The Tramiels

[Stormtrooper of Death]

A list of computer i had in the past - in chronological order:

 

1) Atari 600 XL + Atari 48K (64) memory expansion with an XC-12 tape recorder

2) Atari 800XL + Original 1050 diskdrive and 1027 printer + Omnimom add-on

3) Atari 130XE + 1050 drive (with happy turbo) + Supermon add-on

4) Atari 1040STFM

5) Amiga 600

6) Amiga 1200

7) Intel 486DX2-66Mhz + 4 MB memory + 420 MB harddrive

Intel Pentium 133mhz

9) etc.etc.

 

I might buy a 2nd hand XL system. But no ST system.

 

Even when the Atari ST line had more computing power, i prefer the Atari 8bit because of :

 

Pokey has better sound as the Yamaha of the ST

The XL line has a better keyboard as the ST line

Hardware scrolling was on ATari 8bit, but not on the ST line

 

Concerning The Tramiels: In the 80s and early 90s, our group of Atari friends in Holland looked at Tramiel as if he was GOD. Simply. Also there was a demo-war between the Atari 8bit and C-64 scene going on. (also ST <> Amiga <> PC demo/game wars)

 

I had a very good contact with Atari Benelux (then based in Vianen/Utrecht). We got a lot of merchandise (like an original Atari Rainbow flag, Baseball caps with Atari logo, several golden Atari pins, etc.etc. for free, just because we were the Atari Club Eindhoven group in Holland.

 

I myselve had no complaints about Atari Benelux in those days.

 

OH, and did you know what i still think might be strange:

 

The Atari 8bit kids went on to buy an Amgiga and

The C-64 kids went on to buy an ATari-ST.

 

Many times, me and my friends said to eachother: Its like Atari and Amiga swapped seats.

Edited January 19, 2011 by Stormtrooper of Death

[kool kitty89]

Warner were clueless at selling computers.

 

Exactly, the 400,600xl,800,800xl,1200xl had the SAME (as far as for use in games is concerned) audio/video capabilities which were getting too long in the tooth once the 'bugs' of other machines were being found and the only advantage was which of the 256 colours you selected for your 4 colour games! Atari Warner made one chipset in Dec 79 and that's it....they did bugger all else and the 68000 workstations would have made the Amiga 1000 look as much of a bargain as the Sinclair machines were in 1982! lol

 

Atari however sold the wrong machine, the ST is a through and through 16bit replacement for the PET, probably what Shiraz was working on before he left. The ST is a better Mac than the Mac but for games....well the poor 68000 was getting hammered trying to soft scroll AND playback samples AND imitate a blitter chip. As soon as the ST RAM prices went up (and the ST back up to £399 from £299) at the same time as Commodore dropped the A500 from £499 to £399 it was game over for the ST really. The reality was Amiga games were 90% compromised with ST development first anyway but ho hum marketing and word of mouth and HAM scans of naked ladies got us all wanting Amigas

 

You could argue lots of other things too, like Atari missed both the higher end AND the lower end but catered more to the mid-range sector ... but then got undercut by the C64. Warner/AInc management missed out on a lot of stuff, Kassar's plan for an appliance computer was interesting, but not really good for the market (the Mac was pushed as such later on -much more so with the iMac over a decade later- but niche at that), they didn't understand the nature of the European market, missed out on a lot of opportunities to expand their market and establish a substantial long-term position on the market. (of course the mess on the vidoe game side of things ended up dragging down computers when they finally started to turn to the right direction)

You had things like the removal of the proposed Apple II style expansion ports for the 800, way too long delay for consolidated/cost cut models (especially catering to lesser FCC regs -let alone the fact that Europe didn't enforce that at all, especially the UK which needed no RF shielding at all in most cases), hell they could have had the A8 as a "real" desktop computer from the start, required a monitor and done away with the heavy shielding (as well as retaining flexible parallel expansion slots rather than just the RAM slots) to allow different cost/size trade-offs while leaving the 400 alone other than perhaps offering a model with 800 quality keyboard as the higher end home oriented machine (with the 800 the professional level one), then go forward from there with specific models modified to cater better to the EU market and with a modified market model to match (definitely have built-in BASIC and stronger support for cassettes off the bat), they could even have had an even lower-end derivative of the 400 that could have better countered the VIC and made an attractive (albeit more expensive) alternative to the super low-end sinclair machines. (they could have had a general purpose PBI like port on all lower end models to allow an external expansion interface for more 800 like capabilities -apart from simple RAM expansion, which could have used that same port or been done internally via cards or plain DIP sockets)

 

It might have even been smarter to focus on cost optimizing and supporting compatibility than bothering with the 64k upgrade and 1200 like form factor... assuming the 3rd and 4th controller ports (or especially the 2nd cart slot) went equally underused, those could have been dropped as long as marketing was done carefully enough to avoid panic/confusion (in that case, the earlier the better) but similarly push forward with sleeker, more cost effective replacements of the older models somewhat in like with the 600/800XL but perhaps as plain non bank switched 48k and 16k models with less conflict with older models and stronger competitive edge on the cost front (while retaining expandability -delaying 64k+ expansion until a fully compatible OS was ready, or maybe allowing 48k+RAM disk support more like the Apple II was offering)

 

It gets a bit confusing considering the different market tends for the US and Europe (the latter definitely important due to the huge longevity of the 8-bit market), but it's at least clear that the C64 was a major market hit, and the A8 wasn't too far off in overall capabilities or coat effectiveness if managed differently and supported better (supplying better development documentation for 3rd parties would have been critical), and even with a lacking cost advantage in some areas, a stronger lead from the earlier release would have been substantial. (plus low end models would have given middle ground from the weaker VIC -or even lower end sinclair stuff)

OTOH one smart move could have been buying/merging with a chip vendor to cut out the middle man as CBM had, of course they'd have to weigh the investment of that with the long-term benefits and relative production costs compared to the growing overseas market. As it was, they may have been able to get pretty nice deals from 3rd party vendors for their custom chips. (that and if there were any vendors on the smaller size range that would be reasonable to buy out, or one that they had a favorable business relationship with that could favor a merger -from what I understand they favored Synertek rather heavily as a vendor)

 

OTOH there were certainly areas where going too cheap could hurt things, and that's something the 400's keyboard impacted a fair bit (especially with no middle ground from the 400 to 800).

 

 

And then there's totally separate projects that they could have been pushing for, or true (compatible) successors to the A8. Given the projects that the Advanced tech div were working on, an enhanced A8 chipset wasn't among those new projects, but a number of true next generation 16-bit machines were (in several cases probably configured far too high-end for the early/mid 80s even on the workstation level, but the chipsets likely could have still catered to a more consumer to high-end business machine on a marketable level). That sort of stuff wouldn't have been mutually exclusive with supporting the lower-end consumer range A8 stuff either, or the video game stuff, so long as management had a level head for such things. (to many incompatible overlapping products would confuse things, but having ones dedicated to significantly different market sectors would not)

Of course, Atari Inc/Warner management were not in such a positive position at the time and even flip-flopped on several things (including supporting several of the AT division 16-bit machines before halting them -or maybe they weren't halted until Morgan started reorganization, I'm shaky on that part)

 

 

There was so much potential if they had the right management, they had the funding/revenue to pull of such a broad spectrum of projects too, especially if tempered as far as what projects were actually getting pushed at the retail level and what got capped or shelved at the research level (or turned into long-term follow-on projects in some cases where they were deemed to be of merit but not yet marketable).

Hell, Commodore had a lot of potential for that too, but they also ended up getting screwed management wise, and ironically having a mess of overlapping/conflicting projects on the market too. (they could have kept the VIC as the bottom barrel system rather than doing the C16 up until the C64 dropped to the low-end bracket and then discontinue the VIC completely, C128 could have been more like the later C65 with some Amiga derived features hacked in -or short of that just a more cost effective enhanced C64 sans the CP/M stuff but with added 80 column mode to the VICII -perhaps an expanded palette with added bitmap modes coupled with blitter acceleration- 2 MHz 6502 and an in-house OS with more CP/M like features, then the A1000 as their new high-end multipurpose business/graphics/sound workstation with a push to release a cut-down version as soon as possible -ie A500 in 1986 bit more expensive than in '87 obviously- and a more planned out iteration of the A2000 too with higher-end options for a double speed CPU, FPU, etc, that and pushing for tweaks to the OS for ease of use -or even a dedicated version for "average" users in addition to the more complex but feature rich professional version -or maybe not even push so hard for a cost-cut Amiga and push more for the C128 in that role instead)

 

Hell, it seems most of the platforms of the time were rather heavily hindered by bureaucratic red tape or mismangement as such (from IBM to Apple to Tandy to Atari to CBM -not sure if Acorn's problems were of that nature, seems like it simply may have been bad planning to push the Electron at all rather than a cost reduced full BBC Micro derivative with Electron type consolidation, Sinclair's misstep with the QL was also probably unrelated, not sure about Mattel or Coleco)

 

 

Jaguar killed Atari, just as CD32 killed Commodore. Had either of those companies invested in a usable £400-500 alternative in 1993 to the rubbish £1000 286 PCs being shoved in our faces AND embraced the internet and CD-ROM drives with open arms it would be Apple that died with their overpriced underpowered w*nk of the mid 90s

No, Jag didn't kill Atari and CD32 didn't kill CBM, they both got killed by prolonged internal management problems and related external issues from marketing to a myriad of other things for CBM starting in the mid 80s and for Atari Corp starting about the time Jack stepped down in late '88 (already transitioning out starting in '87).

It was up to poor business decisions on all accounts... the Amiga console idea wasn't bad, but the CD32 was a rather unfortunate implementation (as was the CDTV, a shame CBM hadn't pushed a stripped down cart-based Amiga derivative instead of the C64GS -and not made it Amiga compatible, but used the typical razor and blade licensed console market model -A C64 game system might have worked too, but would have needed to be out by '86 and probably more like a consolidated MAX machine in a console form factor).

 

You could argue Sam Tramiel killed Atari Corp, but the Jaguar argument falls apart as that too falls back to how Sam managed it and the very situation he contributed to putting Atari in by the time Jaguar was released in the first place. (and odd decisions like canceling the Lynx as well as the computers -the former made even less sense in terms of moving back to video games exclusively)

 

That's a scape goat, just like the 5200, ET, or Pac Man are for Atari Inc/the '83 crash, problems with those were symptoms of an underlying management issue and a much bigger issue in general (internal management as well as the horribly distorted/inflated demand figures from their broken distribution network -something not unique to Atari either, but regardless of that Atari held over 70% of the market share so when they started spiraling down, so did the market as a whole)

 

 

This had gone way past the main topic though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A list of computer i had in the past - in chronological order:

 

1) Atari 600 XL + Atari 48K (64) memory expansion with an XC-12 tape recorder

2) Atari 800XL + Original 1050 diskdrive and 1027 printer + Omnimom add-on

3) Atari 130XE + 1050 drive (with happy turbo) + Supermon add-on

4) Atari 1040STFM

5) Amiga 600

6) Amiga 1200

7) Intel 486DX2-66Mhz + 4 MB memory + 420 MB harddrive

Intel Pentium 133mhz

9) etc.etc.

 

I might buy a 2nd hand XL system. But no ST system.

 

Even when the Atari ST line had more computing power, i prefer the Atari 8bit because of :

 

Pokey has better sound as the Yamaha of the ST

The XL line has a better keyboard as the ST line

Hardware scrolling was on ATari 8bit, but not on the ST line

 

Concerning The Tramiels: In the 80s and early 90s, our group of Atari friends in Holland looked at Tramiel as if he was GOD. Simply. Also there was a demo-war between the Atari 8bit and C-64 scene going on. (also ST <> Amiga <> PC demo/game wars)

 

I had a very good contact with Atari Benelux (then based in Vianen/Utrecht). We got a lot of merchandise (like an original Atari Rainbow flag, Baseball caps with Atari logo, several golden Atari pins, etc.etc. for free, just because we were the Atari Club Eindhoven group in Holland.

 

I myselve had no complaints about Atari Benelux in those days.

 

OH, and did you know what i still think might be strange:

 

The Atari 8bit kids went on to buy an Amgiga and

The C-64 kids went on to buy an ATari-ST.

 

Many times, me and my friends said to eachother: Its like Atari and Amiga swapped seats.

 

That doesn't seem to be consistent though:

From Atariage alone you see tons of A8 people move on to ST, others to the Amiga, and the vast majority of mass market US C64 users probably moved onto PC (by sheer market share) or dropped computers for a while in general (went back to consoles) but probably eventually went PC in any case, and of course plenty of C64 users moving on to Amiga too. (especially in Europe)

 

In Europe, you've also got a ton of Spectrum (and to a lesser extent CPC) users who seemed to favor the ST as their next step up, though others seemed to go to the C64 in-between.

Edited January 19, 2011 by kool kitty89

[+wood_jl]

Warner were clueless at selling computers.

 

Exactly, the 400,600xl,800,800xl,1200xl had the SAME (as far as for use in games is concerned) audio/video capabilities which were getting too long in the tooth once the 'bugs' of other machines were being found and the only advantage was which of the 256 colours you selected for your 4 colour games! Atari Warner made one chipset in Dec 79 and that's it....

 

But what would have happened if they did change the A8 capabilities? Incompatibility? It would have been lampooned as "incompatible." It would have been the A8 answer to the Plus/4. What if they made it like the C128 and had it operate in a "new" mode and also be switchable to "old" mode? Would have been like the C128 - no software to support the "new" mode. As for the 4-color games, fortunately many games used tricks to put a few more on the screen.

 

Jaguar killed Atari, just as CD32 killed Commodore. Had either of those companies invested in a usable £400-500 alternative in 1993 to the rubbish £1000 286 PCs being shoved in our faces AND embraced the internet and CD-ROM drives with open arms it would be Apple that died with their overpriced underpowered w*nk of the mid 90s

 

I don't think anything could have stopped the PC juggernaut. Updates to the ST line (STe, MegaSTe, TT, Falcon) all came way to late, and incidentally none of them came even close to being the kind of value that the original 520ST/1040ST was. I have to wonder why they did not fully dive in to the PC marketplace hardcore. I mean, they already had some Atari PCs, and the specs on some like the Atari PC4 seem pretty cool for the time - why didn't they push these harder? They could have been like Dell.

[kool kitty89]

Warner were clueless at selling computers.

 

Exactly, the 400,600xl,800,800xl,1200xl had the SAME (as far as for use in games is concerned) audio/video capabilities which were getting too long in the tooth once the 'bugs' of other machines were being found and the only advantage was which of the 256 colours you selected for your 4 colour games! Atari Warner made one chipset in Dec 79 and that's it....

 

But what would have happened if they did change the A8 capabilities? Incompatibility? It would have been lampooned as "incompatible." It would have been the A8 answer to the Plus/4. What if they made it like the C128 and had it operate in a "new" mode and also be switchable to "old" mode? Would have been like the C128 - no software to support the "new" mode. As for the 4-color games, fortunately many games used tricks to put a few more on the screen.

Unless the A8 line had been handled differently from the start (or early-on at the very least), an upgraded version would have been a bit moot in any case, or backwards compatibility in general (especially if sacrificing capability/cost effectiveness through such).

 

I mean, had the A8 taken off like the C64, that could have been a different story... yes the Plus/4 (and C16) and C128 were confused overlapping products (the VIC could have stayed in the C16s role until the C64 got that cheap for that matter), but that doesn't mean a fully compatible successor to the C64 would have been a bad idea as such: the C65 was much more in the right direction but many years too late... had the C128 been more like the C64, that could have been interesting. (as I said above, it would have been really interesting to see a truely evolutionary and cost optimized C64 successor rather than the tacked on and inefficient 128, maybe not quite so much of a 1984/85 incarnation of the C65 -which would imply a direct infusion of some of the Amiga hardware- but maybe something a bit more modest like extending the VIC-II directly for 80 column text and true framebuffer bitmap modes -especially with an expanded palette and indexed colors -preferably RGB with approximation of the Y/C C64 palette through RGB as well -like the MSX2 and SMS did for the TMS9928 palette, but the plain 16 color palette using up to 4-bit pixels probably would have been OK too for the time) and add a blitter (maybe derived from the Amiga's to save cost, but maybe a cheaper/simpler distinct one -I think the C128's was the latter case), perhaps tweak sprites (more color registers might have been the simplest enhancement), dual SIDs, and add the 2 MHz CPU of the C128 as well. And be proactive on the OS side, rather than tacking on CP/M support, they could have invested in building a much improved in-house OS instead. (fixing the slow disk issues would have been a huge step as well, probably with the plain slow loader mode to offer 100% compatibility but optional fast loading for old software and default fast loading for new stuff -maybe use double-sided disks from the start as well)

That way they could have had the low-end/budget VIC (more of a niche but made a lot more sense to keep on the market than adding the C16), the mainstay C64, higher/mid-range C128/65 successor to the C64 with emphasis on both home and business use, and high-end/versatile business/graphics/multimedia full next generation Amiga in the top bracket. (as time goes on, the VIC gets dropped and the C64 falls to the budget range, the C128/65 becomes the mainstay mass-market home system, and the Amiga as the mid range system extending up from the lower-end A500 range up through comprehensive workstation class units) And it would probably be for the best if they'd omitted any 8-bit compatibility on the Amiga side of things as that would add unnecessary cost and potentially compromise the system in general. (they probably could have designed a reasonably cost effective C64 compatible 16-bit machine had it been designed from the ground up as such, but the Amiga was certainly NOT that machine... if CBM had stayed fully in-house, the best option for something like that probably would have been somewhat like the hypothetical C65/128 alternative above but instead of pushing a faster 6502 alone, relegating the 6502 to coprocessor and adding a 68000 to the main system along with the enhanced VIC-II/III -almost certainly RGB based in that case, preferably 12-bit but 9-bit would minimum- and perhaps not even bother with the higher res hardware text modes but instead just stick to added bitmap modes and blitter support -or maybe just scrolling+software blits- with software/blitter driven text stuff and rather than chucking in another SID perhaps add a DMA audio circuit instead -so you'd have an overall system something like a mix of Amiga/Apple IIGS/C64 and in some ways STe except probably all packed pixel if they were going to build on the VIC-II logic directly... so sort of like an STe with packed pixels more like the IIGS and C64 sprites backing things up -for games it might have been interesting to either enhance the old sprite/char modes too and/or allow the old modes to be used simultaneously with bitmap graphics -if they did extend the old modes, added palette flexibility would have been the most useful maybe simplest in using an indexed set of 16 colors from the master RGB palette to displace the old palette and thus use CRAM entries exactly as they were before, maybe tweak sprites a step further with 3 unique colors per multicolor sprite -old graphics logic would be more useful particularly for the case of no blitter and just scrolling and software blits on the bitmap layer)

 

Pretty much the same sort of thing if the A8 had been really popular, various routes to tiredly extend the architecture or potentially blend it into a full 16-bit machine. (even if they lacked the necessary engineers to smoothly evolve the original ANTIC/GTIA designs beyond further consolidation -ie actual extension with more color registers higher res modes and higher depth versions of existing modes- they could have reasonably efficiently tacked the old hardware onto a new design, especially with some sort of genlock -especially in the digital domain- to allow old graphics to be combined with new graphics, but it certainly would have been more cost effective if the old logic could have been directly evolved or at least partially reused to minimize wasted silicon and board space)

Hell, it might have been interesting if Apple had done that with the Apple II and Mac, especially since the Mac predated the IIgs... maybe the Apple II and Mac teams could have collaborated on a fully integrated Mac+Apple II compatible system that enhanced all of the advantages of the old systems and was designed with cost effectiveness in mind. (embedded ASIC for Apple II I/O, video, etc with 65C02 doing I/O coprocessing and maybe some other tasks like audio work -mixing and resampling to the DMA sound channel- preferably with the main bus shared with the 68k with interleaved bus sharing with 68k and video DMA priority -except in Apple II compatibility mode, have the VDC of the IIGS designed to facilitate direct support of the mono Mac video, enhanced color modes similar to IIGS, enhancements to the Mac OS progressively paralleling those of GSOS, and either a multisync RGB monitor or the video ASICs supporting sync boosting to allow everything to run at Mac sync rates -might require manual adjustment of overscan by the user when switching between modes or just have a bog boarder and possibly wrong aspect ratio when in Apple II mode -and any color modes using the 200 line resolution)

 

 

 

 

However, I think OKY was more talking abou breaking from the A8 line completely with new machines (which Atari Inc had plenty of options for with the numerous 16-bit chipsets and related OS developments tied to the Advanced Technology division, plus the Lorraine Chipset -until Amiga cheated them out of it... actually had they not been banking on the Lorraine/MICKY design they'd probably have put more emphasis on the in-house 16-bit designs -they got shelved in '83 during the start of reorganization iirc and the existence of the Amiga contract certainly would have contributed to lesser interest in the in-house stuff -why keep throwing out funds for internal R&D when you've got an ongoing external contracted product, especially when money was tight with financial trouble; hell if they'd never supported Amiga and goen a bit further with at least 1 of the in-house designs -especially the cheapest/most cost effective- Tramiel/TTL staff and engineers may have given more consideration in dropping the RBP designin favor of the ongoing Atari project -and by Curt and Marty's accounts, those chipsets and related Unix based OS developments would have kicked the Amiga's ass technically -though configuring it to be as cheap as the ST may have been more of a sticking point)

 

 

I don't think anything could have stopped the PC juggernaut. Updates to the ST line (STe, MegaSTe, TT, Falcon) all came way to late, and incidentally none of them came even close to being the kind of value that the original 520ST/1040ST was. I have to wonder why they did not fully dive in to the PC marketplace hardcore. I mean, they already had some Atari PCs, and the specs on some like the Atari PC4 seem pretty cool for the time - why didn't they push these harder? They could have been like Dell.

In the US, very true, by 1985 the PC/clone market was pretty much stuck though had others (especially CBM with the C64 on the market, Amiga, and plenty of funds as well as vertical integration -Atari had limited funds for advertising, Apple always pushed for a premium price though the IIGS wasn't as bad as some) very tactfully pushed competing products, things might have been far less straightforward, especially for things like clone/licensed production (things Atari and CBM both could have promoted to aid competition while still maintaining the defining standard of their lines -and CBM had vertical integration to help out for a while -eventually overseas mass production would overcome that unless perhaps they greatly expanded their infrastructure including strong investment in overseas production).

 

However, aside from the US you also had the European market where PCs didn't become truly dominant until the mid/late 90s and Atari and CBM both had hug potential to continues their established markets there, but both screwed up... CBM was consistently screwed up (but often doing OK in spite of that -still far below potential) from the mid 80s onward and Atari pushed through an adverse start with Warner's debt to a very strong late 80s position in Europe but that fell apart after Sam took over.

The potential for licensed production would have been important there too (especially once PCs really started coming in), but a lot of it was also due to internal management and evolution of the designs... both were rather funky in their expansion of the original systems, especially in regards to faster CPUs among other things. (Atari took too long to offer a more professional desktop system -and still lacked a proper workstation class version, CBM took just as long to bring out the low cost form factor A500, then again the CPU issues -the high end A2000 still had a plain 7 MHz CPU and no FPU support and they finally jumped to '030s but without corresponding shifts to fast 68ks on lower end models, they both waited too long to upgrade the graphics architecture -and Amiga's AGA was rather weak at that, the Amiga never did upgrade the Audio, etc, etc)

 

 

On the PC side, especially in the US, it definitely would have been smart to push into the clone market more (both sooner, harder, and longer) especially with some in-house vertical integration advantages from CBM. Hell, Atari Inc had been planning a semi-PC compatible machine prior to the split even. Marketing would have played a role too, but the sooner they started pushing that, the sooner they could get marketing positioned properly too. (CBM not so much as they were at least known for computers specifically by the masses in the mid 80s -Atari could have been if the A8 had been dramatically more popular )

Hell, Tandy could have been a really big player in the clone market and the T-1000 could have actually established a de-facto lower-end standard (better than CGA graphics, much cheaper than EGA and at least some sort of sound expansion years before any sound cards were offered), or IBM for that matter had the PC-Jr been configured more like the Tandy machines, but IBM screwed up there and Tandy screwed up by pretty much exclusively selling through Radio Shack rather than doing a full breadth of distribution. (let alone for potential separate add-on cards catering to the A/V standard -audio probably would have been simplest to support as an add-on card -both the PSG and the later DMA sound- though I think the video may have needed a BIOS replacement for full commonality -or maybe DOS drivers alone could have facilitated that so long as the card was installed properly -the Plantronics colorplus was almost identical to Tandy/PCJr video but I don't think there was any way for games on generic clones to use that card to play tandy games)

Though going back to the PCJr, given the pre-existence of EGA, it probably would have made more sense if IBM's "video gate array" graphics had been direct EGA derivatives (plus embedded CGA support) stripped down to the 200 line RGBI modes only for full EGB forward compatibility and still low cost. (maybe more silicon since the gate array apparently directly built onto CGA logic with direct 4-bit color modes and full indexed 2-bit color modes, but then again, they could have made EGA like that in the first place too rather than planar based -especially since it had to support CGA too -would have also been nice if 6-bit RGB indexign was available in the lower res modes...)

Edited January 21, 2011 by kool kitty89

[kool kitty89]

As for the 4-color games, fortunately many games used tricks to put a few more on the screen.

I totally overlooked this the first time around... yeah, the A8 hardly was lacking in sheer hardware capabilities, it simply had different trade-offs than the C64 (or other contemporaries), especially impressive considering it was a 1979 design (albeit with the interim CTIA omitting some things early on).

 

The only reason you didn't see lots of late gen highly competitive games was due to lack of popularity/market share, especially in Europe where the C64 hung on well after US development had largely died off in favor of console and PC games towards the end of the 80s. (to some extent Amiga/ST -but that would also have been far more lacking if not from the EU market -both software houses and the general EU market share enticing US developers to push some PC games as well)

 

It is a bit of a shame that the A8 didn't use lookup tables in main RAM or dedicated CRAM to make more use of the great color palette per scanline in character mode (or more flexibile use of the 5 playfield color registers in the 1-bpp character mode -ie 2 bits per cell to toggle through the added 4 colors rather than fixed to 2 only -even more potential with NTSC artifacts for 13 colors per line ), but as it was, it at least had the bit swapping in a 5th (or a 3rd in 2-color char mode iirc -I'm a bit sketchy on the 1-bpp char modes) alternate color on a per character basis and the extremely flexible DLIs and wide range of char and bitmap graphics modes. (you could change color registers on a per line basis triggered by ANTIC -rather than more bare bones raster interrupts- or change video modes entirely on a per line basis, modify sprite colors, or set the interval wider and use it on a veriable basis or strictly on a per character row basis -ie every 8 lines have an interrupt- tons of options)

 

Sprites were a weak point compared to contemporaries (and no TIA/TMS9918 type sprite clones iirc), but again you at least had per line color reloading and there's always soft sprites to supplement things. (albeit if you were using character graphics you'd probably manipulate such "sprites" on a per cell grid basis, so a bit choppy in movement unless you did additional animation or partial blitting for an intermediate character -for plain character manipulated objects you'd at least have the advantage of light CPU overhead and depending how smooth you pushed it, the partial blitting method could also be significantly less intensive than full bitmap mode framebuffer blits and retaining the 5 color per line advantage as well as lower memory usage over the framebuffer modes).

 

The very existence of linear framebuffer modes also allowed things that were impossible (or required hacks to approximate it) on purely character based platforms like the VIC, C64, TMS9918 based platforms, etc.

 

And then you had the flexibility of POKEY to go well beyond the plain square wave and noise generation it does by default using the timers to easily allow interrupt driven PWM as well as facilitating PCM playback on the fly (CPU time dependent obviously) without careful cycle counted code. (for static demos and such, cycle timed code would obviously be more efficient though and would also be neccessary if you were going to push 4 simultaneous PWM/PCM channels -or hack the GTIA keyclick channel for that matter, though that could have been used for fixed volume square/pulse modulation if the A8 had had another interval timer source independent of POKEY -like if it had used RIOT rather than PIA)

 

 

But yeah, the main thing was simply lack of popularity to drive developers to push competitive games late in the system's life... of course that was largely Warner's fault in screwing up marketing and development (in some cases) in different respects in both the US and Europe, and of course CBM's harsh competition making things even worse for Atari. (that's including the apparently weak support for 3rd party development -especially in terms of comprehensive hardware documentation)

[svenski]

I think there are several reasons why the 8-bit wasn't a big success but I'm not sure if backward compatibility would have been one of them.

 

The 800XL which *should* have been the main competitor against the C64 arrived late and many retailers had been aware of problems at Atari for some time, which probably didn't fill them with confidence and inspire them to place huge orders.

 

Jack had initially planned big things for the 800XL when he took over but then Atari ended up box dumping them and clearing out stock just as the 800XL had won computer of the year and Atari shifted the majority of their focus onto the ST. There was a claim by Atari UK that they were flying in 800XLs by the plane load to keep up with demand The opportunity was missed by the 800XL's late arrival, all the upheaval from the Warner sale and Atari not really pushing the 130 and 65XE.

 

Atari seemingly neglected their home market - they did this with both the ST and the 8-bit range. Maybe Jack was making too much money off the dollar / Pound / Mark exchange rates to be be too bothered about the US market where profit margins couldn't be inflated by currency market rates?

[kool kitty89]

I think there are several reasons why the 8-bit wasn't a big success but I'm not sure if backward compatibility would have been one of them.

I don't think it had anything to do with it at all... maybe I wasn't clear about that above. (as it was, A8 compatibility would have done nothing but dragged the ST -or any of AInc's own 16-bit machines- down or driven up cost... using one or 2 of the old ICs in the new design might have made sense for cost reasons, but that's a totally different subject from backwards compatibility)

 

Well, unless you take the XL backwards compatibility issues for 400/800 (OS issues, dropped controller ports, dropped 2nd cart port, etc -the latter 2 issues could have been mitigated by good marketing and it would have helped if the 400/800 themselves had had those features cut earlier on to lessen the shock... the 2nd cart port was a bit of a waste from the start on the 800 while the 4 joyports were a neat idea that only really proved less useful later on -albeit they might have gotten more use later on if retained)

 

The 800XL which *should* have been the main competitor against the C64 arrived late and many retailers had been aware of problems at Atari for some time, which probably didn't fill them with confidence and inspire them to place huge orders.

Yeah, except even if the 800XL had launch had been in '82 it would have been more expensive than the C64, and if Atari hadn't done any better in establishing a strong market position prior to that it still would have been tough. (albeit they did have a decent software US library by that point, but the question is if it would have continued growing enough to counter the C64's growth... and of course they'd failed to establish themselves in the critical EU marketplace, so the head start did almost nothing for them there)

The 600 (or 600XL) in '82 could have been substantial too though, more expensive than the VIC but far more useful and with a much stronger software lineup while being considerably cheaper than the C64 or 800XL (or 1200XL if the original 600 had launched alongside the 1200). Not releasing the 600 alongside the 1200 was probably a bad mistake.

I already addressed the earlier issues (potential to push the 800 more as a "real" computer closer to the Apple II's market position, keep the 400 -and perhaps an intermediate machine- in the lower-end/consumer range, rework the design for the EU market as well as repositioning the general market model used, and better 3rd party tools/documentation all around, especially in Europe -where such docs should have been offered free/bundled with the hardware standard, especially after it was obvious that competition was pushing that -CBM caught on rather quickly and worked hard to cater to the nuances of the EU market)

 

Tons of missed opportunities all around, layered though such that not only did they miss things early on (and different things in different markets), but the continually missed chances to redeem earlier mistakes.

 

 

Then again, other companies also missed a lot of major opportunities (often due to management/bureaucratic issues), IBM lost out in maintaining a strong position in the PC market they established in spite of some good innovation later on (the PS/2 was neat and especially OS/2, but it was too late to retake the market via proprietary means and they could have don better to embrace the nature of the clones rather than trying to fight it... same issue with the PCJr to some extent -and Tandy did it right other than limiting distribution to Radio Shack...), Apple could have pushed a low-end razor cut cost version of the Apple II that undercut the competition (Atari, Tandy, Commodore) yet retained full compatibility/functionality with the standard Apple II. (from a hardware design standpoint, the simplicity of the Apple II probably gave it the most potential as the US counterpart to what Sinclair managed with the Spectrum, especially given how popular and widely supported it was in spite of the huge price for weak capabilities -imagine if there was a bare bone 48k Apple II replacing TTL with custom ASICs, compact form factor with no internal expansion -external interface like the Laser 128- in a compact form factor in 1982 for around $300-400 and a 16k model for under $200, the latter in direct competition with the VIC 20's price -let alone investing in expanded infrastructure for broader mass production and further cost reduction through economies of scale, and of course that would have incited much stronger clone competition too )

 

 

 

Jack had initially planned big things for the 800XL when he took over but then Atari ended up box dumping them and clearing out stock just as the 800XL had won computer of the year and Atari shifted the majority of their focus onto the ST. There was a claim by Atari UK that they were flying in 800XLs by the plane load to keep up with demand The opportunity was missed by the 800XL's late arrival, all the upheaval from the Warner sale and Atari not really pushing the 130 and 65XE.

I've seen a fair number of claims that the only reason the 800XL got popular in Europe for a short time was that Atari Corp was dumping them at cost to help abate the debt in the short term, not sure if that's true though.

Again, AInc definitely missed out on the EU market in general by screwing up from the start, and in different ways than the US market too (or some of the same ways but with different distribution of importance), from not having cost-cut versions (especially given the much lesser RF shielding requirements -in the UK they didn't need any at all, in some others it could have been greatly reduced), and then there's the need for a strong emphasis on cassettes (built-in BASIC, perhaps pushing tighter prices on tape decks, and more tape software) and 3rd party (and homegrown) software support with pack-in hardware/programming documentation. hey should have pushed to make a single-board version of the 400 specific to the EU market (before the FCC regs changed in the US) and probably ditched the 800 entirely in favor of a low-end 400 (cheap keyboard) to a mid-range version with more RAM standard (32-48k) and an 800 quality keyboard and probably a monitor port. (thus having machines that would compete at the higher end of the low-end bracket offering better alternatives to the super-low-end ZX-80/81/Spectrum 16k and slightly later VIC as well as direct competition to the BBC Micro but with full compatibility with the low-end models on top of that and eventually transitioning over to the 32/48k/good keyboard machine as the mainstay model as it dropped in price and got further cost reductions with a price point and head start advantage over the C64 -and probably add a new range with expanded RAM as well-)

 

Hell, that could have paid off for the US market too as those earlier single-board slimmed down EU specific machines could have been spun off with minor modifications (namely added RF shielding) for the US market in response to the FCC's Class B category.

 

Though going back to what the 800 could have been from the start, if it had been a "pure" computer incarnation of the line, they could have goen for FCC Class A like some competition (like Apple II) with only a monitor port, single board design, and the apple-II like internal expansion slots (or the PBI route and only have RAM slots/sockets internally -or both, with a bulkier model with internal slots and a lower-end version with PBI, probably include PBI on the 400 as well). So they could have had better cost effectiveness and more features. (albeit that could have made a fairly narrow price gap from the 400 to the lower-end version of the 800 given the single-board design with no aluminum casting or RF modulator, but the 400 would be necessary for the common consumer end of the market with built-in RF and the cheap keyboard) Hell, maybe they could have had 16k in all 800s from the start. (and had the first 16k soldered straight to the board with the added 32k using cards or DIP sockets)

 

Actually, in the case of a shieldless incarnation of the 800 with just the PBI expansion interface, a single-board design even in 1979/1980 might have been able to be crammed into something close to the size of the 800XL or almost certainly 1200XL at the least. And if they HAD gone that route, it would have been easier to turn around and spin off a EU specific version rather than having to design a single-board machine after the fact. (they could have centered the entire EU line around the lower-end 800 incarnation with 1 cart slot, general purpose PBI expansion port, probably cut to 2 controller ports standard, and then split it into 2 versions, 1 at the bottom end with the 400's cheap keyboard and 16k standard+expansion and RF only, and mid-range version with monitor+RF and 16-48k configured models -perhaps remove any internal expansion entirely and have all RAM/etc expansion via the PBI alone and the internal 16/32/48k soldered in at the factory only -use a common motherboard with holes for up to 48k and only partially fill those on lower memory versions -probably smart to use that very same motherboard for the 400 incarnation to save cost with modular production and potential for factory installed 32k and 48k versions of the low-end 400 -and of course homebrew hacks soldering in DIP DRAM chips rather than buying the RAM module, or potentially even offering service center internal RAM upgrades via soldering, though in that case it might have been easier to opt for sockets for RAM chips)

 

 

 

Atari seemingly neglected their home market - they did this with both the ST and the 8-bit range. Maybe Jack was making too much money off the dollar / Pound / Mark exchange rates to be be too bothered about the US market where profit margins couldn't be inflated by currency market rates?

It was smart, the US market was getting pushed out by IBM and was also far more commercially driven (products far more sensitive to high-budget advertising than viral marketing), but as I mused on above and earlier, it seems Warner/AInc made the opposite mistake of focusing too much on the home market (and even screwed up a fair bit there) while neglecting to put real effort in properly catering to the massive potential in Europe. (for that matter they missed out on bringing the VCS to Japan when it mattered -who knows what might have been in the JP market if they'd localized -or licensed- the VCS even as late as 1980 or '81 -let alone '79 or earlier-)

 

 

Hell, Sam seemed to make the same mistake with the Jaguar (among many other things prior to that) by not putting enough effort into Europe... I mean the hype and US test market made sense to drum up US investors (like IBM) when Atari Corp was in a bad position (in fair part due to Sam's own management), but the problem was that after the fact with the full 1994 rollout they seemed to constantly overlook Europe resulting in severe shortages (at least by several anecdotal accounts).

It's crazy really: Atari had pretty much lost their place in the US market with no new home game console since the late 80s and the mediocre performance of the Lynx along with the niche market of the ST leaving the Atari brand name largely stuck in the 80s (so an "old" stigma) and they didn't have near the resources to push marketing to correct that image (let alone develop enough good 1st party games -and with shaky 3rd party support in the US, lots of sign-ons but that doesn't define commitment). The EU market had a much better position for Atari with a much stronger brand name and much more potential 3rd party development/publishing support (with some of the greatest developers in the world at the time) as well as generally catering far better to viral marketing (smaller countries, denser population, strong magazine culture in many cases, and the brand name to build on) which was all the more important with Atari's shaky financial situation (sort of like back in '85/86 except they had a lot more going on then rather than stripping down to 1 product). If the Jag was going to dig-in anywhere it would have been Europe, but Atari pretty much ruined any chance of that... and success in Europe would trickle down to making for a stronger (albeit almost certainly niche) market position in the US.

 

Canceling the Lynx and the Computers also probably hurt more than it helped... if they weren't selling enough to sustain marketing/distribution in the US (probably the computers more so than the Lynx), they could always have cut back to Europe alone (and it seems that the ST line -including the Falcon- was selling sustainably in 1992 in Europe as it was). Diversification is critical for stability, that's a good argument for the Atari PC stuff in the US as well, though they may have missed the boat on that too by '92. (they could have pushed the ST to Europe -other than perhaps a small/dedicated specialty niche market in the US and pushed more towards PCs alone for their US computer market.

Edited January 22, 2011 by kool kitty89

[atarian63]

I think there are several reasons why the 8-bit wasn't a big success but I'm not sure if backward compatibility would have been one of them.

 

The 800XL which *should* have been the main competitor against the C64 arrived late and many retailers had been aware of problems at Atari for some time, which probably didn't fill them with confidence and inspire them to place huge orders.

 

Jack had initially planned big things for the 800XL when he took over but then Atari ended up box dumping them and clearing out stock just as the 800XL had won computer of the year and Atari shifted the majority of their focus onto the ST. There was a claim by Atari UK that they were flying in 800XLs by the plane load to keep up with demand The opportunity was missed by the 800XL's late arrival, all the upheaval from the Warner sale and Atari not really pushing the 130 and 65XE.

 

Atari seemingly neglected their home market - they did this with both the ST and the 8-bit range. Maybe Jack was making too much money off the dollar / Pound / Mark exchange rates to be be too bothered about the US market where profit margins couldn't be inflated by currency market rates?

At the time the 800xl was released the c64 was not really much in the market,had little to no software but had one thing going for it that changed everything. 1st it was cheap,2nd major advertising. Amazing that anyone bought it at the time considering it's limited library compared to 2000+ for Atari and at least that much for Apple. Even the terible failure rate didnt stop it. Advertising and price are everything in the US market. Look at today,Xbox 360 a machine with the worst failure rate EVER! Still people buy it. Things never change...

[SoulBlazer]

Seems in every post you make, atarian you somehow manage to get in how much you hate the C64 and the XBox or XBox 360.

 

Fan boy much?

[kool kitty89]

At the time the 800xl was released the c64 was not really much in the market,had little to no software but had one thing going for it that changed everything. 1st it was cheap,2nd major advertising. Amazing that anyone bought it at the time considering it's limited library compared to 2000+ for Atari and at least that much for Apple. Even the terible failure rate didnt stop it. Advertising and price are everything in the US market. Look at today,Xbox 360 a machine with the worst failure rate EVER! Still people buy it. Things never change...

Yep, lots of other examples like the Macintosh, PC (also tying in to the IBM brand obviously), NES, Genesis, SNES, N64 (which did poorly in every other region), Playstation, Dreamcast (in spite of the 32x/Saturn/etc mess and also did poorly in other regions), PS2, Wii, etc. (PS3 got good hype and marketing, but the price ruined it -and the tougher programming environment didn't help the software side but the PS2 was many times worse on that front)

 

That's exactly why Atari Corp couldn't compete with strong market share on the mass market as such in the US but did well in a niche and did exceptionally well in the very different nature of the European market. (same reason the Jaguar might have had a better chance if they focused on Europe -Atari was in pretty bad shape by that point though)

 

In spite of the less than ideal early period of the A8's life, if Warner/Atari had gotten their act together by '82 to meet the C64 (let alone the short-term push the VIC got that disrupted the '82/83 market), they still probably could have pulled it off, Europe was another story though. (if they played their cards right there from '82 onward they might have had a chance to be a major player there too)

But instead you got the screw-ups with the 1200XL, lack of 600, delayed 800/600XL, and then the unfortunate halt on operations in late '83. (one of the few harmful things Morgan did at Atari vs the otherwise critically positive change in management)

[atarian63]

Seems in every post you make, atarian you somehow manage to get in how much you hate the C64 and the XBox or XBox 360.

 

Fan boy much?

Well, As you mention I dont like either, but facts are facts .. so I must ask you the same. Fanboy c64 and xbox 360?

These market occurances are interesting and make little to no sense,especially since they repeat.

These are the facts,sorry my statement doesnt fit your view.

[SoulBlazer]

Seems in every post you make, atarian you somehow manage to get in how much you hate the C64 and the XBox or XBox 360.

 

Fan boy much?

Well, As you mention I dont like either, but facts are facts .. so I must ask you the same. Fanboy c64 and xbox 360?

These market occurances are interesting and make little to no sense,especially since they repeat.

These are the facts,sorry my statement doesnt fit your view.

 

If you read my sig, you'll see I'm not a fan boy of anything. I don't care what the hell it is, I play it.

 

I should note also, in the intrest of full disclosure, that by the time I had a C128D in 1985 there were THOUSANDS of games out there. Might I have felt different if I was older and bought a C64 in 1982? Perhaps. That's why I never buy ANYTHING in the first year (or probaly two) that it comes out.

[atarian63]

At the time the 800xl was released the c64 was not really much in the market,had little to no software but had one thing going for it that changed everything. 1st it was cheap,2nd major advertising. Amazing that anyone bought it at the time considering it's limited library compared to 2000+ for Atari and at least that much for Apple. Even the terible failure rate didnt stop it. Advertising and price are everything in the US market. Look at today,Xbox 360 a machine with the worst failure rate EVER! Still people buy it. Things never change...

Yep, lots of other examples like the Macintosh, PC (also tying in to the IBM brand obviously), NES, Genesis, SNES, N64 (which did poorly in every other region), Playstation, Dreamcast (in spite of the 32x/Saturn/etc mess and also did poorly in other regions), PS2, Wii, etc. (PS3 got good hype and marketing, but the price ruined it -and the tougher programming environment didn't help the software side but the PS2 was many times worse on that front)

 

That's exactly why Atari Corp couldn't compete with strong market share on the mass market as such in the US but did well in a niche and did exceptionally well in the very different nature of the European market. (same reason the Jaguar might have had a better chance if they focused on Europe -Atari was in pretty bad shape by that point though)

 

In spite of the less than ideal early period of the A8's life, if Warner/Atari had gotten their act together by '82 to meet the C64 (let alone the short-term push the VIC got that disrupted the '82/83 market), they still probably could have pulled it off, Europe was another story though. (if they played their cards right there from '82 onward they might have had a chance to be a major player there too)

But instead you got the screw-ups with the 1200XL, lack of 600, delayed 800/600XL, and then the unfortunate halt on operations in late '83. (one of the few harmful things Morgan did at Atari vs the otherwise critically positive change in management)

Yes, you are correct, they couldnt make the magic in spite of having huge advantages,R&D,products,name recognition.

There really was nothing to "meet" on c64. It had no name recognition and little software. Had Atari done what Commodore did and saturate TV etc, it would have turned out much differently. They couldnt find their butts with both hands.

Seems the real key is one of 2 scenarios. The first is thye c64 one, make it cheap and advertise the heck out of it. Atari Inc made it cheap but didnt have the funds to market.

The other seems to be the Apple way. Make an expensive overpriced market and get people to think they are buying something "better" or "unique" , amazing what they have done,and at times for apple it has been true but NOT back in those days. Other than the expansion bus it was a truly inferior product. They had a niche though..schools and that was the key.

I am sure you have heard the old saying about IBM from back then..

Inferior

But

Marketable

[atarian63]

At the time the 800xl was released the c64 was not really much in the market,had little to no software but had one thing going for it that changed everything. 1st it was cheap,2nd major advertising. Amazing that anyone bought it at the time considering it's limited library compared to 2000+ for Atari and at least that much for Apple. Even the terible failure rate didnt stop it. Advertising and price are everything in the US market. Look at today,Xbox 360 a machine with the worst failure rate EVER! Still people buy it. Things never change...

Yep, lots of other examples like the Macintosh, PC (also tying in to the IBM brand obviously), NES, Genesis, SNES, N64 (which did poorly in every other region), Playstation, Dreamcast (in spite of the 32x/Saturn/etc mess and also did poorly in other regions), PS2, Wii, etc. (PS3 got good hype and marketing, but the price ruined it -and the tougher programming environment didn't help the software side but the PS2 was many times worse on that front)

 

That's exactly why Atari Corp couldn't compete with strong market share on the mass market as such in the US but did well in a niche and did exceptionally well in the very different nature of the European market. (same reason the Jaguar might have had a better chance if they focused on Europe -Atari was in pretty bad shape by that point though)

 

In spite of the less than ideal early period of the A8's life, if Warner/Atari had gotten their act together by '82 to meet the C64 (let alone the short-term push the VIC got that disrupted the '82/83 market), they still probably could have pulled it off, Europe was another story though. (if they played their cards right there from '82 onward they might have had a chance to be a major player there too)

But instead you got the screw-ups with the 1200XL, lack of 600, delayed 800/600XL, and then the unfortunate halt on operations in late '83. (one of the few harmful things Morgan did at Atari vs the otherwise critically positive change in management)

Yes, you are correct, they couldnt make the magic in spite of having huge advantages,R&D,products,name recognition.

There really was nothing to "meet" on c64.They were already ahead of most but Apple and were working on dethroning them. C64 had no name recognition and little software. Had Atari done what Commodore did and saturate TV etc (guilting parents into buying their kid a pc or their kid would be left behind ), it would have turned out much differently. They couldnt find their butts with both hands.

Seems the real key is one of 2 scenarios. The first is thye c64 one, make it cheap and advertise the heck out of it. Atari Inc made it cheap but didnt have the funds to market.

The other seems to be the Apple way. Make an expensive overpriced market and get people to think they are buying something "better" or "unique" , amazing what they have done,and at times for apple it has been true but NOT back in those days. Other than the expansion bus it was a truly inferior product. They had a niche though..schools and that was the key.

I am sure you have heard the old saying about IBM from back then..

Inferior

But

Marketable

[kool kitty89]

Yes, you are correct, they couldnt make the magic in spite of having huge advantages,R&D,products,name recognition.

There really was nothing to "meet" on c64. It had no name recognition and little software. Had Atari done what Commodore did and saturate TV etc, it would have turned out much differently. They couldnt find their butts with both hands.

Seems the real key is one of 2 scenarios. The first is thye c64 one, make it cheap and advertise the heck out of it. Atari Inc made it cheap but didnt have the funds to market.

The other seems to be the Apple way. Make an expensive overpriced market and get people to think they are buying something "better" or "unique" , amazing what they have done,and at times for apple it has been true but NOT back in those days. Other than the expansion bus it was a truly inferior product. They had a niche though..schools and that was the key.

I am sure you have heard the old saying about IBM from back then..

Inferior

But

Marketable

There was plenty to meet though, the marketing and the price point (and for the "techie" sorts there certainly was the hardware specs and the 64k of RAM... the 1200 XL hardly met that in price point).

For brand name recognition you had Commodore being pretty well known in the industry and Atari recognized as well, but far more strongly in the games industry (which would have some negative connotations to some -but given the C64's primary market area that would have been an asset).

They also needed to meet CBM in the software development side, 1st party was fine, but they weren't freely promoting 3rd party software... one among many problems. (at least they weren't actively discouraging 3rd party software like TI did with the 99/4, stupid, stupid, stupid -it's not a game console, the razor and blade market doesn't apply -and even there it shifted when hardware companies managed to successfully enforce licensed publishing with royalties as Nintendo heavily pushed) That was an even bigger problem in Europe.

 

Warner seemed far too focused on milking the VCS to put the full resources into marketing the A8... but then again both the VCS and computers suffered from various other management problems then just advertising. (both from Kassar and other issues on the Warner side -in several cases Kassar was forced to do things he was right to think were bad ideas too -like the ET license- though he was not the right man for the job in general, a shame they didn't recognize the problems back in '82 when they started manifesting and bring in someone like Morgan to fix things... let alone having a capable president/CEO from the start )

 

Jack's management was a good bit better in many ways, but Atari Corp didn't have the luxuries of funding and massive revenue that Warner/AInc squandered years earlier. (and when things were looking up with revenue high and debt totally gone, Jack stepped down and Sam's weaker management -among other things- tore things down)

 

 

 

In Europe it was a different story, I discussed this at length on AA before (and more so on Sega 16) with both anecdotal and some documented (magazine/newspaper article)... Atari had a pretty weak reputation in the early 80s, the A8 was overpriced, under-supported, mismarketed, and the VCS didn't have nearly the presence it did in the US.

Commodore OTOH made strides with the VIC 20 and quickly adapted to the needs of the market in general which became critical in the mid/late 80s when the C64 became mainstream. Sinclair led the way in several regards: for one it was the cheapest by far in a market where that was absolutely crucial (the low-end ZX8x machines and the very affordable though hardly initially cheap -as no substantial electronics were-), but more important than that was the pack-in software development tools promoting homegrown development that sparked a massive wave of software development in Europe. Atari lagged behind with weaker cassette support (carts were too expensive), no built-in BASIC (both for learning programming and for cassette use), expensive hardware, and slow proprietary tape drives for that matter. (less than 1/3 the speed of the Sinclair machines and while 2x as fast as the CBM computers that would change dramatically when fastloaders were implemented vs the A8 which was locked by hardware decoding -the baud rate could eb tweaked up to about 900 and then you'd have to use compression to do any better without a replacement tape interface -the hardware drive control on the A8 was a nice feature along with the stereo support with parallel audio track alongside data that could potentially have allowed software controlled analog tape soundtracks for games which contemporaries could not do -some games have user controlled tape soundtracks- so that could have been a neat feature if the A8 had caught on -Atari could have released upgraded casette drives too, like several 3rd parties did allowing many times faster loads -some even rivaling the Spectrum's common load speeds -3000 baud at "double speed" fairly similar to the CoCo)

 

The major issues were marketing (and related issues tied to understanding the nature of the market), price point (ties into the market issues), and software support.

 

 

They could have used something more like the 600 back in '80/81, but by the time the 600XL was out in '84, 16k was a joke and useless while the 800XL was OK, but both more expensive and visibly less capable than the C64 (or less well supported and thus perceived as weaker)

 

The Spectrum was the dominant home computer in the UK (and most of Europe for that matter) in the early to mid 80s and stayed popular up to the beginning of the 90s. (though was niche by then) By the time the C64 dropped in price enough to hit big in UK/Europe, any head start the A8 had from its US library was completely and totally gone (iirc it was around '84 and '85 is when it really pulled alongside the Spectrum in pure popularity and surpassing that quickly as it became more affordable -and with no other competition in sight other than the CPC with often better looking but choppier than spectrum games and a price between C64 and Spectrum... a direct successor to the Speccy might have been major but that didn't happen other than the 128k which just added more RAM and a sound chip -had it boosted graphics to something like the CoCo III -incidentally the same resolution as the speccy- and maybe went to a 6-8 MHz Z80 while still being cost competitive it could have been another story hell due to the hardware scrolling and identical sound chip that might have even pushed against the ST's market: a weaker CPU, 6-bit RGB, and 256x192 resolution, but still 16 colors and with hardware V/H scrolling meaning that you'd only need to software blit sprites and thus might actually have faster/smoother games than the ST much of the time -though less RAM for detail/animation- and the same sound chip)

 

 

 

In the US the A8 kicked the crap out of C64 disk loading speeds (and even beat capacity once true DD support appeared), but that was moot in Europe where tapes were the norm and (again) the nominally slower CBM tape loading could be bypassed in software to be commonly more than double the speed of the Atari (though usually less than the Spectrum)... aside from hardware fast loading drives on the Atari.

Hehe, if they were marketing the A8 smartly in the US, Atari could have had a similar sized program loading on the A8 off disk and the C64 to show the vast superiority of the Atari disk loading capabilities side by side with the C64 . . . reminds me of all those cell phone loading/speed/bandwidth commercials around of late.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for IBM machines, they WERE still powerful business/scientific devices with high resolution 720x350 80 column text (or fairly high res for CGA's 640x200 80 column). You obviously didn't buy it as a casual consumer or hobbyist for games/general computing or tinkering. It really wasn't for several more years that something truly better came along. (and even then the Mac, ST, and Amiga all lacked the flexible expansion of the PC -Amiga came closer though, the A2000 met or exceeded it but that wasn't until '86)

 

The closest competition back in 1981 was the TRS-80 Model II (nominally less powerful but for the price and stock loadout it could be considered a better value than the PC by a fair margin -4 MHz Z80 with 32 or 64k and CP/M support out of the box with 4 open expansion slots and a pretty nice keyboard, I think the screen was bigger than the PC's too and there was the nice glare reduction screen that fit neatly over the front plus the thing looks pretty stylish with silver and black vs the common beige/gray stuff of most competition, a compact all-in-one configuration but with relatively flexible expansion). I think the TRS-80 was also limited by Tandy's in-house only distribution strategy unfortunately. (that and they didn't push forward with the Model II as strongly as they could have... and split the market more by continuing the lower-end Model I family as well as the totally incompatible home/consumer oriented CoCo -which was sort of like a moderately more powerful Apple II in terms of the bare-bones nature but with a reasonable price point and not nearly the market interest unfortunately, alongside the VIC it was still one of the first home computers to make the sub $300 range and matched the VIC's price in the '81 holiday season for the 4k models at least though it didn't have the short-run popularity or marketing of the VIC it did have a surprisingly long life and might have made a good budget computer if it had gotten better software support and marketing... like an Apple II sold at a reasonable price point ... but they did split the market and still only sold it in-house, the 6809 was nice but it could have been in Tandy's best interests to push a directly compatible machine based on the model 1 but in a TV compatible home computer form factor -internal or external RF modulator- with added color graphics capabilities and a monitor port for a proper computer configuration as well, that and probably a faster Z80, maybe boosted to a full 3.58 MHz, given the market share the TRS-80 had early on relative to Atari and Apple II, building on that common architecture hardly would have been a bad idea -and a general purpose cart/expansion port like the CoCo had left the design open as well -especially with the 1090XL-like 4 slot expansion box)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I should note also, in the intrest of full disclosure, that by the time I had a C128D in 1985 there were THOUSANDS of games out there. Might I have felt different if I was older and bought a C64 in 1982? Perhaps. That's why I never buy ANYTHING in the first year (or probaly two) that it comes out.

Yeah, but that IS sort of the point. The A8 was about 3 years old in '82 with a strong chunk of the market share, so if you wanted an established system with a good software library and capabilities, the A8 would have been an option where the C64 would not. The thing was that the market expanded drastically from '82 onward (especially in '83-85) and Atari's initial head start got buried quickly (as did Apple and Tandy) with the C64 and PC both expanding hugely in popularity. (the PC overtaking the C64 by '86 I believe, maybe earlier -though largely in a different market sector with the C64 embedded in the home market and PCs more in business and more gradually moving into the mass consumer/home market as the clone market expanded with ever dropping prices and better hardware and software support for games -of course the ST and Amiga both had a notable place in the home market in the US in the late 80s, but that got overrun by PC clones too -probably would have happened sooner too if something like the PCJr and Tandy 1000 had become an industry standard for lower-end clone systems or if the T-1000 alone hadn't been limited to Radio shack outlets)

Edited January 22, 2011 by kool kitty89

[carmel_andrews]

Question is, was Jack and Sam 'Kosher'.....Geddit

 

And anyway, Jack and Sam and the rest of their clan/tribe are history, along with the two companies (three if you include TTL) are also history

[Rybags]

I can just imagine Carmel meeting Jack...

 

"Excuse me, Mr Tramiel, but I was wondering... are you circumcised?"

[atarian63]

I can just imagine Carmel meeting Jack...

 

"Excuse me, Mr Tramiel, but I was wondering... are you circumcised?"

LOL!!!

[atarian63]

Yes, you are correct, they couldnt make the magic in spite of having huge advantages,R&D,products,name recognition.

There really was nothing to "meet" on c64. It had no name recognition and little software. Had Atari done what Commodore did and saturate TV etc, it would have turned out much differently. They couldnt find their butts with both hands.

Seems the real key is one of 2 scenarios. The first is thye c64 one, make it cheap and advertise the heck out of it. Atari Inc made it cheap but didnt have the funds to market.

The other seems to be the Apple way. Make an expensive overpriced market and get people to think they are buying something "better" or "unique" , amazing what they have done,and at times for apple it has been true but NOT back in those days. Other than the expansion bus it was a truly inferior product. They had a niche though..schools and that was the key.

I am sure you have heard the old saying about IBM from back then..

Inferior

But

Marketable

There was plenty to meet though, the marketing and the price point (and for the "techie" sorts there certainly was the hardware specs and the 64k of RAM... the 1200 XL hardly met that in price point).

For brand name recognition you had Commodore being pretty well known in the industry and Atari recognized as well, but far more strongly in the games industry (which would have some negative connotations to some -but given the C64's primary market area that would have been an asset).

They also needed to meet CBM in the software development side, 1st party was fine, but they weren't freely promoting 3rd party software... one among many problems. (at least they weren't actively discouraging 3rd party software like TI did with the 99/4, stupid, stupid, stupid -it's not a game console, the razor and blade market doesn't apply -and even there it shifted when hardware companies managed to successfully enforce licensed publishing with royalties as Nintendo heavily pushed) That was an even bigger problem in Europe.

 

Warner seemed far too focused on milking the VCS to put the full resources into marketing the A8... but then again both the VCS and computers suffered from various other management problems then just advertising. (both from Kassar and other issues on the Warner side -in several cases Kassar was forced to do things he was right to think were bad ideas too -like the ET license- though he was not the right man for the job in general, a shame they didn't recognize the problems back in '82 when they started manifesting and bring in someone like Morgan to fix things... let alone having a capable president/CEO from the start )

 

Jack's management was a good bit better in many ways, but Atari Corp didn't have the luxuries of funding and massive revenue that Warner/AInc squandered years earlier. (and when things were looking up with revenue high and debt totally gone, Jack stepped down and Sam's weaker management -among other things- tore things down)

 

 

 

In Europe it was a different story, I discussed this at length on AA before (and more so on Sega 16) with both anecdotal and some documented (magazine/newspaper article)... Atari had a pretty weak reputation in the early 80s, the A8 was overpriced, under-supported, mismarketed, and the VCS didn't have nearly the presence it did in the US.

Commodore OTOH made strides with the VIC 20 and quickly adapted to the needs of the market in general which became critical in the mid/late 80s when the C64 became mainstream. Sinclair led the way in several regards: for one it was the cheapest by far in a market where that was absolutely crucial (the low-end ZX8x machines and the very affordable though hardly initially cheap -as no substantial electronics were-), but more important than that was the pack-in software development tools promoting homegrown development that sparked a massive wave of software development in Europe. Atari lagged behind with weaker cassette support (carts were too expensive), no built-in BASIC (both for learning programming and for cassette use), expensive hardware, and slow proprietary tape drives for that matter. (less than 1/3 the speed of the Sinclair machines and while 2x as fast as the CBM computers that would change dramatically when fastloaders were implemented vs the A8 which was locked by hardware decoding -the baud rate could eb tweaked up to about 900 and then you'd have to use compression to do any better without a replacement tape interface -the hardware drive control on the A8 was a nice feature along with the stereo support with parallel audio track alongside data that could potentially have allowed software controlled analog tape soundtracks for games which contemporaries could not do -some games have user controlled tape soundtracks- so that could have been a neat feature if the A8 had caught on -Atari could have released upgraded casette drives too, like several 3rd parties did allowing many times faster loads -some even rivaling the Spectrum's common load speeds -3000 baud at "double speed" fairly similar to the CoCo)

 

The major issues were marketing (and related issues tied to understanding the nature of the market), price point (ties into the market issues), and software support.

 

 

They could have used something more like the 600 back in '80/81, but by the time the 600XL was out in '84, 16k was a joke and useless while the 800XL was OK, but both more expensive and visibly less capable than the C64 (or less well supported and thus perceived as weaker)

 

The Spectrum was the dominant home computer in the UK (and most of Europe for that matter) in the early to mid 80s and stayed popular up to the beginning of the 90s. (though was niche by then) By the time the C64 dropped in price enough to hit big in UK/Europe, any head start the A8 had from its US library was completely and totally gone (iirc it was around '84 and '85 is when it really pulled alongside the Spectrum in pure popularity and surpassing that quickly as it became more affordable -and with no other competition in sight other than the CPC with often better looking but choppier than spectrum games and a price between C64 and Spectrum... a direct successor to the Speccy might have been major but that didn't happen other than the 128k which just added more RAM and a sound chip -had it boosted graphics to something like the CoCo III -incidentally the same resolution as the speccy- and maybe went to a 6-8 MHz Z80 while still being cost competitive it could have been another story hell due to the hardware scrolling and identical sound chip that might have even pushed against the ST's market: a weaker CPU, 6-bit RGB, and 256x192 resolution, but still 16 colors and with hardware V/H scrolling meaning that you'd only need to software blit sprites and thus might actually have faster/smoother games than the ST much of the time -though less RAM for detail/animation- and the same sound chip)

 

 

 

In the US the A8 kicked the crap out of C64 disk loading speeds (and even beat capacity once true DD support appeared), but that was moot in Europe where tapes were the norm and (again) the nominally slower CBM tape loading could be bypassed in software to be commonly more than double the speed of the Atari (though usually less than the Spectrum)... aside from hardware fast loading drives on the Atari.

Hehe, if they were marketing the A8 smartly in the US, Atari could have had a similar sized program loading on the A8 off disk and the C64 to show the vast superiority of the Atari disk loading capabilities side by side with the C64 . . . reminds me of all those cell phone loading/speed/bandwidth commercials around of late.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for IBM machines, they WERE still powerful business/scientific devices with high resolution 720x350 80 column text (or fairly high res for CGA's 640x200 80 column). You obviously didn't buy it as a casual consumer or hobbyist for games/general computing or tinkering. It really wasn't for several more years that something truly better came along. (and even then the Mac, ST, and Amiga all lacked the flexible expansion of the PC -Amiga came closer though, the A2000 met or exceeded it but that wasn't until '86)

 

The closest competition back in 1981 was the TRS-80 Model II (nominally less powerful but for the price and stock loadout it could be considered a better value than the PC by a fair margin -4 MHz Z80 with 32 or 64k and CP/M support out of the box with 4 open expansion slots and a pretty nice keyboard, I think the screen was bigger than the PC's too and there was the nice glare reduction screen that fit neatly over the front plus the thing looks pretty stylish with silver and black vs the common beige/gray stuff of most competition, a compact all-in-one configuration but with relatively flexible expansion). I think the TRS-80 was also limited by Tandy's in-house only distribution strategy unfortunately. (that and they didn't push forward with the Model II as strongly as they could have... and split the market more by continuing the lower-end Model I family as well as the totally incompatible home/consumer oriented CoCo -which was sort of like a moderately more powerful Apple II in terms of the bare-bones nature but with a reasonable price point and not nearly the market interest unfortunately, alongside the VIC it was still one of the first home computers to make the sub $300 range and matched the VIC's price in the '81 holiday season for the 4k models at least though it didn't have the short-run popularity or marketing of the VIC it did have a surprisingly long life and might have made a good budget computer if it had gotten better software support and marketing... like an Apple II sold at a reasonable price point ... but they did split the market and still only sold it in-house, the 6809 was nice but it could have been in Tandy's best interests to push a directly compatible machine based on the model 1 but in a TV compatible home computer form factor -internal or external RF modulator- with added color graphics capabilities and a monitor port for a proper computer configuration as well, that and probably a faster Z80, maybe boosted to a full 3.58 MHz, given the market share the TRS-80 had early on relative to Atari and Apple II, building on that common architecture hardly would have been a bad idea -and a general purpose cart/expansion port like the CoCo had left the design open as well -especially with the 1090XL-like 4 slot expansion box)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I should note also, in the intrest of full disclosure, that by the time I had a C128D in 1985 there were THOUSANDS of games out there. Might I have felt different if I was older and bought a C64 in 1982? Perhaps. That's why I never buy ANYTHING in the first year (or probaly two) that it comes out.

Yeah, but that IS sort of the point. The A8 was about 3 years old in '82 with a strong chunk of the market share, so if you wanted an established system with a good software library and capabilities, the A8 would have been an option where the C64 would not. The thing was that the market expanded drastically from '82 onward (especially in '83-85) and Atari's initial head start got buried quickly (as did Apple and Tandy) with the C64 and PC both expanding hugely in popularity. (the PC overtaking the C64 by '86 I believe, maybe earlier -though largely in a different market sector with the C64 embedded in the home market and PCs more in business and more gradually moving into the mass consumer/home market as the clone market expanded with ever dropping prices and better hardware and software support for games -of course the ST and Amiga both had a notable place in the home market in the US in the late 80s, but that got overrun by PC clones too -probably would have happened sooner too if something like the PCJr and Tandy 1000 had become an industry standard for lower-end clone systems or if the T-1000 alone hadn't been limited to Radio shack outlets)

I see some of this but it was not until about late 83 or 84 that c64 really got adver and was moving. I was a dealer back in those time and had been for awhile, we sold it all. IBM was an overpriced joke except for business apps which most consumers of the day did not care about except at work. too expensive for the average person. in 82 Atari was much more concerned with Apple and least as pc's are concerned. I would agree that Warner was way too busy milking it, and not getting R&D out to market. Guess thats what happens when you are a big corp with deep pockets and no leadership/direction.

That was the problem,no one person was leading and taking care of business. Yes there were heads of the company but not ones that lead. They had the deep pockets, great R&D, needed a plan and ADVERTISING. They would have been unstoppable!

Specs on c64 did not really matter, 1200xl looked so much sexier,and more like a peofessional pc rather than a breadbox,with no software and no support.I would not have worried about that small company either,guess you always need to watch your back. TI , Tandy etc were not really relevant and seldom seen mainstream( well a little TI for a short period,again no market penetration and not much software) not to mention ATari was in most all major retailers where in 82 Commodore was not.They really had the opportunity to make it but no leadership or understanding of the market. So sad, truly a very sad story of an American company that could and then blew it.

I will say there was limited acknowlegement as I recall sales brochures we had comparing the IBM,Apple Atari and Commodore specs. The crash changed everything and opened a partially open dore that commodore had in the market all the way. Tied down and stopped Atari. Apple had their own hogh end niche with education so it was not as consumer driven of a machine as Atari. Maybe if they had gone after Apple sooner and more effectively they could have also entered that niche. Again leadership,direction,They had the R&D,deep pockets)..

 

Yes europe was quite different as well as Japan and could have been a great opportunity. Europe being so far behind in drive tech adoption (tapes) it could have been an opportunity.

[kool kitty89]

I see some of this but it was not until about late 83 or 84 that c64 really got adver and was moving. I was a dealer back in those time and had been for awhile, we sold it all. IBM was an overpriced joke except for business apps which most consumers of the day did not care about except at work. too expensive for the average person. in 82 Atari was much more concerned with Apple and least as pc's are concerned. I would agree that Warner was way too busy milking it, and not getting R&D out to market. Guess thats what happens when you are a big corp with deep pockets and no leadership/direction.

That was the problem,no one person was leading and taking care of business. Yes there were heads of the company but not ones that lead. They had the deep pockets, great R&D, needed a plan and ADVERTISING. They would have been unstoppable!

Yes, marketing was the big thing (in the US), but the other screw-ups and missed opportunities didn't help, and when it came down to the line in '83/84 Atari Inc was in over their head with the culminating consequences of prior management bungling followed by the poorly managed split of AInc in summer of '84. (and one added case of an unfortunate decision by Morgan on the otherwise highly improved management under him -which would be the freeze in fall of '83 that substantially hurt Atari that holiday season) Poor marketing is part of what made the 1200's lack of backwards compatibility (let alone perceived weakness on the expansion side of things) in some areas more significant than it otherwise would have been. (all they needed was a PBI or ECI -especially with the convenient side cart slot for the latter, more like the CoCo) Price point, feature set (especially for marketing leverage), software, and marketing are all important and Atari seemed to miss out on the price point thing with a lack of cost reduced redesigns prior to the 1200 and lack of a replacement for the 400 when the 1200 did arrive (even worse given the fact that the 600 prototype WAS there and rather nice at that -sleek, better looking than the 600XL IMO, and with PBI even), but they could have had more minimalistic revised versions by '81 for that matter. (basically just single board versions with moderately increased consolidation and perhaps modifying the 400's PCB for native 48k support -have 16k soldered to the main board and a single slot for up to a 32k card preferably without having to remove the whole case, and of course reduced shielding a la FCC class B -could have initially used direct derivatives of the old case designs too with motherboards and cases redesigned in such a way to maximize re-use of existing tooling, perhaps the bottom half of the plastic casing kept identical and some modification to the tops to cater to the lower profile for a sleeker form factor -or go for saving more cost and keep the cases identical sans the castings and design the motherboards to comply to the original cases)

That and other things like having a mid-range oriented 400 with a good keyboard... and the EU models with no shielding at all. (lots of other changes needed for the EU market though, very different marketing strategy needed, not so much sheer advertising as catering properly to demands/needs and the nature of the markets which would carry over to viral marketing)

 

And of course there was also the computer price war of the Vic 20 and TI99/4A that dragged down a lot of others in the industry (the very fact Atair didn't have the 600 out -let alone marketing to match- hurt it there), plus the super cheap Sinclair/Timex machines muddying the waters too. Of course, many of those lower-end machines went no where in the logn run, but they played a huge role on the market in the short run (and in the VIC's case, it might have even had more life in the long-run had CBM not canned it a bit preemptively -making the C64 backwards compatible also would have been a point of interest... having those VIC sound channels on top of SID wouldn't have been bad either ). The C64 took a while to take off, indeed it was not the primary factor on the mass market in the US (let alone Europe) until after '83. The price war had nothing to do with the C64 as it concerned the low-end stuff. (and no competition was smart enough to market products such that they didn't have to dump the price -ie convince the public of superiority as the likes of the TI let alone 16k A400 were obviously superior to the VIC... TI made the worst mode of trying to compete directly int the low-end only rather than balancing with a higher-end machine -namely a 99/4 with a useful amount of CPU work RAM- and

 

Not sure just how heavy they were pushing, but CBM did at least have some pretty notable marketing for the VIC. (and there's that Willaim Shatner TV ad among those )

 

 

 

Specs on c64 did not really matter, 1200xl looked so much sexier,and more like a peofessional pc rather than a breadbox,with no software and no support.I would not have worried about that small company either,guess you always need to watch your back. TI , Tandy etc were not really relevant and seldom seen mainstream( well a little TI for a short period,again no market penetration and not much software) not to mention ATari was in most all major retailers where in 82 Commodore was not.They really had the opportunity to make it but no leadership or understanding of the market. So sad, truly a very sad story of an American company that could and then blew it.

Yes, but it wasn't the C64 that was even the main Commodore issue until late '83, the VIC (and related price war) caused a huge disturbance on the computer market and also contributed to pushing the unstable console market over the edge. (and even before the crash you had the huge burst in the computer market inducing Mattel and Coleco to rush onto the computer market as well in a rushed and flawed manner -opposed to Atari who'd been there since '79- ... a bit of a shame for Coleco in particular as they might have been able to ride the CV through the crash and the Adam could have been decent if offered -at least optionally- in a consolidated bare bones console form factor like Atari/TI/CBM home machines -the desk top model was certainly a good idea too and something Atari/TI/CBM all could have benefited from too, but they way COleco managed it by ONLY having the desktop model along with the reliability issues, price point, and odd push for custom formatted tapes made it a mess -especially for a company tying it into a game console with compatibility -where a low-cost console form factor would make much more sense ... and Mattel might have fared better if the Aquarius had been based on the Intellivision rather than a new cheap-o design)

 

And from what I understand, Tandy had a pretty notable market share early on with the TRS-80 machines against Atari and Apple, but that fell apart in the early 80s. The CoCo sold better (in sheer numbers) than the Z80 machines, but it may not have been the right direction to go in (the model II was really interesting and you could certainly argue the Model 1/compatible line might have had more merit in being reworked into something in the range of the CoCo at a similar price but with compatibility -and higher-end models with monitors and proper keyboards)

 

 

Hell, Atari Inc did respond properly eventually, but pretty late with the full marketing of the 600/800XL not going into full swing (with available inventory) until '84 and then the split screwed up that even. A shame Morgan forced the hold in late '83 like that, the 600/800XL could have really gotten pushed (along with the 1200) in the '83 holiday season had it not been for that. (a real shame Morgan hadn't come in a year earlier and started turning things around when the problems first started becoming significant)

There were those really good Alan Alda XL commercials that came out around then. (not sure if it was '83 or '84)

 

 

 

I will say there was limited acknowlegement as I recall sales brochures we had comparing the IBM,Apple Atari and Commodore specs. The crash changed everything and opened a partially open dore that commodore had in the market all the way. Tied down and stopped Atari. Apple had their own hogh end niche with education so it was not as consumer driven of a machine as Atari. Maybe if they had gone after Apple sooner and more effectively they could have also entered that niche. Again leadership,direction,They had the R&D,deep pockets)..

 

Yes europe was quite different as well as Japan and could have been a great opportunity. Europe being so far behind in drive tech adoption (tapes) it could have been an opportunity.

Japan they probably missed out even more on the video game side by not launching the VCS by '80/81 (instead of late '83 with the 2800)... and for that matter pushing a tape based 2600 in Europe (like an Atari version of the supercharger).

 

And it wasn't just the drive adoption issue, it was cost: from what I understand, the economy was down and prices were more critical than ever (plus you had taxes like VAT inflating technology stuff especially). Hence cartridges were also seen as unattractive due to the high price. (making the above musing on the VCS with tapes even more important) Disks didn't get big until the 16-bit machines in the mid-80s and thus skipping over 5.25" for 3.5" aside from the BBC Micro disks. (largely limited to schools and scientific/business stuff)

That also meant that the A8's fast disk loading times would be largely moot.

 

Hell, in Europe (and Japan to some extent), aside from repositioning the A8 line with comprehensive localized versions, it might also have been a good idea to push an even lower-end machine directly derived from (and compatible with) the VCS sort of like the Graduate idea (the simple original one) but perhaps without the external hacking and instead a fully internal (and thus neater and more flexible) redesign with added RAM and some other modifications. Even from the beginning of the VCS's life you had examples like BASIC programming showing that reasonable text with TIA was quite possible, and following that, perhaps the redesign could have purely been adding more internal RAM (plus a simple, general purpose external expansion slot/PCB pin connector), perhaps switching to a full 6502 with interrupt support (easing programming more -especially for signaling V/H-blank regions where video would not be active), and probably a 400 based membrane keyboard all in a compact/low cost form factor with built-in analog cassette interface. (no SIO) Perhaps it could have even been set-up for the CPU to be able to switch between 1.79 and 1.19 MHz for an added performance boost. (might not be worth the complexity and sticking to 1.19 MHz alone would allow cheaper/slower DRAM to be used for main memory) Connecting RIOT's interrupt line to the CPU when in computer mode could also have come in handy.

They'd of course be supporting 3rd party development for such a machine as well (different market model) and separate from VCS development.

 

That could have been really neat and might have displaced the VCS entirely in Europe as such and would have been a closer competitor against the ZX80/81 and the like (superior for games to be sure) with better graphics/sound/keyboard and built-in joy ports but maybe not quite as cheap as those (maybe between that and the VIC 20). Hmm, and thinking on the ZX80/81, maybe software driven bitmap/character graphics similar to those machines is how it could be hacked with TIA as well. (embedded BASIC ROM/BIOS with character data and software routines for the CPU to manage the display directly -eating up 100% of CPU time in active display- and either disabling the display to do added work or signaling the CPU to allow work to be done in vblank -maybe hblank- and also including various other commands/routines in the built-in BASIC ROM as well -including tape loading and saving and probably keyboard scanning -and the keyboard itself might be implemented simply via a parallel interface using a common PIA chip or using RIOT to be toggled between keyboard and joystick use either manually or in software -perhaps using one of the unused RIOT lines as the toggle mechanism for the 8-bits to be used for key/joy plus maybe employ any remaining RIOT lines for added keyboard functionality or maybe some would be needed for the analog tape interface in conjunction with a rudimentary DAC/ADC mechanism, though perhaps the analog paddle interface in TIA would be sufficient for reading the cassette, maybe even TIA's square wave generation would be sufficient for writing to the tape too but then again maybe the frequency resolution is too low -I think it's only 4-bits so if you did use FSK encoding it would also be limited to 4-bit data, so you'd either need to cater to that -and accumulate to 8-bit- or use direct CPU modulated square waves with a 1-bit toggle or perhaps allowing RIOT to be configured to drive a 1-bit audio toggle as well like the IBM PC could for the speaker -if they added that toggle separately from TIA's sound generation, that could technically allow a 3rd hardware sound channel with fixed volume and plain timer based square wave generation or CPU driven stuff -like PWM- with interrupts or cycle counted code -using RIOT's timer for square wave tone generation on such a 1-bit channel could actually be better for music than TIA due to the much higher resolution -16 bit timer but only a segment of that range is useful for tone generation for human hearing- . . . hmm, that actually could have been a very useful hack to add better sound to the 7800 with very little added cost )

Edited January 24, 2011 by kool kitty89

[SpaceDice2010]

The title of the 7800 chapter on this book should be called, "The Japanese are coming, so we must become the Japanese."

[svenski]

I'm really going to have to start bashing you guys around the heads with a 1050 or XF551 if all this Europe being behind the times talk continues .

 

As discussed before, we did have disk drives. The Speccy had microdrives, the beeb had drives, even the Oric had a 3" drive. Tapes took off because of cost - and not just the cost of the hardware, the production costs too when it came to releasing a game.

 

Things would probably be a lot different today if half of the UK hadn't been stuck in their bedrooms, squeezing their spots and obsessed with programming great new games instead of doing their homework. Spin side you could buy a great game with your pocket money.

 

The Atari 400/800 actually held their ground pretty well in the UK and atarian63 is right - the C64 took its time to get going - it wasn't an overnight success. From 82 the Vic-20 no longer had any price advantage over the Atari 400 but the Spectrum did.

 

Atari cocked up by not being able to get enough of the XL line out in 83 and the pricing was still too high. If things had been done right (pricing, pushing the 800XL more instead of the 600XL) then Atari could have made in-roads in 1984. By 85 the pricing was sorted out, there was a lot of new interest in the Atari 8-bit range and there was a golden opportunity to kick some ass but the window of opportunity passed them by for several reasons.

 

Given the good, bad, and pretty fantastic UK made home computers that crashed and burned in the early eighties, Atari didn't do too bad but they could have done a lot better as we all know.

 

Just my half penny's worth.

[carmel_andrews]

I'm really going to have to start bashing you guys around the heads with a 1050 or XF551 if all this Europe being behind the times talk continues .

 

As discussed before, we did have disk drives. The Speccy had microdrives, the beeb had drives, even the Oric had a 3" drive. Tapes took off because of cost - and not just the cost of the hardware, the production costs too when it came to releasing a game.

 

Things would probably be a lot different today if half of the UK hadn't been stuck in their bedrooms, squeezing their spots and obsessed with programming great new games instead of doing their homework. Spin side you could buy a great game with your pocket money.

 

The Atari 400/800 actually held their ground pretty well in the UK and atarian63 is right - the C64 took its time to get going - it wasn't an overnight success. From 82 the Vic-20 no longer had any price advantage over the Atari 400 but the Spectrum did.

 

Atari cocked up by not being able to get enough of the XL line out in 83 and the pricing was still too high. If things had been done right (pricing, pushing the 800XL more instead of the 600XL) then Atari could have made in-roads in 1984. By 85 the pricing was sorted out, there was a lot of new interest in the Atari 8-bit range and there was a golden opportunity to kick some ass but the window of opportunity passed them by for several reasons.

 

Given the good, bad, and pretty fantastic UK made home computers that crashed and burned in the early eighties, Atari didn't do too bad but they could have done a lot better as we all know.

 

Just my half penny's worth.

 

 

 

 

 

I'll take your ha'penny and raise you tuppence

 

I think the reason why tape software was more abundant in the UK/Euro market was because of the prices paid for disk drives, i.e if a 1050 cost 199.99 in the US it would also cost 199.99 in the UK (basically a 1 for 1 exchange, common practice amongst importers/distributors in the early to late 80's)

 

Also, unlike commodore, amstrad and sinclair, Atari didn't do enough woo'ing of the 3rd party games publishers (they were piss poor at it) which is why machines like the c64/speccy were better supported (i accept the situation improved under the tramiels, but only because of the ST)

Edited February 3, 2011 by carmel_andrews

[kool kitty89]

I'm really going to have to start bashing you guys around the heads with a 1050 or XF551 if all this Europe being behind the times talk continues .

 

As discussed before, we did have disk drives. The Speccy had microdrives, the beeb had drives, even the Oric had a 3" drive. Tapes took off because of cost - and not just the cost of the hardware, the production costs too when it came to releasing a game.

 

Things would probably be a lot different today if half of the UK hadn't been stuck in their bedrooms, squeezing their spots and obsessed with programming great new games instead of doing their homework. Spin side you could buy a great game with your pocket money.

 

The Atari 400/800 actually held their ground pretty well in the UK and atarian63 is right - the C64 took its time to get going - it wasn't an overnight success. From 82 the Vic-20 no longer had any price advantage over the Atari 400 but the Spectrum did.

 

Atari cocked up by not being able to get enough of the XL line out in 83 and the pricing was still too high. If things had been done right (pricing, pushing the 800XL more instead of the 600XL) then Atari could have made in-roads in 1984. By 85 the pricing was sorted out, there was a lot of new interest in the Atari 8-bit range and there was a golden opportunity to kick some ass but the window of opportunity passed them by for several reasons.

 

Given the good, bad, and pretty fantastic UK made home computers that crashed and burned in the early eighties, Atari didn't do too bad but they could have done a lot better as we all know.

 

Just my half penny's worth.

 

Yes, we had a long winded discussion on this on Sega-16 a while back (or more just me and one British member).

 

The problems were numerous though. One of the major ones was that Atari didn't promote 3rd party development very well, let alone on the level Sinclair had established as a defacto standard (which CBM seems to have quickly adopted).

 

The Spectrum WAS the mass market commodity computer in Europe, the first to really go mainstream and get massive support and Atari missed many, many chances to break through that prior to the C64 becoming established with an affordable price point and strong software ~'85. (the same time the C64 was peaking in the US and soon to fall behind consoles again -along with PCs/clones- as the market moved on -and CBM screwed up in other ways, but I'll not go there )

 

The spectrum had the RAM, borderline acceptable graphics, poor sound, very attractive price, strong support, and fast tape load times out of the box.

 

That's another area the A8 fell behind with: tape loads were 2x as fast as the VIC and C64 out of the box and could be tweaked to about 3x (900 baud vs CBM's ~300), but it was limited by the hardware FSK decoder in the drive vs a software routine in the C64 (and spectrum) that could be circumvented by fastload programs (including many later games that started with the slow ROM loading routine, loaded a fastload program into RAM, and loaded many times faster for the rest -highly competitive with spectrum games eventually). The Speccy was pretty fast out of the box and apparently had a double speed mode as well (sort of like the CoCo's 1500/3000 baud).

You could replace the drive/FSK decoder for boosted speed though, but only with 3rd party devices. (compression was the only other option to speed things up, though since the tape was decoded in hardware, that would leave a lot of CPU time to decompress on the fly )

2 really nice features of the Atari tape drives were the hardware/software motor control (allowing the computer to seek through the tape on its own), and the use of stereo tracks with analog audio on the 2nd track. (so you technically could have the computer play sounds/music and loop them -albeit with pauses from seeking- with no user/manual input on the cassette deck, probably a bit tricky to program well, but a neat possibility -more so for demos, or music while you waited for the tape to load )

 

It's also very odd, but I've heard stories about horrendous tape loading times on the A8, but with the stock 600 baud data rate and even a "full" 48k load (probably at least 8k left for work RAM/display lists, etc), it should be well under 10 minutes, but I'm seeing quotes for 20-30 minutes for some things. (16k loads should have been under 4 minutes)

 

Totally the opposite in the US though, the C64 disk drive was horribly slow while the A8's was very fast relatively speaking (Apple might have been faster stock, though). 19.2 kB/s vs 2.4 kB/s (the latter was closer to the speccy/coco tapes than any competing disk drives ), and with fast loading tweaks it could be pushed to considerably faster speeds. (I believe around 60-70 kb/s, so much faster than the best C64 fastloaders)

 

 

 

But getting down to it, the A8 line had several other problems:

lack of affordable high RAM content models, and lack of cost-reduced models aimed at Europe in general.

By 1983, 16k was getting to be pretty shabby for a computer (carts were not an option, unlike the US, so RAM would heavily limit game content -and multi-load tape games were rare, though might have been facilitated by the hardware/software seeking tape drive).

The A400 was about as low cost as it could be for the US market at its 1979 release. (its bulk and multi-board design were forced by FCC regulations)

Thus it was nowhere near optimal cost for a European release, or the US market by 1981 (when FCC Class B was being employed allowing much reduced shielding and such -spurring Atari to push the sweet8/16 machines, but that ended up with the 1200XL being problematic -far from a simple cost cut 800- and odd cancellation of the very promising 600 -the best looking A8 form factor ever made IMO, better than the later 600XL).

 

I've said most of this before, but the very first thing for Europe would be a quick-fix cut-back on the 400 and 800 removing all RF shielding and adding simple plastic struts/spacers for any areas where the aluminum was structural, plus add BASIC pack-in. (or at least as an optional bundle) Then pushed for single-board designs well before the FCC change facilitated that in the US, including built-in BASIC. (probably retain the same RAM expansion form factor, but move the 400's to a rear port more like the VIC's cart slot, but with a simple cover to allow ease of expansion -800 could keep the 3 slots, or possibly drop to the same single slot form factor with 16k-48k soldered to the board and the rest via the expansion slot(s), or maybe made all the same general case design but with different logos and all 800s with 48k stock and 400s with 16 or 32k)

They also could have dropped to 2 controller ports from the start. (even that would be extravagant compared to the VIC, let alone Spectrum )

 

They should have had a middle-ground version of the 400 too, even in the interim, with a full keyboard, and then followed up with low and mid-range 400s (after the single board models appeared) plus the 48k/800. (so low-end 16k membrane 400, mid-range full keyboard 32k 400, and 48k 800 -again, possibly similar form factor) By '83, they probably could have put the 16k models on low priority in favor of the 32/48k machines. (introducing a "64k" 1200XL compatible model wouldn't be a bad idea either, have that as the new top end with the 32 and 48k models shifting lower down)

 

 

 

 

 

But, even with all those early missed opportunities (including having the 800 cutting into the BBC Micro's higher-end market), Atari still probably could have shifted things in Europe if they played their cards right from '82 onward. They had the 1200XL and 600 projects in the US going in '81/82, and stripping both of those of RF shielding for EU releases could have been very well timed for mid/late 1982. Actually, it might have been smarter to ditch the 1200 entirely in favor of the smaller, sleeker, and more cost competitive 600 (which DID feature the PBI expansion port), but add 32/48/64k models based on that form factor. (or maybe slim down the selection to streamline production, definitely a 16k model to cater to the lower-end and probably not push the 64k too hard since it had no existing software base, but the 32 and 48k models are both good intermediates -maybe if they were careful about the board design, they could facilitate all 4 configurations with the same PCB)

Plus, given the spectrum's need for a framebuffer, 32k on the A8 could stretch closer to 48k on the spectrum anyway. (for character mode games)

THe full 64k machines would have a tougher time competing against the C64's price point, so 48k would be pretty necessary, 16k for the low-end, and maybe 32k intermediate or left out entirely. (16/48/64k would make sense, especially since you'd only need 2 different expansion boards to 64k -1 with 6 8k chips and one with 2 8k chips)

 

 

OTOH, having the 16k 600 out in 1982 in the US and Europe would have been very significant in general, all they had to do was get the marketing right and they'd have been pretty good. (it would be expandable to 64k, should have been cheaper than the preceding 400 -and thus cheaper than the VIC, in Europe at least, and fill a general hole in the market for a fairly high quality lower-end computer with an established software library and expandability to a full high/mid-range machine and a sleek form factor)

Again, 16k became insufficient fast in Europe, but less so for cart users in the US, and there's very simple expandability with a RAM module.

Part of that "right" marketing in Europe would be packing in basic development tools and documentation as well as supporting full, professional documentation at request (possibly for the cost of shipping).

And of course, one of the key new features of the 1200/600 was built-in BASIC.

 

Commodore may have been pushing razor edge cost cuts and vertical integration, but Atari had a machine that had been in production for years with an established library and very capable hardware (weaker in several areas than the C64, but stronger in others -surprisingly for a 1979 chipset- and enough to perform well in the long run with comparable developer support), plus full ownership of the chipset (so overhead from 3rd party vendors -offset in part by close, long-term relationships and competitive bidding), and the potential for consolidation. (CGIA would have been a major step in that direction) Plus, lower-end models to add to the support vs the C64 with 64k and that's it. (a 16k C64 model would have been significant though, but CBM didn't push that for whatever reason -would have been a good low-end replacement for the VIC with forwards compatibility, and a MUCH better idea than the C16... the MAX machine was too extreme on that end though, just a C64 with 2 8k DRAMs rather than

Merging PIA with POKEY later on might be good too. (maybe leave the 6502c alone or perhaps a die shrink if they were willing to invest in such, or just a smaller package -maybe an LCC or QFP, or shrink-DIP -they seemed to be going the LCC route with GTIA, so keeping with that could have made sense -and is something CBM wasn't pushing on the C64 -maybe it would have made more sense not to touch PIA since it was off the shelf and thus cheaper as such a commodity, so from that sense, merging POKEY, SALLY, ANTIC, and GTIA in different configurations would have made more sense -all being custom Atari IPs or licensed/custom for SALLY, so POKEY+SALLY could make sense since CGIA was already prototyped in LSI by mid '83 -odd that it never got implemented in production models -especially since the single chip VCS did on later Jr models)

 

In any case, it would be important to have the 16 and 48k machines to be able to directly compete with Commodore's pricing, but once 32k DRAM chips became attractive they should have started switching over to 64k models and start phasing out the old ones. (like in mid/late '85 -still more expensive than 8k chips, but should be low enough to make the consolidation attractive and start shifting production) Plus they could introduce 128k models and possibly added RAM upgrades around the same time. (upgrades would require onboard banking logic and would have to blank out/waste part of the RAM onboard 64k models though -to fit into for banking, without internal modification at least, 48k models could avoid that if the bank switching took place in the 4k "hole" or OS ROM address range)

[sunspot42]

Interesting discussion, but I think by the time the Tramiels arrived, Atari's goose was already pretty thoroughly cooked and there's not much they could have done different w/the resources at hand to really turn it around. The debt they took on turned out to be crippling for a couple of years, and unfortunately I think it hobbled the STs and crippled them in the videogame space (along with the delay in getting the 7800 to market).

 

In hindsight, I do think that entering the home computer space with the STs was actually a mistake. They probably should have focused all of their capital and energies on getting a kickass videogame system out the door, along with some decent software. The 7800 certainly doesn't fit my definition of kickass, either - in many respects it's inferior to the 5200, whose biggest shortcoming was probably its crappy joysticks.

 

I probably would have written off the 7800 and pumped out that cost-reduced 5200 Atari had already designed (with better joysticks), instead. In lieu of designing the ST, I'd have developed an enhanced 5200 for release in '85 or thereabouts, backward compatible with the original, but featuring a full 64K of RAM, stereo POKEY (or even better, AMY), and new graphics modes, all only accessible to cartridges with the right encryption key (a la the 7800). I would have concentrated from day one on getting the best 800 games ported over to the 5200, and then enhanced for the pumped-up 5200. I think they would have had a hit on their hands with a large library of decent titles and a joystick that wasn't complete crap, and by focusing their marketing money and staying active with developers from '84-'86 I think they could have successfully held off Nintendo from grabbing 80% of the market.

 

If they'd gone down the path of enhancing the 5200 they could have also deployed that new graphics and sound hardware in their 8-bit computer lineup, giving existing 8-bit users a reason to upgrade instead of switching to other platforms (as many did). They would have also benefited more from Commodore's many screwups in that low-end segment post-C64 (the Plus 4 and to some degree the oddball 128).

 

If you want to get fanciful, they could have followed those enhanced 800's up with a backward-compatible system based on a 16 or 32-bit derivative of the 6502, a la the Apple //GS, complete with a GUI-based user interface. Had they held the line on costs and kept about a 50% market share in the game space, they certainly would have had the funds to develop and deploy such a beast by '87 or so. Amiga was late to market and kinda f'ed up, so Atari had more time than expected to launch something to rival it, and having a massive base of 8-bit users to draw on would have afforded Atari a huge advantage.

 

They could have then produced a next-generation console based off of this 32-bit 800 successor as well, sometime around '88, in plenty of time to have held off the Genesis.