Atari v Commodore

[atariksi]

It's easy - ST and Amiga came along.

If that was true it would have killed the C64 too.

 

It is true. But the C64 had a bigger "fanbase" and muuuuuuuch games to spread at schools...

 

Games at schools? In our school they used C64s and PETs for BASIC until the PS/2s came out.

[TMR]

I don't see why they chose character-based graphics mode on C64 and not on A8 which would have given them at least one extra color and deal with the similar tiled based graphics.

 

In the case of The Pawn it's running in bitmap on the C64.

 

I wouldn't generalize that technically you see better games on C64. All he essentially mentioned is having scrolling in 1/2 color clocks which is not essential to having technically better games. And if you have a buffer that's like 512*512 using LMS and color-clock based scrolling, you never have to do any memory copies whereas on C64 you do memory copies essentially every 4 color clocks.

 

Yeah, but since four colour clocks take eight frames to pass on fixed speed scrolling, that's a large amount of CPU time to spread the load over; the only time it gets busy is if the colour RAM is being moved since that can't be repointed and it either has to be moved "live" or a back buffer drawn and dumped over the current display.

[emkay]

I wouldn't generalize that technically you see better games on C64. All he essentially mentioned is having scrolling in 1/2 color clocks which is not essential to having technically better games.

 

Depends on the game itself. Higher resolution makes it possible to have more exact displaying of screen content.

A good example is "Arkanoid" on the A8. The ball moves too coarse, compared to all other versions, or it moves in a weird horizontal speed..

 

Ofcourse, we can have it on the A8 aswell, but where to find the coders for programming hires with full PM overlay?

 

And if you have a buffer that's like 512*512 using LMS and color-clock based scrolling, you never have to do any memory copies whereas on C64 you do memory copies essentially every 4 color clocks.

 

This only helps on the technical side. A negative example is Zybex. Depending on the colourclock movement, the background and the moving objects move at the same speed. Well, for this additional solutions would exist, but it seems to be harder than to copy some memory.....

 

What you can see within those "cheap productions" is clear. Every "easy reachable" feature is added to have some game working...

The features on the C64 for making scrolling games with moving objects got usable "cheaper" which means : with less knowledge and less complexity in the machine code.

[TMR]

The last mass-produced full price game for the UK on the C64 was Lemmings from Psygnosis, released in 1994 - but looking at Gamebase64 shows that there were other European publishers still producing games that year such as CP Verlag or Magna Media for example and the first outings for a couple of smaller, one-person publishing efforts such as Visualize, Electric Boys, Cherry Software and the recently resurrected Psytronik. i suspect that's why i'm seeing something as "missing" from the mid 1980's for the A8, those enthusiastic users stepping up and taking over where the software houses left off.

must be a uk thing they were dead or pretty much so by 88 here.

 

More a Europe thing than UK specifically, i'd have said; some of the companies i listed above are German (and Rainbow Arts stuck with the C64 well into the 1990's, developing Turrican and Turrican 2 on the C64 first), the developers of Lemmings on the C64 weren't English either and the one-person publishing houses were supplied by cracking and demo scene programmers from all over the world.

[atariksi]

I don't see why they chose character-based graphics mode on C64 and not on A8 which would have given them at least one extra color and deal with the similar tiled based graphics.

 

In the case of The Pawn it's running in bitmap on the C64.

 

I wouldn't generalize that technically you see better games on C64. All he essentially mentioned is having scrolling in 1/2 color clocks which is not essential to having technically better games. And if you have a buffer that's like 512*512 using LMS and color-clock based scrolling, you never have to do any memory copies whereas on C64 you do memory copies essentially every 4 color clocks.

 

Yeah, but since four colour clocks take eight frames to pass on fixed speed scrolling, that's a large amount of CPU time to spread the load over; the only time it gets busy is if the colour RAM is being moved since that can't be repointed and it either has to be moved "live" or a back buffer drawn and dumped over the current display.

 

He showed picture of Pawn at 160*200*4 (as he claimed) so at least 160*200*5 (another standard mode) wouldn't have been a big deal to do. I always think of all C64 modes as char-based since they are 8*8. Okay, you can spread out the CPU time, but that's still worse than not having to do memory copies.

[TMR]

I don't have either version of the games you listed so I was asking for a hardware comparison of a particular game (from both sides). So you have more colors and twice the scrolling resolution-- those are good as long as it doesn't come at the cost of slowing down or degrading other features of the game.

 

In the examples i listed, it doesn't have an adverse effect no, the refresh speeds are either the same on both machines or higher on the C64 for the background refresh on Zybex (one colour clock every other frame compared to half a colour clock every frame) when things like Last V8 or Red Max are moving at low speeds. If anything, the increase in precision is helpful to the game, BMX Simulator has finer control on the bikes.

 

Hello, the context is "The Pawn" screen shots

 

Erm... no it wasn't; i was quoting from your post #8527 with "And also remember processor is also a hardware feature so if you use color ram and Atari uses DLIs avg. of every 8 scanlines, you are using similar processing power" which in turn is a reply to one of mine, post #8484, from before The Pawn had even been mentioned.

 

Okay, there were two points being made about the color RAM.

 

Yeah... but cheeky of you putting the "hello" in like that considering it wasn't my context, wasn't it? =-)

 

In your case, I wasn't equating the color RAM to a DLI but claiming to make fair comparisons, you allow the DLI to run 40+ cycles every 8 or so scanlines so that cycles are equalled out. In some cases DLI would outdo the color RAM.

 

Some relatively rare cases perhaps, but certainly none of the examples i'd given.

[TMR]

He showed picture of Pawn at 160*200*4 (as he claimed) so at least 160*200*5 (another standard mode) wouldn't have been a big deal to do.

 

i'm guessing it's rendered as bitmaps on the A8, it's possible that it simply didn't occur to anyone to use characters...

 

Okay, you can spread out the CPU time, but that's still worse than not having to do memory copies.

 

It's swings and roundabouts from a games programming perspective; on the C64 i need to assign a block of CPU time each frame to handling the scrolling but the A8 running true software sprites (full AND/ORA masking) is always going to be doing more shifting of data overall.

[oky2000]

The PC took off for 4 reasons.

 

1. Piracy...was worse than on the Amiga.

2. Internet access (although it was far from easy to set up)

3. MP3 compression to go with 2 above. and MPEG1 video compression to a lesser extent.

4. FPS games like Wolfenstein/Doom

 

Another generalization I am afraid...

 

The internet was not around in 1988/89 when the PC became the home computer in the US.

MP3 did not appear until 1995 (publicly)

 

Piracy was rampant and did as with the C64 make for an attractive freeware scene.

 

FPS's were important - but wolfenstein did not appear until 1992...

 

The rise of the PC was linked to the simple ubiquity of the platform - many manufacturers and the same machine at home and work for many many people...

 

sTeVE

 

I was talking about in western Europe where PCs only got a reasonable look in AND early 90s ie 92/93 which is when Commodore had one foot in the grave (the other was in the console market with the CD32...less said about that marketing decision the better)

 

The internet was the PCs killer app that's for sure, as nice as Doom was for most people the lure of this all new internet thingy was the reason the next wave of home computer adopter got excited. The availability of the internet was something neither Apple Atari or Commodore grabbed with both hands as their saviour it clearly would have been. Both Atari and Commodore were around in some form in 1995/96 but both companies buried their heads in the sand.

 

It was just impossible for Escom (Commodore) to return in 1995 when they had the over priced A4000 (not their fault) which could neither play MP3s and never would have the CPU grunt to do it and the A1200 which was even worse off. The £400 A1200 Had a 14.4kbps capped serial port (so 56k modem use was impossible) not a hope in hell of playing MPEG1 in software unlike the Pentium MMX 200/233 machines blah blah you get the picture. And then there was CD-ROM...no easy official Commodore CD drive for the A1200 let alone a model with it built in (something I can build with about £25 of parts and 2-3 hours with a screwdriver and steel knife). Overnight the A1200 had become obsolete and with it so did Escom 12 months after buying out Commodore.

 

And that's before you even consider how bad the Amiga would cope with the new 'craze' of texture mapped pseudo 3D games like Doom and Descent which ran OK on 2nd hand £400 PCs. A1200...released 1992...Doom appears...instantly AGA is obsolete even in the A4000 which costs more than any other PC for sale BUT would run Doom at best like a 16mhz 286 due to the Amigas 8 bit planes per 256 colour screen compared to the 800% faster to manipulate VGA byte per pixel screen on PCs. A significant nail in the coffin for the so called new baby of the king of home computer gaming (A500) in the late 80s going head to head and holding it's own against the Megadrive/Genesis.

 

And there in not so many words above is the story of how Commodore/Escom died a second time. Atari lasted a little longer only because they completely abandoned the home computer market (but interestingly an 040 and 060 Falcon update was probably better equipped to fight off the PC invasion with it's CD sound/DSP/better screen layout)...but the Jag was no match for the quality of games design on the SNES or the 3D texture mapped power of the PSX/Saturn/3DO and so they went down not long after.

 

Despite being expensive Apple were not going to go bust in this crucial time of change, they adopted plug in and go iMac internet capable machines for example and with their only competition being clones with zero styling running the maligned Windows they stayed in business (and captured a pathetic 2% of the market at it's weakest point for Wintel machines which shows just how useless Apple strategy for mass market sales had become too)

 

Enjoy your Windows boxes now won't you all

[ANTIQ]

 

Well, in detail:

 

In 1984 Activision USA produced 12 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 Activision USA produced 4 games for the A8 and 2 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 Activision USA produced 0 games for the A8 and 5 games for the Amiga only.

 

In 1983 EA produced 10 games for the A8 only.

In 1984 EA produced 3 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 3 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 6 games for the Amiga only (like Marble Madness!)

 

Exactly, there's a simultaneous winding down of one and spinning up of another; i'll say it again, no sane businessman would stop producing games for one platform in favour of another in the way you've previously implied and these figures demonstrate that.

 

If the above companies were being run sanely then presumably Amiga 1000 games were outselling A8 ones in 1986 which is surprising.

[atarian63]

You're wrong in those files about the overlap, we're not talking about titles existing on both machines but the years in which the company produced games simultaneously for them; you said, essentially that your fictional company stopped producing A8 games and started producing Amiga ones, i said that wasn't something a sane businessman would do and your two lists show an entire year for Activision and two years for EA which back me up.

 

Well, in detail:

 

In 1984 Activision USA produced 12 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 Activision USA produced 4 games for the A8 and 2 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 Activision USA produced 0 games for the A8 and 5 games for the Amiga only.

 

In 1983 EA produced 10 games for the A8 only.

In 1984 EA produced 3 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 3 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 6 games for the Amiga only (like Marble Madness!)

 

Exactly, there's a simultaneous winding down of one and spinning up of another; i'll say it again, no sane businessman would stop producing games for one platform in favour of another in the way you've previously implied and these figures demonstrate that.

 

Relax!

 

Who said i wasn't relaxed? i'm not the one who has done all this research on AtariMania am i? =-)

 

Have a game of Winter Wally!

 

Most of this week i've been playing Zybex and Humanoid (and quite a bit of Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the Wii)... but i have to concentrate on other platforms for at least the next four days.

Actually they thought they were being sane, had nothing directly to do with the installed base, it was that the crash and subsequent sale of Atari scared away Dev work. Plain and simple. It was a safer bet to do something else that was a "maybe" than something that was in perceived "trouble". Had this conversation many times with my EA rep.

[Rockford]

21 - Jocky Wilson's Darts Compendium

 

C64

C64

C64

 

The C64 version has more colours and better music & animation. On Atari darts are depicted by ugly transparent sprites. C64 strikes the bullseye again.

 

ATARI

ATARI

ATARI

Edited September 21, 2009 by Rockford

[Lazarus]

The internet was the PCs killer app that's for sure, as nice as Doom was for most people the lure of this all new internet thingy was the reason the next wave of home computer adopter got excited. The availability of the internet was something neither Apple Atari or Commodore grabbed with both hands as their saviour it clearly would have been. Both Atari and Commodore were around in some form in 1995/96 but both companies buried their heads in the sand.

Hmm I used Amiga for internet in 1995.

 

It was just impossible for Escom (Commodore) to return in 1995 when they had the over priced A4000 (not their fault) which could neither play MP3s and never would have the CPU grunt to do it and the A1200 which was even worse off.

Actually it wasn't the CPU power itself. It was the horrible memory bandwidth. Strange enough nobody felt like improving that, I remember discussions with the Phase 5 people why they didn't add a 2nd level cache to their Blizzard cards: "We tested it with Maxon Cinema 3D and it was only 15% faster". Hell, a CPU intensive program without any cache optimizations is already 15% faster but for them this didn't matter. Btw, Archimedes and Falcon had the same problems: Lousy memory bandwidth. I remember that on Archimedes it was faster to calculate a Mandelbrot fractal on the sides of a texture mapped cube than reading from a texture in memory. That way ofcourse it's not possible to do something like Doom in PC speed. For texture mapping you need a good memory bandwidth.

 

The £400 A1200 Had a 14.4kbps capped serial port (so 56k modem use was impossible)

There were other serial device drivers which easily did 56k and more on an A1200.

 

Overnight the A1200 had become obsolete and with it so did Escom 12 months after buying out Commodore.

Yeah, everybody was pretty disappointed about the A1200. The times of "Amiga = dream computer" was over.

 

And that's before you even consider how bad the Amiga would cope with the new 'craze' of texture mapped pseudo 3D games like Doom and Descent which ran OK on 2nd hand £400 PCs. A1200...released 1992...Doom appears...instantly AGA is obsolete even in the A4000 which costs more than any other PC for sale BUT would run Doom at best like a 16mhz 286 due to the Amigas 8 bit planes per 256 colour screen compared to the 800% faster to manipulate VGA byte per pixel screen on PCs.

I never understood that bitplane thing. It only has disadvantages.

 

And there in not so many words above is the story of how Commodore/Escom died a second time. Atari lasted a little longer only because they completely abandoned the home computer market (but interestingly an 040 and 060 Falcon update was probably better equipped to fight off the PC invasion with it's CD sound/DSP/better screen layout)...

The only real advantage of the Falcon was it's high color mode. The DSP was nice but pretty useless for most applications.

[emkay]

 

The C64 version has more colours and better music & animation. On Atari darts are depicted by ugly transparent sprites. C64 strikes the bullseye again.

 

 

Bla....

 

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

[atarian63]

The last mass-produced full price game for the UK on the C64 was Lemmings from Psygnosis, released in 1994 - but looking at Gamebase64 shows that there were other European publishers still producing games that year such as CP Verlag or Magna Media for example and the first outings for a couple of smaller, one-person publishing efforts such as Visualize, Electric Boys, Cherry Software and the recently resurrected Psytronik. i suspect that's why i'm seeing something as "missing" from the mid 1980's for the A8, those enthusiastic users stepping up and taking over where the software houses left off.

must be a uk thing they were dead or pretty much so by 88 here.

 

More a Europe thing than UK specifically, i'd have said; some of the companies i listed above are German (and Rainbow Arts stuck with the C64 well into the 1990's, developing Turrican and Turrican 2 on the C64 first), the developers of Lemmings on the C64 weren't English either and the one-person publishing houses were supplied by cracking and demo scene programmers from all over the world.

sure sounds like the case, such different markets. I sure wish A8 had been like that here, could have been fun times!

[atarian63]

The PC took off for 4 reasons.

 

1. Piracy...was worse than on the Amiga.

2. Internet access (although it was far from easy to set up)

3. MP3 compression to go with 2 above. and MPEG1 video compression to a lesser extent.

4. FPS games like Wolfenstein/Doom

 

Another generalization I am afraid...

 

The internet was not around in 1988/89 when the PC became the home computer in the US.

MP3 did not appear until 1995 (publicly)

 

Piracy was rampant and did as with the C64 make for an attractive freeware scene.

 

FPS's were important - but wolfenstein did not appear until 1992...

 

The rise of the PC was linked to the simple ubiquity of the platform - many manufacturers and the same machine at home and work for many many people...

 

sTeVE

 

I was talking about in western Europe where PCs only got a reasonable look in AND early 90s ie 92/93 which is when Commodore had one foot in the grave (the other was in the console market with the CD32...less said about that marketing decision the better)

 

The internet was the PCs killer app that's for sure, as nice as Doom was for most people the lure of this all new internet thingy was the reason the next wave of home computer adopter got excited. The availability of the internet was something neither Apple Atari or Commodore grabbed with both hands as their saviour it clearly would have been. Both Atari and Commodore were around in some form in 1995/96 but both companies buried their heads in the sand.

 

It was just impossible for Escom (Commodore) to return in 1995 when they had the over priced A4000 (not their fault) which could neither play MP3s and never would have the CPU grunt to do it and the A1200 which was even worse off. The £400 A1200 Had a 14.4kbps capped serial port (so 56k modem use was impossible) not a hope in hell of playing MPEG1 in software unlike the Pentium MMX 200/233 machines blah blah you get the picture. And then there was CD-ROM...no easy official Commodore CD drive for the A1200 let alone a model with it built in (something I can build with about £25 of parts and 2-3 hours with a screwdriver and steel knife). Overnight the A1200 had become obsolete and with it so did Escom 12 months after buying out Commodore.

 

And that's before you even consider how bad the Amiga would cope with the new 'craze' of texture mapped pseudo 3D games like Doom and Descent which ran OK on 2nd hand £400 PCs. A1200...released 1992...Doom appears...instantly AGA is obsolete even in the A4000 which costs more than any other PC for sale BUT would run Doom at best like a 16mhz 286 due to the Amigas 8 bit planes per 256 colour screen compared to the 800% faster to manipulate VGA byte per pixel screen on PCs. A significant nail in the coffin for the so called new baby of the king of home computer gaming (A500) in the late 80s going head to head and holding it's own against the Megadrive/Genesis.

 

And there in not so many words above is the story of how Commodore/Escom died a second time. Atari lasted a little longer only because they completely abandoned the home computer market (but interestingly an 040 and 060 Falcon update was probably better equipped to fight off the PC invasion with it's CD sound/DSP/better screen layout)...but the Jag was no match for the quality of games design on the SNES or the 3D texture mapped power of the PSX/Saturn/3DO and so they went down not long after.

 

Despite being expensive Apple were not going to go bust in this crucial time of change, they adopted plug in and go iMac internet capable machines for example and with their only competition being clones with zero styling running the maligned Windows they stayed in business (and captured a pathetic 2% of the market at it's weakest point for Wintel machines which shows just how useless Apple strategy for mass market sales had become too)

 

Enjoy your Windows boxes now won't you all

With pc's it seemed the beginning of the end was with the advent of VGA graphics on an ISA bus card. You could not really play games well at the beginning but those still pics really wowed people! The tide was turning...

[atarian63]

 

Well, in detail:

 

In 1984 Activision USA produced 12 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 Activision USA produced 4 games for the A8 and 2 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 Activision USA produced 0 games for the A8 and 5 games for the Amiga only.

 

In 1983 EA produced 10 games for the A8 only.

In 1984 EA produced 3 games for the A8 only.

In 1985 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 3 conversions to the Amiga.

In 1986 EA produced 2 games for the A8 only and 6 games for the Amiga only (like Marble Madness!)

 

Exactly, there's a simultaneous winding down of one and spinning up of another; i'll say it again, no sane businessman would stop producing games for one platform in favour of another in the way you've previously implied and these figures demonstrate that.

 

If the above companies were being run sanely then presumably Amiga 1000 games were outselling A8 ones in 1986 which is surprising.

could be but it would have tp be close. A1000 software sales stunk. We did not sell many machines either,ST Ruled in the early days,which was kind of odd considering the swapping of places and people involved. You just cant write wierd situations like that. Very inbred.

[atarian63]

21 - Jocky Wilson's Darts Compendium

 

C64

C64

C64

 

The C64 version has more colours and better music & animation. On Atari darts are depicted by ugly transparent sprites. C64 strikes the bullseye again.

 

ATARI

ATARI

ATARI

I like the 3rd pic on Atari better and SID makes me ill.

[Rockford]

 

The C64 version has more colours and better music & animation. On Atari darts are depicted by ugly transparent sprites. C64 strikes the bullseye again.

 

 

Bla....

 

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

 

In this case the ugly transparent sprites disturb the gameplay, because they interfere with the darts target. It's rather a weakness than a strength.

[Jetboot Jack]

I was talking about in western Europe where PCs only got a reasonable look in AND early 90s ie 92/93 which is when Commodore had one foot in the grave (the other was in the console market with the CD32...less said about that marketing decision the better)

 

The 386 was HUGE in 1989, the 286 or a couple of years before that in consumer PC's - Wing Commander in 1990 destroyed the credibility of the ST/Amiga as ultimate games computers...

 

In computer retail in the late 80's (87 to 93 was my term of service) the PC became very important, as a premier gaming rig and a home computer - propriety system fans might not like that idea, but that's the truth, the PC was firmly entrenched before 1990 in the UK...

 

I'm no PC fan, I much prefer my apple kit, but the truth is the PC was the next big thing after the C64 as a global platform...

 

sTeVE

[TMR]

The internet was the PCs killer app that's for sure, as nice as Doom was for most people the lure of this all new internet thingy was the reason the next wave of home computer adopter got excited. The availability of the internet was something neither Apple Atari or Commodore grabbed with both hands as their saviour it clearly would have been. Both Atari and Commodore were around in some form in 1995/96 but both companies buried their heads in the sand.

Hmm I used Amiga for internet in 1995.

 

So did i, actually - late 1995 to somewhere during 1997 if memory serves.

 

I never understood that bitplane thing. It only has disadvantages.

 

There's a few places it's an advantage, dual playfield displays for example had to be simulated in software.

[Lazarus]

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

C64 can do transparency too by using 2 sprites and a priority paradoxon.

[Lazarus]

I never understood that bitplane thing. It only has disadvantages.

There's a few places it's an advantage, dual playfield displays for example had to be simulated in software.

Dual playfield can be done without bitplanes too. Just have 2 chunky bitmap sources.

[Heaven/TQA]

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

C64 can do transparency too by using 2 sprites and a priority paradoxon.

 

transparency with 16 fixed colours???

[emkay]

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

C64 can do transparency too by using 2 sprites and a priority paradoxon.

 

 

I know

...

 

violett is the transparent of blue and further nonsense

[analmux]

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

C64 can do transparency too by using 2 sprites and a priority paradoxon.

Again an example of 1-side arguments. I still don't understand why some peeps (from C64 camp) sign up on AA, only taking part in this thread, and use this style of arguing.

 

So, let's turn this 180 degrees. A8 can do WITHOUT transparency too, if some care was taken using the PM underlay.

 

 

Now read this:

 

 

The C64 version has more colours and better music & animation. On Atari darts are depicted by ugly transparent sprites. C64 strikes the bullseye again.

 

 

Bla....

 

The "ugly"transparent is something the C64 would have missed , and many programs on other systems use transparency as a special effect.

 

In this case the ugly transparent sprites disturb the gameplay, because they interfere with the darts target. It's rather a weakness than a strength.

Using the same style of arguments of your 'C64 fellow': A8 can do WITHOUT transparency too, if some care was taken using the PM underlay.

 

Thanks.