The real fight Atari versus Commodore

[Mazzspeed]

25 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

closest thing to these today are U1M plus SIDE2/B, plus the freezer... etc.

I can't wait to order all these goodies! SIDE 3 sounds great. The only thing that has me concerned is flashing firmware upgrades, as I believe that can't be done from the PBI HDD itself. My thinking is that an SIO2USB lead may be best for this?

[Tuxon86]

10 hours ago, Faicuai said:

It was Apple who showed it, in reality. IBM paid special attention to it. It later considered the 800 as a possible OEM-like personal computer product, with its own design sketch.

 

And, if anyone here ever wondered how far the 1981 5150 could go with a meager CGA adapter and its color monitor (and essentially NOTHING else), you may be in for quite a wake up call:

 

 

Except nobody used it like that back in the day. And that setup cost way more than what the vast majority of people were willing to spend on a home computer. 

You're comparing two different markets. 

 

And lastly, I don't see anything in that demo that couldn't be done on other contemporary machines with similar specs.

[nadir]

32 minutes ago, Tuxon86 said:

Except nobody used it like that back in the day. And that setup cost way more than what the vast majority of people were willing to spend on a home computer. 

You're comparing two different markets. 

 

And lastly, I don't see anything in that demo that couldn't be done on other contemporary machines with similar specs.

Bits and pieces.  I remember SkyfoxII having really done a good job on the audio.  California Games blew me away by having 6 different distinct colors on screen in 320x200 mode.  I myself played around with the 160x100 16 color "mode"/hack and the 80x100 136 dithered color modes.  Good times, good memories.

[Faicuai]

4 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

Except nobody used it like that back in the day. And that setup cost way more than what the vast majority of people were willing to spend on a home computer. 

You're comparing two different markets. 

 

And lastly, I don't see anything in that demo that couldn't be done on other contemporary machines with similar specs.

 

Nobody? Well, if we consider the things we are doing TODAy with our 8bit platforms, it sounds like your argument is self-defeating.

 

You are right im the sense that the IBM/PC was rather used to open up a whole new productive space at the office, to pay the bills, and to propel forward and sustain an architecture and whole industry that, at its core, could have not been sustained with dumb-ass little games and kiddie computers (sorry for the rude awakening).

 

And even with such usage and pricing, it propelled itself to stardom,  made a TON OF MONEY for a lot of people, become the real king of the hill, and now showing that it would kick anyone's ass (on its time) out of the office, too.

 

Besides my beloved 800s, I would rather collect an Apple Ii  or a nice 515X than any worthless, "el-cheapo" clones that ensued later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[youxia]

10 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

And even with such usage and pricing, it propelled itself to stardom,  made a TON OF MONEY for a lot of people, become the real king of the hill

...and then tumbled down hard, because there was a revolution and the el-cheapo worthless clones have overthrown the King And we should all cheer that up, because otherwise we'd be living in somebody's walled garden, instead of enjoying the benefits of open PC architecture.

 

The unbranded, humble custom-cobbled greybox PC clone is one of the most dumped on machines in the history of computing, but it makes me love it even more. PC really stand's for People's Computer, thanks to its existence (and IBM's early misshaps, bless their little sillicon socks).

[Faicuai]

12 minutes ago, youxia said:

and then tumbled down hard,

Tumbled down?

 

Another self-defeating argument. It as Commodore,  Atari, and many others long gone... not IBM, or Apple, though.

 

IBM developed and sold the PC with the Mainframe-HW mentality.... and forgot to read CLOSELY the contract signed with Bill Gates and Paul Allen (real geniuses dealing with Goliath´s insatiable love for HW dominance)... and once Compaq reversed-engineered the ONlY piece of embedded SW IbM left closed, the el-crappo clone industry was born (putting aside Compaq and others that were REAL about quality).

 

Much, much bigger and sad was Commodore (or even Atari's) fall. Ironically, am much closer connected to Commodore's management than I ever was with Atar's. No one here can tell me a thing about how Commodore was really managed, though... ;-)

[ivop]

@Faicuai The 8088Mph is indeed a great demo! But that was not a common setup BITD. Did you know people that connected an NTSC television/monitor to their CGA card with tv-output? Note that all the extra colors are created by either NTSC artifacting or flickering screens (not seen on the youtube video). On a plain CGA monitor, this would look, ehm, different.

 

[Faicuai]

15 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

Why involve an ancient CPU when you don't have to?

 

That sounds more like an emotional deflection of the core argument and purpose of retro-computing.

 

You know the answer to that question: we involve it for reasons such as HW simplicity, essence of the user-experience,  design premises,  and (ultimately) because we can.

 

Seeing the 6502 running SDX´s sheer complexity and implementation (putting aside the cart´s ROM disk) has a much, much higher figure-of-merit that an external piece of HW that is built with alien HW and designed with the idea of shoveling down as much data down its (slow) host system´s throat.  Plain and simple.

 

And that is something I respect above anything else (and I say so while running my day-to-day needs on a 80+ threads machine, capable of handling TERABYTES of RAM, and GfX processors out of the wazoo).

 

That is the point.

 

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by Faicuai

[Faicuai]

2 minutes ago, ivop said:

Note that all the extra colors are created by either NTSC artifacting

Many of us here run with NTSC artifacting... and quite a good hand of titles on Atari depend on it.

 

GREAT use of the standard and system´s assets! 

[ivop]

2 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

Many of us here run with NTSC artifacting... and quite a good hand of titles on Atari depend on it.

True, but...

Quote

GREAT use of the standard and system´s assets! 

you claimed it was common BITD. It was not IMHO. But sure, it's a freaking great demo that uses an underutilized asset that was there back in '81!

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by ivop
typo..

[Tuxon86]

2 hours ago, Faicuai said:

 

Nobody? Well, if we consider the things we are doing TODAy with our 8bit platforms, it sounds like your argument is self-defeating.

 

You are right im the sense that the IBM/PC was rather used to open up a whole new productive space at the office, to pay the bills, and to propel forward and sustain an architecture and whole industry that, at its core, could have not been sustained with dumb-ass little games and kiddie computers (sorry for the rude awakening).

 

And even with such usage and pricing, it propelled itself to stardom,  made a TON OF MONEY for a lot of people, become the real king of the hill, and now showing that it would kick anyone's ass (on its time) out of the office, too.

 

Besides my beloved 800s, I would rather collect an Apple Ii  or a nice 515X than any worthless, "el-cheapo" clones that ensued later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It didn't... It was the cheap clone market that did that not IBM. If IBM hadn't done a rush job with the 5150 and instead took their time like to produce the closed up, locked down, machine they wanted, the PS serie, history would be quite different. Heck they almost went with Ti for their processors...

[youxia]

2 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Tumbled down?

 

Another self-defeating argument. It as Commodore,  Atari, and many others long gone... not IBM, or Apple, though.

Not sure you understand what "self-defeating" means, though you seem to use very often. IBM is not gone from the home computer market (y'know, the one we're talking about)? Perhaps, in a parallel universe And Apple has survided by skin of its teeth, partially thanks to handouts from MS, and later because of their i-hits. Even so, its computer market share in the US is only few points more than it was in the Nineties. What great victory!

 

You display a  typical fanboy-logic, which is mainly driven by the need to have a brand to worship and build narratives around. Meanwhile, I type this on an el-crappo clone, which can match or blow out the water anything with a fancy sticker on it, while costing a fraction of their price and being completely open too.

[Tuxon86]

8 minutes ago, youxia said:

Not sure you understand what "self-defeating" means, though you seem to use very often. IBM is not gone from the home computer market (y'know, the one we're talking about)? Perhaps, in a parallel universe And Apple has survided by skin of its teeth, partially thanks to handouts from MS, and later because of their i-hits. Even so, its computer market share in the US is only few points more than it was in the Nineties. What great victory!

 

You display a  typical fanboy-logic, which is mainly driven by the need to have a brand to worship and build narratives around. Meanwhile, I type this on an el-crappo clone, which can match or blow out the water anything with a fancy sticker on it, while costing a fraction of their price and being completely open too.

That, and the fact that this poster introduced the whole IBM bull... in a thread about Commodore and Atari 8 bit... In short he's trolling and flamebaiting.

[Lynxpro]

On 3/23/2021 at 12:28 PM, carlsson said:

To be honest, a computer with a 6809, a TMS9928/29 and an AY-3-891x would not have been an entirely bad thing. Like a MSX but with the almost 16-bit 6809.

 

Speaking of the CoCo, what I lament is that MicroWare OS-9 wasn't on Atari Inc's or Atari Corp's radar during the development of the Gaza, Amiga Lorraine, or the ST.

 

Imagine if MicroWare and DRI had merged [Microsoft actually tried to acquire MicroWare but they rebuffed Mr. Gates]... GEM as the GUI sitting atop multitasking/multiuser OS-9. The Vegans, excuse me, Amigans, could've shoved that Commodore purchased Metacomco Trip-OS ma-jiggy down a Sarlaac Pit because OS-9 would've ran circles around them. Leonard Tramiel was asked about that in the Facebook Atari Museum group but he did say they weren't aware of OS-9 while the ST was being developed. MicroWare later did release a 68000-based version of OS-9 for the ST but it wasn't the standard OS of course. 

 

That's of course independent of Atari Inc's own SnowCap GUI running atop BSD in 1983 on the Gaza in the Advanced Engineering Division's HQ. The folks behind it still haven't shown us what it looked like for some strange legal threat they seem to be fearful of to this day. I got it... it was too advanced for the time period and that upset the Men in Black who later burnt up all the produced AMY sound chips in that warehouse fire a few years later.

[Lynxpro]

On 3/23/2021 at 8:40 PM, gnusto said:

 

They were doing fine from a cost control perspective, and they had a huge leg up on their competitors which meant ultimately they could win that race, because they owned MOS and nobody else did. But Tramiel's fits of genius were balanced by equally extreme stupidity; having been an early pioneer in vertical integration by buying MOS, he promptly strangled their R&D funding. They were a parts manufacturer to him; nothing more, much of the engineering staff that built the 6500 series left or quit eventually due to his policies, and he got what he wanted: a parts manufacturer.

 

Meanwhile the legs of the 6500 were running out, and even in the early few years of the 80s it was stumbling. Efficiencies in well-known fabrication process took it a couple of years past that, then it was over. Commodore ran back to Motorola for the Amiga (ironic considering that MOS was a team hired from inside Motorola).

 

The tale of MOS benefitting Commodore is greatly exaggerated. Yes, it gave them a leg-up in quick prototyping but that's about it. Commodore didn't invest property in increasing or improving MOS' production and Atari Inc preferred to work with Synertek and others anyway from the very start. The 6502 and its support chips were so widely licensed that just about everyone plus Cal Worthington's dog Spot was building them. Hell, depending upon who you believe, the 16-bit instructions that later made their way into the WDC 65816 came from the [failed] Atari/Synertek "6510" CPU project from 1979. That's probably why Atari Inc didn't pivot to the Motorola 6809 prior to the release of the 400/800 [because they were banking on the 6510 to be successfully completed in short time]. Well, that and Motorola being colossal buttheads in terms of licensing 6809 tech which was still an issue when Epyx was developing the Handy/Lynx nearly a decade later [the very reason why the Lynx uses the 6502 instead of a 6809 or 68000].

Edited March 26, 2021 by Lynxpro
Yo Joe, go go go...

[carlsson]

2 minutes ago, Lynxpro said:

Atari Inc preferred to work with Synertek and others

That raises a claim I saw from an ex-Commodore alumni on Facebook, that MOS (up to a certain point in time) manufactured all 6502 chips on the market, but due to a requirement to have a second source, some chips were stamped Synertek, perhaps even Rockwell? Perhaps this only relates to a short time frame, like the first year or so before the other factories got their manufacturing in order. It could also be a misunderstanding or internal gospel told at Commodore at the time, that all chips on the market came from them. Since I haven't found any other sources for this claim, it stands unverified.

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, youxia said:

You display a  typical fanboy-logic

Firs this...

 

1 hour ago, youxia said:

Meanwhile, I type this on an el-crappo clone, which can match or blow out the water anything with a fancy sticker on it, while costing a fraction of their price and being completely open too.

Then this....

 

Sounds like hard-core, self-defeating fanboyism, for sure...  

 

??

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, Tuxon86 said:

If IBM hadn't done a rush job

There is no such thing as a "rush job" when the segment leader (Apple) already has years of advantage (and profitability).

 

It was IBM´s own CEO that supported Don Estridge's efforts AWAY from New York's years-lomg product-cycle mentality and get the job done here in Boca Raton, Florida, where the PC industry got launched into satardom.

 

11 Months, about 12-14 people core team. Right on the mark for what they were asked to accomplish.

 

And if we are devoting a kiddie-computing thread to Commodore, we may of course speak about a company that is also connected to Atari and Apple in space an time.. IBM considered the 800 as a possible product for entering the home-market, whether you like or not.

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by Faicuai

[Lynxpro]

44 minutes ago, carlsson said:

That raises a claim I saw from an ex-Commodore alumni on Facebook, that MOS (up to a certain point in time) manufactured all 6502 chips on the market, but due to a requirement to have a second source, some chips were stamped Synertek, perhaps even Rockwell? Perhaps this only relates to a short time frame, like the first year or so before the other factories got their manufacturing in order. It could also be a misunderstanding or internal gospel told at Commodore at the time, that all chips on the market came from them. Since I haven't found any other sources for this claim, it stands unverified.

 

It's not true. Atari Inc, for example, only bought 50,000 6507s from MOS prior to their acquisition by Commodore in exchange for their 6502 - and support chips - license. MOS even originally pleaded with Al Alcorn to request from Manny Gerard to intervene and get approval from Steve Ross at Warner for Atari Inc to purchase MOS in order to keep them from being acquired by Commodore. Alcorn and Gerard both concluded it best to just go for the licensing agreement and to work with Synertek [and others]. 

 

If Synertek hadn't made any 6502s, their former manufacturing sites wouldn't have SuperFund status [just like MOS' former digs]. 

 

It's unclear if vertical integration was actually truly cost effective for Commodore other than having a guaranteed supplier of those chips. Commodore-owned MOS failed to land a second-source contract from Intel for the 8088/86 and they also failed at producing reliable DRAM. With Atari Inc's economies of scale, it's conceivable they were able to buy those very same chips built by second-sourcers at lower prices than Commodore-owned MOS could build them for. I'm not saying that happened but it's possible.

[Lynxpro]

2 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

It didn't... It was the cheap clone market that did that not IBM. If IBM hadn't done a rush job with the 5150 and instead took their time like to produce the closed up, locked down, machine they wanted, the PS serie, history would be quite different. Heck they almost went with Ti for their processors...

 

It wasn't due to a rush job, it was due to IBM still being under Federal investigation over antitrust allegations going back to the 1970s. That's why they went with Intel to supply the CPUs for the IBM PC - as opposed to their own CPUs - and with an outside company for the OS. IBM could've rolled all of that themselves but it would've been the smoking gun for the Feds to break them up.

 

Even with all of that, they did look into buying a 50% stake in Atari Inc - Steve Ross at Warner was gung-ho over it and had actually approached them first - and having Atari design their PC but alas, they didn't want an 8-bit platform and they wanted 80-column mode standard.

 

As for Bill Gates being a contracting genius, well, that's way too much credit given to him. His mom was friends with one of the IBM execs through working together at the United Way organization. That allowed him to capitalize on IBM pivoting away from DRI and going with a single external supplier for both BASIC and the OS. Let us remember that Gates fumbled in providing Microsoft BASIC to Atari in an 8K ROM and his contract was terminated over it. And it was Apple licensing Microsoft BASIC to replace Woz's Integer BASIC on the Apple II that saved Microsoft from bankruptcy after Jack Tramiel ate them alive with that $0.01 per Commodore computer shipped licensing agreement. 

[emkay]

Any conclusion?

Well, the reality is that Intel and Microsoft did the best job of all. 

Today, I start a program of "anything", and it does the needed job. 

Even this discussion can be fully supported by a gazillion of available programs for a Windows PC. 

Checking any C64 game? Start the Emulator

Checking any Atari game? Start the Emulator

Checking..... Start....

 

And it all became possible by the fact that "downward compatibility" was kept as good as possible, and pushing new software on a platform "everybody" has, gets the most interrest . 

This is even working, while Smartphones with their Android OS might get some advantage.  

 

[Mazzspeed]

3 hours ago, Faicuai said:

 

That sounds more like an emotional deflection of the core argument and purpose of retro-computing.

 

You know the answer to that question: we involve it for reasons such as HW simplicity, essence of the user-experience,  design premises,  and (ultimately) because we can.

 

Seeing the 6502 running SDX´s sheer complexity and implementation (putting aside the cart´s ROM disk) has a much, much higher figure-of-merit that an external piece of HW that is built with alien HW and designed with the idea of shoveling down as much data down its (slow) host system´s throat.  Plain and simple.

 

And that is something I respect above anything else (and I say so while running my day-to-day needs on a 80+ threads machine, capable of handling TERABYTES of RAM, and GfX processors out of the wazoo).

 

That is the point.

 

 

It's not a deflection at all.

 

Commodore and Atari computers have always had smart drives, it's one of the reasons we can implement such modern peripherals like the 1541 UII+ so easily compared to a TRS-80 for example. We could set the drives to copy between themselves assuming enough memory and go about using the computer - This is 100% no different. The drives are 'mounted' on the UII+.

 

Considering ANTIC stealing DMA cycles, the A8 has an effective clock speed of 1.3Mhz most of the time, both machines are slow hosts - Hence why I state the processor is something best avoided, and Commodore's serial port has been tweaked over the years to the point that it's speed is up there with the Atari's SIO port with near perfect software compatibility running JiffyDOS and the 1541 UII+ uses that IEC port for cycle accurate 1541 emulation. Considering DMA, I see no reason why both machines wouldn't be identical in data throughput - I love the fact that SIDE 3 now supports DMA.

 

I'm sure if the A8 line had the same virtual drive implementation as the 1541 UII+ you'd be singing it's praises. FujiNet comes close, but it's not quite there in terms of functionality yet - However I will be getting a FujiNet.

 

I looked up this Black Box mentioned by Doc, it's more like a CMD-HD drive for Commodore machines back in the day, it's nothing like the 1541 UII+.

 

 

 

 

[Mazzspeed]

6 hours ago, Faicuai said:

You are right im the sense that the IBM/PC was rather used to open up a whole new productive space at the office, to pay the bills, and to propel forward and sustain an architecture and whole industry that, at its core, could have not been sustained with dumb-ass little games and kiddie computers (sorry for the rude awakening).

And the harsh reality is that today games are the one huge reason why people use Windows, that and Microsoft Office, which is actually less compatible with ISO standards than competing products (some of which are free).

 

The PC took off as a platform due to it's open nature, the only thing IBM were originally responsible for was that BIOS chip. There was little that was technically impressive about the platform, it was basically the next step from the S100 bus design.

Edited March 26, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[_The Doctor__]

The Black Box had a daughter card for floppies, The Floppy Board... BBFB and the freezer together covered mostly anything that was needed at the time, I don't see where the later CMD HD even came close to all a Black Box does, let alone with the freezer added, you could add all of the creative micro devices products line and come closer though, though CMD are still doing serial speeds for the drives.

 

You could say CMD-HD plus CMD RamDrive would come close to an ICD MIO to a degree...

 

I can say with certainty, at the time the MIO and the BB with proper Dives attached were more flexible and faster at real time use than the CMD-HD. I don't remember if it was Greg ?Hulack(sp?) that was the Commodore Guru in our bunch, but he had all that sort of stuff. If I mixed up the name I apologize, but there was much drink and karoake at that time period, as well as computer/BBS/and ladies. It was nearing the end of BBS days.

Edited March 27, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[Mazzspeed]

51 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

The Black Box had a daughter card for floppies, The Floppy Board... BBFB and the freezer together covered mostly anything that was needed at the time, I don't see where the later CMD HD even came close to all a Black Box does, let alone with the freezer added, you could add all of the creative micro devices products line and come closer though, though CMD are still doing serial speeds for the drives.

 

You could say CMD-HD plus CMD RamDrive would come close to an ICD MIO to a degree...

 

I can say with certainty, at the time the MIO and the BB with proper Dives attached were more flexible and faster at real time use than the CMD-HD. I don't remember if it was Greg ?Hulack(sp?) that was the Commodore Guru in our bunch, but he had all that sort of stuff. If I mixed up the name I apologize, but there was much drink and karoake at that time period, as well as computer/BBS/and ladies. It was nearing the end of BBS days.

And likewise the 1541 UII+ is way more versatile than any of these devices. As stated, FujiNet is as close as you'll get to the 1541 UII+ on the A8.

 

The 1541 UII+ uses the serial IEC for cycle accurate 1541 emulation, the thing is: The Commodore IEC is not slow anymore, based on my own testing it's comparable to SIO in the fastest mode it can currently support, not including developments still in beta.