Atari v Commodore

[emkay]

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.

 

I'd say, let him show off those games. Some of them really show how bad the A8 was supported, those comparisions prove it.

[NorthPole(heeHAW)]

I sat, and then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum (through my Iphone)..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k for all you cynics) can't.

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

Edited September 22, 2009 by NorthPole(heeHAW)

[atarian63]

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.

 

I'd say, let him show off those games. Some of them really show how bad the A8 was supported, those comparisions prove it.

I guess you are right, it was pretty poor towards the end here in the US. Thankfully Poland wrote good stuff!

[emkay]

 

ATARI

ATARI

ATARI

 

 

Well, particular this game could have been lightyears better graphically on the A8.

 

 

And the missing music tells storys...

[atarian63]

I sat, then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k)(for all you cynics).

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

Gotta say, for me as a dealer back then, the public really went for the ST till mid 89 or so,We used to show the St doing most anything the Amiga could do,for less money. Amiga had a brief but hot period 89 to 90 then that was it. Pc's.. I use em and I hate em (or at least microsoft)

[Heaven/TQA]

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

 

 

Gähn......

 

Can we short your affords and please simply go through atari.fandal.cz and atarimania.com and simply list 90% of the games???? thanks...

[NorthPole(heeHAW)]

I sat, then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k)(for all you cynics).

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

Gotta say, for me as a dealer back then, the public really went for the ST till mid 89 or so,We used to show the St doing most anything the Amiga could do,for less money. Amiga had a brief but hot period 89 to 90 then that was it. Pc's.. I use em and I hate em (or at least microsoft)

 

But dealers use Amigas (Miggy is whiter Remember).... It goes with the terrority.

 

Did you ever get an earache listening to the ST?

 

You can't sell HAM on an ST can you?

 

/\aron

[Heaven/TQA]

Electra Glide

[emkay]

I sat, and then I sat MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

 

AMIGA had a great sound chip. But it had many flaws. One is that separated stereo... 2 channels to the left and 2 channels to the right. This kills many tunes. Some trackers used software mixing to enhance stereo, but then the sound got noisy.

There is actually one game where I prefer the ST YM chip sound : Chambers of Shaolin. The "plastic" sound seemed to fit better to those tunes...

The AMIGA tunes won often by the samples used... Amiga was not cheap, but it seems again to be a money issue, not to use a "balance" logic for the channels, and to add some filter for each channel, to reduce the sampling noise on deep sounds. And so on...

Edited September 22, 2009 by emkay

[NorthPole(heeHAW)]

I sat, and then I sat MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

 

AMIGA had a great sound chip. But it had many flaws. One is that separated stereo... 2 channels to the left and 2 channels to the right. This kills many tunes. Some trackers used software mixing to enhance stereo, but then the sound got noisy.

There is actually one game where I prefer the ST YM chip sound : Cambers of Shaolin. The "plastic" sound seemed to fit better to those tunes...

The AMIGA tunes won often by the samples used... Amiga was not cheap, but it seems again to be a money issue, not to use a "balance" logic for the channels, and to add some filter for each channel, to reduce the sampling noise on deep sounds. And so on...

 

Dear Emkay,

 

If you are to quote me please DO NOT edit it.

 

 

I sat, and then I sat MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

This is not what I said.

 

What I said was..... (and what you should have addressed, the whole of it) Poo shouldn't be a problem ;o)

 

I sat, then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k)(for all you cynics).

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

 

Regards

 

Aaron ;o)

[emkay]

Electra Glide

 

 

Yo!

 

A8 ego perspective games can jump lightyears ahead of the C64....

C64 sprite based games can jump lightyears ahead of the A8...

[emkay]

What I said was.....

 

 

Nothing?

 

Or could you explain your cause for writing here more exactly?

[TMR]

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.

 

I'd say, let him show off those games. Some of them really show how bad the A8 was supported, those comparisions prove it.

 

Thing is, it almost certainly won't have been a case of the A8 coder not being properly funded in most of these cases, they'd probably have been getting the same money as the C64 people because budget houses paid a lump sum (and in the A8's case here, the late Jim Wilson would've already been paid for the loading picture that was converted, so that's one less expense). And saying the programmer wasn't good... that's very hard to judge unless you know if he was working from Richard Darling's C64 source code or building that fairly complex back engine written from scratch; if it's the latter you're really not doing the poor guy any justice at all, if it's the former he's still done a fair bit of donkey work there.

 

I guess you are right, it was pretty poor towards the end here in the US. Thankfully Poland wrote good stuff!

 

As a game, i wouldn't call Spellbound poor myself because i played it quite a bit on both machines (despite being pretty damned crap at it!) but it could've been done better cosmetically.

[TMR]

Electra Glide

 

A8 ego perspective games can jump lightyears ahead of the C64....

C64 sprite based games can jump lightyears ahead of the A8...

 

Nah, it was just badly programmed (well, it works for A8 games so... =-)

[atarian63]

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.

 

I'd say, let him show off those games. Some of them really show how bad the A8 was supported, those comparisions prove it.

 

Thing is, it almost certainly won't have been a case of the A8 coder not being properly funded in most of these cases, they'd probably have been getting the same money as the C64 people because budget houses paid a lump sum (and in the A8's case here, the late Jim Wilson would've already been paid for the loading picture that was converted, so that's one less expense). And saying the programmer wasn't good... that's very hard to judge unless you know if he was working from Richard Darling's C64 source code or building that fairly complex back engine written from scratch; if it's the latter you're really not doing the poor guy any justice at all, if it's the former he's still done a fair bit of donkey work there.

 

I guess you are right, it was pretty poor towards the end here in the US. Thankfully Poland wrote good stuff!

 

As a game, i wouldn't call Spellbound poor myself because i played it quite a bit on both machines (despite being pretty damned crap at it!) but it could've been done better cosmetically.

Problem is there are games of this type much earlier in the A8 history that appear better. That was the problem, customers were not willing to pay money for a step backwards in software. Especially having had better versions than c64 for years of many titles. I am no programmer but other companies made a better effort it would appear and this one certainly did on c64. No music on a8? doh!

[atarian63]

I sat, then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k)(for all you cynics).

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

Gotta say, for me as a dealer back then, the public really went for the ST till mid 89 or so,We used to show the St doing most anything the Amiga could do,for less money. Amiga had a brief but hot period 89 to 90 then that was it. Pc's.. I use em and I hate em (or at least microsoft)

 

But dealers use Amigas (Miggy is whiter Remember).... It goes with the terrority.

 

Did you ever get an earache listening to the ST?

 

You can't sell HAM on an ST can you?

 

/\aron

No but theamiga o/s and interlace gave me a headache. A1000 models were not really ready for market. St and midi was a big deal and for the 1st year or so games were written on st and ported to amiga

[atarian63]

I sat, then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k)(for all you cynics).

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

Gotta say, for me as a dealer back then, the public really went for the ST till mid 89 or so,We used to show the St doing most anything the Amiga could do,for less money. Amiga had a brief but hot period 89 to 90 then that was it. Pc's.. I use em and I hate em (or at least microsoft)

 

But dealers use Amigas (Miggy is whiter Remember).... It goes with the terrority.

 

Did you ever get an earache listening to the ST?

 

You can't sell HAM on an ST can you?

 

/\aron

No but theamiga o/s and interlace gave me a headache.We called them "meagers" and it was meager pickings. A1000 models were not really ready for market. St and midi was a big deal and for the 1st year or so games were written on st and ported to amiga

[atariksi]

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

 

You can do everything in Chunky and bitplane modes BUT it's more efficient in bitplane mode if you are saving memory and squeezing in graphics in a multimedia environment in same memory as sound, disk buffers, etc. If you have two chunky bitmap sources, you essentially have two bitplanes and the overhead of decoding chunky on top of it. For example, if you have 320*200*8 on Amiga, you update 24K at most and you can squeeze it in anywhere in the 512K chip RAM (or even split it up with 8K at location $1000, 8K at $20000, 8K at $38000). On chunky display like VGA, you have to use 320*200*256 and update 64K at a time.

 

It doesn't matter how many passes blitter makes, total memory updated is less with bitplanes since you optimize it for the colors needed. One other thing as that Standard VGA is stuck at A000:0000 whereas Amiga can dynamically point it's graphics buffer anywhere.

[frenchman]

..... Then I shat myself.

 

Aaron

 

I bet that was a blast

[NorthPole(heeHAW)]

What I said was.....

 

 

Nothing?

 

Or could you explain your cause for writing here more exactly?

 

 

Sorry Dude i'm new to this banter....

 

Making love is now better than war.

 

Paula my darling. 8 bit sound chip was she.

 

I have said nothing to enlighten you or the community...... I'm just a hardcore Miggy fan... I can't help it.

 

Would you ever use the ST AY in production presently?

 

Can we go back to the A8 vs C64... ? It's easier watching.

 

I feel silly...

 

Soz.

[atarian63]

What I said was.....

 

 

Nothing?

 

Or could you explain your cause for writing here more exactly?

 

 

Sorry Dude i'm new to this banter....

 

Making love is now better than war.

 

Paula my darling. 8 bit sound chip was she.

 

I have said nothing to enlighten you or the community...... I'm just a hardcore Miggy fan... I can't help it.

 

Would you ever use the ST AY in production presently?

 

Can we go back to the A8 vs C64... ? It's easier watching.

 

I feel silly...

 

Soz.

Works for me!

[atariksi]

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...

I may need to place an order for these titles for C64 and A8 and test them out.

 

>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?

 

Better to look at cycles left per scanline. Even with HScroll (bit 4 of DL) enabled, you would end up with more cycles per scanline.

 

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.

 

Ahm, similar to double bufferring two 320*200 screens to get 1/2 color clock scrolling, you double buffer GTIA mode 9/11 with GTIA mode 10 and you get one color clock scrolling (if that's essential to the game), but you get 9 colors instead of 16. Or use interlaced Gr.9/10 and scroll one color clock by using the formulae as given previously (remember sprites still run at 50/60Hz and one color clock scroll):

 

P(0..159) = 0..29 (shade to render)

P(Gr10) = P>>2;

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

 

If you have the CPU time, you can even do P(Gr9) = P-2-P(GR10)<<1 and clip to 0..15 then original P(0..159) is 0..31.

[atariksi]

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?

 

...

What's the ball in Arkanoid-- a sprite or a playfield graphic? I have some clone of Arkanoid but I didn't notice any problems with the ball.

[TMR]

Problem is there are games of this type much earlier in the A8 history that appear better. That was the problem, customers were not willing to pay money for a step backwards in software. Especially having had better versions than c64 for years of many titles.

 

Appear better possibly, but that's only at a superficial level and Spellbound's looks on all formats are somewhat misleading; as a game it's got more in common with the SCUMM-driven games that came after than anything else, puzzle solving, interaction with NPCs, time-based events... it's a remarkably complex little beast.

 

I am no programmer but other companies made a better effort it would appear and this one certainly did on c64. No music on a8? doh!

 

Spellbound probably didn't receive much more effort on the C64, there's probably less work gone into it visually since the graphics aren't bespoke and have instead been dumped from the Spectrum original, the only thing the C64 code is doing differently is running a couple of hardware sprites over the top for the Magic Knight (and a few other rare objects that move in realtime) to avoid colour clashes. The Spectrum only had the soundtrack on the 128K version as well, and it lost quite a bit in the AY translation...

[TMR]

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?

 

Better to look at cycles left per scanline. Even with HScroll (bit 4 of DL) enabled, you would end up with more cycles per scanline.

 

Those extra cycles can't be translated into more colours though because in cases like Zybex a lot of them are going to be required elsewhere; on the A8, the software sprites for the bullets take four times as long to plot, the nasties have full AND/ORA masking so need considerably more processing power to draw in and out and when it goes to write in a new column of data for the background it's dealing with 88 bytes (and don't forget to double that, since it's keeping two buffers in sync) compared to the 25 the C64 uses (which doesn't double).

 

In the case of Last V8, there's probably a huge amount of free CPU grind at the A8 end that the C64 doesn't have but there's not much that it can be put to use for as regards enhancing those backgrounds.

 

Ahm, similar to double bufferring two 320*200 screens to get 1/2 color clock scrolling

 

Actually, the C64 doesn't have to double buffer and a lot of the more primitive games simply update the current screen RAM on the fly; i've done it myself a few times in the past and it's just a matter of crash dumping the data on a single frame and splitting the job in two so that you don't try moving anything as the refresh goes past.

 

you double buffer GTIA mode 9/11 with GTIA mode 10 and you get one color clock scrolling (if that's essential to the game), but you get 9 colors instead of 16.

 

So considerably less than the forty or more you were talking about previously... i've never actually seen a screen being scrolled in this manner (i've seen HIP pictures and assume this is how the interlace is handled, i must admit that did puzzle me because Atari800Win used to allow half pixel scrolling in GTIA modes before it was made more accurate and my experiments unwittingly relied on that!) so are there any examples out there at all?

 

(remember sprites still run at 50/60Hz and one color clock scroll):

 

i hadn't forgotten, but i'm also aware that the sprites will stand out like sore thumbs since they're far more limited in colour than the backgrounds will be.