Atari v Commodore

[emkay]

 

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.

 

 

Have you seen WII Sports yet? Your Boxer is transparent to hit your opponent better....

 

And, well, I bet it was intentional to have the transparency. You simply have to set the brightness of the PM to the playfield colour to have it solid.

[oky2000]

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...

 

So true I think it wasn't until the 120mhz Pentium I saw anything remotely like smooth scrolling on PC games, and 320x256 VGA on even a 14" XGA (1024x768) PC monitor look really blocky too. I think there was something before VGA called IBM MCGA or something with the same 320x256 in 256 colours/65k palette? The point was though Commodore did nothing about it and when they finally did do a 256 colour mode they basically added 2 bitplanes and cleaned up a few timing issues and called it AGA 6 years after the fact.

 

I wonder what Jay Miner would have made of that all if he was alive today sometimes

[oky2000]

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

 

The run and jump games were glitchy, the games hardly ever ran without needing a little session of Qemm386 to fix your config/autoexec driver setups and Wing Commander...did you ever play it? It was a terrible game both technically and playability wise....only nobs jumped on that bandwagon fearing to speak the truth and following the herd.

 

However things like Mortal Kombat and Super Street Fighter had shown what good can come of having a system with just a fast CPU and a simple byte per pixel screen memory set up......and of course ALL PC games had an option to install to hard drive so no disk swapping for them. The PC is like a turbocharged Spectrum, the only difference is every 6 months there was a faster CPU that would run the same game. Hell it's the same thing today...buy Crysis in 2008....play it on a 2009 machine to see it as it was intended

 

In 1989 the PC as a HOME machine was a joke in the UK trust me, I remember it well 286 or 386 at that time there was no VCD or kickass games, glitchy graphics, unimaginative games. I would say the first traditional games to even challenge either the Sega consoles or the Amiga was Lotus III and Super Stardust 96....the fact you needed a machine costing 3x more to play the same game was neither here nor there it would seem 120mhz or so was the break point where you could finally do an arcade game on a PC that wasn't glitchy or messed up. Sure some DOSsers had them but normal people who wanted to have fun with games or graphics or music did NOT buy a PC...only idiots who didn't have a clue what they wanted and were sold some overpriced unusable junk like a 'multimedia PC' for their home

 

However there is only so long a 64 colour machine with 4 channel sound can hold off 100s of megahertz and £200 graphics cards and £150 sound cards. AGA was at least 3 years too late AND running at half speed in the A1200 with only chip ram clobbering the poor old 020 inside....David and Goliath indeed...except in our case David had no arms, and Goliath had 6 arms like Gorro in Mortal Kombat haha they didn't have a chance.

[oky2000]

 

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.

 

It's a crap game full stop (on both!)

[atarian63]

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...

 

So true I think it wasn't until the 120mhz Pentium I saw anything remotely like smooth scrolling on PC games, and 320x256 VGA on even a 14" XGA (1024x768) PC monitor look really blocky too. I think there was something before VGA called IBM MCGA or something with the same 320x256 in 256 colours/65k palette? The point was though Commodore did nothing about it and when they finally did do a 256 colour mode they basically added 2 bitplanes and cleaned up a few timing issues and called it AGA 6 years after the fact.

 

I wonder what Jay Miner would have made of that all if he was alive today sometimes

Seems about right on, that was about the speed, there was ega and I do recall mcga, weird times. Os/2 and windows and dos all competing. Some ega stuff looked ok, there really was nothing for sound other than the speaker until adlib, that really helped too.Ide was new too, you had to format it with the Wd controller g=c800:5 in debug in dos.

Edited September 21, 2009 by atarian63

[andym00]

Just stumbled across this whilst on a mammoth search for something..

 

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v6n11/ioboard.html

 

Of interest, about a reply from Trip Hawkins (then EA el presidente) on the subject of why EA are doing cock all Atari stuff, this was March'88 from Antic..

 

TWO FOR EA

 

I recently received a response from Electronic Arts President Trip Hawkins regarding the deplorable shortage of Atari 8-bit software. He told me how EA couldn't make any money on Atari software, citing poor sales among other reasons. However, if you look at the programs that EA released for the Atari, you'll see that they're low-quality. Products such as Mail Order Monsters, Financial Cookbook and Racing Destruction Set aren't worth spending the postage on, let alone $20. Come on EA, give us Skyfox and your other great programs that will be worth the cost to you and us.

 

Jeff Yonker

Chicago

 

Trip Hawkins, I understand that you're reluctant to give us more Atari software because nobody buys your current EA products. However, what do you expect when you port over mundane, boring and low-grade software to the Atari? It's just not worth the money. Don't expect to win over Atari users until you provide Atari versions of your best software.

 

Eric Jensen

Barksdale AFB, LA

[atarian63]

Just stumbled across this whilst on a mammoth search for something..

 

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v6n11/ioboard.html

 

Of interest, about a reply from Trip Hawkins (then EA el presidente) on the subject of why EA are doing cock all Atari stuff, this was March'88 from Antic..

 

TWO FOR EA

 

I recently received a response from Electronic Arts President Trip Hawkins regarding the deplorable shortage of Atari 8-bit software. He told me how EA couldn't make any money on Atari software, citing poor sales among other reasons. However, if you look at the programs that EA released for the Atari, you'll see that they're low-quality. Products such as Mail Order Monsters, Financial Cookbook and Racing Destruction Set aren't worth spending the postage on, let alone $20. Come on EA, give us Skyfox and your other great programs that will be worth the cost to you and us.

 

Jeff Yonker

Chicago

 

Trip Hawkins, I understand that you're reluctant to give us more Atari software because nobody buys your current EA products. However, what do you expect when you port over mundane, boring and low-grade software to the Atari? It's just not worth the money. Don't expect to win over Atari users until you provide Atari versions of your best software.

 

Eric Jensen

Barksdale AFB, LA

Yep Andy, that was the prevailing attitude at the time, they were doing substandard stuff and when it did not sell they blamed the user or platform. Still goes on today sadly.

As I recall some companies were petitioned by Atari users to still do the format, some publishers grudgingly did however some of them did poor work then claimed it would not sell. End of story and EA etc doesnt have to deal with the users anymore. I guess I am saying they really probably wanted to drop it anyway,someone got someone else in the company to give it a go and due to quality it failed. There were many titles that were unreleased for Atari from Atari and others that had they been made available would have sold quite well. There was still a great hunger for "something new" and "something great" or at least very good.

Here is a link for something similar from users

http://www.atarimania.com/detail_soft-MENU-8-VERSION_ID-18850.html

Edited September 22, 2009 by atarian63

[Bryan]

The first time I really got worried about the progress the PC was making was when I saw Wolfenstein 3D. I'd never seen anything like it.

[Rybags]

The best software from EA tended to not come from in-house (Ozark, Freefall, etc).

 

I believe the trend still continues today... you'd be hard pressed to find a dozen good games in 30 years from EA that were 100% in-house.

[Heaven/TQA]

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

 

Interesting that I missed so many Ian Copland games... the soccer one, this one and few others...

[atariksi]

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

 

Interesting that I missed so many Ian Copland games... the soccer one, this one and few others...

 

Yeah, I think you also missed out on my text-based version of Baseball game for Atari 800 written in BASIC. I'll put it up for downloading once I find it...

[Heaven/TQA]

Steve is right. The US scene was ahead of the global scene. 8-bit computers started disappearing from the shelves (or at least were no longer prominently on display) when the 16-bits arrived. But at the same time all kinds of import 8-bit magazines started popping up (which was really the only indicator of the foreign market before theinternet). In the US, people really worried about things like obsolescence but I think the 16-bit wave really drove down prices which helped less technological countries.

 

If there had been no foreign market, 8-bit development would have completely stopped by the late 80's.

 

 

Lucky C64. Commodore did all well from the start. Taking care of peoples interest. Low prize , good sound and graphics did well in the "wanted" way. So people started spreading good words over the C64 and added a good bunch of pirated copies. This sold the C64 for a long time, even after Commodore started to do nonsense at the market. As a cheap computer it really outlived until the PC got a reliable computer for home usage (gaming and home office)....

But, well, as I stated several times before: C64's CPU was too slow to keep the games running that equaled average customer's needs (reliable 3D playability), even with low prizing, people jumped finally over to computers with faster CPUs...

 

Changes in game style/design have always influenced the market. First we wanted better resolution/more colours than the early ZX80/VIC20/VCS type machines and so a new breed of machines started selling. Then we wanted solid filled 3D graphics which only the ST/PC/Amiga could deliver (and this is when many ST/Amiga/PC multiformat magazines in the UK sprung up) so those machines sold well. Then we all wanted textured 3D type games like Doom and only the PC's architecture was suited to that (a very fast CPU doing everything alone = make it do these things for the games like textured pseudo 3D of Doom) and then finally we wanted proper 3D and the era of the super consoles like the Playstation/Saturn/N64 arrived with games like Wipeout having a massive impact on what home gamers wanted.

 

With each of these shifts in game design a new breed of machine took off. The PC as a games machine is almost dead, the Mac never was a games machine this decade forget that so we are now with PC for general use and PS3/360/Wii for gaming for most households. And now we are heading towards the unknown as things really can't change that much short of a direct connection to the human brain for true virtual reality type games you 'experience' the same way as real life. That might never happen so in a way that's your lot (which is why now retro is a big thing no doubt...more colours/resolution than the PS3/360 or some wonky controller ripping off the Wii-mote isn't going to get people like us who have seen it all that excited...which is why sales are a problem for PS3/360 worldwide and Wii is mostly being bought by new console buyers trying it or women who never thought about it in the first place (Nintendo fanboys excluded!)

 

Piracy always helps...remember all those 'chipped' Playstation 1 machines....remember how hard it was to get a Saturn chipped....look which machine won

 

And even better....you can buy a computer, fill it with almost every game for every major machine ever sold + emulator and that's that....more hours of gameplay than the lifespan of a human being allows to complete ha!

 

Piracy always helps... R4 cards on NDS, Windows available for "free"... OS X getting more and more available due to hackintosh projects for "normal PC" users like me, Snow Leopard available in Europe for 25,- EUR... leading me into buying an iMac etc etc etc...

 

And Yes... it was compatibility main reason for having a PC at the 90s... running "killer apps" like Wing Commander, Commanche, Star Wars as first CDROM game, Adlib sound, monitor pic compared with f.e. 60 Hz Amiga 1084 etc etc etc... I was always a kind of outlaw at it was exactly the same time when I was buying an A1200 030 from a friend of mine who switched to PC... well... but it started that all hardware or printers or even standard software disappeared on the Amiga side even Amiga had some "standard" IO ports...

[atariksi]

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)...

I need to get a few of those type games to see what you are talking about.

 

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? =-)

...

Hello, they are essentially the same answer to two different examples. You weren't talking about the Pawn but some other game(s) which also uses up 40+ cycles every 8 scanlines so a DLI substitute would make things more fair.

 

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.

 

If you re-use colors horizontally in GTIA mode or GPRIOR mode 0, you can easily get >40 colors per scanline.

[atariksi]

...

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.

 

...

 

Bitplanes are advantage if you want to optimize the memory useage for the colors you need to use. You always have the blitter to do the moves for you. None of the PCs of various eras (8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and now 64-bit) ever standardized on sprites so people are just relying on BitBlt() to do everything for them or rely on DirectX which is also indirect method of accessing the hardware efficiently. At least Amiga gave you full access to the hardware and at register level and you can bet it would work the same on all AGA machines or if you targetted OCS/ECS, it would still work on AGA.

 

You can also update a single bitplane and quickly put up a graphic rather than update huge chunks of data.

[Lazarus]

Bitplanes are advantage if you want to optimize the memory useage for the colors you need to use.

The same can be achieved by having two chunky bitmap sources with 1, 2 and 4 bits per pixel.

 

You always have the blitter to do the moves for you.

The blitter could easily handle chunky modes aswell, and instead of 3-5 passes you would need only 1-2.

 

I'm talking about pixel formats like this: 1 bit: 01234567 / 2 bit: 00112233 / 4 bit: 00001111

[TMR]

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)...

I need to get a few of those type games to see what you are talking about.

 

Along with the speed difference with Zybex, the ones that'll show the difference most clearly are probably Last V8 and Red Max; try driving horizontally at slow speeds (which you need to during play, especially with the latter) and, when the C64 is moving half a clock every other frame, the A8 has to resort to a clock every four. As regards playability, Zybex is hours of fun if you like shoot 'em ups and i personally enjoy V8 despite it being rather difficult (i can finish both versions, but i believe i'm still in the minority there).

 

Hello, they are essentially the same answer to two different examples. You weren't talking about the Pawn but some other game(s) which also uses up 40+ cycles every 8 scanlines so a DLI substitute would make things more fair.

 

That's fine by me because i honestly can't see many places it'd really help. And in character based modes (which Red Max and Last V8 use, for example) the A8 is doing the same 40 cycles per eight scanlines fetch that the C64 is... actually, since it's using horizontal scroll that means it's grabbing more than 40 bytes a character line now i think about it?

 

If you re-use colors horizontally in GTIA mode or GPRIOR mode 0, you can easily get >40 colors per scanline.

 

You try actually using those colours in a functioning game environment (and for the moment we'll ignore puzzle games, consider it a given that Tetris can be done in APAC or FLI and i've just given myself an idea!) and things rapidly get rather sticky; for example, horizontally scrolling a GTIA mode display isn't an option for most game situations because the resolution of the hardware scrolling is essentially halved to a pixel every other colour clock, either it has to drop frames to get a playable speed (Zybex drops every other frame to be playable, matching that from a GTIA mode involves dropping three out of four frames) or hammer along at either two colour clocks per frame or at least every other frame. Two colour clocks a frame is sort of viable and there are a couple of rare examples of games that move that fast and can still be played on other platforms, Killer Cobra on the Amstrad CPC for example, but you're never going to be able to do a decent Zybex style shoot 'em up at that speed.

[TMR]

Interesting that I missed so many Ian Copland games... the soccer one, this one and few others...

 

Yeah, I think you also missed out on my text-based version of Baseball game for Atari 800 written in BASIC. I'll put it up for downloading once I find it...

 

Yeah, but you're not so interesting because you didn't write the A8 version of Draconus as well, did you? =-)

 

Oh and Heaven, check your PMs mate!

[www.atarimania.com]

That's the point where i'd expect at least some Atarians to pick up an assembler and at least try to fill some of the gap, certainly that's what we saw with the C64 around the early 1990's when the full price games companies left it behind. The incentive is a fairly simple one, if people do that there are more new games to play.

I think it has to do with a certain state of mind which I can't exactly explain either. What I believe is that nothing really pushed the users to go forward and do things on their own. I could be wrong but it may have to do with the very bland magazine support Atari users had in the UK. Probably lack of organization from the start as well that didn't allow programmers to take over, share code, ideas...

 

Note that this didn't happen in Poland when the Atari was getting very popular at the end of the eighties so there definitely was a missing link in the UK somewhere... I know it was a very different situation in Poland - and other countries in Eastern Europe - but it's still quite tempting to compare the level of enthusiasm in both cases.

 

But i don't personally see that as tied to the commercial side of game development generally and, considering the extremely enthusiastic community (is there any way to say this without it sounding like i'm shouting "fanboy" because i'm not, honest!) the A8 has around it now, the question that keeps cropping up in my mind is what were they doing then? i know some people did a game or two and JBJ had some very ambitious plans, but after that... it's almost like there was a general apathy amongst A8 users of the time, but surely that can't be the case?

Apathy is the word... I dunno... I feel Atari users back then were either old farts or very young users. Again, it seems obvious something went wrong in the UK...

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

Edited September 22, 2009 by www.atarimania.com

[Jetboot Jack]

Wing Commander...did you ever play it? It was a terrible game both technically and playability wise....only nobs jumped on that bandwagon fearing to speak the truth and following the herd.

 

I played it and SOLD it - in large numbers, it brought a level of visual polish people could not ignore - and proved VERY attractive to consumer. That it was a very average game did not matter - it was visually and audibly exciting, it compelled people to buy a machine just to play it - I sold lots of PC's off teh back of demonstrating Wing Commander - 256 color graphics were very compelling when compared to the 8bit and early 16bit Atari and Commodore systems...

 

In 1989 the PC as a HOME machine was a joke in the UK trust me, I remember it well 286 or 386 at that time there was no VCD or kickass games, glitchy graphics, unimaginative games.

 

I don't trust you. I trust my experience of selling the machine and the games, 256 color adventures from Lucasarts and Sierra, MT32 audio and Microporose Simulations that ran at a good framerate not a 10fps slideshow were very compelling to people...

 

only idiots who didn't have a clue what they wanted and were sold some overpriced unusable junk like a 'multimedia PC' for their home

 

Not at all PC's were not sold as Multimedia in 1989, had the term been coined then? They were sold as upgradable, future proof, and the next step from proprietry closed systems from what was percieved as "toy" computer comapnies. That's my experience of selling the beige beasts!

 

sTeVE

Edited September 22, 2009 by Jetboot Jack

[TMR]

I played it and SOLD it - in large numbers, it brought a level of visual polish people could not ignore - and proved VERY attractive to consumer. That it was a very average game did not matter - it was visually and audibly exciting, it compelled people to buy a machine just to play it - I sold lots of PC's off teh back of demonstrating Wing Commander - 256 color graphics were very compelling when compared to the 8bit and early 16bit Atari and Commodore systems...

 

That's exactly what we did a generation before with Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga as well, using an A2000 with a large amplifier hooked up to it; that and a quick demo of DPaint 3 could shift A500s at a truly scary rate! i didn't play Wing Commander personally though, it just didn't appeal to me...

 

In 1989 the PC as a HOME machine was a joke in the UK trust me, I remember it well 286 or 386 at that time there was no VCD or kickass games, glitchy graphics, unimaginative games.

 

I don't trust you. I trust my experience of selling the machine and the games, 256 color adventures from Lucasarts and Sierra, MT32 audio and Microporose Simulations that ran at a good framerate not a 10fps slideshow were very compelling to people...

 

i'd have to sit on the fence somewhat here; 1989 where i was selling was very much an Amiga year and it took at least another twelve months before the PC began to look like a serious threat; i remember the moment my personal opinion changed in fact, it was on seeing Gods running on a PC with a Roland sound card and presumably that was at some point near the end of 1991.

[frogstar_robot]

The first time I really got worried about the progress the PC was making was when I saw Wolfenstein 3D. I'd never seen anything like it.

 

You had things like Gloom for the Amiga but it really struggled to do it and you had to cheat a lot with a small viewport on a lower spec Amiga. And that was just to implement a Wolfenstein style raycast engine. Matching Doom or Descent was almost completely out of the question.

 

I got a 486 with 16MB ram and a 540MB hard drive in '94 to replace my 520ST. It had Cirrus Logic 5446 video and a SB Pro clone sound card. In all it was a low range machine for the time but it made most of the STs and Amigas I'd seen look sick. There were scads of smooth running 32-bit extended DOS games that used the 320x240x256 pixel mode and at least Adlib sound. This machine could mostly pull the original Descent off. Win 3.x was still mainstream and laughable compared to even GEM as implemented on my ST but for gaming our beloved STs, Falcons, and Amigas were on life support.

[potatohead]

WOLF3D was the first title that made me think a PC was going to be OK. Prior to that game, there were a bunch of DOS games that were fun, but nothing special. Always loved the little two player space trek game though. Each player had a base, ships and controls to direct them to perform basic tasks. Two players could play over a modem, and that was the other PC feature that I got excited about. Networks.

 

I had dialed up a number of BBSes prior to Internet. That was fun actually. Did it on several machines, and the PC was the best for it's ANSI color graphics capability. C64 was second best because it could do the same thing at 40 columns.

 

Having a serious text mode really helps a machine. Atari was always short on this. Didn't matter much to me, gaming wise, but it did matter for productivity applications. For professional reasons, I had to go down that road and a PC was the machine to have.

 

My first trip to the Internet was some time around '91. The company I worked for did two things that were of interest. One was an EDI system for electronic business data exchange. The other was electronic, paperless manufacturing. Well, we did use a ton of paper, but we didn't have to send it through the mail. Snagged an Internet account and double dipped on it at home. This was pre-web, but amazing anyway. funet.fi archive (is that still there, I haven't checked), USENET, and various Gopher portals were lots of fun. In particular, USENET carried classic video gaming discussion and the roots of homebrew are there. (been looking for some early threads on that, just because) Pre-web, I really wanted an 8 bitter that could do serious text. Was eyeing a C= 128, but it didn't come to pass. Regret that now, as that would be a nice machine to have these days

 

Ended up with a 8088, or 8086 machine, can't remember which, that had the minimum. CGA, 640K RAM, and co-processor that I plugged in myself. That one connected to a modem, became my portal to the greater online world, and the Atari kind of sat for a while.

 

(a long while)

 

At the University, a friend of mine and I had access to powerful machines that could render the web. Jumped on right near the beginning with a machine running a Mosaic beta. Back then, it was possible to surf "the web" and get a good idea of what was out there in just an evening and pizza. I scrambled at home to build up a goofy 386 with 5Mb of RAM. 8 was too much, but most things would run in 5, given some tolerance for swapping and careful use of the machine. That one ended up running winsock, high speed analog modem, VGA, etc...

 

About a year later, an SGI Indy sat next to it, and I moved to that as my primary machine, leaving the PC for a few specialized tasks. That one was fantastic and I should have kept one for the longer term. (purged all the SGI's on a forced move here a while back) R5K MIPS, Geometry engine, lighting engine, and a full set of dev docs and compiler right on the software managed disk. I feel the same way about the IRIX SGIs going away as I do the Ataris, C=, and other 8 / 16 bitters going away. There was absolutely killer engineering in many of those machines. On the SGI side, software management, smart ARC Bios, great graphics hardware, etc... were things never done quite right in hack and slash PC land. If a person actually sat down to read the system documentation, you got a course in Comp-si, and Systems engineering that was college quality. On the PC, this little old book, packed with a few "commands" a "user" could "use", funky, broken help screens, and such just is so damn lame by comparison. 1280 pixel, high color display, with nice, bright red mouse pointer was sweet too. The blinky, shaky Win3.11 environment was a joke. Win 95 was a joke, I liked win98, because it was a fairly stable and fun joke, NT was actually kind of serious and I had high hopes for it. Win2K showed me where it was really gonna go, so

 

WOLF3D, then DOOM, along with several X window networked games all hit, and that was kind of the end of 8 bit gaming for a while. Those networked games were just FUN, and it all spoke to an exciting future.

 

One of the things that brought me back was the simplicity and love of the old machines. (I do the Propeller micro today because of that, and funny too. Working on that serious text driver for it. 80 columns, 16 color palette, which was the feature I always wanted on the text.) Seeing the homebrew efforts, starting with Bob Colbert and Glenn Saunders Stella projects. I scored an original CD, and saw Bob release a few things. Been playing Atari ever since.

 

WOLF3D is just excellent, even today. Pure 3D twitch game. Fast, simple, fun.

 

Anyway, I really wasn't worried about the PC making it, so much as I was concerned that we would leave some gaming behind. What machine it runs on is really secondary in a lot of ways. Early 3D games feel a lot like classics to me. When it became increasingly impossible to just pick one up and play, that's when the worry set in. Today, many games require a significant commitment to play. Ugh... If there is a story, that's worth it for me. If not, well? Probably not worth it. I've generally avoided the Evercrack style games too.

 

Today the PC is kind of great. They run fast, are cheap, have great graphics features, and there are a ton of software applications, and the Internet being ubiquitous. The whole mess is complex and I've kind of burnt out on that. So, back to micros, both new and old, for my hobby fun. Used to do home networking and killer SGI systems stuff, multi displays, remote computing, servers. Today, a simple, flat, home network, important stuff in the cloud for portability (and yes, I backup), and hacking on micros either through emulation, or on the real deal is where it's at.

Edited September 22, 2009 by potatohead

[Heaven/TQA]

I played it and SOLD it - in large numbers, it brought a level of visual polish people could not ignore - and proved VERY attractive to consumer. That it was a very average game did not matter - it was visually and audibly exciting, it compelled people to buy a machine just to play it - I sold lots of PC's off teh back of demonstrating Wing Commander - 256 color graphics were very compelling when compared to the 8bit and early 16bit Atari and Commodore systems...

 

That's exactly what we did a generation before with Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga as well, using an A2000 with a large amplifier hooked up to it; that and a quick demo of DPaint 3 could shift A500s at a truly scary rate! i didn't play Wing Commander personally though, it just didn't appeal to me...

 

In 1989 the PC as a HOME machine was a joke in the UK trust me, I remember it well 286 or 386 at that time there was no VCD or kickass games, glitchy graphics, unimaginative games.

 

I don't trust you. I trust my experience of selling the machine and the games, 256 color adventures from Lucasarts and Sierra, MT32 audio and Microporose Simulations that ran at a good framerate not a 10fps slideshow were very compelling to people...

 

i'd have to sit on the fence somewhat here; 1989 where i was selling was very much an Amiga year and it took at least another twelve months before the PC began to look like a serious threat; i remember the moment my personal opinion changed in fact, it was on seeing Gods running on a PC with a Roland sound card and presumably that was at some point near the end of 1991.

 

Ah... Bitmap Brothers... yeah...

 

Played through Gods without a trainer... never was in Xenon 1 or Xenon 2 to be honest... but Bomb the bass soundtrack was good... but love(d) Speedball 2... Jesus did we had fun in playing it head on head... Magic Pockets was good, too...

[Rockford]

22 - SPELLBOUND

 

C64

C64

C64

 

The C64 version has better sound, graphics and more colours. The Atari version doesn't have any music. C64 casts spells better than Atari

 

ATARI

ATARI

ATARI

[atarian63]

22 - SPELLBOUND

 

C64

C64

C64

 

The C64 version has better sound, graphics and more colours. The Atari version doesn't have any music. C64 casts spells better than Atari

 

ATARI

ATARI

ATARI

Yawn, another post 1984-85 game, when publishers stopped trying on Atari. I am sure a ground up version from a good programmer/funded programmer would have been better than c64.