RAM expansion can do a point A to B transfer in one byte per cycle. Use that right for something like a total re-write of Space Harrier (Sheddy's is done from scratch, why shouldn't a new C64 version have to rely on twenty year old code?) and you've got a way to draw things into the bitmapped screen incredibly quickly, fast enough in fact that if you can find a way of getting the DMA doing the lion's share of the work it'll negate the higher memory overhead.

 

 

Yeah, your DMA controller is a fortune teller and knows all related stuff by presuming the next to use

-coordinates

-size

-shape fill

-overlay priority

....

 

Actually, Space Harrier on the C64 is already doing some "8 bytes" by "1 byte" movement, due to the used char movement...

 

Using graphics instead of the used chars in the original C64 version, will speedup nothing. Possibly the graphics will get handled faster, but then you have to use more calculations for the higher "movement resolution"....

[Lazarus]

Actually, Space Harrier on the C64 is already doing some "8 bytes" by "1 byte" movement, due to the used char movement...

Yes but very limited due to only 256 characters in a character set of which ALL objects in ALL sizes have to be assembled from.

 

Using graphics instead of the used chars in the original C64 version, will speedup nothing.

It is already quite fast on C64, only due to 8x8 pixel movement grid and limited zoom sizes it looks much slower than it actually is.

[oky2000]

 

commando in all honesty was a travesty of a conversion with only 3 levels. which i assmume were uncompressed and stored as whole maps in memory rather than tiled modular maps. i know the Hubbard music took him by surprise because it was bigger than he expected so he had to lose a level but even so, the backgrounds were only 4 colour with no colour ram, and the speccy version got all 9 levels in.

 

actually so did "who dares wins" from alligata which came out at the same time as commando and which really pissed Elite off at the time. apart from the music, Who Dares Wins drops on Commando from a great height as a Commando clone.

 

Steve

 

Isn't the extra levels added in the DSE Crew's crack of Commando? (not played it and the crack has no infinte lives cheats)

 

I found Who Dares Wins (not WDW2 I presume) a slower paced game but even the purchased copy of WDW2 was nice to play.

[TMR]

Yeah, your DMA controller is a fortune teller and knows all related stuff by presuming the next to use

 

Oh dear, you're trying to sound like you understand programming again and it isn't working... the DMA on a C64 RAM expansion doesn't work alone (and i never said that it did) but it takes a lot of the potential donkey work away from the CPU, leaving it with lots more time for the other jobs a game requires. Even if we just cut it down to doing the screen clearance and nothing else, the A8 version of Space Harrier uses 160x96 so we'll take a guess at 3,840 bytes of screen RAM and five cycles per STA to clear it (i'm being very generous here and "ignoring" the extra cycles needed to maintain the clear loop); that'll be 19,200 cycles please guv. Now on the C64 we're looking at 8,000 bytes for an equivalent screen size (160x200) and that's a mere 8,000 cycles to you for cash and over 11,000 cycles less work to actually shift over twice as many bytes.

 

And don't forget, that 8,000 cycles on the C64 doesn't just get you a bitmap clear because it can happily be a bitmap dump from expansion RAM, removing the need to draw in the landscape in the distance seperately.

 

-coordinates

-size

-shape fill

-overlay priority

....

 

Co-ordinates and overlay priority are never going to be an issue because Space Harrier on the C64 in it's current form already handles them - you're forgetting that this isn't a 3D world we're dealing with, it's not anywhere near as complex as something like Encounter on either machine. Size also isn't an issue because, like the A8 version, there's a shedload of expansion RAM just sitting about the place for pre-shifted and pre-scaled objects. Shape fill becomes a combined effort, the DMA takes the large blocks of data where no object transparency is needed and the CPU handles the fiddly bits around the edges; for example, a column may have very little edge work if the graphics are designed with that in mind and, because the C64 treats it's bitmap as a one thousand character font rather than using linear lines, it's not short runs of six or seven bytes a scanline the DMA is being set up to dump but but chunks of whatever width by eight bytes as it does complete character lines in one pass.

[TMR]

well at the time space harrier came out, the average game programming techniques were most definitely not up to using bitmap graphics in any shape or form in game, this did not appear really till at least a year later and even then it was static stuff like cybernoid. at the time of space harrier and outrun it was character set and colour map or nothing.

 

True, but we're ignoring the difference in time ane learnt skills between the C64 and A8 versions anyway so we might as well go the whole hog and start playing emkay's "what if" game. =-) i didn't realise at the time, but the second level of Savage on the C64 is using bitmaps for the columns, so if that were converted to a DMA-based drawing system with a RAM expansion it'd be full colour bitmap and faster than Space Harrier C64's character-based screen.

 

commando in all honesty was a travesty of a conversion with only 3 levels. which i assmume were uncompressed and stored as whole maps in memory rather than tiled modular maps.

 

Yup, same with Ghosts 'n' Goblins, the maps it does have are all interleaved into one big uncompressed area from what i remember. Elite's policy towards just about every 8-bit was "get 'em out the door" really, that's why Airwolf was just a re-badge of Blue Thunder on the A8, explains why Airwolf 2 was just a scrolling shoot 'em up on everything and as for Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Commando on the C16... eek!