Atari 8bit is superior to the ST

[atarian63]

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As much as I like my A8 computers (since my 800XL was the first computer I ever bought), I always hated the lack of standard interfaces. Not being able to connect a standard tape recorder, printer or modem was a major drawback of this particular hardware, plus virtually every piece of hardware was SIO, and even the Turbo-Freezer XL (the only PBI hardware I ever owned) needed 5V from a joystick port to work due to the lack of a +5V pin on the PBI.

 

Thorsten

 

Joystick port was also a standard. I don't know about PBI, but the parallel port on ST also lacks a +5V so using devices meant they had to supply their own power. And ST parallel port lacks some industry standard signals. Take a look:

 

Pin   PC Parallel         Atari ST          Amiga 1000
1     Strobe              Strobe            Strobe/drdy
2..9  D0..D7              D0..D7            D0..D7
10    Ack                 N.C.              Ack
11    Busy                Busy              Busy
12    Paper               N.C.              Paper
13    Select (In)         N.C.              Select
14    Autofeed            N.C.              GND
15    Error               N.C.              GND
16    Init                N.C.              GND
17    Select (out)        N.C.              GND
18..25 GND                GND               GND*

*Amiga has pins 23 to +5V and 25 as Reset

 

Amiga 1000 was the only parallel port with the +5V, but it already had superior joysticks as well.

forgot about that one, you had to sell an A1000 pinned printer cable to a1000 people or things would get blown up!

[atariksi]

No, blitter is still better than doing it all in software. You have this misunderstanding that CPU speed alone can make up for lack of all other hardware. Let me give you an example-- 16-bit ISA VGA cards barely can muster 2MBytes/second using the fastest instructions REP MOVSD. Now even if you double the processer speed, you still won't get any faster. The I/O limit has been reached. So if you wanted to scroll a 640*480 screen in software, you have to update 150K for each frame or 150K*60 = 9MBytes/second so it's IMPOSSIBLE to do smooth scrolling on an ISA VGA in software regardless of how fast your CPU is.

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

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You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

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The reason I stated this is because someone asked the question why did PC sales never suffer from upgrades alienating customers but things like AGA and Falcon updates from Commodore and Atari DID? And my answer was simple...the PC does EVERYTHING in software, scrolling, blitting, parallax, hell even sound with that pathetic PC speaker but in this instance that doesn't help.

 

So...you have a 286 16mhz machine with a VGA card of some description.....3 years later you sell it and get a machine with a 486 and either EISA or Vesa Local Bus card.....that same crappy game you were playing on your 386 =

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And my point is simple-- it's better for a bus upgrade than a CPU upgrade given CPUs are faster than buses (i.e., bottleneck is I/O to graphics card). To put it simply, I will take a 486-66Mhz w/VLB rather than a 486-75Mhz with ISA Bus. So the CPU upgrade won't smoothen your game as much as a bus upgrade. And there was no option to upgrade the I/O bus at the time we are talking. Amiga was stuck at 7.16Mhz, PC at ISA rate, ST to 8Mhz (assuming no wait states). Thus, a blitter would have been better since there's less overhead in doing block copying vs. processor doing it.

[oky2000]

I don't think anyone here is really saying the Atari 520ST is a bad computer. One reason why the PC is successful is that it maintained backward compatibility throughout its history. Commodore, Atari, and Apple were notorious for switching from their 6502 based machines in favor of 68000 based machine. Granted it was a much better CPU, but could not execute 6502 code (directly). They could had gone for 65816 or another 16bit version of the 6502. It would have been more expensive for these companies to make more advance computers backward compatible with their 8-bit counterpart. Apple blundered with the IIGS. What is need is not just make the 6502 16bit, but keep improving the technology as did the 80x86. Keep improving speed, add floating point operation, manage more memory, multibus, etc. These companies would had also make audio & video chips with legacy support for the original modes.

 

I know some on here may say one Windows version has issues running stuff from with older versions, DOS, Linux, but that would be an OS/Microsoft issue, not a problem from the CPU. A Pentium 4 or Athlon can execute code written for the original 8088 at a bit faster speed now.

 

Like I said nothing to do with the fact a 486 has virtual 8088 units inside if required...it is simply down to ANY VGA game on a PC running better without a single change in line of code EVER when the owners of PC games upgraded from XT to AT to 486 to Pentium...ditto with ISA/EISA/11mhz ISA 16bit/VESA/PCI/AGP/PCI-E PC games and applications are not written in the same optimal 'trash the system' way as on the ST/Amiga in the 80s/90s. 65816 is a disaster waiting to happen...might as well flush all of Jack's money down the toilet. The 68k was the best CPU of 1985 for commercial mass market machines by a huge margin.

 

Ditto Apple didn't need 6502/Apple II compatibility with their Mac range...if you wanted that you bought the much slower IIgs model instead (although at least it was in colour!).

 

The only reason PCs took off is any old VGA game can run on any new PC via a compatible OS AND IT IS AUTOMATICALLY FASTER/SMOOTHER/MORE RESPONSIVE...this is something Atari and Commodore had no answer for because they went down the bespoke custom hardware route (Commodore had no choice Atari made a bad choice in the long term)....and software houses were reluctant to spend £10000s re-programming the game for a hand full of AGA or STE owners..end of story.

 

 

PC have to be compatible and therefore no code written direct to any specific video chipset because it is an open standard and 100s of companies make PCs. PC are not hardware backwards compatible in the same sense as STFM/STE or Playstation1 and PS2...they are backwards compatible because all they need to do is stick to the same CISC x86 architecture and keep legacy ASM opcodes. I'm sure DOS will happily install on a Quad Core....the x86 instructions are still there! No graphics chips to support, ISA/PCI/AGP are all incompatible BUT all graphics are written at a high level NOT at the ASM level like on an ST sync scroll or an Amiga bug being exploited. Piece of piss keeping PC compatibility....and now I hope you see why that is? Because there isn't anything to really keep on the motherboard unlike a PS2 which has ALL the PS1 custom GPU/CPU/SPU units on the motherboard at a massive cost to Sony.

 

 

 

I think it's kinda the opposite: The ST and the Amiga suffered from too little changes in the architecture and not too much. That's why many developers only developed for the stock machine and didn't consider any change at all and also never considered to use any kind of OS API. Also PCs don't do everything in software. In fact they do much more in hardware than Amiga/ST ever did. There's a GPU which has vertex shaders, pixel shaders etc. There's soundcards doing own mixing and there's network cards being half-intelligent. And then there are a lot of weirdo CPU extensions which are sometimes used, sometimes not.

 

No No we are talking circa 1990 (Amiga 500 peak sales era) to around 95 when there was no longer a Falcon/ST/Amiga in a shop to buy. Vertex shaders and GPUs came much much later (to combat the supremely superior and infinitely more elegant Playstation hardware...and so the cycle continued...wait half a decade and the PC will be better than Playstation 1...and it still continues with PS3) and even these are not coded to directly....you ask DirectX if ??? feature is present...and support it in your code...if not you don't. So kind of like a swanky IF ##### THEN ##### ELSE ##### certainly not hitting the metal is going on there today...only in the very first days of TNT/S3/3DFX & PC-VR which was over in a flash!

 

The point is ALL games of that era like Lotus III and Super Stardust and Street Fighter II etc etc are 100% software routines...so when you went from 486 to MMX to P2 processors with PCI/AGP motherboard upgrades in between ALL software was immediately improved WITH NO CHANGE IN A SINGLE LINE OF PC GAME CODE. There is no way the Amiga AGA programmers could compete...sure there was the STF then STE then 16mhz Mega STE...but did Street Fighter II run better each time you got the next best Atari? or Super Stardust? nope...you had to buy separately and specifically coded AGA/CD32 games or STE/Falcon specifically coded Atari games....if they existed...which they rarely did...so you were S.o.o.L. unlike PC SF2/Lotus III owners

 

If you were the boss of a software company with smart business plans...which platform would you throw in with? The one you only need to write one program for every owner of that class of machine to use EVER?...or one where you had to release 3 different versions all coded to specific hardware in a specific machine and on specific media like HD disks or CD-Roms? hmmmmm let me think.

 

Also the point I made was the Amiga having a faster CPU say a 12mhz 68000 in the A600 or A2000/1500 etc would have mode no difference to 90% of the games UNLESS they were recoded...there is no way to make a game using copper/blitter/agnus run 50% faster by inventing new chips because the game code is 100% frame locked to what the original chipset can do and doesn't even try to go faster...which is why a slow game like Xenon II on A1200 Amiga is just as crap and useless as on an A500 Amiga. Not the programmers' fault, not Commodore's fault. Atari though with the original ST could have followed in the steps of Apple and IBM with faster CPU and NO CUSTOM HARDWARE requiring games companies to throw loads of money at reprogramming games for a tiny userbase..bad business...so very few STE specific games exist to my knowledge....maybe single figures for commercial releases (Stardust being the only true STE game I can think of)

 

A8 has compatibility because Atari made sod all improvements to the crippling colour resolution compromises...it's not like they invented a new chip that did 16 colours in 160x200 anywhere on the screen or added improved sprites to the ageing PM graphics is it? Basically apart from some weird screen modes the Atari 800 and 130XE have the same features more or less. And the Commodore 128 would have been better off with NO C64 compatibility as far as native software goes.

 

 

 

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

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You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

You were talking games, which makes the 640x480x16 color mode moot.

With 320x200x256 colors you can get 30 fps with a 2MB/s limit. (and isn't 16-bit ISA limited to 5.3 MB/s? -which would allow 320x240x256 color at 60 FPS easily -or even 72 Hz if supported)

 

One point was that ST had to be cheaper to try to compete with what's out there. Even Mac didn't use a 10Mhz 68000. And if you are going to add the faster 68K later on, mine as well add the blitter. Software that did stuff based on cycle-exactness isn't going to work the same unless they know the processor speeds. It's not like Amiga where the Copper remains synched even with 68K upgrades.

That doesn't mean you can't offer both (or all 3, with 8, 10, and 12.5 MHz versions), and not necessarily at release either, but as updated standard. (eventually 16 MHz on the MEGA) With theis emphesized, softtware designers could cater to varying CPU speeds as well. (I personally think the sound and color capabilites were more important to upgrade to approximate/exceed VGA+Soundblaster standards -even a more modest enhancement like the TT shifter's 256 colors out of 4096 and up to 320x480x256 colors -though even a 320x240 or 320x200x256 indexed from 12-bit RGB could have been enough had it been standardized by '88, along with higher res 16-color modes, perhaps higher 4-color, and mono modes)

 

(4) Overloading keyboard with joysticks (nobody will ever use both!)

??? Flight sims perhaps? (unless that's sarcasm)

 

Spout specs all you like but the simple fact is little johnny playing Wing Commander on his 286 shelves the game because it is as slow and choppy as the CD32 version and then a year an a half later on his 486 with PCI or VESA local bus will see a massive improvement, ditto with Doom ditto with Zool 2....Ditto with Street Fighter II ..... capish? When you run A500 copy of Street Fighter II on an A4000 what is the improvement? None! When you run ST street Fighter II on an STE or Mega STE or TT or Falcon what is the improvement? None. Looks just as shit...plays just as shit. VGA was only important because it used 256 colour graphics, as opposed to EGA games which will always look worse than Amiga/ST/C64 versions....hence the significance of VGA being used from 89 onwards more and more....has nothing to do with ISA/PCI/AGP/VESA/EISA blah blah just means that games can be played with improvent forever. Formula One GP 2 by Microprose is a classic example...run it on a Pentium 166mmx...then run it 3 years later on a Pentium 3 1.2Ghz with AGP graphics...did Geoff Crammond have to update F1GP2's code for you to see the improvements? Nope. as it is already in 256 colour mode he has no need to.

Actually I think Wing Commander is a poor example, it's one of the few PC games that's very timing sensitive: not only does it play slowly with insufficent cpu resourse, but will play too fast on faster processors (I think 33~40 MHz being optimum -I don't think a 386 vs 486 would matter in terms of speed -thugh I'd immagine 486 framerate would be better, not positive though as I've only played the DOS version via DOSbox)

 

There was a later win9x re-release (with upgraded audio as well) which solved that problem though. (and the Amiga version should have been FAR better, it seems like they didn't make good use of the blitter if any at all, the Sega CD version used the graphics ASIC very well though, and even the SNES version managed to be less choppy somehow)

 

 

The reason I stated this is because someone asked the question why did PC sales never suffer from upgrades alienating customers but things like AGA and Falcon updates from Commodore and Atari DID? And my answer was simple...the PC does EVERYTHING in software, scrolling, blitting, parallax, hell even sound with that pathetic PC speaker but in this instance that doesn't help.

I think it's kinda the opposite: The ST and the Amiga suffered from too little changes in the architecture and not too much. That's why many developers only developed for the stock machine and didn't consider any change at all and also never considered to use any kind of OS API. Also PCs don't do everything in software. In fact they do much more in hardware than Amiga/ST ever did. There's a GPU which has vertex shaders, pixel shaders etc. There's soundcards doing own mixing and there's network cards being half-intelligent. And then there are a lot of weirdo CPU extensions which are sometimes used, sometimes not.

I agree, they needed to update the standards much sooner, AGA was far too late, and by then already behind XGA/SVGA, both needed to approximate or exceed VGA standards at or shorly after introduction (MCGA foreshadowed this), as above of couse. Sound on the Amiga was quite competitive with standards up to the early 90s, but ST needed an upgrade sooner. (even just an FM synth chip, maybe even offer a low-cost add-on using the midi port)

 

As for software rendering, he was speaking in context of games up to the mid 90s, before hardware accleration started becoming popular. (ie up through Quake and Tomb Raider on DOS) Everything was software rendered up to that point, entirely CPU dirven and usually adhering to 1987 VGA standards (occassonally exceeding that with 640x480x256 colors) and almost never rendering above 256 colors. (usually 320x200, 320x240, or less often 640x480, occasionally the odd 400x300 or 512x384 as well -Quake offered a wide range of resolution in various combinations of 320/360/640 widths and 200/240/350/400/480 heights along with 800x600, 848x480, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 even, though all in 256 color mode)

 

All good points by Kitty, who is getting my drift Atari launched basically a colour Mac, no blitter, no copper, nothing so they AND Apple had a future advantage over Commodore (who certainly weren't going to waste their investment with further investment to 18-24 month chipset improvement...which would require any game to be reprogrammed anyway so big problem with every successive wave of upgrades)

 

Had Atari chosen to go the CPU power route and not the blitter/twin DAC setup for the STE then people sitting at home who already had an ST would go 'wow look at the speed of Gauntlet 1 on that NEW 16mhz ST wow!!' and promptly buy one safe in the knowledge that their disk box was full of existing games that would benefit instantly. And NEW purchasers would never have to see the rubbish scrolling on Gauntlet 1 and so would buy the machine again because there would be 1000s of 'enhanced' games because ALL games suddenly become enhanced.

 

Do that a couple of times with upgrades in a 4 year period and the software houses will trust you in 1989ish when you install your 256 colour 320x200 chip in ALL machines....and with a massive program of trade-ins get some early adopters in very quickly to create artificially high initial demand (which the greed software company owners love to see and take the bait every time) and that would be the only hurdle you would have to face...just the once. Because for 2D games 256 colours IS enough...the Jaguar vs SNES slaughter proved that 256 colours is enough for a 2D arcade game SO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONLY TIME TO FORCE A HARDWARE SPECIFIC CHANGE TO THE ST DESIGN. Significantly PCs had 256 colour capability in the most elegant screen memory model possible byte/pixel in 1987...really...honestly...by 1988 Atari and Commodore should have had prototype 256 chunky pixel mode graphics chips for their replacement base model...because then at least you could turn round and say "well you've already done the 256 colour game engine designed and graphics drawn for PC so it's a small change in code' and remember by this stage we would be up to at least a 25mhz 020 in the ST...perfectly adequate to go head to head with a £1000+ 386DX 40mhz PC clone.

 

Sound was an urgent upgrade though, it was embarrassing putting the ST games next to the SID soundtracked C64 games...but still if that was the only change companies had to make and it was 4 channel not 2 channels then Atari could have easily said to the designers "you already have the 4 channel music/FX worked out for your Amiga version...so just put those in there for us"

 

As for AGA well......it was too late.....but there was no way it would be cost effective in 1990 for sure. Remember Amiga was NOT developed in house...they paid for the tech. Unlike C64 dev costs which were basically 3 man years @ regular MOS Technology employee salary rates...against millions to purchase the Amiga chipset. AND on top of that it would have to sell in huge numbers to get the software houses to write TWO versions of every game. Commodore should have bought EVERYONE at Amiga Computers not just the chipset, the deal should have been done for ongoing R&D for at least 10 years AND get the talented staff already at Commodore involved with the 3 man super team of RJ Mical Dave Needle and Jay Miner. For heaven's sake they drew out the Lynx custom chip design on a napkin!!! These are the people you wanted...sod a one off chipset purchase you wanted to employ the brains who came up with the advanced tech ALL THE TIME.

 

And one final note...even on your $500 shiny new all conquering 3D card in the shopping basket....it's never ever coded to directly...this is why even on 3D games....when you bought Crysis and it ran @ 15fps on....new card swapped out later and it is running 60fps with zero code modified. DirectX and before that OpenGL sorted out all the bit mashing between the programmer and the actual silicon on the card plugged into a multitude of bus interfaces. Remember Voodoo/PC VR/Matrox? well they all HAD to be coded for directly....and a different version for each...guess how long that little war survived on the PC 'don't touch my hardware in ASM you filthy programmer' world? Exactly...within 2 years it was all over and games were either OpenGL or DirectX and so never again was a specific line of code written for even 3D games You only talk to the Vertex shaders and other cool 3D hardware via the DirectX language...never directly at all...PC's like it that way and looking at 1990-2000 guess which was the better way of doing it?

[atariksi]

 

When the ST was released in 1985, it was inferior to the Amiga and not much better than the PC or MAC. By the time the TT030 & Falcon became available, PCs with VGA graphics and higher processor speeds were became more popular.

 

 

 

This is pure drivel. What the hell are you talking about? The PC in 1985 was CGA...4 colour crap and 4 fixed super gaudy colours like cyan yellow and magenta all running on pathetic ADLIB sound or even WORSE PC speaker (like a Sinclair/Timex computer!) the PC was slamdunked by the C64 even AFTER the Amiga was launched in 1986 haha Defender of the Crown on C64 is better than ugly ugly PC beeping EGA rubbish please! The Mac wasn't half the computer the ST was...it was a ZX81 with a 68000 CPU...pure rubbish and overpriced to boot. And yet both cost 200-300% MORE than an STM and SM124 and 1mb drive. Better OS, faster CPU, cheaper, much more colourful, actually had some sound and sample playback capability in games (play ST Gauntlet 1 on A8 and PC EGA before complaining, it's a classic example of what even moderately competent but ambitious programmers can achieve..and is almost as good as the Sega Genesis/Megadrive version with some optimisations in the h-scroll routines!)

 

What I am referring to is the first STs did not offer much better resolution & color depth than that was on the PC with an EGA card. I have played games in EGA mode and a ST version of the same game was not much better. Atari under Jack Tremial was trying to insert the ST into the business market but did not seem to invest in getting software development for the ST. The PC was already becoming a stable for a personal computing not because of video games, but all the useful application software on the market for it. Already in 1985 there were dozens of word processors, spreadsheets, database, and all other types of software that made the PC more attractive. From the start, the PC was easy to upgrade and modify, add memory, faster CPU, and swap out cards. The ST had everything soldered to the motherboard and typical of Tremial expected people to buy a whole new computer for something better. You cannot take a ST at 8MHZ and convert to a Falcon without desoldering chips. Most of the PC clones, even a electronics novice can swap out the graphics card.

 

Yep, ST used technology that was already out there. They just made it cheaper. In fact, EGA had 640*350*16 whereas ST had 640*400*2 so word processors, spreadsheets, etc. were more colorful on PC but games had more accurate color on ST due to larger palette. You also have to remember that EGA had char modes as well so the text modes which was more used in those days was MUCH FASTER on PC than ST. That's another item where A8 has edge over ST (low resolution and char modes).

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1. The boss wanted you to take work home for things like Lotus 123 or Dbase etc etc (can't be helped...company should pay for it!)

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Those are serious apps whether in text mode or graphics mode. I think MS-Works used graphics mode to do bold, italics, graph previews, etc. They could mix and match between text and graphics mode to optimize the speed although they couldn't split them on the same screen like A8/C64.

 

As far as 640x400 in mono being less of a useable screen mode for business than 640x350 in 16 colours (usually in 80 column charmode because these were text based DOS application programs for industry standard...GEM and Windows was nowhere on PC compared to DOS applications like Lotus/Dbase/Wordperfect etc, I fail to see how it is worse. Give me the GEM based 'compatible' ST applications at 20% the price of the 'colourful' PC dominators every time...and most people with braincells n double figures would agree.

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Right, ST did have a better GUI at the time than PC and it had standard sound whereas some PCs had adlib cards. But PC had hard drives and floppies that were more robust than Amiga and ST and also cheaper. Yeah, so you buy a cheaper ST but then spend a ton on getting a hard drive and printer whereas PC peripherals were cheaper and readily available. I'm talking about serious stuff here not games. Mac was too expensive as well for serious stuff and also used nonstandard add-ons.

 

I suspect you are doing this deliberately, the ST had one floppy drive supplied either built in or supplied as a package...with the ST/STM so only a 2nd drive was ever a cost and as you can only use 2 floppies on the ST and PC (unlike the Amiga which could have 4). As for HDD maybe you could spend $100-150 for the same hard drive capacity sure BUT the PC one was slower than a DMA unit on an ST and remember the PC is already costing 2-3x as much as the ST in the first place usually and don't forget you STILL had to buy DOS AND WINDOWS AS WELL FOR $300ish a pair

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There's no Windows at the time and DOS wasn't $300; it came with the machine. I bought a floppy drive for Amiga for $199 and a PC one for like $25; there's other peripherals too-- memory expansion cards, hard cards, SCSI cards, Parallel/serial cards, etc. I was supporting his point that PCs were easy to expand and cheaper. Hard drives were WAY TOO expensive on Amiga-- never bought one for either ST nor Amiga. Plus, PC would have them internally.

 

And printers? What the hell are you gibbering on about...a printer is a printer....there is no 'special' ST printer apart from the SLM laser (which was less than half the cost of the cheapest non-Atari laser printer) all other printers were centronics parallel standard for BOTH so yeah again ST slamdunks your 'business machine'

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Okay, printers weren't that bad but still the gender benders (for A1000), and some nonstandard signals on ST parallel port caused some issues and lack of software to support all the various printers was also a problem.

 

MS Works is Windows only and much later than 1985 ST launch era of Wordperfect and Lotus 123..more like 90s. Even during Windows v3/95 era MS Works and MS Office were only just becoming a standard...

I digress, the point is that you clearly have no experience of PCs at the time (mid 80s) or the software you had to struggle with to use) as there is NO graphical software worth a damn on a PC in the mid 80s which is why people paid so much for a Mac NOT to experience DOS in the mid 80s

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BULLCRAP! MS-Works was required for me to enter college back in the 1980s and it was all DOS-based and used EGA graphics modes. That along with the AT&T 12Mhz 286 I had to buy for $2500 was well worth it given the peripherals costs (HD, 3.5" floppy, memory expansion, etc.) were negligible. MAC lacked a text-mode which is a disadvantage for it; plus Mac did more in software then PC so it has bigger problems than PCs.

 

There is NO advantage of having a char mode except for DOS command lines....no 16 bit application software worth a crap runs in a text mode...never has and never will....

THE BIGGEST BULLCRAP you have stated thus far! Text mode IS still used-- Press ALT+ENTER after running "CMD" from the START menu and you will be in TEXT mode. There were games written that used text mode because (going back to the point) it allow faster screen updates. I used to work in a place that bought BASIC modules from some company called "software bottle" or some name like that and they distributed curtains and visual effects for business text-based applications. AT THAT TIME, ISA wasn't that fast to update in 60Hz or even 30Hz so text mode was VERY useful.

[atariksi]

Careful with that barrel.. I'm really not sure how much more scraping its bottom can take..

I'm going to say that the bottom fell out of this ridiculous unimaginably pedantic 'discussion' about 20 pages or so ago.

 

What have you been smoking? You think that doing video titling w/overscan and scrolling using Graphics 1/2/etc. text modes is useless when it out-performs the ST! I made a whole introduction to a video tape using an Atari; if I had used an ST, I would first have to go and buy a non-existent RF-modulator, write my own software (since there's no PRINT #6;"WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?"), write a Self-destruct Your New CRT scroller (which wasn't discovered at the time), and tell people to adjust their TVs so they don't see the border!

[atariksi]

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

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You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

You were talking games, which makes the 640x480x16 color mode moot.

Bullcrap. I was giving example of how I/O speed can be a bottleneck and CPU speed won't make any difference. I was speaking in general not about games and there's nothing wrong with games using a 16-color mode.

 

With 320x200x256 colors you can get 30 fps with a 2MB/s limit. (and isn't 16-bit ISA limited to 5.3 MB/s? -which would allow 320x240x256 color at 60 FPS easily -or even 72 Hz if supported)

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You have lost your cool. You're now just Kitty. You need to go and measure the transfer rate of memory->VGA and not go by any theoretical/bullcrap derived from some speculative articles. Even with 16-bit ISA VGA cards, REP MOVSD gives about 2MBytes/second (as tested on Paradise VGA, ATI VGA, and a few others). Some even less and you have to target worst case scenario. Even a 320*200*256 (64K) at 60fps would mean 4MB/second. Yes, I'm talking 60Hz not 30fps which is not as good.

 

One point was that ST had to be cheaper to try to compete with what's out there. Even Mac didn't use a 10Mhz 68000. And if you are going to add the faster 68K later on, mine as well add the blitter. Software that did stuff based on cycle-exactness isn't going to work the same unless they know the processor speeds. It's not like Amiga where the Copper remains synched even with 68K upgrades.

That doesn't mean you can't offer both (or all 3, with 8, 10, and 12.5 MHz versions), and not necessarily at release either, but as updated standard. (eventually 16 MHz on the MEGA) With theis emphesized, softtware designers could cater to varying CPU speeds as well. (I personally think the sound and color capabilites were more important to upgrade to approximate/exceed VGA+Soundblaster standards -even a more modest enhancement like the TT shifter's 256 colors out of 4096 and up to 320x480x256 colors -though even a 320x240 or 320x200x256 indexed from 12-bit RGB could have been enough had it been standardized by '88, along with higher res 16-color modes, perhaps higher 4-color, and mono modes)

 

(4) Overloading keyboard with joysticks (nobody will ever use both!)

??? Flight sims perhaps? (unless that's sarcasm)

Yeah, it's common to use keyboard and joysticks; Defender does it for certain things. Pause mode uses it. Etc.

[atariksi]

I think it's all a bit like comparing a cereal box watch to an automatic. Sure the cereal box watch is easier to read, keeps better time, and costs $0.50 to make, but does that necessarily make it 'superior' to the automatic?

 

As long as you also add that it's up to reader to decide which is the cereal box and which is the automatic.

[atariksi]

I don't think anyone here is really saying the Atari 520ST is a bad computer. One reason why the PC is successful is that it maintained backward compatibility throughout its history. Commodore, Atari, and Apple were notorious for switching from their 6502 based machines in favor of 68000 based machine. Granted it was a much better CPU, but could not execute 6502 code (directly). They could had gone for 65816 or another 16bit version of the 6502. It would have been more expensive for these companies to make more advance computers backward compatible with their 8-bit counterpart. Apple blundered with the IIGS. What is need is not just make the 6502 16bit, but keep improving the technology as did the 80x86. Keep improving speed, add floating point operation, manage more memory, multibus, etc. These companies would had also make audio & video chips with legacy support for the original modes.

 

I know some on here may say one Windows version has issues running stuff from with older versions, DOS, Linux, but that would be an OS/Microsoft issue, not a problem from the CPU. A Pentium 4 or Athlon can execute code written for the original 8088 at a bit faster speed now.

 

Like I said nothing to do with the fact a 486 has virtual 8088 units inside if required...it is simply down to ANY VGA game on a PC running better without a single change in line of code EVER when the owners of PC games upgraded from XT to AT to 486 to Pentium...ditto with ISA/EISA/11mhz ISA 16bit/VESA/PCI/AGP/PCI-E PC games and applications are not written in the same optimal 'trash the system' way as on the ST/Amiga in the 80s/90s. 65816 is a disaster waiting to happen...might as well flush all of Jack's money down the toilet. The 68k was the best CPU of 1985 for commercial mass market machines by a huge margin.

...

Bullcrap. The ST/Amiga software that goes directly to the hardware and overtakes the CPU and does cycle-exact coding is the BEST software on those systems. And FYI, there are MANY games/applications that don't run properly when going from 4.77Mhz to today's PCs because they used the processor frequency into account-- that's why many earlier machines had the turbo switch. Of course, Amiga got it right by letting the cycle-exactness be done via Copper and maintaining backward compatibility on hardware level. That way, processor upgrades shouldn't affect the software; however, like on PCs, some people took the 7.16Mhz frequency of processor into account and also made calls to absolute locations in Kickstart/ROM. There's nothing wrong with bypassing the OS to get faster/better throughput. You know what Joust would be like on A8 if it went through some API-- it would be worst than the ST version. Now that's bad.

 

The only reason PCs took off is any old VGA game can run on any new PC via a compatible OS AND IT IS AUTOMATICALLY FASTER/SMOOTHER/MORE RESPONSIVE...this is something Atari and Commodore had no answer for because they went down the bespoke custom hardware route (Commodore had no choice Atari made a bad choice in the long term)....and software houses were reluctant to spend £10000s re-programming the game for a hand full of AGA or STE owners..end of story.

Stop your mental speculation and drivel. PCs maintained hardware level compatibility just like A8 and Amiga. All three made the right decision. Commodore made the worst decision making all those incompatible machines although C64's popularity helped them get something standard out of it. It's NOT AUTOMATICALLY smoother-- I have several PC games that don't even work on modern PCs. And FYI, all Amiga stuff like ray-tracers, word processors, spreadsheets, databases, etc. DO RUN FASTER on faster processors like PC.

 

...instructions are still there! No graphics chips to support, ISA/PCI/AGP are all incompatible BUT all graphics are written at a high level NOT at the ASM level like on an ST sync scroll or an Amiga bug being exploited. Piece of piss keeping PC compatibility....and now I hope you see why that is? Because there isn't anything to really keep on the motherboard unlike a PS2 which has ALL the PS1 custom GPU/CPU/SPU units on the motherboard at a massive cost to Sony.

No, you still don't know because you are just spewing out drivel. ISA/PCI/AGP ARE BACKWARD COMPATIBLE! VGA standard (3c0h..3dfh), keyboard standard (60h/64h), timer standard (40h/43h), etc. still work at LOW LEVEL. Only when you don't have hardware level compatibility, then you have to resort to high-level languages. If you do a MOVSD on an 8-bit ISA card, it also works on PCI/AGP/16-bit ISA because hardware takes care of it. It's just faster on later buses.

 

If you were the boss of a software company with smart business plans...which platform would you throw in with? The one you only need to write one program for every owner of that class of machine to use EVER?...or one where you had to release 3 different versions all coded to specific hardware in a specific machine and on specific media like HD disks or CD-Roms? hmmmmm let me think.

...

Yeah, think about deleting all the drivel you have contributed to this thread. If you write for OCS on Amiga, it will work on all Amigas. If you use hardware for A800, it will work on all A8s, etc.

 

...tiny userbase..bad business...so very few STE specific games exist to my knowledge....maybe single figures for commercial releases (Stardust being the only true STE game I can think of)

More rubbish. You can say instead of going to better graphics chips on VGA, they should have made processors faster. NO. You improve the hardware and maintain backward compatibility and hope eventually all people adopt the newer hardware gradually (and not lose anything they already have).

 

A8 has compatibility because Atari made sod all improvements to the crippling colour resolution compromises...it's not like they invented a new chip that did 16 colours in 160x200 anywhere on the screen or added improved sprites to the ageing PM graphics is it? Basically apart from some weird screen modes the Atari 800 and 130XE have the same features more or less. And the Commodore 128 would have been better off with NO C64 compatibility as far as native software goes.

...

Yeah, the sick mentality of get rid of all previous work and start from scratch. C128 was one of the right moves by Commodore. Did you ever wonder what would have happened if they got rid of EGA compatibility in the first VGA cards?

 

All good points by Kitty, who is getting my drift ...

I'm also getting your drift. All bullcrap. Mostly bad points. [reset of your rubbish deleted].

[+wood_jl]

To the complainers: Actually, although there is disagreement in this thread - once again, the different perspectives are enlightening and the debate entertaining. Many people (not me) in this thread have significant technical knowledge and it's quite a good read for many people here. No complaining!!

[atariksi]

To the complainers: Actually, although there is disagreement in this thread - once again, the different perspectives are enlightening and the debate entertaining. Many people (not me) in this thread have significant technical knowledge and it's quite a good read for many people here. No complaining!!

 

It's better to get to the truth (wherever possible) rather than look at everything as just different views/perspectives.

[PeteD]

To the complainers: Actually, although there is disagreement in this thread - once again, the different perspectives are enlightening and the debate entertaining. Many people (not me) in this thread have significant technical knowledge and it's quite a good read for many people here. No complaining!!

 

It's better to get to the truth (wherever possible) rather than look at everything as just different views/perspectives.

 

LMFAO it helps when you don't ignore the truth when it's someone else posting it to show you when you're wrong.

 

 

Pete

[atariksi]

...

As much as I like my A8 computers (since my 800XL was the first computer I ever bought), I always hated the lack of standard interfaces. Not being able to connect a standard tape recorder, printer or modem was a major drawback of this particular hardware, plus virtually every piece of hardware was SIO, and even the Turbo-Freezer XL (the only PBI hardware I ever owned) needed 5V from a joystick port to work due to the lack of a +5V pin on the PBI.

 

Thorsten

 

Joystick port was also a standard. I don't know about PBI, but the parallel port on ST also lacks a +5V so using devices meant they had to supply their own power. And ST parallel port lacks some industry standard signals. Take a look:

 

Pin   PC Parallel         Atari ST          Amiga 1000
1     Strobe              Strobe            Strobe/drdy
2..9  D0..D7              D0..D7            D0..D7
10    Ack                 N.C.              Ack
11    Busy                Busy              Busy
12    Paper               N.C.              Paper
13    Select (In)         N.C.              Select
14    Autofeed            N.C.              GND
15    Error               N.C.              GND
16    Init                N.C.              GND
17    Select (out)        N.C.              GND
18..25 GND                GND               GND*

*Amiga has pins 23 to +5V and 25 as Reset

 

Amiga 1000 was the only parallel port with the +5V, but it already had superior joysticks as well.

forgot about that one, you had to sell an A1000 pinned printer cable to a1000 people or things would get blown up!

 

Yeah, they did move those +5V/RESET to pins 14/17 with the A500 and changed the gender. But for A1000, I did have to buy the gender-bender even for using the DigiView.

[atariksi]

I don't think anyone here is really saying the Atari 520ST is a bad computer. One reason why the PC is successful is that it maintained backward compatibility throughout its history. Commodore, Atari, and Apple were notorious for switching from their 6502 based machines in favor of 68000 based machine. Granted it was a much better CPU, but could not execute 6502 code (directly). They could had gone for 65816 or another 16bit version of the 6502. It would have been more expensive for these companies to make more advance computers backward compatible with their 8-bit counterpart. Apple blundered with the IIGS. What is need is not just make the 6502 16bit, but keep improving the technology as did the 80x86. Keep improving speed, add floating point operation, manage more memory, multibus, etc. These companies would had also make audio & video chips with legacy support for the original modes.

 

I know some on here may say one Windows version has issues running stuff from with older versions, DOS, Linux, but that would be an OS/Microsoft issue, not a problem from the CPU. A Pentium 4 or Athlon can execute code written for the original 8088 at a bit faster speed now.

 

If they had the kind of money that Intel and Motorola had at the time (they had more sales), perhaps they could have funded more to evolve the 6502 and make it compete with the others. Nothing inherently wrong with 6502 that would prevent it from being made into a 64-bit processor with backward compatibility.

[kool kitty89]

Do that a couple of times with upgrades in a 4 year period and the software houses will trust you in 1989ish when you install your 256 colour 320x200 chip in ALL machines....and with a massive program of trade-ins get some early adopters in very quickly to create artificially high initial demand (which the greed software company owners love to see and take the bait every time) and that would be the only hurdle you would have to face...just the once. Because for 2D games 256 colours IS enough...the Jaguar vs SNES slaughter proved that 256 colours is enough for a 2D arcade game SO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONLY TIME TO FORCE A HARDWARE SPECIFIC CHANGE TO THE ST DESIGN. Significantly PCs had 256 colour capability in the most elegant screen memory model possible byte/pixel in 1987...really...honestly...by 1988 Atari and Commodore should have had prototype 256 chunky pixel mode graphics chips for their replacement base model...because then at least you could turn round and say "well you've already done the 256 colour game engine designed and graphics drawn for PC so it's a small change in code' and remember by this stage we would be up to at least a 25mhz 020 in the ST...perfectly adequate to go head to head with a £1000+ 386DX 40mhz PC clone.

Umm, the SNES rarely uses the 256 color modes in game, mode-7 is most common, a few others used for splash screens, plus software rendering for 3D games. (star fox, Doom, etc)

Most use multiple 16-color/tile layers (some with 4-color tile layers as well) and sprites always using 16-color palettes. (in mode 2, 8 16-color sprite palettes plus another 8 for BG) The main difference between most SNES of Geneis games in term sof color, is th emaster palette (15-bit RGB vs 9-bit RGB) and number of subpalettes (8+8 on SNES, 4 total on Genesis -but universal for sprites and BG). The PC engine has double the subpalettes of the SNES, but the same limiting master palette as the Genesis. (and ST)

The Jaguar (along with contemporary systems, albeit weaker in 2D specific capabilities) are certainly a noticable step up from even SNES (granted games liek DKC did a great jop of optimizing the 16-color tilemapped graphics on SNES). SNES had a pretty low resolution, still only 256x224/239. (with the exception of a seldom used mode supporting 512 width and interlaced display -but with significant limitations in terms of color, felexibility, and number of layers)

Although, a few 2D games ont he 5th gen consoles were 256 color, along with others using highcolor modes.

 

Sound was an urgent upgrade though, it was embarrassing putting the ST games next to the SID soundtracked C64 games...but still if that was the only change companies had to make and it was 4 channel not 2 channels then Atari could have easily said to the designers "you already have the 4 channel music/FX worked out for your Amiga version...so just put those in there for us"

Or go with a cheap FM chip similar to what PCs were using -ie Yamaha's OPL2. (you could go better with 4-op FM, but it'd be likely that it could be wasted and just used to approximate the OPL2's 2-op FM) You might be able to get by using the YM2149 for sample playback. (it was used better than PWM on a PC speaker for sure, and more comperable to the original soundblaster's 8-bit DAC) If not amiga, it would at least approximate PC standards.

 

As for AGA well......it was too late.....but there was no way it would be cost effective in 1990 for sure. Remember Amiga was NOT developed in house...they paid for the tech. Unlike C64 dev costs which were basically 3 man years @ regular MOS Technology employee salary rates...against millions to purchase the Amiga chipset. AND on top of that it would have to sell in huge numbers to get the software houses to write TWO versions of every game. Commodore should have bought EVERYONE at Amiga Computers not just the chipset, the deal should have been done for ongoing R&D for at least 10 years AND get the talented staff already at Commodore involved with the 3 man super team of RJ Mical Dave Needle and Jay Miner. For heaven's sake they drew out the Lynx custom chip design on a napkin!!! These are the people you wanted...sod a one off chipset purchase you wanted to employ the brains who came up with the advanced tech ALL THE TIME.

I didn't mean full AGA either, just some kind of 256 color support (8 bitplanes), although halfbrite mode was pretty useful for approximating VGA quality graphics. And yeah, merging with Amiga would hve been good, I wonder if the MOS and Amiga guys would have worked well together. (maybe even have commodore spin off MOS+Amiga as a combined subsidiary of Commodore)

 

 

Bullcrap. I was giving example of how I/O speed can be a bottleneck and CPU speed won't make any difference. I was speaking in general not about games and there's nothing wrong with games using a 16-color mode.

Fine, for non-game examples, but can you think of any VGA games that ran in 640x480x16 colors?

 

With 320x200x256 colors you can get 30 fps with a 2MB/s limit. (and isn't 16-bit ISA limited to 5.3 MB/s? -which would allow 320x240x256 color at 60 FPS easily -or even 72 Hz if supported)

...

You have lost your cool. You're now just Kitty. You need to go and measure the transfer rate of memory->VGA and not go by any theoretical/bullcrap derived from some speculative articles. Even with 16-bit ISA VGA cards, REP MOVSD gives about 2MBytes/second (as tested on Paradise VGA, ATI VGA, and a few others). Some even less and you have to target worst case scenario. Even a 320*200*256 (64K) at 60fps would mean 4MB/second. Yes, I'm talking 60Hz not 30fps which is not as good.

Yes, but how many games are going to be more likely limit by CPU speed than ISA bus bandwidth? (ther would be a lot of games running at or below 30 fps without high-end CPUs, especially when 3D games came in, you were lucky to get 15-20 fps on a new game with a mid-range 486 PC in the early 90s) And by the time faster CPUs were common, so was PCI.

 

Yeah, the sick mentality of get rid of all previous work and start from scratch. C128 was one of the right moves by Commodore. Did you ever wonder what would have happened if they got rid of EGA compatibility in the first VGA cards?

 

You mean like MCGA? (although, there were many games that specifically supported MCGA just after it was released, albit often simple conversions of EGA graphics into MCGA compatible format -and older games which were forced to drop down to CGA mode)

[atariksi]

...

The Jaguar (along with contemporary systems, albeit weaker in 2D specific capabilities) are certainly a noticable step up from even SNES (granted games liek DKC did a great jop of optimizing the 16-color tilemapped graphics on SNES). SNES had a pretty low resolution, still only 256x224/239. (with the exception of a seldom used mode supporting 512 width and interlaced display -but with significant limitations in terms of color, felexibility, and number of layers)

Although, a few 2D games ont he 5th gen consoles were 256 color, along with others using highcolor modes.

...

Good point.

 

Yes, but how many games are going to be more likely limit by CPU speed than ISA bus bandwidth? (ther would be a lot of games running at or below 30 fps without high-end CPUs, especially when 3D games came in, you were lucky to get 15-20 fps on a new game with a mid-range 486 PC in the early 90s) And by the time faster CPUs were common, so was PCI.

...

This all stemmed from the fact that A8 was doing things in VBI (which means 60Hz/50Hz). I have several 486 machines that do not have VLB and their speeds go up to 75/100Mhz. That's certainly much faster than ISA rate. Even 386 machines were much faster than ISA rate. You do a REP MOVSD on a 386, you are wasting time with I/O wait states.

 

Yeah, the sick mentality of get rid of all previous work and start from scratch. C128 was one of the right moves by Commodore. Did you ever wonder what would have happened if they got rid of EGA compatibility in the first VGA cards?

 

You mean like MCGA? (although, there were many games that specifically supported MCGA just after it was released, albit often simple conversions of EGA graphics into MCGA compatible format -and older games which were forced to drop down to CGA mode)

 

MCGA was backward compatible with EGA/CGA. You see how quickly the PS/2 MCA was dropped because they jumped into a new standard immediately without backward compatibility with existing hardware.

[oky2000]

No, blitter is still better than doing it all in software. You have this misunderstanding that CPU speed alone can make up for lack of all other hardware. Let me give you an example-- 16-bit ISA VGA cards barely can muster 2MBytes/second using the fastest instructions REP MOVSD. Now even if you double the processer speed, you still won't get any faster. The I/O limit has been reached. So if you wanted to scroll a 640*480 screen in software, you have to update 150K for each frame or 150K*60 = 9MBytes/second so it's IMPOSSIBLE to do smooth scrolling on an ISA VGA in software regardless of how fast your CPU is.

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

...

You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

...

The reason I stated this is because someone asked the question why did PC sales never suffer from upgrades alienating customers but things like AGA and Falcon updates from Commodore and Atari DID? And my answer was simple...the PC does EVERYTHING in software, scrolling, blitting, parallax, hell even sound with that pathetic PC speaker but in this instance that doesn't help.

 

So...you have a 286 16mhz machine with a VGA card of some description.....3 years later you sell it and get a machine with a 486 and either EISA or Vesa Local Bus card.....that same crappy game you were playing on your 386 =

...

And my point is simple-- it's better for a bus upgrade than a CPU upgrade given CPUs are faster than buses (i.e., bottleneck is I/O to graphics card). To put it simply, I will take a 486-66Mhz w/VLB rather than a 486-75Mhz with ISA Bus. So the CPU upgrade won't smoothen your game as much as a bus upgrade. And there was no option to upgrade the I/O bus at the time we are talking. Amiga was stuck at 7.16Mhz, PC at ISA rate, ST to 8Mhz (assuming no wait states). Thus, a blitter would have been better since there's less overhead in doing block copying vs. processor doing it.

 

Nope the point is.

 

1. Any upgrade to your PC would improve VGA games (ISA was a legacy thing by 1992 onwards when VGA was supported by default..cards were VLB or PCI usually...and even on ISA not ALL ISA cards actually manage to hit the bandwidth limits because all they were was a simple video DAC and some slow slow memory for data image manipulation (by the card NOT the user)

 

2. ALL ST games previously produced would show SIGNIFICANT improvement when run on a 16mhz 68k....thereby circumventing the entire problem Atari had...which was the STFM was base spec and ALL the games were written to THAT spec ONLY. So the issue was..was the STE a waste of time? Yes as far as number of released games and improvement in ST games compared to Amiga games (benchmark at the time)

 

That is it really. And how this relates to the A8? Well HAD Warner bothered to improve the A8 chipset by 1983 it would have been tough because ALL games would need to be recoded in the new graphics modes provided...so same trap as Atari under Jack fell into....the difference is Jack had a choice...he COULD have gone the CPU boost route and not the bespoke 'force everyone to write seperate code' hardware upgrades on same CPU. It's all academic anyway now.

[oky2000]

.....the Jaguar vs SNES slaughter proved that 256 colours is enough for a 2D arcade game SO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONLY TIME TO FORCE A HARDWARE SPECIFIC CHANGE TO THE ST DESIGN. Significantly PCs had 256 colour capability in the most elegant screen memory model possible byte/pixel in 1987...really...honestly...by 1988 Atari and Commodore should have had prototype 256 chunky pixel mode graphics chips for their replacement base model...because then at least you could turn round and say "well you've already done the 256 colour game engine designed and graphics drawn for PC so it's a small change in code' and remember by this stage we would be up to at least a 25mhz 020 in the ST...perfectly adequate to go head to head with a £1000+ 386DX 40mhz PC clone.

Umm, the SNES rarely uses the 256 color modes in game, mode-7 is most common, a few others used for splash screens, plus software rendering for 3D games. (star fox, Doom, etc)

Most use multiple 16-color/tile layers (some with 4-color tile layers as well) and sprites always using 16-color palettes. (in mode 2, 8 16-color sprite palettes plus another 8 for BG) The main difference between most SNES of Geneis games in term sof color, is th emaster palette (15-bit RGB vs 9-bit RGB) and number of subpalettes (8+8 on SNES, 4 total on Genesis -but universal for sprites and BG). The PC engine has double the subpalettes of the SNES, but the same limiting master palette as the Genesis. (and ST)

The Jaguar (along with contemporary systems, albeit weaker in 2D specific capabilities) are certainly a noticable step up from even SNES (granted games liek DKC did a great jop of optimizing the 16-color tilemapped graphics on SNES). SNES had a pretty low resolution, still only 256x224/239. (with the exception of a seldom used mode supporting 512 width and interlaced display -but with significant limitations in terms of color, felexibility, and number of layers)

Although, a few 2D games ont he 5th gen consoles were 256 color, along with others using highcolor modes.

 

The SNES always used 256 colour graphics, Mode 7 is just a technical piece of hardware for scaling and rotating the plane a la F-zero (which is rubbish compared to real 3D into the screen sprite scaling of Lotus II on Amiga...which the SNES couldn't even do as well as an ST version of Lotus II)

 

And 256 colour graphics are inferior to 1000s of colours of the Jaguar BUT as far as games players plugging in their machines via RF to play some games like SF2...well 256 colours was enough in the early 90s and an improvement in the Genesis's 64 colour graphics. And that was my only point...256 colours is nice and simple on a PC due to byte/pixel layout which is super fast (try getting Doom to run that well on a 25mhz 020 compared to a 386DX25 PC ) but Commodore ballsed it up...not only was AGA a complete kludge...and pretty much just 2 extra registers to the original 6 register/6 bitplane chipset (blitter is the same, as is the sound) because they used a very messy 8 bitplane method to get 256 colours on screen. And it was at least 2 years too late.....AGA in an A500 replacement was required in Jan 91 not 1993 AND with a 24mhz 020 with FAST RAM. A total mess and basically a desperate attempt to hold onto the reigns of the horse that had bolted from the stable a long long time ago.

 

Also AGA is pretty much just a 256 colour mode + original chipset. The copper is a little better but not going to make much difference, the dual playfield mode with two 16 colour screens was pitiful in 1993 compared to the Genesis and SNES of 2 years earlier with proper full colour parallax support on many levels. Extra half brite mode is extremely slow on the original chipset too....which is why very few games use it. And the HAM8 mode is just a by product of adding 2 extra bit planes for the base palette.

 

So in essence the AGA chipset did more for serious software, with 1280x512 + overscan possible in 256 colours. This was great for business software and desktop video but not much use for animators (25fps per second even in 640x512x256 is not really possible) or games programmers.

 

Sound was an urgent upgrade though, it was embarrassing putting the ST games next to the SID soundtracked C64 games...but still if that was the only change companies had to make and it was 4 channel not 2 channels then Atari could have easily said to the designers "you already have the 4 channel music/FX worked out for your Amiga version...so just put those in there for us"

Or go with a cheap FM chip similar to what PCs were using -ie Yamaha's OPL2. (you could go better with 4-op FM, but it'd be likely that it could be wasted and just used to approximate the OPL2's 2-op FM) You might be able to get by using the YM2149 for sample playback. (it was used better than PWM on a PC speaker for sure, and more comperable to the original soundblaster's 8-bit DAC) If not amiga, it would at least approximate PC standards.

 

If they put in the same kind of FM chip as the Megadrive/Genesis that would be interesting, but really...sampled sound was probably the way to go...remember twin DACs were in CD players in the early to mid 80s....so by 1988 they would cost peanuts...especially 8bit DACs. A 4 channel DAC would have meant no effort for EU software companies who already did the sound for the Amiga anyway. 6 channels would be ideal...4 for music 2 for effects...perfect.

 

 

Bullcrap. I was giving example of how I/O speed can be a bottleneck and CPU speed won't make any difference. I was speaking in general not about games and there's nothing wrong with games using a 16-color mode.

Fine, for non-game examples, but can you think of any VGA games that ran in 640x480x16 colors?

 

With 320x200x256 colors you can get 30 fps with a 2MB/s limit. (and isn't 16-bit ISA limited to 5.3 MB/s? -which would allow 320x240x256 color at 60 FPS easily -or even 72 Hz if supported)

...

You have lost your cool. You're now just Kitty. You need to go and measure the transfer rate of memory->VGA and not go by any theoretical/bullcrap derived from some speculative articles. Even with 16-bit ISA VGA cards, REP MOVSD gives about 2MBytes/second (as tested on Paradise VGA, ATI VGA, and a few others). Some even less and you have to target worst case scenario. Even a 320*200*256 (64K) at 60fps would mean 4MB/second. Yes, I'm talking 60Hz not 30fps which is not as good.

Yes, but how many games are going to be more likely limit by CPU speed than ISA bus bandwidth? (ther would be a lot of games running at or below 30 fps without high-end CPUs, especially when 3D games came in, you were lucky to get 15-20 fps on a new game with a mid-range 486 PC in the early 90s) And by the time faster CPUs were common, so was PCI.

 

There was massive improvements from early to last generation ISA VGA cards...with things like VRAM not DRAM onboard and compression techniques to get it through the faster 16bit overclocked ISA bus than ever before. Doom improving cards for ISA were BIG BUSINESS. The figures Atariski is measuring are for low end first generation VGA cards....they are not a bottleneck of the last generation of ISA in 486 PCs...I know because I had screamer running very smooth in 640x480x256 in DOS on my Dx4-100 with a very cool VRAM VGA card on ISA. At least 20fps probably more.

 

Yeah, the sick mentality of get rid of all previous work and start from scratch. C128 was one of the right moves by Commodore. Did you ever wonder what would have happened if they got rid of EGA compatibility in the first VGA cards?

 

Right move for who?

 

C128 user who wanted to spend 66% more on a computer to play games that would look and sound identical to a C64?

C128 user who wanted to run an old crusty OS like CP/M ?

C128 user who wanted bespoke 128 business software on an old 8bit CPU with 5 1/4" disks INSTEAD of an ST/Amiga?

 

Clearly the 128 was a huge mess (going by sales in total AND bespoke games and business software produced for 128 mode), so much silicon on the motherboard and only 33% of it usable at any one time depending what mode you were in...A MASSIVELY OVER ENGINEERED FAIL from a business point of view.

Edited December 22, 2009 by oky2000

[atariksi]

 

Bullcrap. I was giving example of how I/O speed can be a bottleneck and CPU speed won't make any difference. I was speaking in general not about games and there's nothing wrong with games using a 16-color mode.

Fine, for non-game examples, but can you think of any VGA games that ran in 640x480x16 colors?

...

http://www.classicdosgames.com/video/vga_high.html

 

There was massive improvements from early to last generation ISA VGA cards...with things like VRAM not DRAM onboard and compression techniques to get it through the faster 16bit overclocked ISA bus than ever before. Doom improving cards for ISA were BIG BUSINESS. The figures Atariski is measuring are for low end first generation VGA cards....they are not a bottleneck of the last generation of ISA in 486 PCs...I know because I had screamer running very smooth in 640x480x256 in DOS on my Dx4-100 with a very cool VRAM VGA card on ISA. At least 20fps probably more.

Name the video card that did 640*480*256 on ISA VGA card. I was speaking of 486-based systems doing 2MBytes/second tops using fastest instruction REP MOVSD. Compression would help but that's no longer a VGA standard and you aren't actually speeding up the ISA rate.

 

Clearly the 128 was a huge mess (going by sales in total AND bespoke games and business software produced for 128 mode), so much silicon on the motherboard and only 33% of it usable at any one time depending what mode you were in...A MASSIVELY OVER ENGINEERED FAIL from a business point of view.

 

From compatibility point of view, it was a good move to go from C64->C128.

[atariksi]

No, blitter is still better than doing it all in software. You have this misunderstanding that CPU speed alone can make up for lack of all other hardware. Let me give you an example-- 16-bit ISA VGA cards barely can muster 2MBytes/second using the fastest instructions REP MOVSD. Now even if you double the processer speed, you still won't get any faster. The I/O limit has been reached. So if you wanted to scroll a 640*480 screen in software, you have to update 150K for each frame or 150K*60 = 9MBytes/second so it's IMPOSSIBLE to do smooth scrolling on an ISA VGA in software regardless of how fast your CPU is.

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

...

You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

...

The reason I stated this is because someone asked the question why did PC sales never suffer from upgrades alienating customers but things like AGA and Falcon updates from Commodore and Atari DID? And my answer was simple...the PC does EVERYTHING in software, scrolling, blitting, parallax, hell even sound with that pathetic PC speaker but in this instance that doesn't help.

 

So...you have a 286 16mhz machine with a VGA card of some description.....3 years later you sell it and get a machine with a 486 and either EISA or Vesa Local Bus card.....that same crappy game you were playing on your 386 =

...

And my point is simple-- it's better for a bus upgrade than a CPU upgrade given CPUs are faster than buses (i.e., bottleneck is I/O to graphics card). To put it simply, I will take a 486-66Mhz w/VLB rather than a 486-75Mhz with ISA Bus. So the CPU upgrade won't smoothen your game as much as a bus upgrade. And there was no option to upgrade the I/O bus at the time we are talking. Amiga was stuck at 7.16Mhz, PC at ISA rate, ST to 8Mhz (assuming no wait states). Thus, a blitter would have been better since there's less overhead in doing block copying vs. processor doing it.

 

Nope the point is.

 

1. Any upgrade to your PC would improve VGA games (ISA was a legacy thing by 1992 onwards when VGA was supported by default..cards were VLB or PCI usually...and even on ISA not ALL ISA cards actually manage to hit the bandwidth limits because all they were was a simple video DAC and some slow slow memory for data image manipulation (by the card NOT the user)

 

2. ALL ST games previously produced would show SIGNIFICANT improvement when run on a 16mhz 68k....thereby circumventing the entire problem Atari had...which was the STFM was base spec and ALL the games were written to THAT spec ONLY. So the issue was..was the STE a waste of time? Yes as far as number of released games and improvement in ST games compared to Amiga games (benchmark at the time)

 

That is it really. And how this relates to the A8? Well HAD Warner bothered to improve the A8 chipset by 1983 it would have been tough because ALL games would need to be recoded in the new graphics modes provided...so same trap as Atari under Jack fell into....the difference is Jack had a choice...he COULD have gone the CPU boost route and not the bespoke 'force everyone to write seperate code' hardware upgrades on same CPU. It's all academic anyway now.

 

Yeah, but just CPU boost will NOT improve your graphics throughput. Only on games where the graphics is not the bottleneck. And when A8 repaints a text mode screen within a VBI or scrolls it or whatever to cause a repaint, the operation is not CPU intensive and another system mimicing it in software will find that graphics is the bottleneck.

[flashjazzcat]

This is a fascinating thread. It was pretty tough getting through the humungous quotes when reading them on a mobile browser, though. I think some of the more sprawling quotes could benefit from the magic of the elipsis...

[griz]

VGA *is* hardware though no? VGA could easily be added to any PC. I believe the PC did as well as it did largely because it was easily expanded. Imagine if we could have popped an Amiga-killing graphics card into an ST with just a screw driver?

 

Why the EGA bashing? It wasn't all that bad. Simcity and Flight Simulator was able to use the 640x350x16 graphics mode. This mode wasn't as common as 320x200x16 as it required your graphics card to be outfitted with extra memory. Still, even the 320x200x16 version of Monkey Island didn't look too out of place next to the ST version.

[marvio]

I don't think anyone here is really saying the Atari 520ST is a bad computer. One reason why the PC is successful is that it maintained backward compatibility throughout its history. Commodore, Atari, and Apple were notorious for switching from their 6502 based machines in favor of 68000 based machine. Granted it was a much better CPU, but could not execute 6502 code (directly). They could had gone for 65816 or another 16bit version of the 6502. It would have been more expensive for these companies to make more advance computers backward compatible with their 8-bit counterpart. Apple blundered with the IIGS. What is need is not just make the 6502 16bit, but keep improving the technology as did the 80x86. Keep improving speed, add floating point operation, manage more memory, multibus, etc. These companies would had also make audio & video chips with legacy support for the original modes.

 

I know some on here may say one Windows version has issues running stuff from with older versions, DOS, Linux, but that would be an OS/Microsoft issue, not a problem from the CPU. A Pentium 4 or Athlon can execute code written for the original 8088 at a bit faster speed now.

 

Like I said nothing to do with the fact a 486 has virtual 8088 units inside if required...it is simply down to ANY VGA game on a PC running better without a single change in line of code EVER when the owners of PC games upgraded from XT to AT to 486 to Pentium...ditto with ISA/EISA/11mhz ISA 16bit/VESA/PCI/AGP/PCI-E PC games and applications are not written in the same optimal 'trash the system' way as on the ST/Amiga in the 80s/90s. 65816 is a disaster waiting to happen...might as well flush all of Jack's money down the toilet. The 68k was the best CPU of 1985 for commercial mass market machines by a huge margin.

 

Ditto Apple didn't need 6502/Apple II compatibility with their Mac range...if you wanted that you bought the much slower IIgs model instead (although at least it was in colour!).

 

The only reason PCs took off is any old VGA game can run on any new PC via a compatible OS AND IT IS AUTOMATICALLY FASTER/SMOOTHER/MORE RESPONSIVE...this is something Atari and Commodore had no answer for because they went down the bespoke custom hardware route (Commodore had no choice Atari made a bad choice in the long term)....and software houses were reluctant to spend £10000s re-programming the game for a hand full of AGA or STE owners..end of story.

 

 

PC have to be compatible and therefore no code written direct to any specific video chipset because it is an open standard and 100s of companies make PCs. PC are not hardware backwards compatible in the same sense as STFM/STE or Playstation1 and PS2...they are backwards compatible because all they need to do is stick to the same CISC x86 architecture and keep legacy ASM opcodes. I'm sure DOS will happily install on a Quad Core....the x86 instructions are still there! No graphics chips to support, ISA/PCI/AGP are all incompatible BUT all graphics are written at a high level NOT at the ASM level like on an ST sync scroll or an Amiga bug being exploited. Piece of piss keeping PC compatibility....and now I hope you see why that is? Because there isn't anything to really keep on the motherboard unlike a PS2 which has ALL the PS1 custom GPU/CPU/SPU units on the motherboard at a massive cost to Sony.

 

 

 

I think it's kinda the opposite: The ST and the Amiga suffered from too little changes in the architecture and not too much. That's why many developers only developed for the stock machine and didn't consider any change at all and also never considered to use any kind of OS API. Also PCs don't do everything in software. In fact they do much more in hardware than Amiga/ST ever did. There's a GPU which has vertex shaders, pixel shaders etc. There's soundcards doing own mixing and there's network cards being half-intelligent. And then there are a lot of weirdo CPU extensions which are sometimes used, sometimes not.

 

No No we are talking circa 1990 (Amiga 500 peak sales era) to around 95 when there was no longer a Falcon/ST/Amiga in a shop to buy. Vertex shaders and GPUs came much much later (to combat the supremely superior and infinitely more elegant Playstation hardware...and so the cycle continued...wait half a decade and the PC will be better than Playstation 1...and it still continues with PS3) and even these are not coded to directly....you ask DirectX if ??? feature is present...and support it in your code...if not you don't. So kind of like a swanky IF ##### THEN ##### ELSE ##### certainly not hitting the metal is going on there today...only in the very first days of TNT/S3/3DFX & PC-VR which was over in a flash!

 

The point is ALL games of that era like Lotus III and Super Stardust and Street Fighter II etc etc are 100% software routines...so when you went from 486 to MMX to P2 processors with PCI/AGP motherboard upgrades in between ALL software was immediately improved WITH NO CHANGE IN A SINGLE LINE OF PC GAME CODE. There is no way the Amiga AGA programmers could compete...sure there was the STF then STE then 16mhz Mega STE...but did Street Fighter II run better each time you got the next best Atari? or Super Stardust? nope...you had to buy separately and specifically coded AGA/CD32 games or STE/Falcon specifically coded Atari games....if they existed...which they rarely did...so you were S.o.o.L. unlike PC SF2/Lotus III owners

 

If you were the boss of a software company with smart business plans...which platform would you throw in with? The one you only need to write one program for every owner of that class of machine to use EVER?...or one where you had to release 3 different versions all coded to specific hardware in a specific machine and on specific media like HD disks or CD-Roms? hmmmmm let me think.

 

Also the point I made was the Amiga having a faster CPU say a 12mhz 68000 in the A600 or A2000/1500 etc would have mode no difference to 90% of the games UNLESS they were recoded...there is no way to make a game using copper/blitter/agnus run 50% faster by inventing new chips because the game code is 100% frame locked to what the original chipset can do and doesn't even try to go faster...which is why a slow game like Xenon II on A1200 Amiga is just as crap and useless as on an A500 Amiga. Not the programmers' fault, not Commodore's fault. Atari though with the original ST could have followed in the steps of Apple and IBM with faster CPU and NO CUSTOM HARDWARE requiring games companies to throw loads of money at reprogramming games for a tiny userbase..bad business...so very few STE specific games exist to my knowledge....maybe single figures for commercial releases (Stardust being the only true STE game I can think of)

 

A8 has compatibility because Atari made sod all improvements to the crippling colour resolution compromises...it's not like they invented a new chip that did 16 colours in 160x200 anywhere on the screen or added improved sprites to the ageing PM graphics is it? Basically apart from some weird screen modes the Atari 800 and 130XE have the same features more or less. And the Commodore 128 would have been better off with NO C64 compatibility as far as native software goes.

 

 

 

The 640x480 comment doesn't make much sense inless you're taliking 16 colors...

...

You weren't being cool Koolkitty when you replied. Standard VGA has a 640*480*16 so the figure 150K reflects that. And the point was CPU speed won't help increase your frame rate given the ISA I/O limit for VGA. So a 50Mhz 486 w/VGA card (one common configuration at the time) still was stuck at updating 2Mbytes/second. Later the VLB/PCI buses came in to ramp up the I/O speed although ISA architecture (and speed) remains up to this day for some devices like keyboard (60h/64h), timers (40h..43h), gameport (201h), some integrated sound cards (220h..22fh), serial ports (3f8h..3ffh), floppy drives (3f0h..3f7h). They increased speed of VGA/parallel ports to PCI speeds (3c0..3df, 378h/278h).

You were talking games, which makes the 640x480x16 color mode moot.

With 320x200x256 colors you can get 30 fps with a 2MB/s limit. (and isn't 16-bit ISA limited to 5.3 MB/s? -which would allow 320x240x256 color at 60 FPS easily -or even 72 Hz if supported)

 

One point was that ST had to be cheaper to try to compete with what's out there. Even Mac didn't use a 10Mhz 68000. And if you are going to add the faster 68K later on, mine as well add the blitter. Software that did stuff based on cycle-exactness isn't going to work the same unless they know the processor speeds. It's not like Amiga where the Copper remains synched even with 68K upgrades.

That doesn't mean you can't offer both (or all 3, with 8, 10, and 12.5 MHz versions), and not necessarily at release either, but as updated standard. (eventually 16 MHz on the MEGA) With theis emphesized, softtware designers could cater to varying CPU speeds as well. (I personally think the sound and color capabilites were more important to upgrade to approximate/exceed VGA+Soundblaster standards -even a more modest enhancement like the TT shifter's 256 colors out of 4096 and up to 320x480x256 colors -though even a 320x240 or 320x200x256 indexed from 12-bit RGB could have been enough had it been standardized by '88, along with higher res 16-color modes, perhaps higher 4-color, and mono modes)

 

(4) Overloading keyboard with joysticks (nobody will ever use both!)

??? Flight sims perhaps? (unless that's sarcasm)

 

Spout specs all you like but the simple fact is little johnny playing Wing Commander on his 286 shelves the game because it is as slow and choppy as the CD32 version and then a year an a half later on his 486 with PCI or VESA local bus will see a massive improvement, ditto with Doom ditto with Zool 2....Ditto with Street Fighter II ..... capish? When you run A500 copy of Street Fighter II on an A4000 what is the improvement? None! When you run ST street Fighter II on an STE or Mega STE or TT or Falcon what is the improvement? None. Looks just as shit...plays just as shit. VGA was only important because it used 256 colour graphics, as opposed to EGA games which will always look worse than Amiga/ST/C64 versions....hence the significance of VGA being used from 89 onwards more and more....has nothing to do with ISA/PCI/AGP/VESA/EISA blah blah just means that games can be played with improvent forever. Formula One GP 2 by Microprose is a classic example...run it on a Pentium 166mmx...then run it 3 years later on a Pentium 3 1.2Ghz with AGP graphics...did Geoff Crammond have to update F1GP2's code for you to see the improvements? Nope. as it is already in 256 colour mode he has no need to.

Actually I think Wing Commander is a poor example, it's one of the few PC games that's very timing sensitive: not only does it play slowly with insufficent cpu resourse, but will play too fast on faster processors (I think 33~40 MHz being optimum -I don't think a 386 vs 486 would matter in terms of speed -thugh I'd immagine 486 framerate would be better, not positive though as I've only played the DOS version via DOSbox)

 

There was a later win9x re-release (with upgraded audio as well) which solved that problem though. (and the Amiga version should have been FAR better, it seems like they didn't make good use of the blitter if any at all, the Sega CD version used the graphics ASIC very well though, and even the SNES version managed to be less choppy somehow)

 

 

The reason I stated this is because someone asked the question why did PC sales never suffer from upgrades alienating customers but things like AGA and Falcon updates from Commodore and Atari DID? And my answer was simple...the PC does EVERYTHING in software, scrolling, blitting, parallax, hell even sound with that pathetic PC speaker but in this instance that doesn't help.

I think it's kinda the opposite: The ST and the Amiga suffered from too little changes in the architecture and not too much. That's why many developers only developed for the stock machine and didn't consider any change at all and also never considered to use any kind of OS API. Also PCs don't do everything in software. In fact they do much more in hardware than Amiga/ST ever did. There's a GPU which has vertex shaders, pixel shaders etc. There's soundcards doing own mixing and there's network cards being half-intelligent. And then there are a lot of weirdo CPU extensions which are sometimes used, sometimes not.

I agree, they needed to update the standards much sooner, AGA was far too late, and by then already behind XGA/SVGA, both needed to approximate or exceed VGA standards at or shorly after introduction (MCGA foreshadowed this), as above of couse. Sound on the Amiga was quite competitive with standards up to the early 90s, but ST needed an upgrade sooner. (even just an FM synth chip, maybe even offer a low-cost add-on using the midi port)

 

As for software rendering, he was speaking in context of games up to the mid 90s, before hardware accleration started becoming popular. (ie up through Quake and Tomb Raider on DOS) Everything was software rendered up to that point, entirely CPU dirven and usually adhering to 1987 VGA standards (occassonally exceeding that with 640x480x256 colors) and almost never rendering above 256 colors. (usually 320x200, 320x240, or less often 640x480, occasionally the odd 400x300 or 512x384 as well -Quake offered a wide range of resolution in various combinations of 320/360/640 widths and 200/240/350/400/480 heights along with 800x600, 848x480, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 even, though all in 256 color mode)

 

All good points by Kitty, who is getting my drift Atari launched basically a colour Mac, no blitter, no copper, nothing so they AND Apple had a future advantage over Commodore (who certainly weren't going to waste their investment with further investment to 18-24 month chipset improvement...which would require any game to be reprogrammed anyway so big problem with every successive wave of upgrades)

 

Had Atari chosen to go the CPU power route and not the blitter/twin DAC setup for the STE then people sitting at home who already had an ST would go 'wow look at the speed of Gauntlet 1 on that NEW 16mhz ST wow!!' and promptly buy one safe in the knowledge that their disk box was full of existing games that would benefit instantly. And NEW purchasers would never have to see the rubbish scrolling on Gauntlet 1 and so would buy the machine again because there would be 1000s of 'enhanced' games because ALL games suddenly become enhanced.

 

Do that a couple of times with upgrades in a 4 year period and the software houses will trust you in 1989ish when you install your 256 colour 320x200 chip in ALL machines....and with a massive program of trade-ins get some early adopters in very quickly to create artificially high initial demand (which the greed software company owners love to see and take the bait every time) and that would be the only hurdle you would have to face...just the once. Because for 2D games 256 colours IS enough...the Jaguar vs SNES slaughter proved that 256 colours is enough for a 2D arcade game SO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONLY TIME TO FORCE A HARDWARE SPECIFIC CHANGE TO THE ST DESIGN. Significantly PCs had 256 colour capability in the most elegant screen memory model possible byte/pixel in 1987...really...honestly...by 1988 Atari and Commodore should have had prototype 256 chunky pixel mode graphics chips for their replacement base model...because then at least you could turn round and say "well you've already done the 256 colour game engine designed and graphics drawn for PC so it's a small change in code' and remember by this stage we would be up to at least a 25mhz 020 in the ST...perfectly adequate to go head to head with a £1000+ 386DX 40mhz PC clone.

 

Sound was an urgent upgrade though, it was embarrassing putting the ST games next to the SID soundtracked C64 games...but still if that was the only change companies had to make and it was 4 channel not 2 channels then Atari could have easily said to the designers "you already have the 4 channel music/FX worked out for your Amiga version...so just put those in there for us"

 

As for AGA well......it was too late.....but there was no way it would be cost effective in 1990 for sure. Remember Amiga was NOT developed in house...they paid for the tech. Unlike C64 dev costs which were basically 3 man years @ regular MOS Technology employee salary rates...against millions to purchase the Amiga chipset. AND on top of that it would have to sell in huge numbers to get the software houses to write TWO versions of every game. Commodore should have bought EVERYONE at Amiga Computers not just the chipset, the deal should have been done for ongoing R&D for at least 10 years AND get the talented staff already at Commodore involved with the 3 man super team of RJ Mical Dave Needle and Jay Miner. For heaven's sake they drew out the Lynx custom chip design on a napkin!!! These are the people you wanted...sod a one off chipset purchase you wanted to employ the brains who came up with the advanced tech ALL THE TIME.

 

And one final note...even on your $500 shiny new all conquering 3D card in the shopping basket....it's never ever coded to directly...this is why even on 3D games....when you bought Crysis and it ran @ 15fps on....new card swapped out later and it is running 60fps with zero code modified. DirectX and before that OpenGL sorted out all the bit mashing between the programmer and the actual silicon on the card plugged into a multitude of bus interfaces. Remember Voodoo/PC VR/Matrox? well they all HAD to be coded for directly....and a different version for each...guess how long that little war survived on the PC 'don't touch my hardware in ASM you filthy programmer' world? Exactly...within 2 years it was all over and games were either OpenGL or DirectX and so never again was a specific line of code written for even 3D games You only talk to the Vertex shaders and other cool 3D hardware via the DirectX language...never directly at all...PC's like it that way and looking at 1990-2000 guess which was the better way of doing it?

I was scared to hit reply to your post! this is going to get nested quote crazy!!

 

But I just had to correct a couple of things...

 

I mostly agree with you, but there are some specific points that just aren't as accurate..

 

The MAC's were better/faster then the IIGS? I would contest that to my grave!!! In fact, even the stock IIGS, was a far superior machine to the original MAC, both in speed (in most cases) and definitely in capability.

 

 

 

Wait a decade and PC's will match whatever console's?

 

Uhh, DooD! Pass it around man, whatever you're smoking is the good stuff!! ha! It's quite the opposite, PC's always have lead the way on hardware, and still do, in 94 we had The Voodoo, when PS1 was still putting out ugly non fitered polygons, just one Nvidia GX280 card has more processing power then a whole PS3, and you can have up to 4 of them on your computer and then your CPU!

In fact, there's no way a console can keep up, if you think about it, it has to last at least 3 years; Maybe, just maybe the few first months it ocmes out it can just eek out in front of the PC hardware..

Of course I'm talking purely about horse power here, what you do with that is a completely different matter, a console can do a lot more with a lot less then a PC Although even that is changing with these latest consoles...

 

AS a last note...

 

It's kinda hard to compare/contrast commodore/atari to the PC's; The mentalities were completely different, and it's something that Apple has not learnt to this day... Atari and Commodore were in the business of selling machines, the actual computers themselves, so of course they tried their best to make them not tooo compatible between models, they had to be different to sell; When Mr. Gates had his stroke of genius, and let's face it, hate him as much as you want but the dude had one of the biggest business insights of the century, of making software and not hardware the main focus, helping IBM pick out the most ordinary and "standard" of machines to run "his" code (did yo know that IBM thoguht of using the 68k for a CPU? Gates was the one who pushed them to the 8088) the old companies were caught with their pants down, they couldn't shift their business model that fast. Even Apple almost went under, and I still wonder why it didn't altogether, just like the other companies, because I said, to this day they are still trying to sell machines..

So, that is to say, what happened just at that time was completely unprecedented, and nobody really knew which way it was gonna go, well, now we know, but hindsight, as they say...

[PeteD]

wow a 9 "page-down" post. I'm going to start charging for my time to read this thread

 

 

Pete

[+wood_jl]

Why the EGA bashing? It wasn't all that bad. Simcity and Flight Simulator was able to use the 640x350x16 graphics mode. This mode wasn't as common as 320x200x16 as it required your graphics card to be outfitted with extra memory. Still, even the 320x200x16 version of Monkey Island didn't look too out of place next to the ST version.

 

I agree about EGA bashing. My first VGA card was "ATI VGA Wonder +" (or something like that) and it had *both* EGA and VGA (did SVGA) ports on it. SVGA monitors were HUNDREDS of dollars back then - about 1990 - and I got a used IBM-brand EGA monitor for peanuts and ran this while I was saving up for SVGA monitor. I was impressed with EGA, having just come from 1040ST. The ST was *closer* to CGA in graphics; ST was superior to CGA - I'm just saying it was closer to CGA than EGA if you have to make the comparison. The 640x350x16 was pretty cool after 640x400xmonochrome.

[+wood_jl]

Uhh, DooD! Pass it around man, whatever you're smoking is the good stuff!! ha! It's quite the opposite, PC's always have lead the way on hardware, and still do, in 94 we had The Voodoo, when PS1 was still putting out ugly non fitered polygons just one Nvidia GX280 card has more processing power then a whole PS3, and you can have up to 4 of them on your computer and then your CPU!

Yeah, in a theoretical sense. In a realistic sense, you have to factor in cost and software. For the cost (and the time period), the PS1 had fantastic graphics. I don't look back on older systems (consoles and computers) and consider their graphics "ugly."

 

How much would 4 of those Nvidia cards cost, or a whole system with them?

 

A PS3 or Xbox 360 on a big 1080p screen looks awesome. Who cares what the specs are?

 

In fact, there's no way a console can keep up, if you think about it, it has to last at least 3 years; Maybe, just maybe the few first months it ocmes out it can just eek out in front of the PC hardware..

Of course I'm talking purely about horse power here, what you do with that is a completely different matter, a console can do a lot more with a lot less then a PC Although even that is changing with these latest consoles...

 

I think all the consoles are over 3 years old now. All have awesome new games coming out. All play 3-year old games too. All look awesome at 1080p on fancy TV (leaving the Wii out).

 

Only way they're inadequate is if you're a "spec guy." A spec guy would not enjoy Halo on the original Xbox because it "was only 640x480" even though it looked and played great. A spec guy will tell you the MP3 you're listening to (which happens to sound great if its done right) sucks because it's "lossy" compression. Ditto for jpeg, and ditto for any compressed video - which means pretty much all video nowdays. A spec guy would have you believe that most things that look good and sound good to you actually suck, and that you're not qualified to judge what looks and sound good....only go with specs. Seen this type of person a few times, I'm sure we all have......