Sneak Peak - Amiga Atari Design...

[atarian63]

"Guess one could say Atari and Commodore died due to the same cause, idiotic corporate management."

 

A saying that could also be put to our current economic problems.

 

Atari undoubtedly made mistakes, but it was always an uphill battle to sell - or even speak about - Atari computers in the U.S. I'm sure any long-term Atari user knows what I'm talking about....happened all through the 1980s.... Someone asks what kind of computer you have (doesn't matter if it was A8 or ST) and you tell them "Atari" and they come back with some dumb shit like "No,,,,,I mean 'computer'" Then you explain to someone (who's not really interested anyway) that Atari did sell 'actual' computers.... Repeat this experience ad nauseum.

 

Commodore had an advantage in this regard.

 

Regardless of criticism of the management practices, what kind of fancy management would you have suggested for either to take to abate the onslaught of PC clones?

I suppose there were some areas of that thought though I would have to say as a dealer commodore was the common machine though not considered much more than a game machine, next step up was Atari, then sadly a pc, or apple. Also depends on when. Things changed with the ST for awhile.

[+wood_jl]

I might write a hate letter to the Tramiels if I knew where to reach them. The reason I have to blame them is because they are the ones who after taking over Atari very publicly acted like, oh yeah, we are saving Atari, but, it in reality was a radically different Atari under them. I don't think Tramiel understood the loyalty and the followers Atari had. Otherwise he might not have changed things so drastically.. Where are Tramiel and his boys now, anyway? Hiding in a bunker in some sandy area?

 

I'm quite an Atari fan, but do be serious. They bought and paid for Atari; it was their prerogative to do whatever they pleased. I'm no businessman, but I'm willing to guess that turning a profit will always trump fanboy loyalty and blind nostalgia. Of course it was a radically different Atari under them....it was losing $millions ($billions??) the way it was. For as little money as Tramiel had to work with at the time, I think he probably did the best that he could - and that would be to make the orgainization profitable, which he did. It's ridiculous for us - who know absolutely nothing about actually running that business and what the real situation was - to sit here and play "I told you so", second-guessing the moves with no firsthand knowledge of anything.....a quarter-century after the fact. They didn't "act like anything" except to cut they old company's losses. Who better to compare them to than Commodore, and they outlasted Commodore.

 

Where is he now? Rich somewhere, I'd imagine....fat and happy. He was a successful businessman. Just because Atari withered away doesn't mean he wasn't personally successful....much, much more so than ANY of us in this thread. I'd like to take a look at his investment portfolio; I seriously doubt hate mail would trump it.

[HiroProX]

 

 

Erm.. you missed the point about raw CPU speed only. Try computing a huge complex spreadsheet, compiling a complex bit of code or just reorganising and reindexing a huge database in memory (to negate disk i/o speed differences) and you will clearly see the result. the simple fact is the CPU speed was better, even though nothing else was better on a PC. As a machine in use overall I have no doubt the smart money went on an Amiga 1000 in 1985/86 as ALL the industry technical experts for every non-PC specific/multiformat magazines concluded that never has the gap between the most advanced machine (A1000) and its rivals been so large both in technical terms overall and the price/performance equation.

 

And raw speed was something the 286 did not have against the 68000. The 286, like previous Intel CPUs required more clock cycles to execute an instruction than the 68000. In addition, the Atari ST and the Amiga had the advantage of flat memory model from Day One. 286 PCs had to make due with the various kluges such as LIM Extended Memory to access more than 640K of RAM. Also at the time, MS-DOS and the vast majority of its application software was written for the 8088/8086, so most apps couldn't use more than 640K, period. Extended Memory System performance was also an absolute dead dog performance-wise. In addition, the 286 had a very serious bug, in order to use Expanded Memory, it had to switch into Protected Mode, but the bug was that there was no stable way to switch it back into Real Mode. This is what made DOS compatibility such a nightmare under OS/2 1.x. When it came to raw CPU speed, memory access speed, and direct addressing range support in the OS, the PC would be drop-kicked by either the ST or Amiga. CPU-wise, PCs didn't catch up until the 386DX/SX, and they didn't have a widely used OS that could support a flat memory map until Win32. In addition, PCs suffered from an I/O bottleneck inflicted by the ISA bus that wasn't addressed until the advent of the VESA Local Bus and PCI bus. Sure, that fancy 486DX/33 talked to its mainboard at 33MHz with 32-bit data path, but every time it had to access disks or video it had to drop to 16-bits at 8Mhz.

 

So an 80s 286 PC was pretty hopeless in a direct competition against either the Atari ST or Amiga. The much vaunted "raw CPU power" of PCs wasn't a factor until the 486 came to market. But even then, PCs were still expensive for what you got. The same $4000+ that an IBM PC/AT cost in 1986 would build an insanely buffed ST or Amiga. For $4000 one could have an A1000 with 4+Mb RAM, HDD, and a 16MHz 68000 or 68020 accelerator. So for the same cost, an ST or Amiga would absolutely crush the PC/AT without mercy. Heck, after upgrading my A500 with a HDD, a 16MHz ICD AdSpeed accelerator, and 4Mb RAM, it still cost less than an IBM PS/2 Model 50, or Dell's comparable 12MHz 286 at that time and had more raw CPU power than either.

 

I know databases and spreadsheets, contrary to popular opinion, that's what some of us used our Amigas and STs for. My old A500 got a new job when I got my A3000/UX, it replaced the Apple IIc+ that was used to keep the cadet database for the Air Force Junior ROTC unit I was in during high school. Took the Deputy Data Processing Officer and I a week to do so, and the results impressed the PC-centric DP CO, beat his 286 PC based solution, and delivered the user friendly application our Aerospace Science Instructor had always wanted. i heard at my 10 year class reunion that the machine was finally retired in 2002 because the monitor died.

 

So I know what databases and spreadsheets require, and the Atari ST and Amiga had as much or more than a 286 PC. What they didn't have was Lotus 123 and dBase (though having used both on PCs, I don't consider that a loss, both programs were hideous). As has been said, Atari had an uphill battle because of its video gaming business, and Commodore was handicapped by a reputation for cheap machines won via the C64. But the truth is in the silicon and the software, both machines were in every way the IBM PC/AT's superior.

Edited March 3, 2010 by HiroProX

[Lynxpro]

No. No. No.

Apple is the Volvo of the computing world (disregarding the fact that in fact Volvo's market share would be <2% and Ford actually owns Volvo anyhow).

 

 

Compared to Atari's market share, Apple was Ford.

[akator]

To continue the off-topic-680x0-versus-x86 tangent, I also experienced many situations where the performance of 3D rendering software -- which is very math intensive -- was significantly faster on Macs than PCs. And it was even faster on Amigas, for at least the short period of time that I was using all 3 platforms.

 

That doesn't mean all of the PC trolls didn't spend years trying to convince me otherwise. By the 90s I was managing computer labs in an art school, and I repeatedly demonstrated how Photoshop filters and 3D rendering was slower on the PC, even though the CPU clock speed on the PCs was significantly higher. Real world PC performance started to catch up, then the 68040s were released and the PCs were left behind again. PCs caught up once more, then the PowerPCs were released and completely slaughtered comparable x86s by as much as 75%. And that performance difference was even though Apple was emulating 680x0 code in their OS for years after the PPC introduction, effectively sapping real world performance...

[Bryan]

One of the biggest bottlenecks for the PC was ISA video. Until things like VESA Local Bus appeared, the PC spent a large amount of time waiting on the card making it difficult to do anything graphics intensive.

 

EDIT: Just saw HiroProX's comments on this as well. I remember the first time I saw games running on a VLB board. Suddenly I knew the anti-PC arguments wouldn't hold up much longer.

Edited March 3, 2010 by Bryan

[frogstar_robot]

One of the biggest bottlenecks for the PC was ISA video. Until things like VESA Local Bus appeared, the PC spent a large amount of time waiting on the card making it difficult to do anything graphics intensive.

 

EDIT: Just saw HiroProX's comments on this as well. I remember the first time I saw games running on a VLB board. Suddenly I knew the anti-PC arguments wouldn't hold up much longer.

 

My first Intel PC was an 8MB 486 with Cirrus Logic graphics on a VLB and an SB Pro clone which replaced a 1040STFM. A couple of buddies of mine had fairly serious Amiga setups and one of them was trying to do LightWave rendering on his Amiga 4000. Only really simple models were remotely practical. It wasn't too long before they both became "Celeryheads" with overclocked Celeron rigs. But all three of us saw the writing on the wall for 80s-style computing with that 486.

 

That 486 competently played ModeX games of the early nineties like Epic Pinball, Wolfenstein, Doom, and even did a passable job at Descent. We amused ourselves one night with "Gloom" on an upgraded Amiga 600 (don't know what all he had in it). It was more of a Wolfenstein-clone than a Doom-clone and even at that had to run in a reduced size window to get any frame rate at all.

 

Amiga and ST in the early nineties was like going to one of the few Discotheques left in the early 80s: you had a few unfashionable diehards ......

[Lynxpro]

I'm quite an Atari fan, but do be serious. They bought and paid for Atari; it was their prerogative to do whatever they pleased. I'm no businessman, but I'm willing to guess that turning a profit will always trump fanboy loyalty and blind nostalgia. Of course it was a radically different Atari under them....it was losing $millions ($billions??) the way it was. For as little money as Tramiel had to work with at the time, I think he probably did the best that he could - and that would be to make the orgainization profitable, which he did. It's ridiculous for us - who know absolutely nothing about actually running that business and what the real situation was - to sit here and play "I told you so", second-guessing the moves with no firsthand knowledge of anything.....a quarter-century after the fact. They didn't "act like anything" except to cut they old company's losses. Who better to compare them to than Commodore, and they outlasted Commodore.

 

 

Jack Tramiel put very little money into acquiring Atari Consumer. Unless Curt & Co. have more recent figures, the accepted details were that Tramiel "purchased" Atari Inc. by issuing approximately $350 million in promissory notes to Warner [plus a 25% stake in TTL/Atari Corp.]. The figure was equal to the number of 800XLs sitting in the warehouse valued at $80 a piece at the time. Warner then gave away the jewels to the Tramiels to take the losses off their books. This was Enron pre-Enron, pure and simple.

 

Now in "Game Over", it was written that Jack Tramiel rejected Warner's suggestion of taking Atari coin-op - later to be known as the Atari Games. Corp. - for $10 million more [in promissory notes] because video games were dead according to him. Whether he believed it to be true or was just trying to be shrewd in negotiations is up to speculation. It sounds like Curt and Marty believe the Tramiels planned on going back into the video game industry; personally, I don't think so. Most of Jack's statements back at Commodore and up to this day have been dismissive of video gaming in general and I think he found it demeaning. He never really looked happy at any of the shareholder's meetings from 1992 on with all the focus on video gaming even though Sam seemed quite happy [except when I criticized his choice of licensing the "Highlander" cartoon for a JagCD game instead of the infinitely more popular "Highlander" live action tv series; in response he protested he himself was a huge "Highlander" fan].

 

Jack then paid back those promissory notes not out of his money but out of the profits generated by Atari Corp. Sure, he apparently sank in something like $20 million in cash during the development of the ST, but he got it all back. It wasn't a charity operation and they made good money off us Atari fans.

Edited March 4, 2010 by Lynxpro

[+wood_jl]

I'm quite an Atari fan, but do be serious. They bought and paid for Atari; it was their prerogative to do whatever they pleased. I'm no businessman, but I'm willing to guess that turning a profit will always trump fanboy loyalty and blind nostalgia. Of course it was a radically different Atari under them....it was losing $millions ($billions??) the way it was. For as little money as Tramiel had to work with at the time, I think he probably did the best that he could - and that would be to make the orgainization profitable, which he did. It's ridiculous for us - who know absolutely nothing about actually running that business and what the real situation was - to sit here and play "I told you so", second-guessing the moves with no firsthand knowledge of anything.....a quarter-century after the fact. They didn't "act like anything" except to cut they old company's losses. Who better to compare them to than Commodore, and they outlasted Commodore.

 

 

Jack Tramiel put very little money into acquiring Atari Consumer. Unless Curt & Co. have more recent figures, the accepted details were that Tramiel "purchased" Atari Inc. by issuing approximately $350 million in promissory notes to Warner [plus a 25% stake in TTL/Atari Corp.]. The figure was equal to the number of 800XLs sitting in the warehouse valued at $80 a piece at the time. Warner then gave away the jewels to the Tramiels to take the losses off their books. This was Enron pre-Enron, pure and simple.

 

Right....hence my comment about how little money he had to work with, and doing the best he could with it. It wasn't like he came in with $50 billion and just screwed it up.

 

Now in "Game Over", it was written that Jack Tramiel rejected Warner's suggestion of taking Atari coin-op - later to be known as the Atari Games. Corp. - for $10 million more [in promissory notes] because video games were dead according to him. Whether he believed it to be true or was just trying to be shrewd in negotiations is up to speculation. It sounds like Curt and Marty believe the Tramiels planned on going back into the video game industry; personally, I don't think so. Most of Jack's statements back at Commodore and up to this day have been dismissive of video gaming in general and I think he found it demeaning.

 

And I was saying, we who don't really know the intimate details - select few people in the world actually do - so we shouldn't be pointlessly speculating and playing "I told you so" 25 years later. What for? Again, he was a businessman. I find it rather more likely that after the game crash, perhaps they didn't think there was money in videogames - or some technical/financial/licensing deal in the way. Wouldn't "whether or not we think there's a profit in it" make more sense to a businessman than an emotional block against it as "demeaning?" How likely is it that a ruthless businessman like Jack - who relished nothing more than making money as businesspeople often do - would turn his nose up at videogame dollars because they're "demeaning?" I should think the fact that they did get back into videogames indicates otherwise. Once again....no real point in clueless speculation....I would imagine that Curt and Marty have access to some degree of "insider info" which should advance their understanding beyond that of unsubstantiated speculators. I do not know them at all, but the information they provide appears sensible.

 

He never really looked happy at any of the shareholder's meetings from 1992 on with all the focus on video gaming even though Sam seemed quite happy [except when I criticized his choice of licensing the "Highlander" cartoon for a JagCD game instead of the infinitely more popular "Highlander" live action tv series; in response he protested he himself was a huge "Highlander" fan].

 

My pointless speculation would be he was happy when money was rolling in and less so when it was not.

 

Jack then paid back those promissory notes not out of his money but out of the profits generated by Atari Corp. Sure, he apparently sank in something like $20 million in cash during the development of the ST, but he got it all back. It wasn't a charity operation and they made good money off us Atari fans.

 

Of course they did. There's nothing wrong with making money. Isn't that the point of business? Nobody extorted us to buy Atari; we live in the free world. Of course he got his money back; he wouldn't have been successful otherwise. I don't understand all this "Jack is Evil" stuff; it's kind of childish. Maybe you guys think making money is evil....I suggest staying out of business, if that's the case.

Edited March 4, 2010 by wood_jl

[atarian63]

I'm quite an Atari fan, but do be serious. They bought and paid for Atari; it was their prerogative to do whatever they pleased. I'm no businessman, but I'm willing to guess that turning a profit will always trump fanboy loyalty and blind nostalgia. Of course it was a radically different Atari under them....it was losing $millions ($billions??) the way it was. For as little money as Tramiel had to work with at the time, I think he probably did the best that he could - and that would be to make the orgainization profitable, which he did. It's ridiculous for us - who know absolutely nothing about actually running that business and what the real situation was - to sit here and play "I told you so", second-guessing the moves with no firsthand knowledge of anything.....a quarter-century after the fact. They didn't "act like anything" except to cut they old company's losses. Who better to compare them to than Commodore, and they outlasted Commodore.

 

 

Jack Tramiel put very little money into acquiring Atari Consumer. Unless Curt & Co. have more recent figures, the accepted details were that Tramiel "purchased" Atari Inc. by issuing approximately $350 million in promissory notes to Warner [plus a 25% stake in TTL/Atari Corp.]. The figure was equal to the number of 800XLs sitting in the warehouse valued at $80 a piece at the time. Warner then gave away the jewels to the Tramiels to take the losses off their books. This was Enron pre-Enron, pure and simple.

 

Right....hence my comment about how little money he had to work with, and doing the best he could with it. It wasn't like he came in with $50 billion and just screwed it up.

 

Now in "Game Over", it was written that Jack Tramiel rejected Warner's suggestion of taking Atari coin-op - later to be known as the Atari Games. Corp. - for $10 million more [in promissory notes] because video games were dead according to him. Whether he believed it to be true or was just trying to be shrewd in negotiations is up to speculation. It sounds like Curt and Marty believe the Tramiels planned on going back into the video game industry; personally, I don't think so. Most of Jack's statements back at Commodore and up to this day have been dismissive of video gaming in general and I think he found it demeaning.

 

And I was saying, we who don't really know the intimate details - select few people in the world actually do - so we shouldn't be pointlessly speculating and playing "I told you so" 25 years later. What for? Again, he was a businessman. I find it rather more likely that after the game crash, perhaps they didn't think there was money in videogames - or some technical/financial/licensing deal in the way. Wouldn't "whether or not we think there's a profit in it" make more sense to a businessman than an emotional block against it as "demeaning?" How likely is it that a ruthless businessman like Jack - who relished nothing more than making money as businesspeople often do - would turn his nose up at videogame dollars because they're "demeaning?" I should think the fact that they did get back into videogames indicates otherwise. Once again....no real point in clueless speculation....I would imagine that Curt and Marty have access to some degree of "insider info" which should advance their understanding beyond that of unsubstantiated speculators. I do not know them at all, but the information they provide appears sensible.

 

He never really looked happy at any of the shareholder's meetings from 1992 on with all the focus on video gaming even though Sam seemed quite happy [except when I criticized his choice of licensing the "Highlander" cartoon for a JagCD game instead of the infinitely more popular "Highlander" live action tv series; in response he protested he himself was a huge "Highlander" fan].

 

My pointless speculation would be he was happy when money was rolling in and less so when it was not.

 

Jack then paid back those promissory notes not out of his money but out of the profits generated by Atari Corp. Sure, he apparently sank in something like $20 million in cash during the development of the ST, but he got it all back. It wasn't a charity operation and they made good money off us Atari fans.

 

Of course they did. There's nothing wrong with making money. Isn't that the point of business? Nobody extorted us to buy Atari; we live in the free world. Of course he got his money back; he wouldn't have been successful otherwise. I don't understand all this "Jack is Evil" stuff; it's kind of childish. Maybe you guys think making money is evil....I suggest staying out of business, if that's the case.

Been said many times here but in spite of all the problems I am grateful they kept the party going. Sure it could have been better.. but it also could have just been over. Thanks Jack!

[landondyer]

Okay here is sneak peak tease #2:

 

 

Introducing "GUMP"...

 

 

Curt

 

That's interesting. I know Bob Alkire pretty well (we were housemates for several years).

 

GUMP was one of those pie-in-the-sky projects that Research was always doing. Interesting concept, using chips that were under development, but no consumer cost structure. It /might/ have been a product, given several years of development.

[kool kitty89]

The Amiga 2000 ended up with 1MB of VRAM. But of course that was in 1987 at a high price point for professional - or prosumer - buyers.

That was shared memory thouhg (chipram), right?

 

had a highly formidable arsenal of extremely capable 16bit systems already developed from Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering, however when the Tramiels walked into Atari with Shiraz, they already had a design that was well along and they're blinders were in full force and they focused on their own system and not on systems literally ready to go with extremely capable features, just look at AMY - the reports of the demo's of the sound processor show it to be a chip that was years ahead of its time, well ahead of anything else.

 

Of course the Tramiels walked in discounting anyone from Atari Inc. and what they said. "Business is war" in their minds, and they conquered Atari. I guess it never dawned upon them that it took their chief engineer 5 years to produce a system [the C64] that was arguably [somewhat] better than what Jay Miner designed back in 1978/79.

I'd imagine the nature of the sale by Warner didn't help that either, with hapless Atari personnel becoming quite irate in not being notified that the parent company had been looking to sell A.Inc. for quite some time and hadn't even notified the CEO (Morgan) until the day the deal went though.

So it might have been tough for Tramiel to keep soem of the key members of such progects even if he'd been aware of them and wanted to keep them. (granted, the nature of the formation of Atari Corp. didn't make things any better)

 

One does have to wonder if any of thse designs were really practical for the low-cost concept Tramiel had in mind. Greater details haven't been posted yet, but it seems like Sierra might have been more in line than Gaza -with the dual CPUs. (though, if nothing else, some of the components could have ben used in a more stripped down unit)

 

The FCC did not allow it. They were the ones - not Ray - that forced Atari not to include internal expansion slots on a "home computer" because of RF. That's what compelled Atari to create the grand-daddy of USB, the SIO port. The Apple // line was for "business" and thus they only needed Class B [and not Class C] licenses. Of course, Ray probably did put his feet down on releasing anything more powerful - and more expensive - than the 800 at the time which could've been a business class system which could've skirted around Jimmy Carter's FCC.

Hmm, I thought Apple II was class A, and the more flexible class B came later, prompting atari to produce the cost redused XL series. (and facilitating other computers, like the C64 and possibly VIC)

Wasn't part of Apple's meeting the lest constraining FCC requirement linked to the lack of an onboard RF modulator (only a monitor port), so it didn't have to be categorized as class C. (of course, there were external modulators)

 

iirc, a lot of the early home computers that scated class C with external modulators later got forced into class B, thus actually havign to improve RF sheilding. (I seem to recall this contributing to the TRS-80 model III)

 

I'm not sure why atari didn't go the monitor only/external RF route, at least with the 800. (the 400 had been more casual/entertainmnet oriented, so it might have been tougher to sell with a separate RF modulator required -and more troublesoem witht he FCC catching on to this)

 

However, the whole point is moot int he contect of expansion slots, which should have been internal, so within the RF shielding and not an issue for the FCC requirement. (hence the RAM, ROM, and CPU slots)

The class C requirement does explain the lack of a parallel port (and creation of SIO) though.

 

Yeah but the Adam bombed in terms of sales, and the CoCo wasn't especially successful, but how did the VIC manage to be successful in spte of such critisism? (just because it was so cheap and could play games?)

 

 

William Shatner is more manly than Bill Cosby or Alan Alda.

Huh???

One note though, I was mistaken with my comment about the CoCo, it was pretty successful (at least sales wise), even if it didn't match the market share the original TRS-80 had in the early years. (I think it ended up outselling the original TRS-80 line thoug: ie model I, III, IV)

 

 

I seriously believe that had Atari acquired MOS - as Al Alcorn claims some in the company wanted - Commodore would've fizzled long before the debut of the C64. One can easily assert that Apple and Atari subsidized Commodore by purchasing 6502s from them. Actually, Atari even more so since it sold far more products with 6502s in them than Apple, plus, from what I've read, a lot of the VCS game cart ROMs came from MOS. Had Atari kept all that in-house, Commodore would not have generated the profits they did that in turn subsidized the low prices that the Vic-20 and the C64 enjoyed.

Huh? How could they, Atari was in no position to buy anything at the time... Warner bought atari around the same time CBM acquired MOS, so if possible at all, Atari would have had to convince Warner to try beat CMB to that quickly, and possibly outbid CBM for it. (the vertical integration would have paid off though, with their main products using a lot of MOS components)

 

Maybe Tramiel would've tried to buy Zilog to get his precious vertical integration, but then their computers would've been even worse.

Hmm, that might have implications for Tandy though, for the TRS-80 design, but nevertheless, using a Z80 would allow for CP/M, so that's something to consider.

 

Commodore had a reputation of making toy computers, so it wasn't exactly like they had better street cred than Atari. Atari had a much lower defective rate on their products, video games and computers. Atari touted a 0.5% defective rate near the end of XL production.

Huh? What about the PET, that was mainly business and education oriented. (moreso than the original TRS-80, which was abit more hobby oriented, though I believe had a significant presence in the education market as well -the model II was obviously business oriented)

 

In fact, it seems a bit of a shame that Commodore didn't continue to push for the market they'd established with the PET, the VIC and C4 were not in line with those for sure. Although, I suppose Tandy did kind of the same thing with the CoCo compared to the original TRS-80, though they did continue to update and support the original TRS-80 line (and model II tangent) in parallel with the CoCo, unlike CBM with the PET. (and the switch to PC clones put them back into the education/business market)

 

 

The EU back then? It didn't exist. It was the EEC and then the EC before it had its current federalist trappings post Maastricht which ruined the trade organization. The UK and Ireland should withdraw and just go back to being in the EFTA which is part of the EEA.

EU= abbreviation for Europe, not E.U. as in european union...

it seems a shame Atari never managed to really popularize the 8-bit line in Europe givne how popular 8-bit computers were for gaming. (and indeed the ST was in several EU countires)

 

Yet somehow the music and sound effects in the 7800 version of Xevious sounds far beyond anything done in a 2600 specific title using the very same sound chip.

it's the same if you compare a lot of 7800 games to the 2600 versions. I think it's mostly due to CPU time, with heavy restrictions on the VCS (witht he CPU having to drive the display). TIA's sound is rather similar in capabilities to POKEY other than 1/2 the channels, no direct DAC mode (for PCM playback) and some other limitations like not being able to pair channels for higher resolution. (but, like pokey, more flexible in sound production than the SN76489 or MOS's VIC for example, other than having fewer channels)

 

 

I'm quite an Atari fan, but do be serious. They bought and paid for Atari; it was their prerogative to do whatever they pleased. I'm no businessman, but I'm willing to guess that turning a profit will always trump fanboy loyalty and blind nostalgia. Of course it was a radically different Atari under them....it was losing $millions ($billions??) the way it was. For as little money as Tramiel had to work with at the time, I think he probably did the best that he could - and that would be to make the orgainization profitable, which he did. It's ridiculous for us - who know absolutely nothing about actually running that business and what the real situation was - to sit here and play "I told you so", second-guessing the moves with no firsthand knowledge of anything.....a quarter-century after the fact. They didn't "act like anything" except to cut they old company's losses. Who better to compare them to than Commodore, and they outlasted Commodore.

 

Where is he now? Rich somewhere, I'd imagine....fat and happy. He was a successful businessman. Just because Atari withered away doesn't mean he wasn't personally successful....much, much more so than ANY of us in this thread. I'd like to take a look at his investment portfolio; I seriously doubt hate mail would trump it.

 

Seriously... to me it seems more sigificant to point out Warner selling Atari in general (Rupert Murdoc contributing to that to some degree as mentioned before), but worst that Warner kept Atari Inc. and James Morgan in the dark until quite literally the last minut, so that messed things up. (and most definitely contributed to bad blod with soem Atari Inc employees)

Edited March 23, 2010 by kool kitty89

[kool kitty89]

Oh, and this was off topic, but on the whole 286 speed issue, that came up before in the ST vs Amiga thread, including a list of benchmark performances:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/29957-atari-st-vs-amiga/page__st__475__p__1927140#entry1927140

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/29957-atari-st-vs-amiga/page__st__500__p__1927675#entry1927675

Ok, if we are going to talk benchmarks....

http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html

 

I *thought* there were some 40Mhz 80286 chips but as we discuss this more I realize it was only 20MHz.

 

 

<edit>

More benchmarks. One thing here... it has 6502, Z80 and 6809 machines listed.

http://www.anonymous-insider.net/advocacy/research/1986/1014.html

[SpaceDice2010]

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but can I ask where the Amiga/Atari documents are. I may have something to contribute to this as well, but I would like to see what ended up getting posted.

 

thanks,

Lloyd

[Mclaneinc]

Curt,

 

What a fantastic historian you are, I've enjoyed your enthusiasm throughout the years on comp.sys and here, I'm sorry to hear about your health issues but they clearly have not stopped the drive in you and may I say a huge well done and thanks.

 

I'm hoping that all this brings in some financial rewards as you deserve every penny for the work involved, allowing us to see what might have been on many occasions.

[Spurge]

I'm actualy glad this old thread got bumped. It was a great read! Thanks comes from me also to Curt, his tireless effort is finally giving us information about what really happened all those years ago, and what could have been. There were some extremely talented people working for Atari back then.

[OldAtarian]

After years of research, thanks to research teamwork of Marty Goldberg and myself - in 2 weeks a new page of information will be posted with a history of Atari's "Advanced Engineering Division" and how it all lead up to Atari developing its version of the Amiga Lorraine as an Atari console system.

 

During the trip through this historical look through Atari's advanced designs - never before seen notes, photo's, documents and emails on Atari systems such as the 1600XL Atari IBM PC system, Gaza, Sierra, GUMP, Eskimo/Dogsled and Explorer. Atari's work on its own BSD Unix OS with its own GUI - codenamed "Snowcap" and then we lead up to project "Mickey" - Atari's Amiga powered system.

 

Afterwards you'll be able to peruse through contracts and court documents and see what really transpired during the summer of 1984 which shatters the myths and mis-history of Jack Tramiels involvement with buying Amiga - but shows how in the end he sued the heck out of Amiga and then Commodore...

 

So here is a juicy little treat to wet your appetite.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_10_2009/post-23-125549102769_thumb.gif

 

Curt

 

Would there be sufficient documentation to actually construct a Lorraine using parts from an Amiga?

[Innovative Leisure]

I'm not an expert but couldn't help but notice a few interesting details in the "Mickey" photo:

 

 

If you look closely at the connectors on the board, you'll notice that the PCBs used in the ST prototype* are very similar with two buses and a smaller connector in the middle. A close-up picture of the latter reveals the boards were designed in 1983 "ATARI © 83 040483-01". (*The URL is unfortunately down at present but you can search for "atari st prototype bambi.net" in Google Images.)

 

Also, the numbers on the spaces for the 3 Amiga chips match those on the Lorraine developer boxes.

 

 

P.S.: Curt and Marty have been of great help to the Atari and Amiga communities and the information they have uncovered is nothing short of amazing.

[Retro Rogue]

I'm not an expert but couldn't help but notice a few interesting details in the "Mickey" photo:

 

 

If you look closely at the connectors on the board, you'll notice that the PCBs used in the ST prototype* are very similar with two buses and a smaller connector in the middle. A close-up picture of the latter reveals the boards were designed in 1983 "ATARI © 83 040483-01". (*The URL is unfortunately down at present but you can search for "atari st prototype bambi.net" in Google Images.)

 

I wouldn't read much in to that. They simply used the stock of inherited standard prototyping boards for RBP (and in fact did that for a bunch of things). It does not denote any sort of connection between the Mickey project, or any of the many many other projects under Atari Inc. that used them. At no time was the ST based around anything related to Amiga or the Mickey project.

Edited November 9, 2010 by wgungfu

[Nebulon]

I continually see debate focusing on Tramiel, Gould, Atari, and Commodore. Personally, I prefer to trace the paths of the designers of the machines.

 

IMHO, the Amiga is the actual next step in the evolution of the Atari 8-bit machines. Hence, I regard the Amiga as more of an Atari computer than a Commodore computer. Commodore didn't design the Amiga -- they acquired it. And the Amiga design is built on the backbone of the Atari 8-bit machines. As for the ST/TT series, they've always struck me as a detour or a different direction for the purposes of offering an inexpensive machine with similar features.

 

Generally speaking, if you take the features of the Atari 8-bit machines and double them and add a few optimizations and enhancements, you get an Amiga:

 

- 8-bit data paths become 16-bit.

- 16-bit data paths become 32-bit.

- upgrade the custom chips

- add a Blitter

- cycle-interleave the CPU with the Blitter

- give separate RAM to the custom chips

- double the horizontal and vertical pixel resolutions

- sprite texture width of 8 becomes texture width or 16

- 1 background bitmap layer becomes 2

 

And this reveals the irony of the Atari-Amiga 'war'. The Amiga is technically just a continuation of the Atari line of computers. It just happened to end up under the umbrella of a different company. And vice-versa with the ST line of machines being spearheaded by ex-Commodore people.

 

So, to me, the lineage is: Atari 2600 -> Atari 8-bit series -> Amiga.

[ilaskey]

Err, yes. We know.

[doctorclu]

I continually see debate focusing on Tramiel, Gould, Atari, and Commodore. Personally, I prefer to trace the paths of the designers of the machines....

So, to me, the lineage is: Atari 2600 -> Atari 8-bit series -> Amiga.

 

I was thinking about that lineage this morning. I've been playing with a ST and a Amiga, trying to figure which I want to set a BBS up on. I am a huge fan of the Atari 8 bit and didn't want to burn up any 8 bit equipment over long term use. Between the ST and Amiga the Amiga really does feel like a grown up 800. Some of the graphics effects you would see on the Atari 8 bit you see on the Amiga. It is really kinda funny.

[tschak909]

Not to derail the topic or anything, but...

 

Whatever happened with this?

 

Curt makes an announcement and then poof.

 

-Thom

[Lynxpro]

Probably being saved for their follow-up book "Business is War".

[+DarkLord]

Love this thread, very interesting and informative.