My new blog

[TMR]

Business acumen as well as deathless prose on display... there's information Apple needs to look at in one of the comments if the struggling company wants to make its hardware more popular.

 

Love the way that response made it through moderation but mine, correcting most of the points in the same post and quoting sources, was refused... how big can an Apple 2 be cranked anyway?

[carmel_andrews]

But aren't commodore's and atari's....games machines, since there were more games released on said machines then non games (there again the same phrase applies to the st and amiga)

Edited August 15, 2012 by carmel_andrews

[SIO99]

But aren't commodore's and atari's....games machines, since there were more games released on said machines then non games (there again the same phrase applies to the st and amiga)

 

The A8 followed on from the Atari games consoles, but was designed and marketed as a computer, meaning people could suddenly have power at their fingertips, which was previously only in the realms of Sci Fi, although Atari fully intended that people should be able to play games on it. The Commodore 64 (fingers down throat, puke, puke!), was also marketed as a computer, not a games console, but the antique BASIC supplied with it means that IMHO it shouldn't have been fitted with a keyboard and should have been marketed as a games console. Clive Sinclair was very upset that his Spectrum was being used mainly for games instead of for "serious" software, as in seen in

.

 

"Mr Chekov, lay in a course for Vulcan".

 

"One moment Captain, while I finish this level of Miner 2049er".

 

BTW, see my latest blog post about C64 hires graphics.

[flashjazzcat]

Why not write something about how the joystick ports are hard-wired to the keyboard matrix? Got nothing against the C64 personally (Atari BASIC is hardly a paragon of virtue, after all), but I just learned about this joystick craziness last night... a much more fundamental design flaw than dodgy BASIC.

[TMR]

Why not write something about how the joystick ports are hard-wired to the keyboard matrix? Got nothing against the C64 personally (Atari BASIC is hardly a paragon of virtue, after all), but I just learned about this joystick craziness last night... a much more fundamental design flaw than dodgy BASIC.

 

It doesn't really get in the way on a day-to-day basis and you get used to spotting the effect on the occasions a joystick has ended up with it's fire button held down by a book or whatever... but the reason he's not writing about it is because, despite moving on to an Amstrad CPC with a fantastic BASIC after the C64, he's still a complete novice writing a load of biased rubbish about a machine he barely scratched the surface of. Take the comparison with the Spectrum's BASIC; lets all ignore the lack of standard string handling commands like left$ because the basics of BASIC just isn't important compared to the graphics commands! (Yes i know the functionality is there but it treats strings differently to other implementations and, since he doesn't know the Spectrum past reading a command list, those missing features should've been ringing alarm bells but didn't because that wouldn't have fit with his agenda.)

[sack-c0s]

The Commodore 64 (fingers down throat, puke, puke!),

 

quoted for maturity

[NuY]

My favourite SIO99 quotes so far:

 

There's no way I should have to know the intimate workings of a computer's hardware in order to make it do what I want.

 

I also read some other comments praising the Commodore 64, claiming it helped people get into programming. I couldn't stand by and allow this propaganda to continue unopposed.

 

One game idea is called "Salt Empires", based on a one player game, or not even that, I made up as a little boy. It required me to use my imagination a lot. I scattered salt on a small, black, round coffee table, then gathered some of it together to threaten the still scattered salt. This meant that at least one other empire would be formed to defend against the first empire, but eventually one of the empires would be bigger than the other, or all the others, then at the end, all the grains of salt would be united in a single empire.

 

Another game I'm working on takes place in a city and the user controls a superhero type character enforcing the law as they see fit, instead of the Police sick, twisted version of the law where some laws don't matter, but others must be rigorously enforced.

 

Lonely childhood + OCD = Bitter and twisted adult unable to forget perceived personal wrongdoing by the establishment (including Commodore)?

[+Stephen]

How the hell are you supposed to make any machine do what you want without knowing its inner workings? I certainly have way more of an understanding of how my car's engine works than "put in gas and it goes forward". That's why I can build race engines. What a dumb statement.

[+rdemming]

Why not write something about how the joystick ports are hard-wired to the keyboard matrix? Got nothing against the C64 personally (Atari BASIC is hardly a paragon of virtue, after all), but I just learned about this joystick craziness last night... a much more fundamental design flaw than dodgy BASIC.

 

Thanks, now I finally understand why lots of C64 games need a joystick in port 2 instead of port 1. On the C64 it was always a gamble in which port to plug in your joystick for single player games.

 

Robert

[TMR]

i've just had a thought... has anyone warned SIO99 to steer clear of the current issue of Retro Gamer? There's a teensy little bit of C64 stuff in there this month because of the breadbin's birthday and, if he's not told, he'll likely have a heart attack in the middle of Smiths whilst thumbing through!

[+Stephen]

Does the article mention BASIC?

[TMR]

Does the article mention BASIC?

 

[Flicks through quickly] Nope, looks like they all got past it to machine code pretty quickly and got on with writing their games in machine code...

[svenski]

Well there you go; I'm with rdemming on the joystick thing. I've learnt something new.

[TMR]

That's why, apart from the wide-eyed close to lunacy posts from someone like SIO99, i rather like threads like this - they're always an education. Similarly, the Write a game in Atari Basic under 4K thread that span off from SIO99's ranting is a blast, i enjoyed writing a little game and at the same time i learnt things i may have forgotten but probably never knew in the first place about Atari BASIC.

 

Every 8-bit has quirks, the interesting part is finding out what they are and how programmers worked around them; look at some of the inventive ways to check a joystick for example, some of that is mentally sneaky and you've got to admire that kind of coding. =-)

[NuY]

Similarly, the Write a game in Atari Basic under 4K thread that span off from SIO99's ranting is a blast, i enjoyed writing a little game and at the same time i learnt things i may have forgotten but probably never knew in the first place about Atari BASIC.

I was seriously thinking about banning the POKE statement as well as the USR function...but I figured that might have been a little too mean