Atari 8bit is superior to the ST

[atarian63]

What we need for these threads is Top Trumps cards and the arguments should be decided with those.

 

 

Pete

 

I think its hilarious how the ST fails so utterly against the Amiga that its reduced to fighting with the Amigas little brother (and only just holding its own.)

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.Amiag is the big brother to the A8 in a hardware sense. too bad for the awful commodore part of it.

[atarian63]

vcsdream and atariksi have been banned from this topic.

 

Everyone else, please be civil, okay?

 

..Al

I think it's not enough because vcsdream should be banned permanently. Why ? Because he is a little cheater. You see vcsdream = frenchman. Yeap, I'm 99% sure that he is our old "uber brainiac" who used to amuse us to death with his "deep knowledge" and "logical thinking". First he compromised himself many times, next got timely banned and after that cowardly registered again under a false nickname. And he surely thinks he is sooooo smart. The new nickname hasn't changed his mentality and he still trolls around here, therefore another ban. Well, only Albert can check both IP addresses to be 100% sure. I don't know if Albert allows such dirty tricks here, but most admins hate being bamboozled like this by such half-smart dickheads and they usually ban them for good.

vcsdream and frenchman have each posted images under the same Photobucket account:

 

frenchman in this thread he started -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/P1010027.jpg

 

vcsdream in this thread (where he references 'his' Master Gear converter) -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/SegaGameGear.jpg

 

 

 

Yep, there is more of this, since he was stupid enough to leave traces all over this site. Pretty soon he will reincarnate under another false nickname, so we should be looking for an imbecile among new members.

We already have you for that title. His post seem to be much different and a different style to me.

[atarian63]

All this ST talk has me ecited about ST's again. Blitz cables! Forgot all about those. what a handy device!

[dwhyte]

All this ST talk has me ecited about ST's again. Blitz cables! Forgot all about those. what a handy device!

 

I never had the pleasure of using a Blitz Cable on the ST. My backups were always done through a Discovery Cartridge...

[Lazarus]

I think it’s hilarious how the ST fails so utterly against the Amiga that it’s reduced to fighting with the Amiga’s little brother (and only just holding it’s own.)

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.Amiag is the big brother to the A8 in a hardware sense. too bad for the awful commodore part of it.

Wrong. The ST has nothing in common with the C64.

[kool kitty89]

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.

Hey, off topic, but I found a C64 game with music I think you'll actually like. (but skip to 0:21)

 

Wrong. The ST has nothing in common with the C64.

You mean other than being championed by Jack Tramiel? (Power without the Price)

[ijor]

Which computer could produce the most reliable backup (could copy something the other couldn't): An A8 with a 1050/810 enhanced with a Happy/Super Archiver/etc or an ST with a PC551 and a Happy Discovery Cartridge? Or is this question moot?

EDIT: I'm referring to backing-up a 5 1/4" copy protected A8 disk.

 

In theory, and for most cases, the Discovery Cartridge could backup more protections and more reliably. And this is not just comparing with the 1050 Happy or Super Archiver/Bit Writer, but actually comparing with anything else (at least publicly available) for any personal computer, until "modern days".

 

I am saying in theory, because the Discovery Cartridge software didn't include support for A8 disk. Without specific software, backups were still possible to make, but not very reliably.

 

An additional problem was dealing with flippy sides. Some 5.25 ST drives couldn't, or weren't configured, for accessing the flippy side.

[carmel_andrews]

Speaking of the happy discovery cartridge (ST), I was thinking as to if that sort of thing was possible on an A8...i.e instead of hacking a mod into a 1050/810 you could hack it onto a cartridge or PBI/ECI device that way you don't have to open up your 1050/810)

 

I've got a feeling it could be done, After all CSS's 'Impossible' program (which apparently was the most advanced media copy program out there that can copy commercial games without the need of a modded disk or tape drive) allows you to copy over certain types of commercial disk and cassette games

[+rdemming]

Blitz cable and two matched speed drives on an ST was pretty darned good.

 

I've got the Blitz cable right now, and I can say its amazing. A very high percentage

of all my protected floppy disk based games have been backed up this way, and its F A S T.

 

Be careful with the Blitz cable. To make it correctly work you need to have identical drives as poobah already mentioned. If the drives are not close matching, you will get a faulty/unreadable copy and you will only notice that when testing the copy. You won't get an error message while copying.

With my drives, the copies it made were very unreliable and I returned quite a few unreadable PD disks to the PD library who used the Blitz cable to quickly make copies. So in the end it took them longer to make a copy.

 

So in my opinion, the Blitz cable should only be used to copy disks that can not be copied by other means. Or you should be 100% sure the two drives are matching and you need to verify the copy.

[Albert]

vcsdream and frenchman have each posted images under the same Photobucket account:

 

frenchman in this thread he started -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/P1010027.jpg

 

vcsdream in this thread (where he references 'his' Master Gear converter) -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/SegaGameGear.jpg

This is a good catch, thanks.

 

..Al

[Rybags]

"The Impossible" wasn't a media copy program, it's a memory dumper.

 

I'd hardly call it advanced, I used to copy some games using the exact technique it does, and you can do it with maybe 300 bytes of programming.

[oky2000]

What we need for these threads is Top Trumps cards and the arguments should be decided with those.

 

 

Pete

 

I think it’s hilarious how the ST fails so utterly against the Amiga that it’s reduced to fighting with the Amiga’s little brother (and only just holding it’s own.)

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.Amiag is the big brother to the A8 in a hardware sense. too bad for the awful commodore part of it.

 

Technically incorrect in the extreme, and shows your ignorance in technical matters in this thread.

 

A8 is more like the 6502 Lynx/Handy given the CPU bus design with custom chips tacked on, the only similarity to the Amiga is the Copper, that's it really. Doesn't have anything like the audio flexibility, nothing like the blitter, nothing like the restrictions of two types of moveable objects (players and missiles as opposed to uniform sprites..the only comparable difference is to save you multiplexing them by having them of unlimited length but this is not a unique A8 ability) etc etc and the CPU is not at the mercy of Antic/GTIA in the A8 like the 68000 is with the Amiga. Also there is nothing like Slow/Fast/Chip RAM differences you find in the Amiga affecting overall computational speed of the CPU...if the chipset is busy the CPU will never get it's chance if you have no slow/fast ram.

 

The C64 with hardware scrolling, analogue synthesizer phase accumulator type soundchip, hardware sprites, 12bit addressing via VIC-II to main memory (technically 8+4 but still has bespoke DMA access to video ram in addition to standard bus lines) have nothing in common with the ST. The ST is like a 16bit Amstrad CPC, lots of usable colours(for the time) and high resolution matching almost anything else in mono, some psuedo vertical scrolling in hardware but no real pixel scroll, off the shelf sound chip, CPU doing everything else.

 

Personally, they should have got the Epyx Handy designers to do something with the A8, by modifying some of the Handy's custom hardware to increase on screen total unrestricted colours, improve sprites, and add more sound facilities. It already interfaces to the same CPU so I can't see any difficulty in making a home computer ASIC to improve the A8 using some of that research.

 

Glad my knowledge has cleared this up for everyone mislead by your post (as usual)

 

Also as a games machine IF the A8 is superior to the ST as YOU claim then the C64 is even further ahead given the only gaming advantage the A8 has over the C64 is an unusable 128/256 colour palette in resolutions acceptable to games (320x200/160x200). Not that I agree with that though, clearly there are many games neither the A8 or the C64 can do as well (Gauntlet 1, Starglider, Dungeon Master, The Pawn/Guild of Thieves, Virus, Backlash, Damocles etc)

[carmel_andrews]

"The Impossible" wasn't a media copy program, it's a memory dumper.

 

I'd hardly call it advanced, I used to copy some games using the exact technique it does, and you can do it with maybe 300 bytes of programming.

 

 

 

 

 

The Impossible was released about this time, becoming a best-seller. It was the first back-up tool that made backing up protected programs on unmodified disk drives possible.

 

 

back up tool, I guess that's another way of saying a program to copy from one media to another media (hence media copy program)

 

taken from the following site (the original manufacturer/marketer)

 

http://nleaudio.com/css/products/history.htm

 

or the following AA thread

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/12076-atari-800-the-impossible-back-up-device/

[oky2000]

vcsdream and atariksi have been banned from this topic.

 

Everyone else, please be civil, okay?

 

..Al

I think it's not enough because vcsdream should be banned permanently. Why ? Because he is a little cheater. You see vcsdream = frenchman. Yeap, I'm 99% sure that he is our old "uber brainiac" who used to amuse us to death with his "deep knowledge" and "logical thinking". First he compromised himself many times, next got timely banned and after that cowardly registered again under a false nickname. And he surely thinks he is sooooo smart. The new nickname hasn't changed his mentality and he still trolls around here, therefore another ban. Well, only Albert can check both IP addresses to be 100% sure. I don't know if Albert allows such dirty tricks here, but most admins hate being bamboozled like this by such half-smart dickheads and they usually ban them for good.

vcsdream and frenchman have each posted images under the same Photobucket account:

 

frenchman in this thread he started -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/P1010027.jpg

 

vcsdream in this thread (where he references 'his' Master Gear converter) -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/SegaGameGear.jpg

 

 

 

Yep, there is more of this, since he was stupid enough to leave traces all over this site. Pretty soon he will reincarnate under another false nickname, so we should be looking for an imbecile among new members.

We already have you for that title. His post seem to be much different and a different style to me.

 

And yet he just happens to use the same photobucket account as someone else, yes I am sure this was just a coincidence and of the billions of images thrown up by Google this new member just happened to use one from a member here..... LOL

[dwhyte]

So in my opinion, the Blitz cable should only be used to copy disks that can not be copied by other means. Or you should be 100% sure the two drives are matching and you need to verify the copy.

 

IIRC, weren't the ReadySoft conversions of the old Don Bluth laser-disc arcade games something like six 1024k secters per track? Those were the only disks I could never back up with the Discovery. How successful were the Blitz cable with those?

 

The Happy Enhanced 1050 I had back-in-the-day couldn't back-up the newer Electronic Arts games to play on an unmodified 1050/810/whatever, maybe I didn't have the newest Happy software or something; can't remember for sure. But my Discovery and a PC551 could copy them fine, or so I was told...

Edited January 8, 2010 by dwhyte

[+DarkLord]

 

Be careful with the Blitz cable. To make it correctly work you need to have identical drives as poobah already mentioned. If the drives are not close matching, you will get a faulty/unreadable copy and you will only notice that when testing the copy. You won't get an error message while copying.

With my drives, the copies it made were very unreliable and I returned quite a few unreadable PD disks to the PD library who used the Blitz cable to quickly make copies. So in the end it took them longer to make a copy.

 

So in my opinion, the Blitz cable should only be used to copy disks that can not be copied by other means. Or you should be 100% sure the two drives are matching and you need to verify the copy.

 

Wow, sorry you had such problems with it. For me, it worked(s) like a charm. I can only

remember a small handful of titles it wouldn't copy. By far, the majorities of titles

I tried worked first time. I did have to redo a very small number - and they would

work on the 2nd attempt. I usually attributed this to bad media. The only titles it

failed on with more than 3 tries, were titles that I later found out everyone had some

problems with.

 

BTW, who doesn't make sure a copy works first?

 

Thanks.

[ijor]

Be careful with the Blitz cable...

 

I agree. Sometime ago I wrote a post (probably in the ST sub-forum) describing the details about "why should try to avoid those cables, if possible".

 

Short story is that analog copiers, like the Blitz, are very convenient. They are fast, simple, and work with almost any protection, format, encoding, etc. But they are not very reliable. The reason for both being convenient and not so reliable, is that it works almost the same as dubbing an audio tape.

 

IIRC, weren't the ReadySoft conversions of the old Don Bluth laser-disc arcade games something like six 1024k secters per track? Those were the only disks I could never back up with the Discovery.

 

The Discovery Cartridge software had some bugs, quirks and limitations (far and beyond the hardware limitations) that were never updated. ReadySoft disks were troublesome indeed for the cartridge. Not because of the sector size though, that wasn't a problem whatsoever

 

The Happy Enhanced 1050 I had back-in-the-day couldn't back-up the newer Electronic Arts games to play on an unmodified 1050/810/whatever,...

 

That is correct, AFAIR the only A8 hardware that could copy those disks was the Bit Writer (Super Archiver add-on).

[uglyclone]

I personally have gotten more enjoyment out of my ST than i have over my A8. I've owned my fair share of A8 games and systems including a 400, 600 and an 800XL and a decent collection of games which I have mainly sold off over the last year. There is just something special about the ST to me. I started out with a purchase of an Atari 520ST and ended up purchasing an 1040STfm. I enjoy the games I have (llamatron, superfly, and znax get a lot of play)but mainly I love the ST line for it's music and art programs. The midi capabilities and programs/trackers are very impressive to me and I love drawing in pixel programs such as Degas and Neochrome.

[+poobah]

Short story is that analog copiers, like the Blitz, are very convenient. They are fast, simple, and work with almost any protection, format, encoding, etc. But they are not very reliable. The reason for both being convenient and not so reliable, is that it works almost the same as dubbing an audio tape.

 

Absolutely correct, aside from the reliability issue.

 

One can quite reliably make good 1st generation copies, I do agree that there is potentially considerable generational loss, but one should NOT use these cables to make copies of copies.

 

The key is having speed matched drives, and a good cable.

[Lazarus]

The C64 with hardware scrolling, analogue synthesizer phase accumulator type soundchip, hardware sprites, 12bit addressing via VIC-II to main memory (technically 8+4 but still has bespoke DMA access to video ram in addition to standard bus lines) have nothing in common with the ST. The ST is like a 16bit Amstrad CPC, lots of usable colours(for the time) and high resolution matching almost anything else in mono, some psuedo vertical scrolling in hardware but no real pixel scroll, off the shelf sound chip, CPU doing everything else.

Exactly. While there are a few similarities between Amiga and A8, there is absolutely no similarity between the ST and the C64. ST is more like "Amiga light with MIDI".

[+rdemming]

I agree. Sometime ago I wrote a post (probably in the ST sub-forum) describing the details about "why should try to avoid those cables, if possible".

 

Short story is that analog copiers, like the Blitz, are very convenient. They are fast, simple, and work with almost any protection, format, encoding, etc. But they are not very reliable. The reason for both being convenient and not so reliable, is that it works almost the same as dubbing an audio tape.

 

I believe this thread is what you are mentioning too.

IIRC the Blitz cable connects the data out signal of the source drive directly to the data in signal of the destination drive. Thus the data bypasses the floppy controller altogether. Indeed more like duplicating audio tapes. Thus using non matching drives (slightly different speeds) is causing the pattern written to be condensed or expanded. Which will only get worse when you make a copy of a copy. When this is too much the bit rate will be out of specs and the disk can't be read.

 

Robert

[flashjazzcat]

I personally have gotten more enjoyment out of my ST than i have over my A8. I've owned my fair share of A8 games and systems including a 400, 600 and an 800XL and a decent collection of games which I have mainly sold off over the last year. There is just something special about the ST to me. I started out with a purchase of an Atari 520ST and ended up purchasing an 1040STfm. I enjoy the games I have (llamatron, superfly, and znax get a lot of play)but mainly I love the ST line for it's music and art programs. The midi capabilities and programs/trackers are very impressive to me and I love drawing in pixel programs such as Degas and Neochrome.

I think it was pure timing which kept me alienated from the ST. I would have LOVED one in the nineties, but I never had the cash and ended up totally entrenched in all things A8. The ST would have been more practical for virtually everything I wanted to do: large scale word processing, DTP, C programming, etc. But an indefatigable spirit made me solider on with the 8-bit and consequently form a relationship with and odd loyalty to that hardware which survives to this day. Moreover, the 8-bit is more dramatically different to our everyday, mordern computing plaforms than the ST. The ST blurs the boundaries a bit: I kind of think if I'm word processing using 1st Word Plus I might as well go the whole hog and fire up MS Word on the PC. The A8 is a totally different world: it makes the journey from the PC and back again more significant for me. However - I've not really touched either of my STs much yet: who knows what will happen when I get into them properly.

[atarian63]

vcsdream and atariksi have been banned from this topic.

 

Everyone else, please be civil, okay?

 

..Al

I think it's not enough because vcsdream should be banned permanently. Why ? Because he is a little cheater. You see vcsdream = frenchman. Yeap, I'm 99% sure that he is our old "uber brainiac" who used to amuse us to death with his "deep knowledge" and "logical thinking". First he compromised himself many times, next got timely banned and after that cowardly registered again under a false nickname. And he surely thinks he is sooooo smart. The new nickname hasn't changed his mentality and he still trolls around here, therefore another ban. Well, only Albert can check both IP addresses to be 100% sure. I don't know if Albert allows such dirty tricks here, but most admins hate being bamboozled like this by such half-smart dickheads and they usually ban them for good.

vcsdream and frenchman have each posted images under the same Photobucket account:

 

frenchman in this thread he started -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/P1010027.jpg

 

vcsdream in this thread (where he references 'his' Master Gear converter) -

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/voltageman321/SegaGameGear.jpg

 

 

 

Yep, there is more of this, since he was stupid enough to leave traces all over this site. Pretty soon he will reincarnate under another false nickname, so we should be looking for an imbecile among new members.

We already have you for that title. His post seem to be much different and a different style to me.

 

And yet he just happens to use the same photobucket account as someone else, yes I am sure this was just a coincidence and of the billions of images thrown up by Google this new member just happened to use one from a member here..... LOL

even if it were so and it's probably not. I think you just dont like the guy as he has a differenet and usually correct opinion.

[atarian63]

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.

Hey, off topic, but I found a C64 game with music I think you'll actually like. (but skip to 0:21)

 

Wrong. The ST has nothing in common with the C64.

You mean other than being championed by Jack Tramiel? (Power without the Price)

Thanks! you are right that sound is alot nicer, kind of a cross between pokey and NES.

[atarian63]

What we need for these threads is Top Trumps cards and the arguments should be decided with those.

 

 

Pete

 

I think it’s hilarious how the ST fails so utterly against the Amiga that it’s reduced to fighting with the Amiga’s little brother (and only just holding it’s own.)

Technically it's little brother is the C64 which it is very superior to.Amiag is the big brother to the A8 in a hardware sense. too bad for the awful commodore part of it.

 

Technically incorrect in the extreme, and shows your ignorance in technical matters in this thread.

 

A8 is more like the 6502 Lynx/Handy given the CPU bus design with custom chips tacked on, the only similarity to the Amiga is the Copper, that's it really. Doesn't have anything like the audio flexibility, nothing like the blitter, nothing like the restrictions of two types of moveable objects (players and missiles as opposed to uniform sprites..the only comparable difference is to save you multiplexing them by having them of unlimited length but this is not a unique A8 ability) etc etc and the CPU is not at the mercy of Antic/GTIA in the A8 like the 68000 is with the Amiga. Also there is nothing like Slow/Fast/Chip RAM differences you find in the Amiga affecting overall computational speed of the CPU...if the chipset is busy the CPU will never get it's chance if you have no slow/fast ram.

 

The C64 with hardware scrolling, analogue synthesizer phase accumulator type soundchip, hardware sprites, 12bit addressing via VIC-II to main memory (technically 8+4 but still has bespoke DMA access to video ram in addition to standard bus lines) have nothing in common with the ST. The ST is like a 16bit Amstrad CPC, lots of usable colours(for the time) and high resolution matching almost anything else in mono, some psuedo vertical scrolling in hardware but no real pixel scroll, off the shelf sound chip, CPU doing everything else.

 

Personally, they should have got the Epyx Handy designers to do something with the A8, by modifying some of the Handy's custom hardware to increase on screen total unrestricted colours, improve sprites, and add more sound facilities. It already interfaces to the same CPU so I can't see any difficulty in making a home computer ASIC to improve the A8 using some of that research.

 

Glad my knowledge has cleared this up for everyone mislead by your post (as usual)

 

Also as a games machine IF the A8 is superior to the ST as YOU claim then the C64 is even further ahead given the only gaming advantage the A8 has over the C64 is an unusable 128/256 colour palette in resolutions acceptable to games (320x200/160x200). Not that I agree with that though, clearly there are many games neither the A8 or the C64 can do as well (Gauntlet 1, Starglider, Dungeon Master, The Pawn/Guild of Thieves, Virus, Backlash, Damocles etc)

Sorry, you appear to be the ignorant one on the technical side once again.

I was referring to the fact that A8 and amiga chipsets were designed by Jay Miner and the Amiga chipset it generally viewed as the evolution of the A8 (in the hardware sense ONLY) You know,graphics co processor etc. Things the ST and C64 both lacked and why they are more similar in that regard. Also Shiraz Shivji designed the ST and was an engineer at commodore(though not it;s designer)

ST was always my choice. Agin you seldom pay attention. You and Rocky have that in common.

As for C64 as a games machine, I think I have made it very clear here that I do not like it, it's games,it's sound and washed out colors or crappy non dos system. I collect most all game systems and arcade machines, however c64 never made the cut. A8 was always more to my liking.A8 at least had a real arcade sound chip. Pokey (usually dual) was used in many arcades from the classic period.

 

Do try harder,happy to help you here!