Millipede 5200

[zzip]

13 minutes ago, ledzep said:

That's not going to work with a game that has a load of options.  I'm not saying that there were hundreds of those games or that those were the best games, but once you have strategy and sim games with a bunch of options, it's easier to lay them out on a keypad if you don't have an actual computer keyboard to work with.  I don't see how a few buttons and that miserable '+' direction thing on the NES controller would be anywhere near adequate for a game like Star Raiders or Intellivision style sports games.  It would have been cool for some of those more intricate Intellivision games to have been ported to the 5200, I'm thinking like Utopia (but with cooler graphics) which was fun, I remember playing that a lot -

I think those games were actually years ahead of their time on consoles.   Especially something like Utopia.    The way the console market developed after the crash, it kind of moved towards simpler game controls, and let the computer gaming market have more complex sim games-  at least until consoles got local hard drives then you saw them start to achieve parity.  

 

Or maybe Mattel could have just made that their niche.   Atari was in a position where they could have gone all-in on the arcade experience on the 5200 including have arcade-like controls, and have the XL line for people who want simulators, war games, RPGs, and so on.   Maybe the 5200 didn't need Star Raiders, and instead should have had some more exclusives that you couldn't get on the 8-bit

 

36 minutes ago, ledzep said:

I don't know where you get that idea, my friends and I quickly memorized which buttons did what so we typically played without overlays after a few runs (also to preserve the overlays themselves).  When in doubt, we'd just look at the overlay itself to remember which button did the thing we wanted.  The Intellivision had many games that took advantage of the overlays, we never had a problem with that control scheme.

 

I mean, how is that different from memorizing what the various joypad buttons do on a Playstation controller?  There's like 8 buttons that aren't normally direction buttons, yes?  And not even an overlay, so how did that succeed?  Any gamer worth his salt can quickly remember what button does what after a few plays.

Well if you asked me what the controls are for any particular Playstation game, I probably couldn't tell you,  but my thumbs and fingers know!  by feel-- It's all muscle memory.    Sure it's possible to have that with a keypad as well,  but I thing having buttons in a grid makes it a bit less ergonomic.   It's probably why the keypad never caught on after the crash (Jaguar excepted)

 

[ledzep]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

I think those games were actually years ahead of their time on consoles.   Especially something like Utopia.    The way the console market developed after the crash, it kind of moved towards simpler game controls, and let the computer gaming market have more complex sim games-  at least until consoles got local hard drives then you saw them start to achieve parity.  

 

Ya, mostly due to lack of RAM for all the maps and objects and weak A.I.  But the stripped down games were still cool and were still fun on consoles.  Sometimes you don't want the immersive 2-week long game yet you still want more than a joystick level-clearing shooter.  A lot of games could benefit from keypads, even non-sims, in terms of just something like weapons options, play calling (sports), there are only so many ways you can reformulate the same shooters and platformers.  Simple games like the old 2600 Superman or something like an expanded Pitfall would work with more options.

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Or maybe Mattel could have just made that their niche.   Atari was in a position where they could have gone all-in on the arcade experience on the 5200 including have arcade-like controls, and have the XL line for people who want simulators, war games, RPGs, and so on.   Maybe the 5200 didn't need Star Raiders, and instead should have had some more exclusives that you couldn't get on the 8-bit

 

Maybe the 5200 didn't need Sta... you wash out your mouth with soap!  Hahahaa, but seriously, Star Raiders on the 5200, with that analog stick and the keypad, is far better than the 8-bit computer version.  I love both (own both), but a first-person flight game needs an analog control, a yoke if you can afford one, or at the least an analog joystick.  Imagine driving your car with only a digital controller for direction, no way to speed up direction changes.  Of course if the 8-bits had analog joystick controllers then you'd have a point, though that would only make those computers more like the 5200 so if one can have Star Raiders, the other can, too.

 

Why should only Mattel have all the fun if both consoles had keypads on their controllers?  As much as I didn't enjoy many Intellivision games (their shooters were ass, hated the graphics) I always hoped that their strategy and sim games would be popular enough for Atari to decide that they needed those types of games, too.  Never happened.

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Well if you asked me what the controls are for any particular Playstation game, I probably couldn't tell you,  but my thumbs and fingers know!  by feel-- It's all muscle memory.    Sure it's possible to have that with a keypad as well,  but I thing having buttons in a grid makes it a bit less ergonomic.   It's probably why the keypad never caught on after the crash (Jaguar excepted)

 

Maybe so, but the keypad has the advantage of the overlay in order to easily visually designate what the buttons are for.  After a few plays you wouldn't need them to play the game.

[SoundGammon]

During the attack on the Death Star you can hear someone say:

 

"Stay On Target!"

[zzip]

6 hours ago, ledzep said:

Maybe the 5200 didn't need Sta... you wash out your mouth with soap!  Hahahaa, but seriously, Star Raiders on the 5200, with that analog stick and the keypad, is far better than the 8-bit computer version.  I love both (own both), but a first-person flight game needs an analog control, a yoke if you can afford one, or at the least an analog joystick.  Imagine driving your car with only a digital controller for direction, no way to speed up direction changes.  Of course if the 8-bits had analog joystick controllers then you'd have a point, though that would only make those computers more like the 5200 so if one can have Star Raiders, the other can, too.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of an analog stick, as long as it could be implemented well and reliably.   There are other games that could benefit like Rescue on Fractalus, Star Wars Arcade, etc.   But I can't say I had great experience with them either back in the day--   every PC analog stick I owned stopped working fairly soon after I bought it, (and I ultimately bought a Gravis D-pad for reliability).     Anyway perhaps the 5200 should have had options for both analog and digital joysticks since many games designed for digital don't feel right with analog.    Or Atari could have continued with the 2600 concept of different controllers for different games (including a pin-pad like that 2600 Star Raiders had),   but I think the default 5200 controller should have been something other than what they shipped with-  something more arcade-like since that was all the rage at the time.

 

7 hours ago, ledzep said:

 

Why should only Mattel have all the fun if both consoles had keypads on their controllers?  As much as I didn't enjoy many Intellivision games (their shooters were ass, hated the graphics) I always hoped that their strategy and sim games would be popular enough for Atari to decide that they needed those types of games, too.  Never happened.

Intellivision was a very different gaming experience.   Atari found something that worked with the 2600,  for all the noise the George Plimpton ads made about superior sports games, they never really threatened 2600 sales all that much.  Different audience.   Atari should have focused on what they did well instead of looking at Intellivision and saying "oh we want to do that too!"  and creating a controller almost everybody hates that became the system's Achilles heel

 

 

[christo930]

23 hours ago, zzip said:

 IBM's own PCjr aimed at the home market failed.

Not really. It only failed for IBM.   The Tandy 1000 was probably one of if not the most sold DOS PC of the 80s (in the home market. They were not a player in corporations).  Tandy simply did the Jr right.  The Tandy 1000 is a Jr Clone, at least as far as the graphics and sound.

There was a lot of sabotage of the Jr within IBM.  While the 5150 was very quietly developed off-site from any major IBM office, the Jr was subject to all the intrigue IBM was famous for. They hobbled the Jr so it wouldn't eat into 5150 sales.

 

The sub 1000 Dollar PC didn't really come until the 90s and even then, not really. It wasn't until the later part of the 90s that prices fell across the board.  The sub $1000 PCs of the late 80s were many years  obsolete.  Almost all of them were 5150 clones with the Tandy 1000 being a Jr clone.  The about 1000 Dollar entry level PC in the early 90s was a 286 or a low end 386.  Even as late as around 1994, a name brand PC well equipped and with a current processor could approach 4-5 grand.  But then right after that, prices collapsed as production was moved to China.

 

But even in 1985, the writing was on the wall that PC would win.  If you wanted to launch a successful model, you had to be IBM compatible. Even Commodore released the ST with the ability to put a DOS PC in the Amiga 2000, though this was 87 when the PC was in an even stronger position.  The ST might have been able to hold onto the music market for quite a while, but they really didn't go all out on sound once "Atari" realized that this was driving a large portion of ST sales.  Instead of dumping millions of Dollars into creating a unix workstation, "Atari" should have put that into a souped up ST aimed squarely at the music market.

 

23 hours ago, zzip said:

Jack thought all you had to do to win was sell things cheaper than the competition.   According to one off the GCC guys, Jack wanted to sell the 7800 so cheaply there would be no money for them, and that's why they held up the release. 

Yes, I agree.  It was all about the price for Jack.

 

One of the Amiga magazines put out a video (probably VHS) on how to set up your new Amiga.  I want to say it was the 500.  The video is on youtube.  They filmed it in their office.  All of their computers in their office were Macs. You can see them all in the background.  The same was probably true with the ST magazines.  The Amiga was even more suitable to this task than the ST and they still wouldn't use them.  "Atari" and Commodore probably all had PCs and Macs too.

Edited June 28 by christo930

[zzip]

42 minutes ago, christo930 said:

The sub 1000 Dollar PC didn't really come until the 90s and even then, not really. It wasn't until the later part of the 90s that prices fell across the board.  The sub $1000 PCs of the late 80s were many years  obsolete

Yes they generally were 4.77mhz 8088's in the 286 era,  but this was when you started to see regular users snatch them up en-masse.   These sub-$1000 may have seemed obsolete on paper, and certainly weren't impressive to us ST or Amiga users at the time.   What we didn't understand is not everyone buys a computer for graphics/sound or even CPU speed.   People wanted those even slow PCs for app compatibility,  They wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3 at home and bring their work home, and not deal with learning a different spreadsheet on ST/Amiga that could maybe read 1-2-3 files (poorly)

 

50 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Instead of dumping millions of Dollars into creating a unix workstation, "Atari" should have put that into a souped up ST aimed squarely at the music market.

I suspect the music market was too small which was why the Tramiels were chasing the other markets.

 

51 minutes ago, christo930 said:

One of the Amiga magazines put out a video (probably VHS) on how to set up your new Amiga.  I want to say it was the 500.  The video is on youtube.  They filmed it in their office.  All of their computers in their office were Macs. You can see them all in the background.  The same was probably true with the ST magazines.  The Amiga was even more suitable to this task than the ST and they still wouldn't use them.  "Atari" and Commodore probably all had PCs and Macs too.

Yeah the Mac captured the Desktop Publishing market early.   And it's hard to get people to switch from what they know.  Didn't help that PCs and probably Macs had higher quality, more comfortable keyboards, which would be a big deal for a magazine writer.   Also the general population who were not into computers in the 80s and 90s were not very tech savvy-   They'd learn what they need to on a computer to get their job done, and not much more. I used to have to help people like this use new apps to get their job done, and it wasn't fun because they'd panic anytime something unexpected happened.   For that reason alone I could see people in the office not wanting to use an Amiga even if they worked at an Amiga magazine! 

 

[BassGuitari]

On 6/27/2024 at 2:21 PM, zzip said:

Yeah for as much as Atari and Coleco made a big deal about how arcade-like their consoles were,  you'd think they'd ship with arcade-like controls to drive that arcade experience home.  

Arcade controls are expensive and could have conceivably added $100-150 to the sticker price of the console.

 

EDIT: Forgot to subtract the cost of the stock controllers included with the console, so the net increase wouldn't be that much, but still appreciably higher. 

Edited June 28 by BassGuitari

[christo930]

17 minutes ago, BassGuitari said:

Arcade controls are expensive and could have conceivably added $100-150 to the sticker price of the console.

Not in 1982.  Plus, they could have delivered arcade controls with a consumer quality, much like a lot of the bar arcade machines do now.  The 5200 trackball could have easily been a  joystick instead.  That was well under $100.  Plus, like the 5200 track ball controller, it likely would have been sold separately.

[christo930]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

These sub-$1000 may have seemed obsolete on paper, and certainly weren't impressive to us ST or Amiga users at the time.   What we didn't understand is not everyone buys a computer for graphics/sound or even CPU speed. 

The problem is the 5150 was pretty obsolete in the late 80s and a lot of then current software wouldn't run on them and would need a hard disk at minimum.  Most of these sub $1000 machines had 1 or 2 360k disk drives.  Many of them had MDA cards which had a single font and no graphics modes.  Some of the better ones did have Hercules cards though or at least CGA, which had been vastly chip-reduced by then.  CGA was a full length card in 1981 with dozens of chips.  But I agree with you that the main thing people wanted was compatibility.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

I suspect the music market was too small which was why the Tramiels were chasing the other markets.

I don't know either way. But I'm sure the market for a great sound machine was bigger than the Unix workstation with the Atari brand on it.  I think the branding really hurt both "Atari" and Commodore.  Still, both had some degree of success despite how hard both companies worked to destroy their respective computer platforms.  I saw a video on youtube that was a magazine on a VHS type thing.  It covered an Amiga event, IIRC, it was 1987,  I guess comparable to the Apple yearly events.  It was nothing but vendors and customers complaining about how awful Commodore was and how they were wrecking the Amiga.  Though I don't think any such thing happened, let alone so early on in the life of the ST.  It's a shame they didn't get the Falcon a few years earlier.

 

It's sad to look back at the ST and especially the Amiga.  Maybe they could have carved out a niche customer base.  Though I believe this would have been really, really difficult, 1985 was early enough that maybe they could have.  But both were broke shatter shadows of their former glory.  That they hung on as long as they did was an accomplishment of sorts.

 

 

[zzip]

On 6/28/2024 at 4:00 PM, christo930 said:

Still, both had some degree of success despite how hard both companies worked to destroy their respective computer platforms.  I saw a video on youtube that was a magazine on a VHS type thing.  It covered an Amiga event, IIRC, it was 1987,  I guess comparable to the Apple yearly events.  It was nothing but vendors and customers complaining about how awful Commodore was and how they were wrecking the Amiga.  Though I don't think any such thing happened, let alone so early on in the life of the ST.  It's a shame they didn't get the Falcon a few years earlier.

I did go to an Atari show in 1987.  It was mostly a positive experience.  Atari did have a lot of products announced at the time and were showing off many of them.   Of course many got delayed, released with fewer features and/or cost more than originally promised.   Some never got released at all.   Atari definitely took too long to get updates out.   STe wasn't a huge revamp of the ST and still that took 4 years! 

 

On 6/28/2024 at 4:00 PM, christo930 said:

It's sad to look back at the ST and especially the Amiga.  Maybe they could have carved out a niche customer base.  Though I believe this would have been really, really difficult, 1985 was early enough that maybe they could have.  But both were broke shatter shadows of their former glory.  That they hung on as long as they did was an accomplishment of sorts.

 

Once the clone market took off, the economies of scale shifted to X86 hardware and PC upgrades started to become cheaper than anything Atari / Amiga could do.  Even the Motorola CPUs struggled to keep up with PC CPUs.

 

Of course there's a lot of things that could have gone differently.   For instance IBM was considering using the 68000 in the PC, and if that had happened a 68k clone market may have benefited ST/Amiga upgrade paths

[zzip]

On 6/28/2024 at 3:20 PM, BassGuitari said:

Arcade controls are expensive and could have conceivably added $100-150 to the sticker price of the console.

 

Yes, real arcade controls have to be built to take abuse,  but you could still do arcade-like controls that aren't so expensive.  There were joystick manufacturers doing this on the 2600.

[ledzep]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Yes, real arcade controls have to be built to take abuse,  but you could still do arcade-like controls that aren't so expensive.  There were joystick manufacturers doing this on the 2600.

 

Agreed, I think the 5200 Trak-ball and the Vectrex controller are arcade-ish, good components that hold up well and feel like arcade versions (love the Trak-ball fire buttons).  Some Wico controllers, too.  Nobody is going to abuse those things like actual arcade cabinets, hundreds of plays a week per game.

[christo930]

On 7/1/2024 at 1:03 PM, zzip said:

Once the clone market took off, the economies of scale shifted to X86 hardware and PC upgrades started to become cheaper than anything Atari / Amiga could do.  Even the Motorola CPUs struggled to keep up with PC CPUs.

 

Of course there's a lot of things that could have gone differently.   For instance IBM was considering using the 68000 in the PC, and if that had happened a 68k clone market may have benefited ST/Amiga upgrade paths

 

Inertia can overcome some of that.  That is largely how the Mac survived as a platform.  They never became entrenched in any field.  Even the video stuff with the Amiga was largely a niche within a niche.

 

If IBM had chosen the 68000, the computer market would probably look very different, even today.  Maybe the extra money would have helped Motorola keep the 0x0 alive, but who knows.